Rangoon "army mutiny" reported

Rangoon: ‘army mutiny’ reported
Reports from Rangoon suggest soldiers are mutinying. It is unclear the numbers involved. Reports cite heavy shooting in the former Burmese capital.
The organisation Helfen ohne Grenzen (Help without Frontiers) is reporting that "Soldiers from the 66th LID (Light Infantry Divison) have turned their weapons against other government troops and possibly police in North Okkalappa township in Rangoon and are defending the protesters. At present unsure how many soldiers involved."
Soldiers in Mandalay, where unrest has spread to as we reported this morning, are also reported to have refused orders to act against protesters.
Some reports claim that many soldiers remained in their barracks. More recent reports now maintain that soldiers from the 99th LID now being sent there to confront them.
Growing numbers of protestors are gathering in Rangoon, with 10,000 reported at the Traders Hotel and 50,000 at the Thein Gyi market. The police are reported to have turned water cannons against crowds at Sule Pagoda.
Many phone lines into the Burmese state have now been cut, mobile networks have been disabled and the national internet service provider has been taken off-line.

USA Today Reveals FBI Theory That World Trade Center Towers Destroyed By Explosives
On September 11, 2001, then USA Today foreign correspondent Jack Kelley revealed that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation suspected that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed by explosive devices located within the bottom of each tower.

Jack Kelly: "Um, apparently what appears to happen was that at the same time 2 planes hit the building, that there ... that the FBI most likely thinks that there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the buildings, which also exploded at the same time and brought both of them down."
Lauren Ashburn: "Now that's the first time were hearing that, so 2 planes and explosives that were in the building, is that correct?"
Jack Kelley: "That is the working theory at this point, that is still unconfirmed but that is what the FBI is going on at this point."

Iraq PM: Senate Proposal to divide Iraq A "Catastrophe"



At least eight Iraqis were killed in a shooting involving Blackwater private security officers in Nisour Square on Sept. 16.

BAGHDAD, Sept. 27 — Participants in a contentious Baghdad security operation this month have told American investigators that during the operation at least one guard continued firing on civilians while colleagues urgently called for a cease-fire. At least one guard apparently also drew a weapon on a fellow guard who did not stop shooting, an American official said.
The operation, by the private firm Blackwater USA, began as a mission to evacuate senior American officials after an explosion near where they were meeting, several officials said. Some officials have questioned the wisdom of evacuating the Americans from a secure compound, saying the area should instead have been locked down.
These new details of the episode on Sept. 16, in which at least eight Iraqis were killed, including a woman and an infant, were provided by an American official who was briefed on the American investigation by someone who helped conduct it, and by Americans who had spoken directly with two guards involved in the episode. Their accounts were broadly consistent.
The Blackwater compound, rimmed by concrete blast walls and concertina wire in the Green Zone in central Baghdad, has been under tight control. Participants in the Sept. 16 security operation have been ordered not to speak about the episode. But word of the disagreement on the street has slowly made its way through the community of private security contractors.
At 12:08 p.m., at least one guard began to fire in the direction of a car, killing its driver. A traffic policeman said he walked toward the car, but more shots were fired, killing a woman holding an infant sitting in the passenger seat. After the family was shot, a type of grenade or flare was fired into the car, setting it ablaze, according to some accounts. Other Iraqis were also killed as the shooting continued. Iraqi officials have given several death counts, ranging from 8 to 20, with perhaps several dozen wounded.
At some point during the shooting, one or more Blackwater guards called for a cease-fire, according to the American official. The word cease-fire “was supposedly called out several times,” the official said. “They had an on-site difference of opinion,” he said. In the end, a Blackwater guard “got on another one about the situation and supposedly pointed a weapon,” the official said. “That’s what prompted this internal altercation,” the official said.

Congressman: State Dept. official threatened investigators

Aides to State Department Inspector General Howard Krongard threatened two investigators with retaliation this week if they cooperate with a congressional probe into Krongard's office, the chairman of a House of Representatives panel and other U.S. officials said Friday.
The allegations are the latest in a growing uproar surrounding Krongard. Current and former officials in his office charge that he impeded investigations into alleged arms smuggling by employees of the private security firm Blackwater and into faulty construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

VERMONT TO SECEDE FROM THE UNITED STATES?

The Vermont secession impulse is born out of our understanding that the United States - once a great republic - has become an unsustainable Empire governed by a very few. Beyond massive (and bipartisan) national electoral fraud, 9/11's unanswered questions, a "war on terror" (that will not end, we are told, in our life times), the collapse of the U.S. Constitution, the erosion of civil liberties, and the practicing of "disaster capitalism" on a massive scale by political and economic elites, the U.S. is simply too big to function as a democratic republic in its current state. In other words, as astute observers from across the political spectrum have pointed out, the Empire is essentially ungovernable, unsustainable, and un-reformable.

Hillary Prods Bush to Go After Iran

So let me see if I’ve got this right: Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for the presidential nomination, is demanding that George W. Bush take a more belligerent posture toward Iran.
In opposing the resolution, Sen. James Webb, D-Virginia, warned that the move could be tantamount to a declaration of war.
Despite Webb’s protest, 29 Democrats joined Republicans and neoconservative Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to pass the “sense of the Senate” resolution. The Democrats egging Bush on included Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, California’s Dianne Feinstein and Michigan’s Carl Levin.
Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Richard Lugar of Indiana were the only Republicans voting no. Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden of Delaware and Chris Dodd of Connecticut also opposed the measure. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois was absent but said he would have voted against it.

FDIC Shuts Down NetBank Due to Defaults

NetBank Inc., an online bank with $2.5 billion in assets, was shut down by the government on Friday because of an excessive level of mortgage defaults.

German POW's Diary Reveals Post War US Camp Horrors
"We had not expected that the Americans would behave in such a manner. We could hardly believe it. War brutalizes human beings.
Here, in freezing temperature, 20,000 of us were squeezed together on the naked ground, without blanket or cover, exposed day and night to the winter weather. For six days we received neither food nor water! We used our spoons to catch drops of rain.
Many of us were near collapse. One of our comrades went mad, he jumped around wildly, wailing and whimpering. he was shot at once. His body was lying on the ground, and we were not allowed to come near him. He was not he only one. Each suspicious movement caused the guards to shoot into the crowd, and a few were always hit. German civilians, mainly women of the surrounding villages, tried to approach the camp to bring food and water for us prisoners. they were chased away.
One day later we were organized into groups of 400 men .... We were to receive two cans of food for each man. This is how it was to be done: The prisoners had to run through he slippery mud, and each one had to grab his two cans quickly, at the moment he passed the guards. One of my comrades slipped and could not run fast enough, He was shot at once .... On May 10th , several truckloads of us were transported the the garrison of Ulm by the Danube..... As each man jumped into the truck, a guard kicked him in the backbone with his rifle butt.
It became known, that the conditions in the POW camps in the American Zone were identical everywhere. We could therefore safely conclude, that it was by intent and by orders from higher ups to starve the German POW's and we blamed General Eisenhower for it. He, who was of German descent could not discern the evildoers during the Nazi time from our decent people. We held that neglect of knowledge and understanding severely against him."

THE MEN PLANNING AMERICA'S NEXT WAR

Cartoons from the weblog archive of the amazing Nick Anderson
from 2002 to 2005 (and a few recent ones), still incredibly relevant.



THE MEN PLANNING AMERICA'S NEXT WAR
I asked when the Bush administration's widely expected air war against Iran would begin. This was not a subject my hosts cared to discuss. Smiles vanished. Dr Lani Kass, Checkmate's formidable senior civilian official, a former Israeli military officer who had somehow morphed into a senior Pentagon advisor, dismissed my question, insisting no decision to attack Iran had been made. She called a possible air war "unlikely". But I was ready to bet plans to blitz Iran were being drawn up in an adjoining office. One could feel a buzz of excitement among Checkmate's hard-eyed officers who wore combat flight suits and tensed up every time I mentioned Iran. Pentagon sources say the air force has selected 3,000-4,000 targets in Iran, and that some US and British special forces are already operating there. However, Washington sources also report strong opposition to war against Iran among the Pentagon's brass, and high-ranking officials in the CIA, Treasury, and state department. They view war with Iran as unpredictable, unwise and dangerous at a time when US ground and air forces are stretched to breaking point in Iraq and Afghanistan.



"Lost" B-52 nuke cruise missiles were on way to Middle East for attack on Iran
Labor Day weekend incident was a revolt by US Air Force and other US intelligence agencies against Bush-Cheney plans for pre-emptive nuclear and conventional strike on Iran.

WMR has learned from U.S. and foreign intelligence sources that the B-52 transporting six stealth AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles, each armed with a W-80-1 nuclear warhead, on August 30, were destined for the Middle East via Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
However, elements of the Air Force, supported by U.S. intelligence agency personnel, successfully revealed the ultimate destination of the nuclear weapons and the mission was aborted due to internal opposition within the Air Force and U.S. Intelligence Community.
Command and control breakdowns involving U.S. nuclear weapons are unprecedented, except for that fact that the U.S. military is now waging an internal war against neo-cons who are embedded in the U.S. government and military chain of command who are intent on using nuclear weapons in a pre-emptive war with Iran.



Defense stocks hit new highs
Defense stocks on Wednesday hit new highs ahead of Defense Secretary Robert Gates' visit to Capitol Hill to request roughly $45 billion in additional funding to cover military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008.
The AMEX Defense Index, which tracks 14 major defense company stocks, rose 14.25 to a high of 1,686.72 in afternoon trading. Since last year, the index has risen roughly 47 percent, outperforming the broader S&P 500 index, which has climbed nearly 15 percent over the same period.



TRANSCRIPT OF A SPEECH BY DANIEL ELLSBERG:
'A Coup Has Occurred'
I think nothing has higher priority than averting an attack on Iran, which I think will be accompanied by a further change in our way of governing here that in effect will convert us into what I would call a police state.
If there's another 9/11 under this regime ... it means that they switch on full extent all the apparatus of a police state that has been patiently constructed, largely secretly at first but eventually leaked out and known and accepted by the Democratic people in Congress, by the Republicans and so forth.
Will there be anything left for NSA to increase its surveillance of us? ... They may be to the limit of their technical capability now, or they may not. But if they're not now they will be after another 9/11.
And I would say after the Iranian retaliation to an American attack on Iran, you will then see an increased attack on Iran – an escalation – which will be also accompanied by a total suppression of dissent in this country, including detention camps.



IRAQ: Travel restrictions considered as cholera spread

The Iraqi government will impose travel restrictions in the country if more cases of cholera are confirmed after a warning by the World Health Organization (WHO) that the disease was spreading in Iraq.
The WHO said 2,116 people had contracted cholera so far, including 616 new cases reported in the past week. Eleven people have died of the disease, it said.
Over 30,000 people had acute watery diarrhoea and the contamination of currently unaffected areas was highly possible, it said, adding that the outbreak had spread to 25 districts of northern Iraq, four districts in the south and across the centre of the country.
"If the disease reaches the displacement camps, there’ll be chaos. With the poor sanitary conditions, the disease will spread very fast and hundreds of people might get ill within hours," said Fatah Ahmed, a spokesperson for the Iraq Aid Association (IAA).



No Going Back: Little relief in sight for millions of displaced Iraqis

One explanation for why the international community has been slow to act is that is has been waiting for U.S. leadership. But for the U.S. to acknowledge the size and seriousness of the humanitarian disaster in Iraq would be to admit that the recent troop "surge" is not working. According to a senior UN official, "the U.S. government doesn’t want to admit there is a refugee problem because it is a sign of failure."
It would also mean acknowledging that a massive process of ethnic cleansing has taken place under the watch of the U.S.-backed government—indeed, that it has been perpetrated by the Iraqi government’s own security forces. Iraq’s Christian and Sabean minorities were decimated and have left for good. Baghdad, now cleansed and controlled by Shias, is irrevocably a Shia city, and its former Sunni-majority neighborhoods are ghost towns.



Probe of missing U.S. weapons in Iraq dates back to 2004

WASHINGTON - As President Bush and Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry clashed in late 2004 over the direction of the Iraq war, a rising Army star joined the debate. Then-Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, head of a new command overseeing the training and equipping of Iraq's security forces, said headway was being made.
Tens of thousands of rifles, pistols, body armor, vehicles, and radios, along with millions of ammunition rounds, had been delivered to Iraqis over a three-month period, he wrote in a commentary for The Washington Post six weeks before the presidential election.



The weapons and countless pieces of other gear, paid for with tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars, were indeed flowing — but as it turns out, not always to the right places or into the right hands.
In the rush to arm Iraqi forces against a violent insurgency, U.S. military officials did not keep good records. About 190,000 weapons weren't fully accounted for, according to one audit.



The accounting failures are at the heart of a broad inquiry by the Pentagon's inspector general, sharp questions from Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and complaints from officials in Turkey who claim that pistols used in violent crimes in their country came from U.S.-funded stocks.
Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who preceded Petraeus as the officer in charge of training Iraq's forces, said he expects the inspector general will find there were too few people to handle the enormous influx of weapons and money into the country.



"One of the greatest irritants to me was watching the Pentagon cooking along at full strength while we in Iraq were running on a very thin personnel shoestring," said Eaton, a critic of the Bush administration's handling of the war. "There have never been enough people, and there has never been enough bureaucratic support and effort to do this thing properly," Eaton told The Associated Press.
Peter Velz, a Pentagon official specializing in Iraq issues, said Petraeus' command was operating under "extremely difficult, Spartan conditions" and was in need of more personnel experienced in contracting and materiel management.
The training command had about 900 people in 2004, according to a command spokesman, and it now has 1,100.
There is no evidence of any wrongdoing by Petraeus, now a four-star general and the top American officer in Iraq. And there is no indication that he is the subject of any of the inspector general's inquiries. His commentary, however, is a reminder of how even cautiously optimistic assessments of the war in Iraq can turn with time.


