The War on Lebanon and the Battle for Oil

Michel Chossudovsky:

"Is there a relationship between the bombing of Lebanon and the inauguration of the World's largest strategic pipeline, which will channel more than a million barrels of oil a day to Western markets?

Virtually unnoticed, the inauguration of the Ceyhan-Tblisi-Baku (BTC) oil pipeline, which links the Caspian sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, took place on the 13th of July, at the very outset of the Israeli sponsored bombings of Lebanon."

Lebanon oil slick 'worst environmental disaster' in Med

Yahoo! News:

"BEIRUT (AFP) - The Mediterranean is threatened by its worst ever environmental disaster after
Israel's bombing of a power plant in Lebanon sent thousands of tonnes of fuel gushing into the sea, the environment minister charged.

'Up until now 10,000-15,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil have spilled out into the sea,' after Israel's bombing of the power station in Jiyeh two weeks ago, Lebanese Environment Minister Yacub Sarraf told AFP Saturday.

'It's without doubt the biggest environmental catastrophe that the Mediterranean has known and it risks having terrible consequences not only for our country but for all the countries of the eastern Mediterranean.'"

FEMA a Disaster for Freedom of the Press

This is unreal, unbelievable, and, like so much similar these days, apparently true:

Fair.org:

"FEMA a Disaster for Freedom of the Press
Katrina victims “not allowed” to talk to media, reporter told

7/21/06

The Federal Emergency Management Agency prohibits journalists from having unsupervised interviews with Hurricane Katrina victims who have been relocated to FEMA trailer parks, according to a report in the Baton Rouge Advocate (7/15/06).

“If a resident invites the media to the trailer, they have to be escorted by a FEMA representative who sits in on the interview,” FEMA spokesperson Rachel Rodi is quoted in the article. “That’s just a policy.”"

Also chased away by guards was Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.

White phosphorus weapons? Check. Bombing Ambulances? Check...

“We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones,” said Mrs. Clinton, who was joined by two dozen political and religious leaders on a stage along 42nd Street."—New York Times, July 17, 2006.

And, she's right. Israel continues to adopt US values.

http://www.thestate.com: Fleeing families, ambulances hit in rocket attacks

Jawad Najem, a surgeon at the hospital, said patients admitted Sunday had burns from phosphorous incendiary weapons used by Israel. The Geneva Conventions ban using white phosphorus as an incendiary weapon against civilian populations and in air attacks against military forces in civilian areas. Israel said its weapons comply with international law.

“Mahmoud Sarour, 14, was admitted to the hospital yesterday and treated for phosphorous burns to his face,” Najem said. Mahmoud’s 8-month-old sister, Maryam, suffered similar burns on her neck and hands when an Israeli rocket hit the family car.

The children were with their father, mother and other relatives when the car was hit by an Israeli missile. Their father died instantly.

The Sarour family was evacuated from Tyre to Cyprus on Monday aboard a ferry chartered by Germany.

The Sarours had to go to the port by taxi because the Lebanese Red Cross suspended operations outside Tyre after Israeli jets blasted two ambulances with rockets, said Ali Deebe, a Red Cross spokesman in Tyre.

In the incident Sunday, one Red Cross ambulance went south of Tyre to meet an ambulance and transfer the wounded to the hospital.

“When we have wounded outside the city, we always used two ambulances,” Deebe said.

The rocket attack on the two vehicles wounded six ambulance workers and three civilians — an 11-year-old boy, an elderly woman and a man, Deebe said.

“One of the rockets hit right in the middle of the big red cross that was painted on top of the ambulance,” he said. “This is a clear violation of humanitarian law, of international law. We are neutral, and we should not be targeted.”

Kassem Shalan, one of the ambulance workers, told AP Television News nine people were injured. “We were transferring the wounded into our vehicle and something fell, and I dropped to the floor,” he said.

Amateur video provided by an ambulance worker confirmed Deebe’s account of damage to the vehicles, showing one large hole and several smaller ones in the roof of one ambulance and a large hole in the roof of the second. Both were destroyed.

The Israeli military said it was investigating the incident.

Israeli rockets have been hitting around Najem Hospital for most of the past two weeks, nursing director Inaya Haydar said. “I don’t sleep very much at night, sometimes two hours; sometimes I don’t sleep at all.”

Six members of Haydar’s family were killed three days ago in Srifa, her home village southeast of Tyre.

A voice of reason from Haaretz

Stop now, immediately - Haaretz - Israel News:

A thoughtful and well reasoned essay by Gideon Levy ends with this:

"It is still too early to weigh out the balance of achievements and failures of this war. The day will come when it will become clear that it was purposeless, as are all wars of choice. Ceasing it now guarantees a limited achievement at a limited price. Continuing it guarantees a heavy price without any guarantee of a suitable reward. Therefore, Israel must cease and desist. The president of the United States can push us to continue the war all he wants, the prime minister of Britain can cheer us in parliament, but in Israel and Lebanon, the blood is being spilled, the horror is intensifying, the price is rising and it is all for naught."

Why does this sound familiar...?

Khaleej Times Online - Israel warns it will hit 10 buildings for every rocket fired:

"JERUSALEM - The Israeli air force is under orders to blast 10 buildings in south Beirut, a Hezbollah stronghold, for every rocket the Shiite militant group fires at the Israeli port of Haifa, army radio said Monday.

“Army chief of staff Dan Halutz has given the order to the air force to destroy 10 multi-storey buildings in the Dahaya district (of Beirut) in response to every rocket fired on Haifa,” a senior air force officer told the station."

Oh, yeah. Now I remember. There was this bombing in Rome. Italian Communists blew up some Nazis, killing 33 of them.

Hitler's reaction? Kill 10 Italians for each dead Nazi.

WILLIAMS: The Germans were furious. Hitler ordered retribution, a policy clearly understood before the bomb.

GIOVANNI ZUCHARETTI: All over Rome and the Vatican, the German put posters saying Achtung for each German soldier, they would kill ten Italians. They have provoked the death of 333 people.

WILLIAMS: When the bombers refused German demands to give themselves up, the reprisal list was compiled. The first names were fellow Italian resistance fighters, held by the SS at their notorious Via Tasso prison. Next, petty criminals from the local gaol but the Germans were still short. The final seventy five chosen simply because they were Jews. The list was completed. Ten Italians for every German plus another five for good measure. The men and boys were taken in small groups through the winding caves. There they were confronted by the bodies of those who’d just been killed and had to wait their turn for a single shot to the neck. A young SS captain was ticking the prisoners’ names off the list as they were slaughtered and took his turn shooting two himself – his name, Eric Priebke.

Erik lives in an apartment which is his prison as a war criminal.