In June 2004, Petraeus took over the just-formed Multinational Security Transition Command-Iraq, more commonly known by the acronym MNSTC-I (pronounced "min-sticky"). The organization's job is to train Iraqi army and police units so they are capable of operating on their own. Petraeus has likened the experience to "building an aircraft that was already in flight."
Given the rising strength of the insurgency at the time, Petraeus felt it was more important to get weapons and ammunition to troops in the fight "than to wait for a signature on a hand receipt," Army Col. Steven Boylan, Petraeus's top spokesman, said Tuesday by e-mail. Petraeus left the post in September 2005.
Since then, audits have cited the Iraq transition command for lack of oversight.
An October 2006 audit by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction said there was "questionable accuracy" and "incomplete accountability" in the way MNSTC-I managed weapons.
In one case, 751 assault rifles were purchased, but there is no record of their delivery to Iraq's ministries of defense and interior.
More recently, the U.S. Government Accountability Office said until December 2005, MNSTC-I had no centralized set of records for the shipping of weapons to Iraqi forces.



The command said 185,000 Russian-designed AK-47 rifles, 170,000 pistols, 215,000 sets of body armor, and 140,000 helmets had been issued to Iraq troops by September 2005, according to the July GAO report. But due to incomplete record-keeping, the command couldn't be certain if the Iraqis received 110,000 of the rifles, or 80,000 of the pistols. More than half of the body armor and helmets couldn't be tracked.
Military officials in Washington and Baghdad still have not settled on which, "if any," accountability procedures apply to the train-and-equip program, the GAO said.
Velz, who works for the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Middle East, said oversight continues to be a subject of debate inside the Pentagon.
"There clearly has been a lack of guidance to MNSTC-I on what accountability requirements apply to them," Velz said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week.


Federal investigators are also examining whether employees for Blackwater USA, one of the largest private security firms in Iraq, played a role in the loose arms problem by selling weapons on the black market that ended up in the hands of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
Turkish officials have complained to the United States that they had seized weapons from the PKK, a Kurdish militant group, with markings matching those intended for Iraqi forces.
Blackwater has denied any involvement in weapons smuggling and called the allegations "baseless."
Lawmakers who received a classified briefing from the inspector general last week expressed concern that U.S. troops might be injured or killed by firepower the United States purchased.



If "there is a wholesale movement of weapons that U.S. taxpayers have paid for into the hands of those who would do us harm or further destabilize the region, we must make resolving this problem one of our top priorities," Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said at the Sept. 20 House Armed Services hearing.
Thomas Gimble, the Pentagon's deputy inspector general, said his office has 90 open investigations stemming from nearly $6 billion in contracts for supplies and equipment needed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Gimble said his staff also is auditing $88 billion in wartime expenditures to see if further investigation is warranted. Since 2003, more than $19 billion has gone to build up Iraq's security forces.
Army Lt. Col. Levonda Joey Selph, a former assistant to Petraeus during 2004 and 2005, is a target of one of the investigations.
Selph served as the U.S. commander of a large depot north of Baghdad that was responsible for outfitting Iraq's military.
On Wednesday, Selph told AP a gag order prevents her from commenting. But before hanging up, she called press reports about her "freaking lies."


Erik Prince, Blackwater CEO

Blackwater blamed for guard deaths
Blackwater USA triggered a major battle in the Iraq war in 2004 by sending an
unprepared team of guards into an insurgent stronghold, a move that led to their horrific deaths and a violent response by U.S. forces, says a congressional investigation released Thursday
The private security company, one of the largest working in Iraq and under scrutiny for how it operates, also is faulted for initially insisting its guards were properly prepared and equipped. It is also accused of impeding the inquiry by the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The results of the staff inquiry come less than a week before Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and Blackwater's founder, is scheduled to testify before the committee, which is chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a longtime critic of Blackwater.
The March 2004 incident involving Blackwater was widely viewed as a turning point in the Iraq war after images of the mutilated bodies of the four guards were seen around the world. Four days after the Blackwater guards were killed, a major military offensive, known as the Battle of Fallujah, began. The combat lasted almost a month in Fallujah, which is 40 miles west of Baghdad. At least 36 U.S. military personnel were killed along with 200 insurgents and an estimated 600 civilians, the congressional investigation found.
Blackwater "consistently delayed and erected impediments" to the investigation by claiming information was classified and "asserting questionable legal privileges," the report says.

Site where Blackwater guards opened fire, killing nine civilians and a policeman.

Blackwater Tops Firms in Iraq in Shooting Rate
The officials said that Blackwater’s incident rate was at least twice that recorded by employees of DynCorp International and Triple Canopy, the two other United States-based security firms that have been contracted by the State Department to provide security for diplomats and other senior civilians in Iraq.



US Senate agrees to raise U.S. credit limit

With the U.S. government fast approaching its current $8.965 trillion credit limit, the Senate on Thursday gave final congressional approval of an $850 billion increase in U.S. borrowing authority.
The Senate voted 53-42 to raise the debt ceiling to $9.815 trillion, the fifth increase in the U.S. credit limit since President George W. Bush took office in January 2001. The U.S. House of Representatives approved the higher debt limit earlier this year as part of the overall budget resolution and the legislation now goes to Bush for his signature.




EXCLUSIVE-Money trail to Hamas begins with Israeli banks

Israeli authorities tracking Hamas's funds said they made an unexpected discovery last month -- cash from one of Israel's biggest banks had found its way to a security force loyal to the Palestinian Islamists in Gaza.

US, Russia Spar Over Iran Sanctions

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov exchanged sharp words Wednesday as the Bush administration tried to cement support for new U.N. sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programs.
Lavrov told The Associated Press that he had strong words with Rice about whether the time was right for new sanctions when the IAEA has struck an agreement with Iran about its past activities.
Lavrov said the United States wanted to ignore the IAEA - as it has in the past.



Not reported in the MSM: What Ahmadinejad did on Monday afternoon

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Monday afternoon met with a group of Jewish rabbis who gave him a silver grail as a sign of friendship.
The rabbis carried a placard which read, "I am Jewish not a Zionist." A senior rabbi of the group said that they considered the visit to New York of President Ahmadinejad as an exceptional opportunity and would never forget it. He referred to the Iranian president as a person who made a distinction between Jews and Zionists.
"You understand us and make a distinction between the violent behavior of Zionists and the religious beliefs of Jews," said the senior rabbi who called President Ahmadinejad "a pious man who is seeking to restore peace in the world and has humanitarian plans." Appreciating the rabbis for their gift, President Ahmadinejad said he was happy to visit them.
"All people in the world have now understood that Judaism is different from Zionism," said the president. He added, "Zionists are a political group looking for taking advantage of the opportunities while Jews are the followers of the Moses who promoted peace and friendship."
President Ahmadinejad stressed that there was no disagreement between the followers of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as they all pray the same God and are brothers.

Council on Foreign Relations member Gary Hart Suggests False Flag Event For Iran War

Tacit warning to Iranian government suggests staged event may be used to ensure "bombs fall on your head."

Bush, the Bomb and Iran

Ultimately, the international community needs to work in conjunction with the IAEA to secure real nonproliferation of weapons – and as Falk pointed out in his Nation article, that means multilateral nuclear disarmament: "… It is disastrous folly to suppose that some will agree to live forever beneath the nuclear Sword of Damocles without trying to obtain such weapons themselves." In the meantime, while the Bush administration plays cowboy at the expense of global security – and influential newspapers like the Washington Post hurl hit jobs at el-Baradei, Congress should follow the wise advice of The Nation's defense correspondent, Michael Klare, who wrote in the magazine that legislation should be passed banning the use of federal funds for any attacks on Iran or Syria without prior authorization.
Most importantly, we need to confront the insanity of a military confrontation with Iran.

2 Patriot Act Provisions Ruled Unlawful
A federal judge issued a stern rebuke of a key White House antiterror law, striking down as unconstitutional two pillars of the USA Patriot Act.
U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled Wednesday that using the act to authorize secret searches and wiretapping to gather criminal evidence - instead of intelligence gathering - violates the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Army plans to increase size of the force more quickly

The US Army is making plans to expand its active and reserve forces by 74,000 troops in four years instead of five to ease stress on the force, the service's secretary said Thursday.

Tent City to hold AWOL soldiers

Tent City will begin holding soldiers convicted of being absent without leave. Because Tent City is a federally approved confinement facility, Arizona Statute requires that the jail accept military. Petrenko makes the decision on where to send the inmates.




Rev. Billy Graham: A Prince of War Exposed

The Rev. Billy Graham, a darling of the Evangelical Right, has never seen a U.S. war that he couldn’t bless. He once advocated that President Richard M. Nixon bomb the “dikes” in the north of Vietnam.
He also criticized the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. for speaking out against the war. A new book, “The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Crusade for a Wholly Christian Empire,” by Cecil Bothwell exposes the camera-mugging preacher as a serial warmonger.

US conference 'will not focus on peace'

The minute US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice left Ramallah City last week President Mahmoud Abbas's office turned into a hub to prepare for the international conference due to be held in Washington.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's declarations in front of the Knesset security and foreign committee on Monday saying the forthcoming conference will not be a peace conference, have instilled hopelessness "in the hearts of Palestinians" according to the Palestinian President's consultant Nabeel Amr.



Dehumanizing the Palestinians

The Israeli cabinet has voted to declare the occupied Gaza Strip a "hostile entity," thus in its own eyes permitting itself to cut off the already meagre supplies of electricity (needed among other things to pump water), fuel and other basic necessities that it allows the Strip's inmates to receive.
The decision was quickly given backing by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

For first time in 60 years, all Arab states willing to recognize Israel

This is misleading. The Arab states have always been willing to recognize Israel ... so long as Israel recognized Palestine. The problem all along is that Israel demands for itself that which it refuses to give to others.

Newsweek Senior Editor Says 'Israeli Lobby' Is Shaping U.S. Policy Toward Iran

An old Zionist dream: the partition of Iraq

A few months ago, Sen. Biden, interviewed by Shalom TV, an American mainstream Jewish cable television network, called Israel "the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East".
"I am a Zionist," stated Senator Biden. "You don't have to be a Jew to be a Zionist."

Hilary Clinton supports Israeli 'strike' on Syria

In televised debate, presidential candidate says she supports Israel's alleged air strike on Syria in which she believes a nuclear facility, built with North Korean aid, was eliminated.

Senators Kyl and Lieberman and their Stealth War Authorization

Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) want the US to attack Iran, but because they know most Americans know that is a crazy idea at a time that the US is already bogged down in a losing war in Iraq, they want to authorize this disastrous expansion of the conflict secretly.



Newt Gingrich: Bush Should Blow Up Iran's Natural Gas Insfrastructure

Monday night (September 24, 2007) during On the Record with Greta van Susteren, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich called for the Bush administration to sabotage Iran's natural gas refinery, using the same black-ops tactics Ronald Reagan authorized in 1981 against the Soviet Union, tactics that resulted in an explosion so large that it compared in force to a nuclear bomb. Gingrich chuckled at that thought.

Verizon Reverses Itself on Abortion Messages

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

Infant Morality

Ward Harkavy
Cuba's not a dead issue in the nutty debate over health care for poor kids.
Americans owe thanks this morning to Wyoming senator Mike Enzi for clarifying how different our health-care system is from Cuba's.
During heated debate in the Senate yesterday, Enzi zoomed in on a crucial point of George W. Bush's threatened veto of funding for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), a federal-state partnership that provides coverage to about 6 million poor children.
The Senate passed a pretty good compromise to help out those kids. Bush, while asking for an increase of more than $40 billion for the Iraq war, has said he won't spend more than $30 billion on this children's health program. The Senate disagreed — even some of its rock-hard conservatives, such as Orrin Hatch and Pat Roberts, and passed a bill. Roberts, a hardline Kansas conservative, pointed out that Bush is misinformed. You think?
But Mike Enzi is tagging right along with Bush, telling his fellow senators:

"We shouldn't create a new federal entitlement and we shouldn't be laying the foundation for Castro-style healthcare, which Americans don't want."

Our kids should be so lucky — rather, our babies should live so long. Enzi and the other senators didn't bring this up, so I will:
Cuba's infant-mortality rate is lower than the U.S.'s, according to widely accepted stats from the UN's World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision.
The number of infant deaths per thousand live births in the period 2000 to 2005 was 6.1 in Cuba. It was 6.8 in the U.S. In deaths under the age of 5, Cuba's rate is 7.7, and the U.S.'s rate is 8.4.

When it comes to overall death rates, Americans have it even worse.
The CIA's World Factbook reveals that the estimated overall death rate in the U.S. in 2007, per thousand people, is 8.26. Cuba's death rate is 7.14.
African kids have it worse than anyone else on the planet. But the U.S. is an anomaly among other developed nations. It has a higher overall death rate than the rates of most of those countries, like France, Sweden, and Japan. In addition, the U.S. overall death rate is higher than the rates in the following countries (this is a partial list):
Cambodia, Bangladesh, Kiribati, Yemen, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, North Korea, Papua New Guinea, Thailand, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Tuvalu, Mauritius, Maldives, Paulu, Nauru, Grenada, Jamaica, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Peru, Brazil, Vietnam, Timor-Leste, Turkmenistan, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Columbia, Syria, Egypt, Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, and Iran.
Yes, according to the CIA, the U.S. death rate is higher than the death rates in Iran, Iraq, the West Bank, and Gaza.
If you really want to understand this current problem of health care for poor kids in the U.S., go to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, where you can read a readable analysis of the bill and a breakdown of Bush's wrong analysis of the issue.
As for Enzi, a 63-year-old former Eagle Scout, shoe salesman and accountant, let's just say that his personal financial disclosure for 2006 shows that he ranks only 82nd in the Senate in net worth: His is $190,039 to $853,000. But 94 percent of his investments are in oil and gas, plus he does have at least $50,000 in his Senate credit union account — and the time to spend that cash: His tardiness rate is twice as high as the average senator's.

More to the point, he got no campaign money from Cuba, but the health-care industry poured $259,591 into Enzi's campaign coffers last year, second only to the support he got from big finance. And the health-care industry hates federal health care programs unless the money goes directly to the industry.
Enzi's PAC, Making Business Excel — get it? Michael B. Enzi, Making Business Excel? MBE, MBE? — raked in an additional $646,567 last year.
And no surprise here: Enzi gets more campaign money from D.C.-area operatives than he gets from the home folks in Wyoming.Who cares about death rates when our political system is running so smoothly?

Senate approves Lieberman resolution on Iran

Senate approves Lieberman resolution on Iran
An amendment by Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to the Senate Defense Appropriations Bill virtually declares war on Iran. The Senate approved the Lieberman amendment by a vote of 76 to 22.
Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., was among those voting against the amendment. Dodd referred to the 2002 congressional vote authorizing the use of force that led to President Bush's decision to invade Iraq.
"We shouldn't repeat our mistakes and enable this president again," Dodd said in a statement.
Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., branded the Lieberman-Kyl measure as Vice President Dick Cheney's "fondest pipe dream."

Lieberman-Kyl vs. the Evidence
The administration has not come forward with a single piece of concrete evidence to support the claim that the Iranian government has been involved in the training, arming or advising of Iraqi Shiite militias. The U.S. intelligence community has not endorsed the argument being made by some in the Bush administration that the Iranian government was responsible for the rise in Shiite military activity in Iraq. The main argument made in the February 11, 2007 briefing for an Iranian official role in providing EFPs to Shiite militias -- the allegation that only Iran had the capability to manufacture EFPs or components for EFPs that can penetrate U.S. armor -- was quickly proven to be untrue. U.S. and British Military officers and civilian officials have expressed doubt that EFPs and other armaments in the hands of Shiites have actually come from Iran or that Iranian Quds force personnel have been involved in the supply.



Senate votes to designate Iran's elite force as terrorists
Sen. Hillary Clinton voted for the amendment, sponsored by Republican John Kyl of Arizona and independent Democrat Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. Fellow Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden of Delaware and Christopher Dodd of Connecticut voted against it. Sens. Barak Obama (D-Ill.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) missed the vote.

Crucial Kyl/Lieberman Amendment Passes Senate
In the amendment, it stresses the future of the Middle East especially in consideration of Iran and the threat they create to the region. It goes on further to substantiate the threat of Iran and it plays a vital role in our national security to eliminate the threat.
An important and contentious part of the amendment calls for the use of United States national power inside Iraq, which includes diplomatic, economic, intelligence, and military instruments in regards to Iran and its proxies. Some see this as opening the doors to conflict with Iran and the start of another war.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) will now be designated as a foreign terrorist organization under section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. The IRGC will also be added to the list of Specially Designated Global terrorists. This amendment addresses the threat of Iran but only time will tell if we can resolve this crisis.

Lieberman-Kyl amendment wrong idea
The Lieberman-Kyl amendment to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill is essentially a declaration of war against Iran.
This is insanity.
We are already in a war that we will never win in Iraq. How many more of our young men need to die before we realize that our nation has made a critical error?

Bloomberg: "Iraq is like 1776" only this time, "we're the British"
In his most detailed comments on the Iraq war, Mayor Bloomberg last night suggested the United States was in the same difficult position as the British in the Revolutionary War - facing a determined band of insurgents.
Bloomberg said the comparison occurred to him when he visited his mother recently and was driving through Lexington, Mass., where a scrubby group of farmers rose up against a well-trained militia more than 200 years ago.
"We're the British," the mayor said during an interview with Tom Brokaw at Cooper Union, part of a series featuring potential presidential contenders hosted by former Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Weren't the British the bad guys????

US Military official: Blackwater "May be worse than Abu Ghraib".
Condi Rice has ordered Blackwater not to answer any questions from Congress.
To describe the ongoing Blackwater scandal as a fiasco would be a dramatic understatement. Not only do we have a situation in which private security contractors stand accused of killing Iraqi civilians without provocation, we also have deep divisions brewing between the Pentagon and the State Department, coupled by State stonewalling a congressional investigation.
"This is a nightmare," said a senior U.S. military official. "We had guys who saw the aftermath, and it was very bad. This is going to hurt us badly. It may be worse than Abu Ghraib, and it comes at a time when we're trying to have an impact for the long term."
At this point, the State Department seems to be treating Blackwater contractors as the agency's own private army, accountable to no one outside the department. The Maliki government believes Blackwater is a criminal enterprise, the Iraqi people resent Blackwater's presence, the Pentagon believes Blackwater is lying about the Sept. 16 incident in Nisoor Square, and congressional Democrats have questions about what has transpired -- which the State Department refuses to answer.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice not only refuses to cooperate, her office has also ordered Blackwater not to answer any questions from lawmakers.



Shootings by Blackwater Exceed Other Firms in Iraq
An Iraqi woman walked past a burnt car at the site where Blackwater guards opened fire, killing nine civilians and a policeman.

Gates moves to rein in contractors in Iraq

Private Security Providers Become a Pentagon Focus

House Panel Says Rice Is Hindering Its Work
An ongoing battle between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a House committee investigating Iraqi government corruption and the activities of the Blackwater security firm erupted into another skirmish yesterday as Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) accused Rice of interfering with the committee's work and preventing administration and Blackwater officials from providing pertinent information.



Lawmaker says Rice interfered with Iraq inquiry
Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman said State Department officials had told the Oversight and Government ReformCommittee he chairs they could not provide details of corruption in Iraq's government unless the information was treated as a "state secret" and not revealed to the public.
"You are wrong to interfere with the committee's inquiry," Waxman said in a letter to Rice. "The State Department's position on this matter is ludicrous," added Waxman, a vocal opponent of the Bush administration's Iraq policies.

The State Department had no immediate comment on the letter or Waxman's allegations of interference but it has in the past dismissed the California lawmaker's comments as partisan.
Waxman said security contractor Blackwater, which was involved in an incident in which Iraqi civilians were killed last week, said they could not hand over documents relevant to an investigation without State Department approval.
"Congress has a constitutional prerogative to examine the impacts that corruption within the Iraqi ministries and the activities of Blackwater may have on the prospects for political reconciliation in Iraq," Waxman wrote to Rice.
Blackwater is under scrutiny after its forces killed at least eleven civilians last week in Baghdad. It’s also under investigation for alleged weapons smuggling into Iraq. The State Department called Waxman’s complaint a “misunderstanding.”

Iraq ministry finishes draft law on contractors
Iraq's Interior Ministry has finished draft legislation that would end the legal immunity enjoyed by private security contractors after a deadly shooting involving U.S. firm Blackwater, an official said on Tuesday.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has called the Blackwater case “a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Iraq.”

Senate to vote on Iraq division plan

The US Senate is expected to vote as early as Tuesday on a Bosnia-style plan to subdivide Iraq on ethnic lines, touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife. Though the measure is non-binding, and would not force a change in President George W. Bush's war strategy even if it passes, the vote will provide a key test of an idea drawing rising interest in Washington.

One-fourth of Gulf War veterans ill

Sixteen years after the Persian Gulf War ended, more than 1 in 4 of those who fought remain seriously ill with medical problems ranging from severe fatigue and joint pain to Lou Gehrig's disease, multiple sclerosis and brain cancer, the chairman of a congressional advisory committee testified Tuesday.

U.S. accused of failing ill 1991 Gulf War veterans
Some of the harshest criticism of the government came from members of an advisory committee created by Congress in 1998 to advise the VA on Gulf War illnesses.
This panel's chairman, James Binns, said 16 years after the war, 175,000 U.S. veterans -- one in four of those who served -- remain seriously ill, with the sickest among them developing neurodegenerative diseases and brain cancer.
Binns said Pentagon and VA officials continue to "minimize these illnesses at every opportunity, misleading Congress and the scientific community."
He faulted a VA fact sheet given to some senators stating, "Gulf War veterans suffer from a wide range of common illnesses, which might be expected in any group of veterans their age."
"That," Binns testified, "is garbage."

America’s Police Brutality Pandemics
Bush’s "war on terror" quickly became Bush’s war on Iraqi civilians. So far over one million Iraqi civilians have lost their lives because of Bush’s invasion, and four million have been displaced. Iraq’s infrastructure is in ruins. Disease is rampart. Normal life has disappeared.
Self-righteous Americans justify these monstrous crimes as necessary to ensure their own safety from terrorist attack. Yet, Americans are in far greater danger from their own police forces than they are from foreign terrorists. Ironically, Bush’s "war on terror" has made Americans less safe at home by diminishing US civil liberty and turning an epidemic of US police brutality into a pandemic.

Generals are Revolting at an Alarming Rate - Never in History Have Generals Revolted Against a War Like They are About IRAQ.

Iraq: A Bush Family Jihad?
The people of Iraq are being kept on their knees, their infrastructure unrepaired, they are tortured, disappeared at the hands of and because of the invasion. The blame lies squarely in Washington and Whitehall. Four million displaced and one and a quarter million dead, according to the recent poll, by respected ORB and now a cholera epidemic. Have the 'liberators' flown in emergency and essential medicines and medical equipment to counter this, as they would if it were their troops, or their pals cowering in the Green Zone? Of course not.

Military Opens Camp on Iranian Border
Iran's role with the violence in Iraq remains a major preoccupation of the Bush administration, with the U.S. military now building a base, practically within shouting distance of Iran — an extraordinary step to curb what it says is the smuggling of advanced weapons into Iraq.
It will be called Combat Outpost Shocker, and it will hardly come as a pleasant surprise to Iran that the United States will have a new base just 5 miles from their border. Col. Mark Mueller, of the 3rd Infantry Division, said it is the first time the U.S. military will be that close to Iran.

Admin Withdraws Nomination for Top CIA Legal Post
The Bush administration has withdrawn its nomination of John Rizzo to become the top lawyer at the CIA. The move comes after Democrats raised concerns over Rizzo’s stance on the torture of prisoners. Rizzo told a Senate hearing in June he supported the infamous 2002 Justice Department memo that said torture would not occur unless a prisonerexperiences pain serious enough to cause organ failure or death.

Iraq Extremists Begin a Drive to Assassinate Security Forces
Sunni Arab extremists have begun a systematic campaign to assassinate police chiefs, police officers, other Interior Ministry officials and tribal leaders throughout Iraq, staging at least 10 attacks in the last 48 hours.
Are these the guys Petraeus was giving money to?

Defying Veto Threat, House OKs Expanding Child Health Insurance
On Capitol Hill, the House has defied a veto threat from President Bush to pass a measure that would expand health insurance to millions of low-income children. The State Child Health Insurance Program, known as S-CHIP, expires later this month. Lawmakers have proposed to spend thirty-five billion dollars to cover an additional four million children. The money would come mostly through a tax increase on cigarettes. The House measure passed 265 to 159 -- short of the votes needed to override a presidential veto. The Senate is expected to take up the S-CHIP measure later this week.

Following Bush Over a Cliff
The spectacle Tuesday of 151 House Republicans voting in lock step with the White House against expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) was one of the more remarkable sights of the year. Rarely do you see so many politicians putting their careers in jeopardy.
The bill they opposed, at the urging of President Bush, commands healthy majorities in both the House and Senate but is headed for a veto because Bush objects to expanding this form of safety net for the children of the working poor. He has staked out that ground on his own, ignoring or rejecting the pleas of conservative senators such as Chuck Grassley and Orrin Hatch, who helped shape the compromise that the House approved and that the Senate endorsed.

Bush Admin Recommends Zapping ‘Popcorn Lung’ Bill
The White House today took what may be a lone stand against the Popcorn Workers Lung Disease Prevention Act, a bill the House may vote on as soon as Wednesday. It would require the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to publish standards regulating worker exposure to diacetyl, a flavoring chemical used in microwave popcorn and other foods that can cause bronchiolitis obliterans, or “popcorn lung.”

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Being “Guarded” by Israel

This puts a whole new spin on that story of the Nuclear weapons "accidentally" loaded onto a B-52.

Israel "in charge of security" for nuclear power and weapons in the US

Military aspect of immigrant bill eyed
The proposed legislation, a version of which was first introduced in 2001, would make high school graduates who arrived in the United States illegally at 15 or younger and who have lived here at least five years, eligible for conditional legal status provided they attend two years of college or serve two years in the military.

Fear Factor
Vaccines have eradicated polio, smallpox and mumps, and every year the shots administered to children prevent 14 million infections, prevent 33000 deaths and save society $40 billion in direct and indirect medical costs. Yet some parents say they are responsible for a rise in autism cases.
The overwhelming consensus among scientists that vaccines don't cause autism or learning problems is getting a boost today from a government study of 1,000 children that showed no evidence at all that receiving vaccines containing a mercury-containing preservative, thimerosal, caused any problems for children at all. It is published in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
Parent groups aren't convinced. "Positioning this as relevant to the debate around vaccines and autism is simply dishonest because the study doesn't address autism," says J.B. Handley, the parent of a 5-year-old son with autism and founder of Generation Rescue, which contends vaccines are behind the autism epidemic. He notes that many of the researchers work or have consulted for vaccine companies.
"It is like Philip Morris doing a study exonerating cigarettes for lung cancer. It’s a joke and parents are tired of it."

Thimerosal not linked to neurological problems, says study
Critics have slammed the study saying it draws misleading conclusions. Sallie Bernard, Executive Director of SafeMinds said the study was observational and hence cannot be conclusive. "Children in the U.S. and worldwide are still given vaccines containing mercury. Health officials should be erring on the side of caution," said Bernard.