WILLIAMS: The killing continued for hours. After the last shot was fired, 335 Italians lay dead. The entrance to the caves was dynamited to hide the evidence. Hitler’s reprisal was complete.

ERIC PRIEBKE: If I would have refused it, they would have shot me but the reprisal would go on just the same you see.

Marshals: Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota

Hope these photos don't put me on the terrorist watch list:



TheDenverChannel.com:

"DENVER -- You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

'Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong,' said one federal air marshal."

Bacteria could have electromagnetically seeded the galaxay

New Scientist SPACE :

"The startling conclusion grew out of work by Tom Dehel, an electrical engineer at the US Federal Aviation Administration, who was investigating how electromagnetic fields in the Earth's atmosphere can affect GPS satellites and disrupt their use for aircraft navigation. He presented his findings at the biennial meeting of the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), in Beijing, China, this week.

Dehel calculated the effect of electric fields at various levels in the atmosphere on a bacterium that was carrying an electric charge. He showed that such bacteria could easily be ejected from the Earth's gravitational field by the same kind of electromagnetic fields that generate auroras. And these fields occur every day, unlike the extraordinarily large surface impacts needed to eject interplanetary meteorites."
[ . . . ]
The idea that microbes could be electrically levitated into the upper atmosphere was first suggested in 1908 by chemist Svante Arrhenius, but until recently there had been no direct measurements of the strength of electric fields high in the atmosphere to show whether the mechanism would work to propel microbes away from the planet.

Other researchers have already demonstrated that some bacterial spores can survive in conditions thought to exist in interplanetary space, and then be revived. So the possibility of interplanetary spread of life is plausible and deserves further investigation, Dehel believes.

Charged microbes could also be propelled outwards from a planet at high speed by “magnetospheric plasmoids” - independent structures of plasma and magnetic fields that can be swept away from the Earth’s magnetosphere. Hitching rides on these structures could accelerate microbes to speeds capable of taking them out of the solar system and on to the planets of other stars.

And because of the potential for a steady outflow of the particles pushed by the electric fields, a single life-bearing world might seed an entire galaxy with life, claims Dehel.

Cheese Poetry

By Neddie Jingo!:

Ladies and gentlemen, with a baleful glare at those unworthy academics who hid his existence from me for all those years, I give you James McIntyre, the Bard of Canadian Cheese!

"Ode on the Mammoth Cheese

We have seen thee, Queen of cheese,
Laying quietly at your ease,
Gently fanned by evening breeze --
Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed soon you'll go
To the great Provincial Show,
To be admired by many a beau
In the city of Toronto."

Diebold Machines Flip Votes Before Startled Voters' Eyes

Atlanta Progressive News:

"(APN) ATLANTA –“You’ve got electronic voting machines. Many people called in and shared their concern. They pushed the button for Cynthia McKinney and Hank Johnson came up. It wasn’t one time, it wasn’t two times, it was many, many times,” Karen Fitzpatrick, who has been monitoring elections for US Rep. McKinney’s re-election campaign, told Atlanta Progressive News in an exclusive interview.

Let me repeat: The McKinney Campaign says they have documented complaints of voters here in Georgia whose votes FLIPPED BEFORE THEIR VERY EYES on Diebold machines.

“It started early this morning. There were well over 25 to 30 calls that came in [to the campaign office]. Many of them went to the poll manager [after this happened]. In some cases, the poll managers said there’s nothing we can do. In some cases the voter left frustrated as if their vote had been compromised, as if it had been stolen,” Fitzpatrick said."

Physics to the rescue of the fresco

physorg.com:

"When Florence was hit by disastrous floods in 1966, art conservation experts rushed to the city to save as many priceless pieces of art as they could. Now Florentine scientists have developed a tool to help restorers preserve Italy’s many precious fresco paintings without causing any damage to the paint itself, an Institute of Physics journal reports today."

Over time, salt and water in the frescoes damage and destroy them. By reading microwaves reflected off the wall, this device can measure salinity and moisture content to a depth of two centimeters.

'Apartheid' put AngloSaxons on the woad to supremacy

physorg.com:

"The Anglo-Saxons who conquered England in the fifth century set up a system of apartheid that enabled them to master and outbreed the native British majority, according to gene research published on Wednesday. In less than 15 generations, more than half of the population in England had the genes of the invaders, investigators say."
[ . . . ]
The Anglo-Saxons -- Germanic tribes who lived in present-day Germany, northern Holland and Denmark -- invaded Britain in 450 AD after the fall of the Roman empire. They conquered England but were unable to penetrate far into the Celtic fringes of what are now Wales and Scotland. They coincidentally prompted an exodus of Britons to what is now Brittany, France.

The population of England at that time was probably around two million while the number of Anglo-Saxons was minute: the lowest estimate puts the number of migrants at less than than 10,000 some 200 years after the invasion, although others put it at more than 100,000.

How could such a tiny minority have ruled a country so emphatically? How could it skirt assimilation with the native British majority and impose a language, laws, economy and culture whose stamp is visible today?

The answer, suggest Thomas and colleagues: an "apartheid-like social structure" that enshrined Anglo-Saxons as the master and the native Britons (called "Welshmen", from the Germanic word for slave) as the servants.

Indoor swimming pools linked to childhood asthma

physorg.com:

"Investigators in Belgium analysed data from 190,000 youngsters aged 13-14 in 21 countries, who were asked to give details about any breathing problems, hay fever and atopic eczema.

The researchers found a preponderance of asthma and wheezing in towns and cities where there was a high density of indoor pools.

Rates of asthma and wheeze rose by 2.73 and 3.39 percent respectively for every additional indoor swimming pool. Prevalence of these problems was higher in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, mirroring the higher number of pools in the western part of the continent.

The study appears online in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, published by the British Medical Association (BMA).

Chief author Alfred Bernard, a professor of public health at the Catholic University of Louvain, Brussels, believes the cause lies with nitrogen trichloride, a gassy, easily inhalable irritant.

This chemical, also called trichloramine, is released when chlorinated water reacts with urine, sweat or other organic matter brought by swimmers.

Bernard notes that more and more swimming pools have been built in past decades and, thanks to their increasingly lavish equipment, such as wave machines and slides, children spend more and more time there. "

US evacuating its citizens from Lebanon so it's ally won't kill them

Chris Floyd :

"Well, here's something you don't see everyday: a nation evacuating its citizens so they won't be killed by their close and faithful ally.

Is this not a tacit admission that Israel is carrying out indiscrminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure – i.e., committing state terrorism? If they are 'carefully targeting military objectives only,' then why are American citizens in danger? The subtext of this story – which will never, ever be stated anywhere in the mainstream American media – is clear: American citizens in Lebanon are at dire risk of being killed by Israeli bombs, despite the fact that few if any of these citizens have even the slightest connection to Hezbollah, because the IDF is methodically laying waste to the whole country regardless of how many civilians they kill, or where they might come from.