Vaccines Don’t Cause Brain Damage. But What About Autism?
Study Clears Mercury as Culprit in Neurological Damage, but it Didn’t Consider Autism
Mercury is a known neurotoxin that can cause serious and prolonged brain damage, but a new study finds that when used as a preservative in vaccines, mercury does not cause babies to develop language, behavior or intelligence problems.
Because parents have long suspected mercury as a potential cause of autism, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study instantly became a lightning rod for criticism. A second CDC study, still underway, looks specifically at mercury in vaccines as a potential cause of autism. The newly published study did not.
The study did correlate a greater risk of verbal and motor tics in boys with the highest exposure to the preservative — thimerosal.

Bush blasts UN for Israel bias
According to Bush, the UN isn’t biased enough towards Israel!

Cuban Delegation Walks Out of Bush UN Speech
A gathering of world leaders for the opening of the General Assembly continues at the United Nations. On Tuesday, Cuba’s delegation walked out of the General Assembly after President Bush called Fidel Castro a “cruel dictator” during his speech.
In a statement, the Cuban government said: “Bush is responsible for the murder of over 600,000 civilians in Iraq ... He is a criminal and has no moral authority or credibility to judge any other country … Cuba condemns and rejects every letter of his infamous tirade.”
As Bush spoke, hundreds of people rallied outside against the Iraq war. A coalition of New York City grandmothers held a mock funeral procession for those who have died in Iraq since the US invasion.

Ahmadinejad flays US, West in UN attack
From the podium in the UN General Assembly, the Iranian leader denounced "bullying powers" who violate human rights, accusing them of spreading insecurity and destabilization around the world.
"Unfortunately human rights are being extensively violated by certain powers, especially by those who pretend to be their exclusive advocates," Ahmadinejad said, without mentioning the United States by name.
"Setting up secret prisons, abducting persons, trials and secret punishments without any regard to due process, extensive tapping of telephone conversations intercepting private mail... have become commonplace and prevalent," he added.

Ahmadinejad urges world to renounce Satan; U.S. walks out
The U.S. delegation walked out when the Iranian leader took the podium, leaving behind a sole note-taker to hear him pronounce the UN Security Council "ineffective" and accuse the victors of World War II of extorting other nations "from a condescending position similar to that of the master/slave relationship
of the medieval ages."

The lessons of Ahmadinejad at Columbia
Thecrowds were mainly pro-Israel groups from Columbia and bused in from
neighboring colleges. They were out for blood. They didn’t want the “holocaust denier” to speak in the first place. He was a sponsor of "terror," unlike, of course, the United States and its 160,000 troops plus mercenaries in Iraq. Also, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an “anti-Semite” because he did not approve of the state of Israel, which had inhaled Palestine, as the Nazis had the ghettos of Lodz, Krakow and Warsaw, not to mention most of Europe.

Revealed: script for Bush's mangled words
There is nothing mysterious about George Bush when he comes to the annual
General Assembly of the United Nations. Thanks to a snafu by the White House staff who mistakenly allowed a few journalists to glimpse a draft of the President's address complete with phonetic spellings in brackets to assist him with names of people and places. In the correct version for the press, they had been erased.

Can We End the American Empire Before It Ends Us?
According to a 2007 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, some 78 percent of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22 percent think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term -- and lost. What people don’t agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy -- or remedies -- ought to be.

Ortega Blasts U.S. in General Assembly Speech
Inside the General Assembly, several Latin American leaders gave speeches focusing on climate change, poverty and human rights. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega criticized the U.S. role in Latin American and the world.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega: "And then we had the immigrants from Europe who came over here to mix with those people and to become in turn owners of what didn't belong to them. They robbed the original peoples of their rights and their cultures and they imposed their culture and the interests of the colonizers and that is what gave rise to what we see today - what we call today the most exemplary democracy in the world when really, it's a tyranny. It's the most impressive, huge dictatorship that has existed - the empire of North America."

FDA CRACKS DOWN ON NATURAL HERBAL SWEETENER,STEVIA
The FDA, under pressure from the powerful sugar and artificial sweetener lobby, has issued a warning letter to Celestial Seasonings for using a popular natural sweetener in some of its teas. The letter indicates the FDA classifies the herb stevia as "unsafe", even though it is a main staple sweetener in countries like China and Japan and has been used without negative health effects by indigenous people for at least 400 years.
In the FDA's letter to Celestial Seasonings, the agency aggressively condemns the use of the herb, noting that "enforcement action may include seizure of violative products". The FDA claims no evidence has been provided to the agency regarding the herb's safety, but federal records reveal the FDA has received over a thousand scientific studies regarding stevia, and all but one of them verify the safety of the herb. In sharp contrast, nearly half of the studies provided to the FDA regarding the artificial sweetener aspartame, previously owned by Monsanto, indicate serious health concerns, yet it is one of the most commonly used (and one of the most profitable) sweeteners in the U.S.
The OCA has also verified the FDA has strengthened enforcement of stevia imports at the borders. Last week, the agency updated a document that mandates detainment of imported food products containing stevia.



BEYOND TOXIC PLASTIC WATER BOTTLES
Although it's common knowledge that industry, factory farms, government agencies (especially th military), and municipalities are polluting our drinking water supply, this awareness has led to a widespread phobia of tap water that is ironically exacerbating the water pollution problem.
It takes five times as much water to make the plastic bottle than the amount of water the bottle actually holds. Last year, Americans consumed 1.5 million barrels of oil to make disposable water bottles. That's enough to take 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The average American adult spends nearly $200 each year on bottled water. And of course recent scientific studies indicate that hormone disrupting chemicals are steadily leaching out of those billions of non-recycled plastic water bottles that Coke and Pepsi are selling us, slowly and poisoning us.

TEST TUBE SKIN At L’Oréal Research, products are tested on reconstructed human epidermis, thus saving the skin of countless animals formerly forced to undergo trials to determine the safety of the cosmetics.

Saving the Animals: New Ways to Test Products
HUMAN skin, eyes, the lining of the throat — snippets of these and other tissues are now routinely grown in test tubes from donated human cells. The goal is not to patch up ailing people but to use the human tissues in place of mice, dogs or other lab animals for testing new drugs, cosmetics and other products.
The high costs and concerns about reliability have been the biggest forces behind the shift away from tests on animals. Industry executives say that as much as 25 percent of the drugs tested on animals failed to show side effects that later proved serious enough to prevent the drugs from being marketed. To avoid such mistakes, companies often test products on multiple species and large numbers of animals.
By conservative estimates, tens of millions of animals are killed or maimed each year in research on the safety and effectiveness of new drugs, agricultural chemicals and consumer products. For companies, animal testing can be a public relations nightmare, involving confrontations with animal-rights activists, or less intense but still negative reactions from consumers. The total was 1.18 million in 2005, the last year for which numbers have been reported. The government’s statistics are limited to cats, dogs, primates and a few other species and do not cover birds or fish, or the most common lab animals, mice and rats.
Charles River Laboratories, the world’s largest supplier of genetically engineered rodents for labs, also has a subsidiary called Endosafe, which provides an alternative to the testing of solutions in rabbits’ eyes for contamination with fever-producing bacteria. The test, which can be as cheap as $5, has not only replaced most rabbit testing in quality-control rooms at drug company factories but is also finding a market at dialysis centers as a check on water quality, the company said.

Recession and Shock Doctrine

Alan Greenspan vs. Naomi Klein on the Iraq War, Bush's Tax Cuts, Economic Populism, Crony Capitalism and More
In a Democracy Now! exclusive debate, former federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and journalist Naomi Klein square off on the Iraq war, oil, President Bush tax cuts, social security, economic populism in Latin America, corruption and crony capitalism.
Greenspan headed the central bank in the United States for almost two decades. He has written a new 500-page memoir titled, "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World."
At one point in the debate, Klein asks Greenspan, "The policies that you pursued -- deregulation, privatization, free trade -- have contributed to this extraordinary division of income that is really the fuel for this economic populism that you’re now denouncing. Aren't you the one that has caused this crisis of faith in capitalism?"

Blackwater Back on Patrol in Baghdad as Shootings Probe Continues
On Monday, the Iraqi government said it will await the outcome of an investigation into last Sunday's killing of at least 11 people by Blackwater USA in Baghdad before taking any action against the company. The statement comes one day after Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said the shooting deaths pose "a serious challenge to the sovereignty of Iraq." We speak with Jeremy Scahill, author of "Blackwater: the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."


Blackwater killing people for sport - see it with your own eyes
This is a video clip of Blackwater. A private NO BID CONTRACT army of so called Christians. Here in this clip you will see them shooting at people for sport.
I also read that they were caught throwing frozen bottles of water at Iraqi civilians' windshields.

Graft in Military Contracts Spread From Base
Less than 24 hours later Major Cockerham was behind bars, accused of orchestrating the largest single bribery scheme against the military since the start of the Iraq war. According to the authorities, the 41-year-old officer, with his wife and a sister, used an elaborate network of offshore bank accounts and safe deposit boxes to hide nearly $10 million in bribes from companies seeking military contracts.

Pentagon authorized snipers to "bait" insurgents with detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, then killing any Iraqi who picks up items
A Pentagon group has encouraged some U.S. military snipers in Iraq to target suspected insurgents by scattering pieces of "bait," such as detonation cords, plastic explosives and ammunition, and then killing Iraqis who pick up the items, according to military court documents.

The “Green Zone” government hiding the real Cholera casualty figures

This is a report from Islamtoday reporter in Iraq accusing the "Green Zone" government of hiding the Cholera cases static number from the media for political reasons.
Um Mustafa says: "They threatened me that if I tell anybody that my nine years old son is infected with cholera, they will expel him from the hospital and will not provide him with medical attention, I agreed and other mothers agreed also, they lied and my son died, I hope I told the whole world at that time."

Department of Veterans Affairs Reports 73 Thousand U.S. Gulf War Deaths

How come the government numbers of 3,777 as of 9/7/07 are so low? The answer is simple, the government does not want the 73,000 dead to be compared to the 55,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Vietnam. Iraq = Vietnam. What the government is doing is only counting the soldiers that die in action before they can get them into a helicopter or ambulance. Any soldier who is shot but they get into a helicopter before he dies is not counted.

U.S. Military Court Reinstates Charges Against Omar Khadr
In news from Guantanamo, a U.S. military appeals court has reinstated terrorism charges against a Canadian citizen who was first detained in Afghanistan when he was only 15 years old. In June a military tribunal judge dismissed murder and conspiracy charges against Omar Khadr because Khadr had not been designated an "unlawful enemy combatant." But on Monday a military court overturned that decision. Khadr has been held at Guantanamo for five years. He turned 21 years old last Wednesday.

24 die in Iraq peace meeting blast
A suicide bombing in Iraq's volatile Diyala province ripped through a "reconciliation meeting" on Monday night attended by Sunni and Shiite militia leaders -- a brazen attack that killed and wounded dozens and fractured an effort to foster amity between the rival sects.

Senate to vote on Iraq division plan
The US Senate is expected to vote as early as Tuesday on a Bosnia-style plan to subdivide Iraq on ethnic lines, touted by backers as the sole hope of forging a federal state out of sectarian strife.
Though the measure is non-binding, and would not force a change in President George W. Bush's war strategy even if it passes, the vote will provide a key test of an idea drawing rising interest in Washington.

Syria refuses peace talks with Israel
Senior Syrian officials said Monday the U.S. airstrike on a Syrian nuclear facility Sept. 6 has ruined all chances of peace with Israel.

Mexico becoming one of world's more dangerous countries
The report, made public last week, said that major federal crimes, which include homicides, kidnappings and arms trafficking, rose 25 percent in the first half of 2007 over the same period last year. In 2006, the same crimes had risen 22 percent over the previous year.
Gangland style executions have risen 155 percent since 2001, according to the congressional report.
Thank you, NAFTA.

Plans to Demolish 4,500 Public Housing Units in New Orleans Approved
The Bush administration has given the Housing Authority of New Orleans the go ahead to demolish the city's four largest public housing complexes. The Department of Housing and Urban Development approved the demolition of the 4,500 housing units on Friday. Democratic Seantor Mary Landrieu criticized the ruling but other lawmakers have endorsed such moves. Shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Republican Congressman Richard Baker said: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it but God did."

Bush: We Can’t Spend $22 Billion On America Because We Need $200 Billion For Iraq War

Mississippi Moves to Divert Katrina Housing Aid to Spruce up Port
Meanwhile in Mississippi, Oxfam America, the Mississippi NAACP and the Mississippi Justice Center are protesting a plan to divert post-Katrina housing aid to improve the state port at Gulfport. The Mississippi Development Authority wants to take $600 million in federal funds from a housing plan for low-income homeowners hit by Hurricane Katrina and move it to spruce up the port.

U.S. Severe poverty rate at highest in three decades
The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high as the gulf between the nation's "haves" and "have-nots" continues to widen.

US economy kills American middle class

82 Billionaires Not Rich Enough to Make Forbes 400 List
In economic news, Forbes has published its list of the 400 richest Americans. For the first being 82 billionaires were not wealthy enough to make the list. The top 1 percent of Americans – those with comes incomes over $350,000 – are now receiving the largest share of national income since 1928.


The Second Great Depression

“The US economy is in danger of a recession that will prove unusually long and severe. By any measure it is in far worse shape than in 2001-02 and the unraveling of the housing bubble is clearly at hand. It seems that the continuous buoyancy of the financial markets is again deluding many people about the gravity of the economic situation.”

MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites

Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.

US Attorney General orders Monsanto to reveal secrets

In Germany, Monsanto had suppressed the evidence of serious damage to the
liver and kidneys of rats in their own GM MON863 maize trials until ordered to release this evidence by a German Court.

Merck's Experimental AIDS Vaccine Fails

Officials at the company, based in Whitehouse Station, N.J., said 24 of 741 volunteers who got the vaccine in one segment of the experiment later became infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

These are the same people trying to mandate vaccinations for cervical cancer.