This is what the Bush Administration is saying – through deeds, not words – with this evacuation. It is a remarkable admission. Yet at the same time, the Bushists are sending $210 million worth of vital jet fuel supplies to Israel to help run the IDF war machine (which is already well-stoked by American largess) as it wages mass slaughter and threatens the lives of up to 25,000 Americans. Obviously, Bush doesn't really care how many civilians the Israelis kill, or where they might come from, either."

US blocks call for cease fire

International News Article | Reuters.com:

"By Irwin Arieff

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The U.N. Security Council on Saturday again rejected pleas that it call for an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon after the United States objected, diplomats said.

Washington argued in closed-door talks that the focus for Middle East diplomacy for now should be on the weekend summit in St Petersburg of the Group of Eight industrialized nations, council diplomats said.

It was the sole member of the 15-nation U.N. body to oppose any council action at all at this time, they said."

That was Saturday.

This was Sunday:

Some 30 Lebanese were killed in various attacks through the day. Over the past four days, more than 85 Lebanese have died, most of them civilians, and more than 200 have been wounded, according to Lebanese officials. Hezbollah rockets have killed four Israeli civilians and wounded more than 150 since the barrage began Wednesday.

Of course. More US ideals. Focus should be on Group of 8 meeting. Ignore the escalating war right under their nose.

Pearlstine To Join Carlyle Group | The Huffington Post

Eat The Press | The Huffington Post:

"Former Time Inc. Editor-in-Chief Norman Pearlstine is to join elite private equity firm the Carlyle Group as a senior advisor, reports Keith Kelly. He will leave his current position as senior adviser to Time Warner to which he ascended after leaving the executive editorship of Time Inc."

Satirists no longer have to make up jokes.

The progression:
Editor, Time (making sure the proper spin is put on the news) ->Senior Advisor, Time-Warner (making sure the proper spin is put on news, entertainment—in short, the intellectual commons) -> Carlyle Group Associate (getting his reward—cashing in his connections and influence for a piece of the $13+ billion dollar Carlyle pie)

Obviously, the Carlyle Group thinks his expertise will help them make money, because that's what they do.

From Wikipedia:

"Though known for its expertise in aerospace & defense, more than 30 percent of Carlyle’s invested assets are in the telecommunications & media sector. Noted portfolio companies are Dex Media, the former directories business of Qwest Communications; Willcom, a Japanese wireless company; Casema, a Dutch cable company; and Insight Communications, the ninth largest cable company in the U.S.

"Brand-name companies that Carlyle owns include: rental car company Hertz, Dunkin’ Brands, which owns Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, and dental hygiene company Water Pik."

Ecuador volcano explosion destroys homes of 100,000 residents

People's Daily Online:

Patricio Donoso, president of Ecuador's Chamber of Agriculture, said on Monday that 100,000 people have lost their homes and 15,000 hectares of land were destroyed by the eruption of Tungurahua Volcano some 135 km south of the capital Quito."

I don't seem to see this anywhere else in the news. Happpened two days ago. Maybe tomorrow someone will mention it.

I do see a story about people injured when a cruise ship tilted...

Hillary: "Israel is standing for American values"

Israeli attack on Beruit airport

...you know, I used to think I'd like Hillary...

New York Times:

"Speaking at a boisterous rally for Israel near the United Nations headquarters this afternoon, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton said she supported taking “whatever steps are necessary” to defend Israel against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and Syria in the military conflict in the Middle East.

Senator Clinton, addressing a crowd of several thousand people, said the United States must show “solidarity and support” for Israel in the face of the “unwarranted, unprovoked” seizure of three Israeli soldiers by members of Hamas and Hezbollah, which she referred to as among “the new totalitarians of the 21st century.”

“We will stand with Israel because Israel is standing for American values as well as Israeli ones,” said Mrs. Clinton, who was joined by two dozen political and religious leaders on a stage along 42nd Street."

Right. American values like mercilessly destroying all transportation routes and then attacking civilians trapped there, like attacking hospitals, like kidnapping hundreds of innocents and keeping them in prisons for months. Well, she's right. That's what the US did in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Bombs Away!" says PNAC signatory Woolsey

Robert James Woolsey Jr.
former CIA head says we (the US) should be bombing Syria—right now! because that would show Iran who's boss! See the video:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14041.htm

From Wikipedia:

Woolsey has served in the U.S. government as:

• Advisor (during military service) on the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1), Helsinki and Vienna, 1969-1970
• General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1970-73
• Under Secretary of the Navy, 1977-1979
• Delegate at Large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), Geneva, 1983-1986
• Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), Vienna, 1989-1991
• Director of Central Intelligence, 1993-1995

He is currently a trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Advisor of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, Founding Member of the Set America Free Coalition, and Vice President at Booz Allen Hamilton for Global Strategic Security. He was formerly chairman of the Freedom House board of trustees.

He is also a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and was one of the signatories to the January 26, 1998, PNAC letter sent to President Clinton that called for the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Woolsey is featured in the new documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? addressing solutions to oil dependency.

Blogger Steve Clemons has accused Woolsey of both profiting from and promoting the Iraq War.
__________________________________________________________________
Clemons also mentioned that Woolsey, as a lawyer, represented Ahmed Chalabi, darling of the neocons, fugitive from Jordan, spy from Iran. Curious.

There's more here than you want to read about unsavory things Woolsey has done in the last decade or so:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?id=1521846767-3805

Keep the US Strong!

Today, the Information Clearing House starts off like this:

---

Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War? As Many As 250,000

---

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In America's War 2552

---

Cost of America's War in Iraq

$296,857,473,263
To see more details, click here.

This got me thinking. We can set up a formula to encapsulate the Iraq War.

$297 billion in expenses=2552 dead US military+(>250,000 Iraqi dead)

We can round this off further, simplify it, because, well, war is inexact...

$300 billion in expenses=3000 dead US military+(>300,000 Iraqi dead)

Divide by 300, and you get this, the Absolute Formula of the Iraq War:

$1 billion war machine profits=30 US military dead + (>1000 Iraqi dead)

This could be a great campaign tool for November! It should be obvious by now that what's good for US industry is good for the US. The sole beneficiaries of the Iraq War are the US Masters of War (you who build the big bombs, etc.), and it's fairly obvious that the only thing keeping the US economy out of a depression at this point is the unprecedented spending of money we don't have on war toys for big boys.

So, here's the pitch.

Keep the US Strong! For each 30 US Military sacrificed, a prize of $1 Billion will be awarded to US industry, to keep the US Strong! (some unintended side effects may occur, like perhaps as many as 1000 Iraqi dead...)

Is that such a large price to pay for Economic Vitality?