FCC Fines Comcast $4,000 For Airing Fake News
And the Federal Communications Commission has fined Comcast $4,000 for broadcasting a fake news segment on the company's CN8 local news channel last year.
Comcast aired a video news release produced by the manufacturer of a sleeping remedy without disclosing the company's ties to the video. This marks the first time the FCC has fined a broadcaster for airing a corporate public relations video as if it was an actual news segment.
Last year the Center for Media and Democracy released a study that found at least 77 TV stations around the country have aired corporate-sponsored video news releases over the previous 10 months.

U.S. Stalls on Human Trafficking

Pentagon has yet to ban contractors from using forced labor.

B-52 flies over US with nuclear bombs by mistake

It was only then that crews discovered the six Advanced Cruise Missiles mounted on the bombers’ wings were armed with W80-1 warheads, which have yields of between 5 and 150 kilotons.

US nuclear dump plan in danger after seismic shock

The most expensive public works project in the US was today in disarray after it emerged that a planned giant nuclear dump would be located on a faultline.
More than $8bn has already been spent on the $58bn project, which had been due to open in 2017, but the proposals - approved by George Bush in 2002 - may now have to be redrawn.
Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, expressed amazement that the US Department of Energy had only just carried out the "11th hour" drilling tests.

Bacteria sent to space come back more infectious

Microbes that cause salmonella came back from spaceflight even more virulent and dangerous in an experiment aboard the US space shuttle Atlantis, according to a study published on Monday.
After about three weeks, 40 percent of mice fed the salmonella from Earth were still alive while only 10 percent of those given the bacteria from space survived, according to the study.
I'd certainly love to know who really funded the study: this could either lead to some terrifically better treatments for disease, or create an entire category of new bioweapons.

GM strike a harbinger of future U.S. health care battles

The problem is that Americans want health that everyone can afford, but without limits on care. Instead, what they have is no care for a large chunk of the population (47 million Americans are uninsured) and unaffordable, gold-plated care for others.

New service eavesdrops on Internet calls
A startup has come up with a new way to make money from phone calls connected via the Internet: having software listen to the calls, then displaying ads on the callers' computer screens based on what's being talked about.

And here is the part MSNBC isn't telling you. The Maislos brothers who founded this service are both ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE OPERATIVES, according to the New York Times! Mr. Maislos founded Pudding Media with his brother, Ruben. Each had spent several years doing intelligence work for the Israeli military.



Cheney mulled luring Iran into war with Israel: report
US Vice President Richard Cheney has considered provoking an exchange of military strikes between Iran and Israel in order to give the United States a pretext to attack Iran, Newsweek magazine reported in its Monday issue.

Bush quietly advising Hillary Clinton, top Democrats

President Bush is quietly providing back-channel advice to Hillary Rodham Clinton, urging her to modulate her rhetoric so she can effectively prosecute the war in Iraq if elected president.
In an interview for the new book “The Evangelical President,” White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten said Bush has “been urging candidates: ‘Don’t get yourself too locked in where you stand right now. If you end up sitting where I sit, things could change dramatically.’ ”

WTO to investigate U.S. compliance with antidumping ruling

The World Trade Organization authorized an investigation Tuesday into claims that the United States is still breaking global commerce rules with the way it penalizes "dumping" of imports, trade officials said.

Harvest Prospects In West Africa Improve Greatly

Harvest prospects have improved significantly in parts of Africa's Sahel region bordering the Sahara with good rains falling in August after below-normal levels in June and July, according to an update issued today by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Israelis Likely Wore Syrian Uniforms
ISRAELI commandos from the elite Sayeret Matkal unit – almost certainly dressed in Syrian uniforms – made their way stealthily towards a secret military compound near Dayr az-Zawr in northern Syria. They were looking for proof that Syria and North Korea were collaborating on a nuclear programme. Israel had been surveying
the site for months, according to Washington and Israeli sources.
President George W Bush was told during the summer that Israeli intelligence suggested North Korean personnel and nuclear-related material were at the Syrian site. Israel was determined not to take any chances with its neighbour. Following the example set by its raid on an Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak 1981, it drew up plans to bomb the Syrian compound. -Times on line

CNN: The war with Iran has begun

Discussion on CNN with Col. Sam Gardiner who clearly states that the war in Iran

is already underway and that a second phase of overt military action will soon begin.

Brzezinski: U.S. in danger of 'stampeding' to war with Iran

Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski likened U.S. officials' saber rattling about Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions to similar statements made before the start of the Iraq war.

LIVE_ Ahmadinajhad speaks to National Press Club
Don't look for this on TV. I already checked and nobody is covering it that I can find. The questions are obvious provocations, and in virtually every case,
Ahmadinejad simply asks, "Where are you getting this information?" and
the moderator dodges the question by saying, "We must move on."

'Wiped off the Map' – The Rumor of the Century

According to legend, Iran's president has threatened to destroy Israel, or, to quote the misquote, "Israel must be wiped off the map." Contrary to popular belief, this statement was never made.

Juan Cole: Demonization of Ahmadinejad Part of Pro-War Effort
Ahmadinejad appearance at Colombia dominated the news media on Monday. The headline on the Daily News read "The Evil Has Landed." Fox News ran a screenshot that read: “Is war the only way to stop Mahmoud?”
Middle East analyst Juan Cole said the demonization of the Iranian president is part of a neoconservative push for yet another war.
Cole writes: "The real reason his visit is controversial is that the American right has decided the United States needs to go to war against Iran. Ahmadinejad is therefore being configured as an enemy head of state."


Quid Pro Quo

Looking at the hysteria caused by the visit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to New York and Columbia University, I would like to dare George Bush to reciprocate the visit. And I would like to dare the Iranians to let him. It doesn't matter what Ahmadinejad actually says. What matters is that he is entering the territory of a president who has openly vowed to put him out of business, and has dared to speak, indeed, has dared to give what appears to be his honest opinions. And he has been confronted by protesters and by irate news commentators (such as Scott Pelley). Would Bush allow the same sorts of confrontations? I doubt it. He doesn't even allow himself to confronted by Americans who disagree with him.

Iran's Ahmadinejad: No attack on Israel

"Iran will not attack any country," Ahmadinejad told The Associated Press, when asked if his country would ever strike first against Israel. Iran has always maintained a defensive policy, not an offensive one, he said, and has "never sought to expand its territory."

THE PRESIDENT OF IRAN SPEAKS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ON CBS: COMMENTARY

It is shocking because it is hard to imagine that this took place on an American television station. This was an interrogation not a interview. If American media treats the President of a Country with so little respect, imagine how they treat a
common man! Never have I seen a newscaster with so much imbedded
arrogance. I was speechless. CBS does not speak for me.
CBS is proof of what happens when a single group of people, with
allegiances to only themselves, control all the main stream media in the western world.
Apparently accusations are all it takes in America to prove guilt. To hell with the courts.
Iran (Persia) has never invaded and occupied another country in its history. America and Britan invaded IRAN four times.


Iranian leader 'petty, cruel dictator,' school president says

Ahmadinejad responded quickly.
"We don't think it's necessary before the speech is given to come in with some series of claims," the Iranian leader said.
He said Bollinger's comments included "insults" and false claims, and flew in the face of an environment that's supposed to let people speak their minds.

Ahmadinejad Speaks at Columbia Amid Protests, Univ. President Excoriates Iran Leader from Podium
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: [translated]
The Palestinian people didn't commit any crime. They had no role to play in the World War II. They were living with the Jewish communities and the Christian communities in peace at the time.
But why is it that the Palestinians should pay a price, innocent Palestinians, for five million people to remain displaced or refugees abroad for sixty years? Or is this not a crime? Is asking about these crimes a crime in and by itself? Why should an academic, myself, face insults when asking questions like this? Is this what you call freedom and upholding the freedom of thought?

Giuliani's proposal for endless Middle East wars on behalf of Israel
In London this week, Rudy Giuliani proposed what is probably the single most extremist policy of any major presidential candidate, certainly this year and perhaps in many years:

Rudy Giuliani talked tough on Iran yesterday, proposing to expand NATO to
include Israel and warning that if Iran's leaders go ahead with their goal to be a nuclear power "we will prevent it, or we will set them back five or 10 years." . . . .While Giuliani did not explicitly address the implications for Iran of adding Israel to NATO in his speech, his aides later highlighted a 2006 Heritage Foundation paper by Nile Gardiner, a former Thatcher aide who was announced as a new Giuliani adviser yesterday.

Washington’s proxy war inside Kurdish Iran

US backing 'secret war' against Iran?

The US government has been secretly supporting a Pakistani militant group that has staged a series of deadly attacks against Iran, ABC News reported, citing unnamed US and Pakistani intelligence sources.

NEW YORK TIMES PUBLIC EDITOR FURIOUS OVER ANTI WAR AD
'All the news that's fit to print'.... that is, if it's in agreement with George W. Bush.... is this the new policy of the New York Times?

Hillary: "We Stand With Israel Now and Forever"

Rudy Hides on Ferry From Ron Paul Supporters

Fire Alarm: Feeding the Flames at Traitor's Gate

Given the headlong rush to a new war against Iran, and the G-force acceleration into the tyranny of a lawless, all-encompassing surveillance state that is unfolding before our eyes -- anyone whose hair isn't onfire today is either brain-dead, bought-off, or an active, eager, conniving traitor to the American people, and the human race.

What Exactly Makes Mukasey 'Widely Admired'?
by Ward Harkavy, Village Voice Blog
The most thorough news story so far about putative Attorney General Michael Mukasey comes, not from the mainstream press, but from the Jewish Week. And James D. Besser's extremely well-balanced account cuts right through to the topics of church-state separation, the Patriot Act, and civil liberties.
Faith is an issue when it comes to Mukasey, and that has nothing to do with the Jew-hating websites that are foaming at the mouth about him.
It figures that the Bush administration would replace a dumb but avid opponent of civil liberties — Alberto Gonzales — with a smart but avid opponent of civil liberties, as I pointed out in "War of Terror's New Front: Mukasey."
But with the Arab world blowing up all around us, do we have to have an attorney general who's not only an ardent supporter of the Patriot Act but also an avid Zionist?

Bush Administration Worked to Block California's Strengthening Emissions Standards
Newly released government documents show that the Bush administration directed a behind-the-scenes effort to block California's attempt to develop its own standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. Emails show Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters prodded her staff to lobby members of Congress and state governors to oppose California's efforts.

Mercenary Inc.

U.S. Repeatedly Rebuffed Iraq on Blackwater Complaints

Senior Iraqi officials repeatedly complained to U.S. officials about Blackwater USA's alleged involvement in the deaths of numerous Iraqis, but the Americans took little action to regulate the private security firm until 11 Iraqis were shot dead last Sunday, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
Before that episode, U.S. officials were made aware in high-level meetings and formal memorandums of Blackwater's alleged transgressions. They included six violent incidents this year allegedly involving the North Carolina firm that left a total of 10 Iraqis dead, the officials said.


Eric Prince, CEO of Blackwater

Blackwater 'arms smuggling probe'

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether staff from US security company Blackwater smuggled weapons to Iraq, according to reports.

The Mercenary Revolution: Flush with Profits from the Iraq War, Military Contractors See a World of Business Opportunities.

Blackwater in a Grey World


180,000 private contractors flood Iraq

The United States has assembled an imposing industrial army in Iraq larger than its uniformed fighting force and responsible for a such a broad swath of responsibilities the military might not be able to operate without its private-sector partners.

Making a killing: how private armies became a $120bn global industry

In Nigeria, corporate commandos exchange fire with local rebels attacking an oil platform. In Afghanistan, private bodyguards help to foil yet another assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai. In Colombia, a contracted pilot comes under fire from guerrillas while spraying coca fields with pesticides. On the border between Iraq and Iran, privately owned Apache helicopters deliver US special forces to a covert operation.
This is a snapshot of a working day in the burgeoning world of private military companies, arguably the fastest-growing industry in the global economy. The sector is now worth up to $120bn annually with operations in at least 50 countries, according to Peter Singer, a security analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington.

US resumes Blackwater convoys in Iraq

American convoys under the protection of Blackwater USA resumed on Friday, four days after the U.S. Embassy suspended all land travel by its diplomats and other civilian officials in response to the alleged killing of civilians by the security firm.

U.S. says Blackwater still under contract in Iraq

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said on Wednesday that the embassy could use another security firm for protection and vowed not to allow Iraqis to be killed again in 'cold blood'.

“Success” In Iraq

By A.K. Gupta, THE INDYPENDENT
For more than four years now, U.S. troops are always about to be withdrawn, Iraqis are always taking the initiative, the terrorists are always being defeated, Iraqi forces are always joining the fight, the government is always making progress.

Video: Baghdad Hospital Children's Ward - Alive in Baghdad

In this episode, Alive in Baghdad takes you to the children's ward of Baghdad Hospital, to make visible the plight of some very sick children, stricken with cancer by the presence of Depleted Uranium munitions, left over from the last to US wars in Iraq.

Sex-slave whistle-blowers vindicated

DynCorp, a private military powerhouse, fired two employees who complained that colleagues were involved in Bosnian forced-prostitution rings. The employees went to court -- and won.

U.S. DoD To Outsource $15B War on ‘Narcoterror’
The U.S. Defense Department has invited five contractors to bid on elements of a new multibillion-dollar effort to combat the global flow of illegal drugs allegedly used to finance terrorism.

President Bush bill pardons himself for his war crimes

Targeting the pain business | Technology | The Guardian
The $10m Silent Guardian weapon is part of a family of Raytheon's directed energy
Silent Guardian works by projecting a beam of microwave energy.

Raytheon's Silent Guardian
Run away -- the ray-gun is coming : We test US army’s new secret weapon: This an article about Raytheon’s new “Silent Guardian.” It’s pretty horrifying.


Iraq war budget jumps for 2008

After smothering efforts by war critics in Congress to drastically cut U.S. troop levels in Iraq, President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure -- totaling nearly $200 billion -- to fund the war through next year, Pentagon officials said.
As defense contractors continue to salivate...