Keep the US Strong! for each 30 US military sacrificed, a prize of $1 billion will be awarded to US industry—to KEEP the US STRONG!

(some unintended side effects may occur, like perhaps as many as 1000 Iraqi dead...)

The P-Word

Feral Scholar:

By Stan Goff at 5:07 pm, 7/16/06

Is Palestine.

And the discussion of Zionism for what it is — exactly as we are witnessing right now — a secular, racist political movement, characterized by expansionism and militarism , is going to have to happen online, because neither the mainstream press nor mainstream politicians will touch it with a ten-foot pole… even when it is piling up more bodies as it leads the world into a regional disaster.

Let’s just get something out of the way right up front, before I go any further. Zionism is not Judaism; being Jewish does not make anyone Zionist; and anti-Zionism is not equivalent to anti-Semitism.

It is now well past time for the United States to withdraw all rogue state, Israel; though that is unlikely to happen without a movement to make it happen, because the US is now effectively the biggest and most dangerous rogue state on the planet.

Democrats won’t touch this issue for the same reason they avoid that other P-Word, Prison. They are as complict in the incarceration of 2 million people here — mostly of color — as they are in the continuing support of the terror state of Israel.

So let’s just talk briefly about what Zionism actually is, and get away from the mythology promoted by and AIPAC.

What follows is exactly that. And then this rational for the way things are perceived:

Robin C. Miller’s book “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement” is a good primer on how this works, listing ten “rules” that are scrupulously followed and giving examples of each.

Rule 1: See the Middle East through Israeli eyes.
Rule 2: Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as hard news.
Rule 3: Ignore the historical context.
Rule 4: Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation.
Rule 5: Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis.
Rule 6: Muddy the waters when necessary.
Rule 7: Credit all Israeli claims, even if wholly unfounded.
Rule 8: Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident.
Rule 9: Condemn only Palestinian violence.
Rule 10: Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights.

There is an eleventh rule that hovers over all the other rules. Equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This shuts everyone up. That’s why it is so critically important that this Eleventh Rule be challenged loudly and clearly and frequently. Anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism. Zionism is not Judaism. Not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews. The point is that Zionism raises many questions about what constitutes Jewishness. Israeli Jews are largely secular, so it cannot be called a strictly religious category. Race is not even a scientifically operational term. The Jewish communities around the world are distinctly developed from one another. If Zionism is to define Jewishness for itself, it can only do so - loosely - as the Diaspora, the political utility of which, for example with the African Diaspora, is one where that ’scattered’ status still results in a common historically conditioned oppression. For Israeli Jews, the contrary is true. They have become not an oppressed nationality, but an oppressing European settler state.

What Iraqi Air Force?

Another gem from this site. From 6/20/2006:

Against the War on Terror:

"The problem with calls to “bring home the troops” is not that it is premature or defeatist, but that it is disingenuous. For example, the debate today in the Senate over the Defense Appropriations Bill for 2007 is focused around “redeployment” in Iraq rather than “withdrawal”. (As the New York Times notes, the latter word is not even used in the Democrat's proposal.) Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), explains “redeployment”: the US would retain a force in Iraq capable of “direct participation in counter-terrorism activities, training Iraqi security forces, and protecting United States infrastructure and personnel.” Beyond police check-point duty, what else is there? The crucial point is that the cited activities can all be accomplished from one of the US’s massive, permanent air bases. The Democratic Party is calling not for withdrawal from Iraq, but for withdrawal to the permanent footprint. This is but the latest in the long line of America's empty gestures toward Iraqi sovereignty."

Against the War On Terror

Here's something to chew on.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Friday Review: The Antiwar Position Revisited

The raison d’etre of the war on terror is that it makes us safer. Security, however, is never an end in itself, it is only worthwhile as a means to other ends. We can only measure different security arguments against these ends. For instance, we know that in domestic politics, security is supposed to be a means to liberty, or living a free life. Since demands for security can have authoritarian consequences, we do not accept all of them, and we are, or at least should be, critical of them. We expect there to be some criteria by which we distinguish between real and unreal threats, and between policies that sacrifice too much liberty to security.

The problem with the war on terror, is that it makes security an end in itself. It doesn’t even admit of external principles against which we can distinguish rational and irrational demands. Any act that makes us feel safer is presumed to be justified. Logically speaking, an enemy does not even have to exist. All that has to exist is a perception of threat for a security demand to be seen as valid. This eliminates any rational grounds for criticism because the only standard left is not the materiality of the threat, or the value of security in relation to other principles, but simply our, or really our politicians’, feelings. So in the domestic sphere, we are asked to trade whatever liberty is necessary to make us safe, rather than recognize that some demands for security are unjustified or unnecessary because they have no rational purpose – they do not actually make us safer.

Within our own society, we at least recognize an alternative principle – liberty – against which to measure and criticize different demands for security. But when it comes to international relations it is unclear what the analogous principles are. It is that the antiwar position has failed to come up with an adequately powerful set of arguments. As we have written here before, it is insufficient and potentially problematic to be merely against the war in Iraq, but not against the war on terror. One reason is that the focus on the war on Iraq has lead to an overemphasis on problems that appear specific to that war, and therefore failed to develop properly principled positions. Much of the opposition has focused on the dishonesty, venality, and criminality of the war. Even as criticisms of the Iraq War, these arguments are insufficient:

Lies: It is true that Bush lied, but had he not lied the war still would have been wrong. Even if Saddam had possessed large stocks of biological and chemical weapons, and even if he
had been seeking nuclear weapons, he would not have posed anything like an immediate threat to the United States. This was the leader of an incredibly weak country, ravaged by ten years of sanctions, and unable even to mobilize his soldiers for symbolic military exercises, let alone some kind of attack on the United States.

Corruption: It is also true that there is all kinds of venal, war-profiteering amongst Bush's corporate friends. But this, too, would not be an argument against the war if the war had been necessary.

Illegality: Likewise, it is true that the war was illegal. But calling into question the legality of the war, on its own, does not challenge the important political questions: was Saddam a threat, was this war necessary, and when is it appropriate to violate the sovereignty of another nation?

The fundamental problem with this war was that it was the unjustified violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Nor is this a matter of Iraq alone. The deeper problem with just critiquing the Iraq War is that the overarching war on terror is left unaddressed. The war on terror is presupposed as a background to the debate, rather than brought to the fore as the central issue for us to discuss. Yet it is relevant even for the Iraq War. Why were people so willing to believe that Saddam was a threat given that he clearly was not? It is not so much that the public was manipulated, but that the Iraq debate was and is deeply interwoven with the war on terror itself. This means that all debate takes place in a climate of fear, in which to challenge any particular claim - like Saddam is a threat - is also to challenge the underlying premise that even the most remote and undefined threats must be assailed 'pre-emptively'.