Bush: Kids' health care will get vetoed

Bush's Mandela death gaffe 'out there'

"Well, Mandela's dead because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas."

Mr. Bush's Next World Order

Even the most cursory look at the paper trail of the infamous neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century clearly reveals that the Iraq invasion's purpose was to establish a military base of operations in the center of the Middle East from which America could control the region's oil flow--and ultimately the global energy industry--for virtual perpetuity. That things didn't quite go as planned gave our old Cold War nemeses, Russia and China, the table stake they needed get back in the power politics game. By now, Russia and China have taken on junior partners like Iran and Venezuela to form an ad hoc "axis of energy," one that can present serious competition to the U.S. for the role of world power broker. And make no mistake--the coin of political power in the post-modern world is the kind of power that lights and heats homes and runs industry and moves things from place to place.

A World Occupied by Profit: An Interview with Naomi Klein

By Jeremy Scahill, INDYPENDENT
This was the game. I think it goes back to Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation in 1989 about the end of history, that there is really only one way for societies to be governed: free markets in the economic sphere and liberal democracy in the political sphere. What we’ve seen is a concerted attempt to impose that formula on the world. The Arab world really was, and remains, the last holdout — in many cases — on both fronts. And it was really the last frontier, besides North Korea, for this neoliberal crusade to conquer. It swept Latin America in the 1970s and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. The Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s cracked open much of Asia to this economic model and to multinational corporations, most of them based in the United States.

Euro roars to record high $1.41 dollars

Israel asks U.S. foreign aid be paid in EUROS

"In the spirit of Yom Kippur, the United States will not hold Israel to any agreements obligating them to accept Dollars as payment for their foreign aid. We will translate our obligations into Euros or whatever currency that best fits Israel's needs" Secretary RIce said in the Friday, Sept 21 announcement.

CIA unveils Cold War spy plane
A sleek piece of Cold War history was put on display at the CIA Wednesday -- the once supersecret A-12 spy plane, which flew higher and faster than any other manned aircraft to spy on North Vietnam and North Korea.

Treasury to halt state, local securities sales

The move to close the "slugs" window again is the first of several emergency measures the Treasury can take to gain more precise control of federal finances as it nears the $8.965 trillion debt limit.
Next week's closure will be the fifth time that the Bush administration has closed the slugs window to avoid breaching the debt limit before Congress raised its credit authority.

Greenspan Admits Fed Is Not Beholden To Any Government Agency

Recession Too Mild a Word

The same group of people who lied to the world about the war in Iraq are doing the same about the state of the global economy, and again the public is sleepwalking as it listens to their lullabies. We could be witnessing the collapse of the capitalist model of society as we know it. According to President Bush, however, we are seeing a “thriving” U.S. economy.

Home Sweet Hoax - the Myth of ‘Home Ownership’
But, left unsaid is that neither blacks, nor hispanics, nor whites are getting a fair deal.

U.S. Banks Brace for Storm Surge as Dollar and Credit System Reel

This is what a good old fashioned bank run looks like. And, as in 1929, the bank owners and the government are frantically trying to calm down their customers by reassuring them that their money is safe. But human nature being what it is, people are not so easily pacified when they think their savings are at risk. The bottom line is this: The people want their money, not excuses.

Premier Says France Bankrupt
This may explain the sudden urgency to kick off a war with Iran.
Nicolas Sarkozy tries to win Tony Blair’s place to become Bush’s poodle


Dan Rather : 'Somebody's got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive... with government interference in news'
And if anyone should know that, it would be Dan Rather, who bought his way to network stardom by reporting that the Zapruder film had shown that John Kennedy's head "went forward with considerable violence" from the gunshot supposedly fired by Lee Oswald from the rear. Years later, Jim Garrison's case against CIA agent Clay Shaw would drag the Zapruder film into the public eye, which confirmed that Kennedy's head was driven backwards, not forwards.

FLASHBACK: 60 Minutes: Shelving a Story to Boost Bush?

In an outrageous politicization of journalism, CBS announced it would not air a report on forged documents that the Bush administration used to sell the Iraq war until after the November 2 election.
See MOCKINGBIRD: The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA

Iran's Ahmadinejad to meet 9/11 survivors

After having been rejected by the United States administration to visit the site of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now planning to meet the families of the 9/11 victims, Fars news agency reported.

Columbia won't cancel Ahmadinejad speech

Columbia University said it does not plan to call off a speech by Iran's president despite pressure from critics including the City Council speaker, who said the Ivy League school was providing a forum for "hate-mongering vitriol."

BBC graphic with US included in the Axis of Evil

The eerie familiarity of these preparations for war

Have we learnt nothing from the shameful and shameless run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Then, Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel prize-winning Egyptian head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, quietly but firmly said that as far as he and his UN agency were concerned, there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons or the materials to make them.
So here we are, nearly five years later, and exactly the same is happening over Iran. Once again the UN process of inspection is in the firing line. Once again it is the figure of ElBaradei being roundly abused and told, more or less openly by the US and British, that his work is worthless, his opinions are of no consequence and that his proper place is sitting quietly by while the European Union and the UN Security Council got on with punishing Iran through sanctions.

UN: Israel violating Palestinian rights

Iran demands UN inspectors visit Israel to investigate its nuclear capability

Iran and Israel face off over nuclear weapons

Iran called for UN inspectors to be dispatched to verify whether Israel has nuclear weapons, in a heated showdown with the Jewish state at a meeting of the UN atomic agency Friday.


UNITED NATIONS REVEALS THAT ISRAEL HAS BEEN LYING

It took the UN long enough to realise that Israel does nothing but lie to cover up the crimes they commit. They lie to the United States, they lie to the European Union, to the UN itself and even to their 'self proclaimed partner in peace,' Kapo Abbas.... just how long did they think they could get away with this?

Bush may bypass UN with tough sanctions against Iran

President Bush is prepared to bypass the United Nations and instead work with European allies on imposing tougher sanctions against Iran’s defiant stance on its nuclear programme.

More Profit and Less Nursing at Many Homes

Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, Fla., was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.
The facility’s managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities and other services also fell, according to Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration.
The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes.
Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what their families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court.

ARE PALESTINIANS NOT HUMAN? ARE THEY NOT OUR BROTHERS?

For approximately 225 years Africans and their descendants were held as slaves in the United States. For approximately 45 years apartheid was an official part of the racist regime in South Africa. In both cases the oppressor justified their methods by not recognising the oppressed as human beings.
The same can be seen in Israel today.... with the total dehumanisation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government. Just as slavery ended, just as South African apartheid ended, so will it end in Israel... the questions are when and how?


Investigate Israeli Nuclear Capacity Now

We are extremely concerned about the possibility that Israel, a country which refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NTP), possesses the capacities to develop and export nuclear weapons and technologies.

Welcome to Planet Gaza

It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded "international community"? It's the standard "three monkeys" - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.
This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet's decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a "hostile territory" has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun "gradually" to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.

Israel on high alert

Israel shut off the Palestinian territories for the holy Jewish day of atonement and went on alert for possible attack, 34 years after Syria and Egypt launched a surprise assault that sparked war.

ICAHD: GAZA; A CALL FOR URGENT ACTION

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) deplores the unanimous decision by the Israeli cabinet to impose sanctions on supplies of electricity, fuel and other basic goods and services to the civilian population of Gaza, and calls upon the international community to prevent this crime against humanity from being carried out. Indeed, the very legal framework invoked by Israel to carry out this illegal and immoral act - declaring Gaza a "hostile entity" within a "conflict short of war" - has absolutely no standing in international law. The collective punishment of an entire civilian population, by contrast, is explicitly prohibited.

Israeli military attacks on the Gaza Strip will come "sooner or later", Israeli transport minister says

The war on Gaza's children

An entire generation of Palestinians in Gaza is growing up stunted: physically and nutritionally stunted because they are not getting enough to eat; emotionally stunted because of the pressures of living in a virtual prison and facing the constant threat of destruction and displacement; intellectually and academically stunted because they cannot concentrate - or, even if they can, because they are trying to study and learn in circumstances that no child should have to endure.

Health and Healing for a Divided City

The entire northern region of the West Bank, with a population of a million people, is served by two government hospitals one surgical and one medical. They were built in 1905 and have not been renovated or augmented since. There are also several private hospitals, but most people cannot afford to pay their fees.

Civil Society and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Beneath the Hideous Veneer of "Security"

It is bad enough that the United States and Israel together behave like neighborhood bullies dictating their whims to both friends and enemies alike; but when their pious appeals to freedom, democracy and justice are heard as tanks, heavy artillery and warplanes devastate the lands and decimate the civilian populations they have occupied it is long past the time to censure their record-breaking violations of international law and basic human morality.
With regard to Palestine, it is important to ask ourselves why Hamas, which won power in free, fair and transparent democratic elections has been deemed a criminal terrorist organization whose carefully planned demise depends on the calculated starvation and suffering deliberately imposed on the Gaza Strip, 50% of whose population is under age 25. We need to understand that brutal, authoritarian regimes such as those in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are upheld as "moderate" and "friendly" states by the US because their first priority is to the Master and his whims.

Israel scrambles warplanes to intercept 'Syrian' birds

Israeli fighter pilots scrambled warplanes on Friday after radar spotted a potential airborne enemy flying from Syria only to discover the culprits were migratory birds, army radio reported.

Americans warned on travel to Syria

The department has urged Americans to stay away from Syria amid threats of Islamic insurgency attack. Officials said the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad might be unable to stop attacks on Americans in the country.

ISRAEL CRANKS UP THE RHETORIC FOR THE ‘FINAL CONFRONTATION’ WITHOUT SAYING A THING!

What with Syria being a de facto member of the ‘Axis of Evil’ because of its association with Iran, it was inevitable that sooner or later North Korea, a fully paid up member of the ‘Axis of Evil’, would be linked with Syria via its dabbling in nuclear stuff and that Israel would exploit that link to the hilt as it cranks up the propaganda and rhetoric in the lead up to an attack on both Iran and Syria in push for the ‘Final Confrontation’.

Army weighs 'complete' Gaza pullout

A day after the cabinet defined the Gaza Strip as "hostile territory," The Jerusalem Post learned Thursday that the IDF is working on a proposal that calls for a "complete disengagement" from the Gaza Strip - involving the closure of all border crossings with Israel and the transfer of all responsibility over the Palestinian territory to Egypt.

US gives 'strategically important' Ethiopia $97 million

The United States said Friday it is donating 97 million dollars (69 million euros) to Ethiopia in recognition of the Horn of Africa country's "strategic importance."

The New Military Frontier: Africa

Amid the commemorations, tributes, and critiques that cluster around the September 11 anniversary, we should not lose sight of how the war on terrorism is militarizing Africa. With under-tapped oil reserves, vast stretches of ungoverned space, impoverished populations and pandemics of AIDS/HIV and other diseases, Africa is now on Washington's radar screen. The National Security Strategy for the United States, 2006 says: "Africa holds growing geostrategic importance and is a high priority of this administration." But the most significant way that high priority status is being expressed is through commitments of military aid, training, troops and equipment.

The new British empire? UK plans to annex south Atlantic ocean floor round the Falklands

Britain is preparing territorial claims on tens of thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean floor around the Falklands, Ascension Island and Rockall in the hope of annexing potentially lucrative gas, mineral and oil fields, the Guardian has learned.
The Falklands claim has the most potential for acrimonious political fallout. Britain and Argentina fought over the islands 25 years ago, and the value of the oil under the sea in the region is understood to be immense: seismic tests suggest there could be up to 60m barrels under the ocean floor.

Chernobyl Fungus Feeds On Radiation

Casadevall and his co-researchers then set about performing a variety of tests using several different fungi. Two types - one that was induced to make melanin (Crytococcus neoformans) and another that naturally contains it (Wangiella dermatitidis) - were exposed to levels of ionizing radiation approximately 500 times higher than background levels. Both of these melanin-containing species grew significantly faster than when exposed to standard background radiation.

US Bars Attorneys' Access to Detainees

Attorneys for at least 40 Guantanamo Bay prisoners have been barred from visiting or writing their clients because of a judge's order dismissing legal challenges to the men's confinement, the U.S. Department of Justice said Friday.
A Justice Department lawyer informed the attorneys of the new restrictions in an e-mail that cited Thursday's dismissal of their cases by District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina in Washington.
Urbina's ruling, which covered 16 legal petitions filed on behalf of 40-60 detainees, invalidated an order that establishes rules for contact with detainees, Warden said.

Democrats Stab MoveOn in the Back

Memo to Democrats: you control the Congress. That means you can decide what bills come to the floor for votes--and what don't. So why, in a week where Republicans blocked the restoration of habeas corpus, voting rights for DC and adequate rest time for our troops between deployments, did you allow Republicans the opportunity to score a cheap PR stunt by approving a resolution condemning a week-old newspaper ad by Moveon.org--on the same day Republicans once again voted to keep indefinitely continuing the Iraq war?!

Here is why

Obama rallies state Democrats, throws support behind Lieberman ...
US Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.

Lynn Sweet: Obama: Mocks Stephen Colbert! Read outrageous letter here.
Oh, and on the other end of the spectrum, Obama endorsing Lieberman makes me hate Obama so much.


Obama, Lieberman, and the DLC « Piece Of Mind
That’s right - Joe Lieberman is Obama’s mentor, and Lieberman brags that Obama picked him, not the opposite.


Obama Endorses Lieberman for Senate - TalkLeft: The Politics Of Crime
I'll gladly drink champaign with you as we make a toast to Obama/Lieberman or Lieberman/Obama for their victory on the democratic ticket in 2008.

Giuliani's proposal for endless Middle East wars on behalf of Israel

Ron Paul wins Alabama Republican Straw Poll with 81%

REPUBLICAN JEWISH COALITION EXCLUDES RON PAUL FROM DEBATE

University of Michigan for Ron Paul

Free Republic Kick Out Ron Paul?