Here is where a critique of the war on terror is simply unavoidable, and where the need for a set of political principles for assessing global affairs is necessary. Having mainly substituted cynicism for criticism, the antiwar position has left us sorely lacking. When considering just the international dimensions of the war on terror, the alternative principles, against which we can measure security demands, are self-determination and sovereignty. The defense of self-determination abroad derives from the same commitment to freedom and democracy at home. Every nation is capable of becoming a democratic society, but only if it is allowed to determine for itself the shape of its own institutions. Only in this way do their institutions become expressions of their own, collective will. Democratic liberties are only won when they are seized by the people themselves. But for this process of self-determination to take place, then the sovereignty, or territorial integrity and political independence, of these nations must be respected. Sovereignty is instrumental to self-determination. Non-intervention must be the norm. (Of course, the erosion of sovereignty did not begin with Bush).

If sovereignty is the norm, then that means powerful nations, like the United States, cannot invade or otherwise intervene in the affairs of others states whenever it feels worried, or has a hunch about some potential security threat. The threat must be imminent, real and over-powering. Security as a reason for war is only potentially justified when it is in self-defense because survival is a precondition for self-determination: a society cannot determine its fate if it is about to be invaded and destroyed, as the Iraqis and Afghanis now well know. That there is some possibility, some 'unknown unknowns' in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, is not a good reason for war. Iraqi sovereignty should not have been violated. Wars whose justification is simply that some other state *might* someday be threatening, or *might* have some weapons, is simply an invitation for powerful states to act on whatever hunch it might have, with no rational limitations on its actions. It is a prescription for permanent war. If we accept sovereignty as a norm, and self-determination as the principle we are aiming at, then we at least possess a rational standard for assessing, and criticizing, various justifications for war. Having a 'bad feeling about things' is not enough.

Finally, as we have mentioned before, a defense of self-determination and sovereignty is not merely important for what happens internationally and in other countries. By rejecting the idea that the state can go to war to address even the most unfounded and speculative of fears, we also impose restraints on our own government. That is to say, we defend our own process of self-determination, by rejecting our government's attempt to impose a permanent state of war and suspend domestic politics. In this way, by defending sovereignty we allow other nations to retain some of their own political autonomy, and we recover some of our own democratic agency. We must develop the principles that allow us to break free from the politics of fear, suspicion, and irrational conjecture.

US Death Squads to the Rescue!

Nuns pray over the bodies of four American
sisters killed by the military in El Salvador in 1980

Razek Al-Kazem Al-Khafaji, who lost 15 members of his family
as his pickup was bombed by a helicopter, throws up his hands
as he grieves over his loss in Hilla in the southern province
of Babylon. (AFP, Arab News, 4/2/03).

The Salvador Option at work in Iraq - (courtesy of the cosmic iguana.)

Asia Times Online

"Merchants of death in Iraq
By Dahr Jamail and Ali Fadhil

FALLUJAH - It could be called perhaps just another raid. Early in the morning on Sunday, June 18, US military helicopters landed near the home of Sinan Abdul-Ilah al-Mashadani in the al-Jughaifi district of Fallujah.

Within two minutes the doors of his home were blasted open and 'a strange looking group of people' stormed inside, according to Said Walid Ahmed, a 40-year-old teacher who lives in the neighborhood.

'This force is not totally unknown to us here in Fallujah,' Ahmed, who witnessed the incident from a nearby house told Inter Press Service (IPS). 'They are a special force of Americans that assassinates more people than it arrests.'

Ahmed described the force from the helicopters as 'big men with long hair and beards, some wearing earrings, and others with little black caps on the top of their heads at the back'.

Sinan Abdul-Ilah al-Mashadani, who was a student at al-Mustansiriya University and the sole supporter of his mother and younger brother and sister, was killed in the raid, apparently by a special operations team supported by the US military, according to witnesses.

'Their [special forces troops'] dogs were biting everybody, including children and women in the neighborhood,' Um Amar, a 63-year-old woman who lives three houses away from Sinan told IPS. 'They killed the poor boy in cold blood and arrested his little brother.' She burst into tears and began to pray.

Another neighbor, Jassim al-Jumaily, said Sinan's father Najim Abdul-Ilah al-Mashhadani was killed during Operation Phantom Fury in November 2004 when his house was bombed by US warplanes.

The US military assault on Fallujah then destroyed most of the city and killed between 4,000 and 6,000 people, according to Monitoring Net of Human Rights in Iraq (MHRI), an Iraqi non-governmental organization based in Fallujah.

Sinan took responsibility for his family after the death of his father, Jumaily said. 'He had to work and study at the same time. We did not notice any abnormality in his behavior at all. When the helicopters came, we never thought Sinan would be the target, because we realize they only come after big personalities from al-Qaeda or leaders in the Iraqi resistance.'

Jumaily said the long-haired bearded men from the special force 'blasted the doors of Sinan's house open as if they were attacking an army headquarters'.

People in the neighborhood said they heard some of what was going on. 'The screaming of Sinan's mother and sisters was frightening,' Jumaily said. 'All we could do was pray for their safety, trying to comfort each other that the worst possibility was that they would arrest Sinan.'

After the men had been inside the house for three hours, Jumaily and other witnesses said they heard Sinan's mother wailing, and saw the men leave with Amin, her 13-year-old son who was being beaten by the men and bitten by their dogs as he was taken away.

Many of the neighbors then went to Sinan's home, and found his body, covered with sheets and mattresses. There was a pool of blood on the floor, some was splattered on the walls.

'Three days after his detention, Amin was released,' said Muhamad al-Deraji, director of MHRI. 'The left hand of this orphaned child was bitten three times, and is now scarred and deformed.'

The US forces also raided other homes in the area, Deraji said. 'One of the dogs attacked a woman who tried to protect her baby. The dog bit the mother's hand.'

Deraji said the forces looted money and jewelry from several of the houses they raided.

IPS sent an email to Major Douglas Powell at the Combined Press Information Center for the Multi-National Force in Iraq to request comment on the incident. There was no reply.

Later, IPS phoned the US military spokesperson in Baghdad to request information on the incident. The spokesman, who declined to give his name, said, 'We have no information confirming this event ever took place.' "

Attack Lebannon to Bait Iran

Jeff Wells at Rigorous Intuition (v. 2.0):

"Israel's war upon Lebanon would be a disproportionate response if Israel were actually responding to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers. It isn't, of course. (If it were, we may have seen a limited cross-border incursion that resembled a rescue mission, rather than these blunt-force deep attacks on Lebanese infrastructure.) Rather the war, like most wars of aggression, is a response to the pathological necessities of the aggressor's ideology.

America's Countdown: Tehran has been stuck at 20 minutes and holding for a couple of months now, derailed by Iran's rational posture regarding its nuclear ambitions and the ongoing thwarting of anything approaching even the Bush administration's benchmark for a casus belli. Israel's hawks, by smashing in the back door, are baiting Iran to action, which would goad the US to crash through the front. Israeli military claims, trumpeted by FoxNews, that the Haifa rockets were fired by Iranian Guard units, and the absurd suggestion that Hezbollah intends to transport their captured soldiers to Iran, say forcefully that this isn't about Lebanon, though for now it will be mostly the Lebanese who perish. (Interestingly, The Jerusualem Post noted yesterday that 'Before the attack on Haifa, CNN reported that the US Navy ordered one of their ships that was docked at the Haifa Bay to be moved to a safer location.' Though the story has since been removed.)

This is a war crime of opportunity, calculated to at last draw out Iran and draw in American arms to finish what they began in Iraq. Madness is the method, and Death was never going to take a holiday this summer."

From comments to the above post on Jeff's blog:

"I am still not sure who's agenda leads the way in all of this. Is it The U.S. agenda, or Israel's"

I think we're seeing the shadow of forces that operate beyond national agendas, because the end of this path is the ruin of nations. (And the shadow isn't "Zionism" either, because Israel will also be broken by these choices.) I'm thinking, rather, of globalist narco-criminals who profit by the propagation of "failed states."

Like I wrote about neocons as the patsies of Iraq's "failure" in The Lone Conmen, "Iraq is viewed almost entirely as a neocon project, but the backstory to the war includes the purposeful bankrupting of America, which has weakened the state from the inside while the Iraq war has not only created more enemies, but left it more vulnerable to attack.... Like Oswald, these patsies aren't innocents, but neither should perfect blame be laid at their feet."

Newt Knows How To Win in November—Convince the Public We're in WWIII

You can see this one coming a mile away...


The Seattle Times: Postman on Politics:

"Gingrich said in the coming days he plans to speak out publicly, and to the Administration, about the need to recognize that America is in World War III.

He lists wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, this week's bomb attacks in India, North Korean nuclear threats, terrorist arrests and investigations in Florida, Canada and Britain, and violence in Israel and Lebanon as evidence of World War III. He said Bush needs to deliver a speech to Congress and 'connect all the dots' for Americans.

He said the reluctance to put those pieces together and see one global conflict is hurting America's interests. He said people, including some in the Bush Administration, who urge a restrained response from Israel are wrong 'because they haven't crossed the bridge of realizing this is a war.'

'This is World War III,' Gingrich said. And once that's accepted, he said calls for restraint would fall away:

'Israel wouldn't leave southern Lebanon as long as there was a single missile there. I would go in and clean them all out and I would announce that any Iranian airplane trying to bring missiles to re-supply them would be shot down. This idea that we have this one-sided war where the other team gets to plan how to kill us and we get to talk, is nuts.'

There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change 'the minute you use the language' of World War III. The message then, he said, is ''OK, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?'"

Racist Extremists Active in U.S. Military

A search for a photo to accompany the previous post turned up this similar story:

Salem-News.Com

July-9-2006 18:16
Racist Extremists Active in U.S. Military
Southern Poverty Law Center

Southern Poverty Law Center urges Rumsfeld
to adopt zero-tolerance policy.

Matt Buschbacher joined the military and became a Navy SEAL shortly after this photo was
taken at the Imperial Klans of America's Nordic Fest in May 2000
Photo courtesy: splcenter.org

(WASHINGTON D.C.) - Under pressure to meet wartime manpower goals, the U.S. military has relaxed standards designed to weed out racist extremists. Large numbers of potentially violent neo-Nazis, skinheads and other white supremacists are now learning the art of warfare in the armed forces.

Department of Defense investigators estimate thousands of soldiers in the Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity. 'We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,' said one investigator. 'That's a problem.'

Southern Poverty Law Center President Richard Cohen urged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to adopt a zero-tolerance policy regarding racist extremism among members of the U.S. military.

'Because hate group membership and extremist activity are antithetical to the values and mission of our armed forces, we urge you to adopt a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to white supremacy in the military and to take all necessary steps to ensure that the policy is rigorously enforced,' Cohen wrote in a letter to Rumsfeld.

Military extremists present an elevated threat both to their fellow soldiers and the general public. Today's white supremacists become tomorrow's domestic terrorists.

'Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists are joining the military in large numbers so they can get the best training in the world on weapons, combat tactics and explosives,' said Mark Potok, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project.

'We should consider this a major security threat, because these people are motivated by an ideology that calls for race war and revolution. Any one of them could turn out to be the next Timothy McVeigh.'"

Nazis enilsting in US military—for terrorist training

Chris Floyd - Empire Burlesque:

"Over and over, the Bush Regime and its media apologists have peddled the same mendacious line in defense of their war crime in Iraq: "We're fighting the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them over here." But in fact the brutal occupation is actually breeding a cadre of vicious terrorists intent on bringing death and destruction back home to America's streets, using the deadly skills they've learned – in the U.S. military.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of neo-Nazis and "white power" extremists have infiltrated U.S. forces in a deliberate strategy to get training in weapons, urban warfare and covert operations, the Pentagon's own investigators report. These homegrown terrorists – avowed enemies of democracy, committed to sparking the same kind of horrific civil war in America that George W. Bush has spawned in Iraq – have wormed their way into some of most elite military units, as well as filling up the ordinary ranks with cretinous "race warriors."

This infestation is being actively abetted by the Bush Regime. Who says? Well, Department of Defense investigator Scott Barfield for one. "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members," Barfield told the Southern Poverty Law Center, in a report issued last week.

In the last year alone, Barfield identified 320 white power extremists at a single U.S. army base, Fort Lewis in Washington state; only two were discharged. Some were part of just one neo-Nazi cell that has burrowed into five bases spread across the entire country, Barfield said; many of its members have joined the hundreds of known neo-Nazis now schooling themselves in Bush's masterclass in carnage.
[ . . . ]
"In its heedless lust for loot and dominion, the Bush Faction will use anyone: neo-Nazis, neoconservatives, theocrats, dictators, death squads, nutballs, gasbags. The blowback from this nest of vipers will poison American life for generations – but of course the Bushists don't care. America is nothing to them but a cash cow and a billy club. Let the stupid rabble worry about war-trained Nazis in the streets; the Bush elite will be safe and cozy in their gated, guarded mansions."