Excerpts from the thread, "Where are all the Ron Paul people coming from," seem to indicate a fairly significant rupture is taking place, though its extend remains somewhat unclear as of this report.

Wal-Mart threatens to sue independent lab that found toxins in its toys

The True Food Shopping Guide
Do you know what foods contain Genetically Modified ingredients? According to this list, most popular "junk food" brands do.

Florida Tasering incident divides faculty opinions
Saldana said police are only authorized to use force in three circumstances: self defense, the defense of others and to effecting a lawful arrest. In each of these circumstances, only the minimum amount of force necessary is allowed.
"Any use of force beyond the necessary amount is excessive," Saldana said.
Saldana said he believes Meyers has a strong case against the police in terms of using excessive force.

Deputies subdue autistic boy with Taser

Police defend drowning death case
Police chiefs have defended two community support officers (PCSOs) who did not enter the water as a 10-year-old boy drowned in a pond.

Wheelchair-Bound Woman Dies After Being Shocked With Taser 10 Times
"One, she's in a wheelchair. Two, she's schizophrenic. Three, they're using a Taser on a person that's in a wheelchair, and then four is that they tasered her 10 times for a period of like two minutes," Alexander said.

This is the "Fake Bomb" Airport Securty Almost Killed a Student For?
MIT coed with fake bomb 'art' arrested

Troopers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint Friday after she walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweatshirt. Authorities call it a fake bomb; she called it art.

Arrested For Reading the Constitution
Reading the Constitution? That makes you a TERROR SUSPECT!

The Light at the end of the tunnel

Blackwater security firm banned from Iraq
Iraq's Interior Ministry has revoked the license of Blackwater USA, an American security firm whose contractors are blamed for a Sunday gunbattle in Baghdad that left eight civilians dead. The U.S. State Department said it plans to investigate what it calls a "terrible incident.
In addition to the fatalities, 14 people were wounded, most of them civilians, an Iraqi official said.
Sunday's firefight took place near Nusoor Square, an area that straddles the predominantly Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Mansour and Yarmouk.
An Interior Ministry spokesman, Brig. Gen. Abdul Kareem Khalaf, said, "We have revoked Blackwater's license to operate in Iraq. As of now they are not allowed to operate anywhere in the Republic of Iraq. The investigation is ongoing, and all those responsible for Sunday's killing will be referred to Iraqi justice."
Iraqi authorities have issued previous complaints about shootings by private military contractors, according to a July report from the Congressional Research Service. The Congressional Research Service report cited other concerns, such as "the apparent lack of a practical means to hold contractors accountable under U.S. law for abuses and other transgressions and the possibility that they could be prosecuted by foreign courts." The reported added, "Iraqi courts do not have jurisdiction to prosecute contractors without the permission of the relevant member country of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq."
Contractors fall under Justice Department and FBI jurisdiction for alleged crimes, said a Pentagon official, who confirmed the accuracy of the congressional report.



Alan Greenspan claims Iraq war was really for oil

AMERICA’s elder statesman of finance, Alan Greenspan, has shaken the White House by declaring that the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.
However, it is his view on the motive for the 2003 Iraq invasion that is likely to provoke the most controversy. “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” he says.

The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein on the Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Pinochet's coup in Chile. The massacre in Tiananmen Square. The collapse of the Soviet Union. September 11th, 2001. The war on Iraq. The Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. Award-winning investigative journalist Naomi Klein brings together all of these world-changing events in her new book, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."
In her first national broadcast interview since the publication of "The Shock Doctrine," Klein joins us in our firehouse studio for the hour. Klein writes, "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks." She argues that "Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms."

NAOMI KLEIN: The shock doctrine, like all doctrines, is a philosophy of power. It’s a philosophy about how to achieve your political and economic goals. And this is a philosophy that holds that the best way, the best time, to push through radical free-market ideas is in the aftermath of a major shock. Now, that shock could be an economic meltdown. It could be a natural disaster. It could be a terrorist attack. It could be a war. But the idea, as you just saw in the film, is that these crises, these disasters, these shocks soften up whole societies. They discombobulate them. People lose their bearings. And a window opens up, just like the window in the interrogation chamber. And in that window, you can push through what economists call “economic shock therapy.” That’s sort of extreme country makeovers. It’s everything all at once. It’s not, you know, one reform here, one reform there, but the kind of radical change that we saw in Russia in the 1990s, that Paul Bremer tried to push through in Iraq after the invasion. So that’s the shock doctrine.
And it’s not claiming that right-wingers in a contemporary age are the only people who have ever exploited crisis, because this idea of exploiting a crisis is not unique to this particular ideology. Fascists have done it. State communists have done it. But this is an attempt to better understand the ideology that we live with, the dominant ideology of our time, which is unfettered market economics.

Grand Theft Iraq

At the end of August, in Dubai and the beginning of September, in London, conferences were held in order to privatise and carve up contracts for every essential service and infrastructure in Iraq. There was not a mega-corporate pig anywhere on earth, seemingly, who did not have its trotters in the trough. As Iraqis flee in an exodus of biblical proportions and die in a genocidal one, US/UK government backed corporate priority is a smash and grab raid of every asset and facility in the "land between two rivers".

Microsoft suffers decisive EU antitrust defeat

Microsoft suffered a decisive antitrust defeat on Monday when a European Union court upheld a landmark ruling that the world's largest software maker had abused its dominant market position to crush rivals.


Al-Jazeera man at Guantanamo Bay 'close to death' and Humiliated In The Shackles

Mr Haj, 38, was sent on assignment by al-Jazeera television station to cover the war in Afghanistan in October 2001. The following month, after the fall of Kabul, Mr Haj left Afghanistan for Pakistan with the rest of his crew. He was imprisoned, handed over to the US authorities in January 2002, taken to the US military compound in Bagram, Afghanisatan, then Kandahar, and finally to Guantanamo in June 2002.

Demobilized soldiers riot in China

Demobilized soldiers rioted at a retraining center in northeastern China overnight, the latest in a series of apparently coordinated protests against living conditions, a teacher and a human rights monitoring group said Friday.
About 1,000 ex-soldiers began smashing up classrooms and dormitories at the Qiqihar Railway Institute late Thursday night using beer bottles, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
The violence comes just over one week after about 2,000 demobilized Chinese soldiers rioted at training centers in at least three cities.

Vandana Shiva Decries the "Outsourcing of Pollution to the Third World"
We speak world-renowned environmental leader and thinker, Vandana Shiva about India and global resource depletion. Shiva says, "India is one of the preferred spots for outsourcing of all the pollution and energy-intensive production of the world. We hear of outsourcing of jobs and informational technology sector. We don't often enough hear about the outsourcing of pollution to the third world."



OBAMA IN 'HOT WATER' WITH DERSHOWITZ AND THE REST OF THE 'KOSHER NOSTRA'

Anyone that has any doubt as to the influence AIPAC has on the American scene must read the article, it clearly shows how their blind support for Israel comes before their support for the country they live in, the United States. In any other country these people would be charged with treason.

Congressman Under Fire for Mentioning AIPAC

Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.) has again come under fire from local Jewish organizations for remarking in a magazine interview that the "extraordinarily powerful" pro-Israel lobby played a strong role promoting the war in Iraq.

War Opponents Train For Visits to Area Schools And Recruitment Centers

Two days after bringing thousands of protesters to the U.S. Capitol, Iraq war opponents will begin a "week of action" today that starts with sending activists to area high schools and military recruiting centers and marching through a congressional building.
Dozens of war opponents, including some who were among the 192 arrested Saturday, spent yesterday training for this week, which will be "the most intense week" of planned actions since the Iraq conflict began, said Brian Becker, national coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition, which organized Saturday's rally and march and many of the other large antiwar events across the country.

A Look At How Petraeus Helped Arm Warring Sunni and Shia Militias in Iraq
On Tuesday, President Bush's top military commander in Iraq returned to Capitol Hill for a second day to urge the continuation of the war in Iraq. We speak with Arun Gupta, an editor of "The Indypendent" about the Petraeus hearings. Gupta's most recent article is titled, "Meet Gen. David Petraeus: His Militia Strategy Plunged Iraq Into a Civil War, And Now He's Back for More."

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us who David Petraeus is. Arun, you’re the first person to mention General Petraeus on our show years ago.

ARUN GUPTA: What we were talking about two-and-a-half years ago was Petraeus’s role in helping to set up the Special Police Commandos. In 2004, 2005, he was given the mission to train all Iraq military and police forces. And, in fact, in July 2004, Newsweek had this cover of him, saying that Petraeus was going to train Iraqis to take over the fight. Now, the reality is, is that was, of course, a failure, because three years later he was back with an escalation of US forces.
Now, one of the key things that Petraeus did was they decided -- him and his command decided -- that they were going to create this paramilitary force, the Special Police Commandos. They armed them. They funded them. They trained them. And they also issued the usual denials: “Oh, we're not giving them any weapons. This is an Iraqi initiative.” And so, now he’s saying the same thing with the Sunni militias.

So, anyway, the Special Police Commandos quickly morphed into Shiite death squads that were used against the Sunni insurgency and against Sunnis, in general, throughout Iraq. And this played a key role in terms of stoking and fomenting the civil war, because you had these death squads wearing government uniforms, being armed and trained by the US, going around killing Sunnis randomly. It generally alienated the Sunni Arab population from the government and drove them into the arms of the resistance.

Now what Petraeus is doing is he’s funding and arming these Sunni militias. And there are reports that have stated clearly with these militias saying, like, “Yes, we’re getting weapons from the US government.” And part of it is, is that they do want to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, which is another Sunni-based group. It’s an Iraqi-based group. But their main purpose is they want this money and weapons and aid to fight the Shiite militias.
So here we have them, like in 2004, setting up these Shiite militias, and now he’s setting up these Sunni militias to fight these Shiite militias. And what it portends is just an absolute disaster for Iraq. And, of course, it will also be used as justification: “Well, we can't leave because a bloodbath will result.” But we’re not looking at the fact that it’s the US that’s creating this bloodbath.

Iraq a boon to US Arms Industry

Significantly, in 2007, Iraq will, as in 2006, spend more on its security forces than it will receive in security assistance from the United States. In fact, Iraq is becoming one of the United States’ larger foreign military sales customers, committing some $1.6 billion to FMS already, with the possibility of up to $1.8 billion more being committed before the end of this year.

"Mission Accomplished."

Billions over Baghdad
Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, VANITY FAIR

Between April 2003 and June 2004, $12 billion in U.S. currency—much of it belonging to the Iraqi people—was shipped from the Federal Reserve to Baghdad, where it was dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority. Some of the cash went to pay for projects and keep ministries afloat, but, incredibly, at least $9 billion has gone missing, unaccounted for, in a frenzy of mismanagement and greed. Following a trail that leads from a safe in one of Saddam's palaces to a house near San Diego, to a P.O. box in the Bahamas, the authors discover just how little anyone cared about how the money was handled.

Pallets of American currency arriving in Baghdad.

Billions Over Baghdad: How Did $9B in Cash Airlifted From the Fed to Iraq Go Missing?
One month after the invasion of Iraq, the United States began airlifting planeloads of cash to Baghdad. Between April 2003 and June 2004, a total of $12 billion dollars of US currency was shipped to Iraq where it was to be dispensed by the Coalition Provisional Authority for reconstruction. To date, at least $9 billion dollars cannot be accounted for. In a startling new expose in Vanity Fair, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele follow the money trail from the Federal Reserve to Iraq.

DONALD BARLETT: And the other thing is that the Pentagon did establish an auditing, basically, for us to track the money, make sure it was spent properly. So who does the auditing contract go to, but something called NorthStar Consultants, run out of a million-dollar home in La Jolla, California, with a post office box in Nassau, Bahamas, which also happens to be the post office box set up for a $200 million securities swindle a few years earlier. And the company was actually created -- the company in charge of monitoring the money to making sure it’s spent right -- was created by a Bahamian man for the -- on the behalf of the San Diego man who ran it. But the Bahamas guy who set this up also had set up and been involved in companies linked to the $200 million swindle. And this was the group that the Pentagon put in charge of seeing where the money went, which means one of two things: the Pentagon didn't want anyone to know where the money was going, or they wanted it to go a certain place that nobody knows about.



Robert Fisk: It is the death of history

2,000-year-old Sumerian cities torn apart and plundered by robbers. The very walls of the mighty Ur of the Chaldees cracking under the strain of massive troop movements, the privatisation of looting as landlords buy up the remaining sites of ancient Mesopotamia to strip them of their artefacts and wealth. The near total destruction of Iraq's historic past – the very cradle of human civilisation – has emerged as one of the most shameful symbols of our disastrous occupation.
It's everyone's history that's being destroyed. This reminds me of when the conquerers burned down the library in Alexandria, Egypt, then claimed that Greeks & Romans invented civilization.



Israel snubs Tony Blair in new envoy role

Israel has refused to authorise a meeting between Tony Blair and a senior human rights activist from Gaza, effectively snubbing the former prime minister in his new role as international envoy to the Palestinians.

That's gratitude for you!

Brock Bierman to head FEMA program

While Bierman has been a loyal Republican, he has no background as a police or fire professional, or in emergency management or homeland security. That has raised concerns for Rhode Island U.S. Rep. James Langevin, a Warwick Democrat who sits on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.
“I do know Brock Bierman. I appreciate his service to Rhode Island. He’s a nice guy,” Langevin said yesterday. “But I am concerned that FEMA hasn’t learned the lessons of the Mike Brown situation.”

Key Lockerbie Witness Admits Perjury

But in 1998, Bollier obtained a copy of a blown-up photograph that Thurman had shown on ABC in 1991. Bollier could tell from certain characteristics that the fragment was part of a board of the timers made for East Germany, and definitely not one of the timers delivered by him to Libya.