CIvilians Targetted by US-Backed Military

-------------the very definition of a war crime

Wayne Madsen Report - Home:

Our U.S. intelligence sources in Lebanon have exclusively reported to us the extent of Israel's Blitzkrieg attack on Lebanon, which has destroyed most of the country's critical infrastructures. Beirut International Airport's newly-restored terminal, where many passengers, including Americans, were stranded after the Israelis carpet bombed the runway during flight operations, was bombed in the latest Israeli attack. Israel has turned Lebanon into another Iraq -- there is no electricity and airports, roads, and bridges have been knocked out across the country. Israel has even bombed small ports preventing civilians from escaping to Cyprus.
[ . . . ]
"According to our U.S. intelligence sources, the numbers of dead are in the hundreds. In south Lebanon, Israeli planes bombed three vans carrying families after they were turned away from a UN outpost while seeking protection. A total of 23 people were killed, including nine small children. The Israeli attacks have been described by various sources in Lebanon as 'sub-human,' 'monstrous,' and 'animalistic.' Our intelligence sources phoned us before what they believe will be the targets of attacks in the next wave of Israeli attacks -- the nation's telecommunications networks, including cell phone towers and exchanges.

The Israel regime is acting with the full approval of the Bush administration, both regimes that are totally beholden to neo-con interests intent on throwing the entire Middle East into a firestorm of destruction and death."
- - - - - -
"Our intelligence sources in Lebanon have reported to us exclusively that Israel is now using poison gas and depleted uranium shells on towns in the south of Lebanon. Residents of the small village of Kasarshoba became violently ill, experiencing severe vomiting, after the Israelis hit the village with poison gas. In other cases, underground shelters in southern Lebanon were hit by Israeli depleted uranium shells. Our sources also report that the entire southern suburbs of southern Beirut, with a population of 800,000, have been totally depopulated. Israel has targeted thousands of civilian homes for destruction.

Meanwhile, Israeli government spokespersons and Bush administration officials took to the Sunday morning talking head programs in Washington to defend Israel's barbarous actions. The networks failed to present the views of Lebanese government spokespersons. Israel's and the Bush administration's line is that Israeli attacks are "precision targeted." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pointedly refused to criticize Israel on ABC's This Week.

American media is failing to report that the Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza, like the U.S. attacks in Iraq, are violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Additional Protocols governing military attacks on civilians by governments that are parties to the conventions:

Civilians are not to be subject to attack. This includes direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks against areas in which civilians are present.

There is to be no destruction of property unless justified by military necessity.

Warring parties must not use or develop biological or chemical weapons

the Eiger falling apart

LiveScience.com - Big Chunk of Swiss Mountain Falls: "

GRINDELWALD, Switzerland (AP)—A large section of stone broke away and tumbled down a famous Swiss Alps mountain Thursday, shrouding a resort in dust but causing no injuries, officials said.

Stone from the east face of Eiger mountain fell hundreds of feet in a thundering, 15-minute avalanche, Grindelwald rescue chief Kurt Amacher told TV station SF DRS.

The more than 20 million cubic feet of stone came to rest on a mountainside, sending up a cloud of dust that shrouded nearby Grindelwald resort for hours. Amacher said no one was injured and no buildings were hit in the rock fall.

Rock on the Eiger had been crumbling in recent days because glacial ice that had been holding it together had melted, geologists said.

A 100-foot-high rock formation on the Eiger known as the 'Madonna'' collapsed earlier Thursday.

The Eiger's north face, which towers over Grindelwald, with a mile-high sheer wall and a summit at 13,025 feet is considered one of Europe's greatest challenges to mountaineers."

Paint-On Semiconductor Outperforms Chips

www.physorg.com

Paint-on semiconductor, Image: Ted Sargent

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today's conventional chips -- and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass. The finding, which represents the first time a so-called "wet" semiconductor device has bested traditional, more costly grown-crystal semiconductor devices, is reported in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature.

"Traditional ways of making computer chips, fibre-optic lasers, digital camera image sensors – the building blocks of the information age – are costly in time, money, and energy," says Professor Ted Sargent of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and leader of the research group. Conventional semiconductors have produced spectacular results -- the personal computer, the Internet, digital photography -- but they rely on growing atomically-perfect crystals at 1,000 degrees Celsius and above, he explains.

The Toronto team instead cooked up semiconductor particles in a flask containing extra-pure oleic acid, the main ingredient in olive oil. The particles are just a few nanometres (one billionth of a metre) across. The team then placed a drop of solution on a glass slide patterned with gold electrodes and forced the drop to spread out into a smooth, continuous semiconductor film using a process called spin-coating. They then gave their film a two-hour bath in methanol. Once the solvent evaporated, it left an 800 nanometre-thick layer of the light-sensitive nanoparticles.

At room temperature, the paint-on photodetectors were about ten times more sensitive to infrared rays than the sensors that are currently used in military night-vision and biomedical imaging. "These are exquisitely sensitive detectors of light," says Sargent, who holds a Canada Research Chair in Nanotechnology. "It's now clear that solution-processed electronics can combine outstanding performance with low cost."

The U of T development could be of critical importance to both research and industry, according to John D. Joannopoulos, a Professor at MIT. "The ability to realize low-cost, paintable, high-performance designer semiconductors for use as short-wavelength infrared detectors and emitters is of enormous value for a wide range of communications, imaging and monitoring applications," says Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"The key to our success was controlled engineering at the nanometre lengthscale: tailoring colloidal nanocrystal size and surfaces to achieve exceptional device performance," says lead author Gerasimos Konstantatos, a doctoral researcher at UofT. "With this finding, we now know that simple, convenient, low-cost wet chemistry can produce devices with performance that is superior compared to that of conventional grown-crystal devices."

Source: University of Toronto

U.S. reaps what the Army sows

thanks to Swedish Meatballs Confidential

Salt Lake Tribune:
"Article Last Updated: 07/08/2006 10:37:11 AM MDT

by David R. Irvine

Recent headlines from Iraq are ugly: Marines charged with murdering Haditha civilians. A crippled man killed by Americans, who then planted a rifle and shovel near the body as if he had been burying roadside bombs. And a particularly gruesome charge that U.S. soldiers raped and killed an Iraqi woman, killed her family, and burned the bodies to cover the crime.
If these atrocities are carefully investigated, the likely deficiency may be sufficient command leadership and discipline. A recent book (May 2006) speaks to the issue of leader accountability with stunning eloquence. Tiger Force is a documented account of 120 U.S. soldiers who, between May and November of 1967, rotated through an Army special operations platoon. This platoon, Tiger Force, wreaked its vengeance in the vicinity of Duc Pho and Chu Lai in South Vietnam.
Operating largely on their own and only passingly accountable to a chain of command that rarely ventured into the jungles and paddies, these soldiers ruthlessly murdered hundreds of unarmed men, women and children. One soldier cut off a baby's head with a knife. Victims' ears were regularly sliced off, collected and fashioned into necklaces which some soldiers proudly wore. Other victims were scalped. Some were tortured. Teeth were kicked out to retrieve the gold from fillings. Virtually all of the civilian deaths were reported as 'Viet Cong,' even though, oddly, no weapons were ever found and none were ever reported. No officer in command ever questioned this glaring disparity.

That part of Tiger Force is grim enough. What the Army then did with the evidence is shocking, and what was covered up in 1974-75 may have sowed the headlines we are reaping in 2006. One of the most thorough Criminal Investigation Division (CID, the Army's internal FBI) investigations ever conducted, meticulously gathered the facts surrounding the war crimes committed by Tiger Force. The evidence was voluminous, certain and had been obtained at the risk of a few investigators' lives.

In 1974-75, Richard Cheney was a special assistant to President Ford. Ford's chief of staff was Donald Rumsfeld. The secretary of defense from 1973-75 was James Schlesinger. The case was made to disappear by these men who served presidents Nixon and Ford - probably out of considerations of politics. There were never any charges filed against the soldiers or the officers who ordered and participated in the routine killing of civilians.
The only reason the case file ever became public was that the CID officer who directed the investigation, and who later commanded the Criminal Investigation Division, kept a copy of the investigation file, and prior to his death in 2002 made provision for the file to be delivered to a reporter with the Toledo Blade.

Thirty years later, Mr. Rumsfeld refuses to discuss the Tiger Force case. Mr. Cheney declines to discuss much of anything. Mr. Schlesinger conducted one of the see-no-evil investigations at Abu Ghraib. The senior leadership of the Army and the nation prefers to characterize war crimes as the work of a few 'bad apples.' My Lai was pinned to Lt. William Calley, who suited the bad apple role.

Tiger Force was far larger, killed three times as many people, but involved too many 'bad apples' and too much gore to maintain the right story line.

The common thread which runs from Tiger Force through My Lai, to Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, to a hundred episodes of sadistic brutality inflicted by U.S. soldiers in Iraq, is the remarkable fact that the official responsibility for all these tragedies never runs higher than the lowest-level trigger-pullers or body-stackers.

But suppose in 1975 that Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney had made a different decision. Suppose the CID Tiger Force investigation had been permitted to charge the perpetrators and their superior officers with war crimes. Suppose a court-martial inquiry had asked why no battalion commanders bothered to check out the reports of Tiger Force ear collections? What if a colonel or two had been found guilty of failing to adequately control the troops under their command? For starters, those cases and leadership lessons would have been part of today's core curriculum in ROTC and at West Point.

This administration never holds anyone in senior positions accountable for derelict performance. However, unless there is full accountability for the war crimes of Iraq - wherever the evidence leads - there is a high probability that the lessons today's lieutenants and captains need to learn about the law of war and command leadership will never be sufficiently absorbed to make the crucial difference when those men and women become colonels and generals.
---
David R. Irvine is a lawyer in Salt Lake City and a retired Army Reserve brigadier general. He was commissioned as a strategic intelligence officer in 1967, and taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for the Sixth Army Intelligence School for 18 years."

It's official—Hillary is indeed in league with Satan

This is not a joke.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., April 29, 2006, left and News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch, June 18, 2003. (AP)

CBS News:

Rupert Murdoch Loves Hillary Clinton
Conservative Media Mogul To Host Fundraiser For Liberal N.Y. Senator

NEW YORK, May 9, 2006

(CBS) To call them a political odd couple would be a rash understatement.

Conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch will host a fundraiser for liberal New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the Financial Times reports.

The mating ritual of the unlikely allies has been under way for months. Clinton set political tongues to wagging last month by attending a Washington party celebrating the 10th anniversary of Fox News, the cable news channel owned by Murdoch.

The Financial Times quoted one unnamed source as describing the Clinton-Murdoch connection in this way: 'They have a respectful and cordial relationship. He has respect for the work she has done on behalf of New York. I wouldn't say it was illustrative of a close ongoing relationship. It is not like they are dining out together.'

The fundraiser will take place in July, the newspaper said. Clinton is the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, though she has not indicated whether or not she will run.

The Last Free Fourth of July?

Clare Hanrahan in Counterpunch

A local grocery chain gets a permit for a Fourth of July celebration in a public park. The cops then use this as an excuse to try to disband an anti-war protest that's taken place there every Tuesday for three years.

Election Report from Mexico

Narco News:

"Death by Video: Mexico’s Election Fraud Is Coming Undone
Video and Audio Evidence, an Outraged Citizenry, and Panic from the White House Are Converging to Make Lopez Obrador the Next Mexican President

By Al Giordano
Part III of a Special Series for The Narco News Bulletin

July 11, 2006"

Quite a story.

From Iraq, Riverbend puts it in perspective

Baghdad Burning:

"The horrific thing about the killings is that the area had been cut off for nearly two weeks by Ministry of Interior security forces and Americans. Last week, a car bomb was set off in front of a 'Sunni' mosque people in the area visit. The night before the massacre, a car bomb exploded in front of a Shia husseiniya in the same area. The next day was full of screaming and shooting and death for the people in the area. No one is quite sure why the Americans and the Ministry of Interior didn't respond immediately. They just sat by, on the outskirts of the area, and let the massacre happen."
[ . . . ]
"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"
[ . . . ]
"Why don't the Americans just go home? They've done enough damage and we hear talk of how things will fall apart in Iraq if they 'cut and run', but the fact is that they aren't doing anything right now. How much worse can it get? People are being killed in the streets and in their own homes- what's being done about it? Nothing. It's convenient for them- Iraqis can kill each other and they can sit by and watch the bloodshed- unless they want to join in with murder and rape."

10 Ways to Build a Cult-Like Following

Mindpowernews: — JK Ellis—Mind Control 101

Recently I was contacted by a very successful Internet marketer who asked me what I would suggest to someone who wanted to create a cult-like following.

This is right down my ally so I gave him some very good advice that he couldn't wait to put into action but the question got me thinking. What steps are there for anyone who wants people to want his/her attention and wisdom?

The result are 10 ways to build a cult-like following."

An Alien Abductee Shares Proof That We are Not Alone

Mediawire:

"Cleveland, OH (PRWEB) July 9, 2006 -- Craig Jacocks’ Aware of Their Presence is set to be the first major book about alien abduction since Whitley Streiber’s best seller Communion. But, Jacocks has something even Streiber did not: proof.

In the book, Jacocks recounts details from the many times he was abducted by aliens, beginning when he was a young child. He details how the encounters grew in intensity and how he began to realize he was dealing with humanoid beings with amazing abilities. Gradually, he began to hear their voices and see them. Recently at work, a scanner reacted to an unknown code inside his body. X-rays revealed two needle-like objects, which he now believes to be tracking devices. These experiences, Jacocks suggests, are not only real, but they should be explored as proof of alien existence, rather than mocked or hidden away in secrecy."