Bush setting America up for war with Iran

In a chilling scenario of how war might come, a senior intelligence officer warned that public denunciation of Iranian meddling in Iraq - arming and training militants - would lead to cross border raids on Iranian training camps and bomb factories.
Under the theory - which is gaining credence in Washington security circles - US action would provoke a major Iranian response, perhaps in the form of moves to cut off Gulf oil supplies, providing a trigger for air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities and even its armed forces.

Outrage as DNA profile of seven-month-old baby is added to register

The DNA of a seven-month-old baby girl has been added to the police's national database designed to identify criminals.

The Emmys censored Sally Field!

Producers of Sunday's Emmy telecast bleeped best drama actress winner Sally Field in the midst of a controversial acceptance speech attacking U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Fox censors Sally Field’s anti-war speech at Emmy’s

Field then continued, “If mothers ruled the world, there would be no –” But the Fox Emmycast cut off her sound and pointed the camera away from the stage, silencing the rest of her sentence: “god-damned wars in the first place.”

As Nation Marks Sixth 9/11 Anniversary, a Look at "Why America is Losing the War on Terror"
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched the so-called "war on terror." Is the world a safer place as a result? We speak with Georgetown law professor David Cole, co-author of "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror."

Two years on -- still a failure

Blood in the Water: Katrina and the Death of the Common Good
This week we remember the destruction of New Orleans: an "act of God" aided mightily by the perfidy of man. As Greg Palast revealed this week, the Bush White House knew that the levees were breaking -- and deliberately failed to inform emergency officials in the city and state. His source was Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the LSU Hurrican Center, "the chief
technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina."
Why on earth would the White House not tell the state to get the remaining
folks out of there? The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an act of God -- but a catastrophic failure of the levees is an act of Bush. Under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system makes the damage -- and the deaths -- a federal responsibility. That means, as van Heeden points out, "these people must be compensated."

De Palma's Iraq war film stuns Venice festival

BRIAN De Palma, the director of Hollywood hits such as Mission: Impossible and Scarface, stunned the Venice Film Festival yesterday with a harrowing film about the Iraq war. Redacted, billed as a "fictional story inspired by true events", follows United States soldiers in Iraq who rape a teenage girl and slaughter her family. It is based on an incident in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, in which soldiers raped a 14-year-old girl before setting her body alight and shooting dead her parents and five-year-old sister. In one graphic scene shot in the style of an al-Qaeda internet video, a US soldier is beheaded. The film ends with a montage of real-life photographs of Iraqi war victims, including maimed and dead women and children.
The film's title refers to the process of editing out material for legal or other reasons and De Palma claimed censorship was stopping the US public from seeing the reality of the war. He said: "Unlike
Vietnam, when we saw the destruction and sorrow of the people we were maiming and killing, we see none of that in this war. You can find it if you look for it, but it's not in the mainstream media."

Live Vote: Do you believe 9/11 conspiracy theories?
66% of 88,000+ respondents said YES.

9/11 conspiracy theories
Many Americans suspect U.S. government involvement or complicity
"To me, the report read as a cartoon." White-haired and courtly, Griffin
sits on a couch in a hotel lobby in Manhattan, unspooling words in that
reasonable Presbyterian minister's voice. "It's a much greater stretch to accept the official conspiracy story than to consider the alternatives."
Distrust percolates more strongly near Ground Zero. A Zogby International poll
of New York City residents two years ago found 49.3 percent believed
the government "consciously failed to act."
Then there's the collapse of the twin towers, which Jones, the physics professor, timed
at just short of free fall. Griffin cites firefighters, including a
captain, who said in hearings and on tapes from that day that they saw
flashes and heard the sound of explosions before the collapse.

U.S. nuke work afflicted 36,500 Americans
The U.S. nuclear weapons program has sickened 36,500 Americans and killed more than 4,000, the Rocky Mountain News has determined from government figures. Those numbers reflect only people who have been approved for government compensation. They include people who mined uranium, built bombs and breathed dust from bomb tests. More than 15,000 of the 36,500 are workers who made atomic weapons. They were exposed to radiation and toxic chemicals that typically took years to trigger cancer or lung disease.
Many of the bomb-builders, such as those at the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, have never applied for compensation or were rejected because they could not prove their work caused their
illnesses. Congressional hearings are in the works to review allegations of unfairness and delays in the program for weapons workers.

Cholera spreads in Iraq as health services collapse
Lack of clean drinking water and poor sanitation has led to 5,000 people in northern Iraq contracting cholera.
The outbreak is among the most serious signs yet that Iraqi health and social services are breaking down as the number of those living in camps and poor housing increases after people flee their homes.

Iraq water plant treatment causes cholera

North Iraq faces cholera outbreak
Cholera is a gastrointestinal disease that is spread by drinking contaminated water. Severe cases can cause fatal dehydration.

Marine 'ordered to kill women and children'
"I told him there were women and kids inside there. He said 'Well, shoot them,''' Lance-Cpl Mendoza told prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Sean Sullivan.

Marine tells of order to execute Haditha women and children
A US Marine was ordered to execute a room full of Iraqi women and children during an alleged
massacre in Haditha that left 24 people dead, a military court heard Thursday. During a subsequent search of the house, Mendoza said he received an order from another Marine, Lance Corporal Stephen Tatum, to shoot seven women and children he had found in a rear bedroom.

Hawaii soldiers died before testifying
The Army has confirmed that "several" of the 10 Schofield Barracks soldiers who died in an Aug. 22 helicopter crash in northern Iraq were witnesses in a murder case involving two other Schofield soldiers accused of shooting an Iraqi detainee.

The Civilian Inmate Labor Program

We will lose savings and home, says soldier's mother
Lance Bombardier Ben Parkinson, 23, has been described as one of the
most seriously wounded soldiers ever to survive. He lost both legs,
suffered serious brain damage, fractured several vertebrae and
sustained 34 further injuries when his vehicle struck a landmine in
Helmand province last September.


Battle Over Right to Return: Housing Advocates Occupy New Orleans Public Housing Office
Prior to Hurricane Katrina, over 5,000 families in New Orleans lived in public housing. Today, less than one quarter of them have been able to return home. Last Friday, over two dozen public housing residents and activists took over the HANO offices in New Orleans. They demanded that
the government reopen the buildings.


Fight to Reopen New Orleans Public Housing "Horrible Slow and Tragic"
We speak with Tracie Washington, a lifelong New Orleans resident and civil rights attorney who has sued the city over its housing policies.
"Somehow we've got to get to a critical mass of people where they are all telling the government that it's wrong, so that the government will stop on its own," Washington said. "We just can't keep suing every single day. They'll wear us out."

The Privatization of New Orleans: Curtis Muhammad on Tycoons, Trump and Gulf Coast Oil
On the second anniversary of Katrina, Curtis Muhammad wrote a farewell letter to the left and progressive forces in the United States. He is leaving the country and heading south.



Two Years After Katrina, Billions in Relief Funds Are Missing
The federal government has promised more than $116 billion in recovery aid, but residents of the still-devastated Gulf Coast wonder whether the check bounced.

Pentagon balks at using 'ray gun' for Iraq crowd control
The amount of money and research spent on such systems recently is a very
powerful indicator that this weapon- and many others like it - are in the pipeline are being developed not only for use abroad but also domestically.



911 General Strike Gains Momentum
The 911 General Strike called by a coalition of antiwar, 911 Truth, and pro impeachment groups is gaining strength with gatherings scheduled across the country and rapidly expanding activity on the Internet, where the idea originated.

Announcement Of 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal
International Lawyer Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd, who is a Judge on the Kuala Lumpur International War Crimes Tribunal, will make a public call for an
International Citizen's 9/11 War Crimes Tribunal. He will speak at Ready for Mainstream, a 9/11 Anniversary Conference (Sept.8-9, 2007) at Cooper Union, 7th St and 4th Avenue, New York.


Auditors Say Iraq Goals Not Being Met
Especially this next one:

The Iraqis’ Failure to Pass the U.S.-Authored Oil Law
But something happened — something the arrogant, sneaky, bullying, greedy proponents of the law in this country somehow didn’t anticipate. Civil society rebelled against the Hydrocarbon Act. The Sunni bloc in parliament rejected the law. So did the Shiite followers of Muqtada al-Sadr who denounce the act as an attack on Iraqi sovereignty. Oil field workers have staged protests and vowed “mutiny” if the law is passed.
“This law cancels the great achievements of the Iraq people,” Subhi al-Badri, who heads the Iraqi Federation of Union Councils, said in a televised interview last week. “If the Iraqi Parliament approves this law, we will resort to mutiny.
This law is a bomb that may kill everyone. Iraqi oil. … belongs to all
future generations.”
Even the Iraqi minister of planning and development, Ali Baban, has vowed to “resign one hour after [the] passing [of the] oil and gas draft law.”




Porter ties U.S. withdrawal from Iraq to $9 gasoline
Gasoline prices could rise to about $9 per gallon if the United States withdraws troops from Iraq prematurely, Rep. Jon Porter said he was told on a trip to Iraq that ended this week.
If we leave Iraq, the US military will no longer be consuming thousands of tons of fuel every single day. Without that demand, prices will likely drop.

'Bin Laden' Options Trades Have Wall Street Whispering
The blogosphere and options trading desks have been rife with speculation about these trades, which are unusually large bets that the market will make a huge move in the next month. Some entity, or entities, has taken a large position on extremely deep in the money S&P 500 options, both puts and calls,
that won't pay off unless the market undergoes an extremely large price
move between now and the options' expiration on Sept. 21.Why don't the powers that be instead of whispering, expose just who those entities are?

Antiwar vets get school access
The decision means that after a 2 1/2-year ban, antiwar groups such as Veterans for Peace will be allowed on Pinellas County high school campuses - as long as their intent is to present an alternative to the message delivered by military recruiters.



Hillary Clinton Willing to Nuke Iran

Sarkozy affirms alliance to Israel
Mr. Sarkozy said: "I have the reputation of being a friend of Israel, and it's true. I will never compromise on Israel's security."

Iraq says Iran continues shelling despite protest
Iran has continued to fire shells into northern Iraq despite protests from Baghdad, threatening relations between the two neighbours, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari said on Thursday.
Iraqi Kurdish officials have complained about cross-border shelling since mid-August. Cross-border skirmishes also occasionally occur as Iraq's neighbours Turkey and Iran battle Kurdish separatist rebels operating from bases in Iraq's mountainous north-eastern region of Kurdistan.This sounds very suspicious.

IAEA: Iranian Cooperation Significant
The U.N. nuclear agency said Thursday that Iran was producing less nuclear fuel than expected and praised Tehran for "a significant step forward" in explaining pastatomic actions that have raised suspicions.


CheneyBush's "Mercenary" Legions
History shows us the dangers involved when leaders have large extra-institutional forces at their command, such as the Praetorian Guards and Legions of ancient Roman Caesars, Hitler's Brownshirts, Saddam's Republican Guards, the private
militias of political and religious leaders today in Iraq, Blackwater forces in control of New Orleans after Katrina, etc. By and large, these mercenaries swear allegiance to their employer, not to the rule of law, not to any constitution. The catastrophic damage done to democracy by the existence, and power, of these private forces can't be over-stated.
News flash: Blackwater, the huge corporation that CheneyBush rely
on for most of the non-military functions in Iraq and elsewhere, is
buying combat aircraft. Do we really want a private air force, effectively operating under the aegis of the Executive Branch, conducting secret ops in our names?


U.S. probe of arms fraud in Iraq widens
Dozens of cases involve billions in weapons, supplies
BAGHDAD - Several federal agencies are investigating a widening network of criminal cases involving the purchasing and delivery of billions of dollars of weapons, supplies and other material to Iraqi and American forces, according to officials from the agencies. The investigations amount to the largest ring of fraud and kickbacks uncovered in the conflict here, the officials said.
The inquiry has already led to several indictments of Americans, with more expected, the officials said. One of the investigations involves a senior American officer who worked closely with Gen. David Petraeus in setting up the logistics operation to supply the Iraqi forces when Petraeus was in charge of training and equipping those forces in 2004 and 2005, law-enforcement officials said Monday.
Over the past year, inquiries by federal oversight agencies have found serious discrepancies in military records of where thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces actually ended up. None of those agencies concluded whether weapons found their way to insurgents or militias.
The GAO found that the military was consistently unable to collect supporting documents to "confirm when the equipment was received, the quantities of equipment delivered, and the Iraqi units receiving the equipment." The agency also said there were "numerous mistakes due to incorrect manual entries" in the records that were maintained.
In their public reports, those agencies did not raise the possibility of criminal wrongdoing, and Petraeus has said that the imperative to provide weapons to Iraqi security forces was more important than maintaining impeccable records. In an interview on Aug. 18, Petraeus said that with ill-equipped Iraqi security forces confronting soaring violence across the country in 2004 and 2005, he made a decision not to wait for formal tracking systems to be put in place before distributing the weapons.
"We made a decision to arm guys who wanted to fight for their country," Petraeus said.
That operation moved everything from AK-47s, armored vehicles and plastic explosives to boots and Army uniforms, according to officials who were involved in it.
Much of the equipment provided to Iraqi troops, including the AK-47s, originates from countries in the former Soviet bloc. In a report last year, Amnesty International said that in 2004 and 2005 more than 350,000 AK-47 rifles and similar weapons were taken out of Bosnia and Serbia, for use in Iraq, by private contractors working for the Pentagon and with the approval of NATO and European security forces in Bosnia.
But by far the most alarming charges involve the laxity of controls over the weapons distributed to Iraqi security forces. After government reports indicated serious problems with accounting for the weapons -- raising the possibility that they've gone to the black market and are being used to attack U.S. forces -- the Pentagon's inspector general, Lieutenant General Claude "Mick" Kicklighter, launched an investigation. He's about to leave for an "indefinite" period in Iraq at the helm of an 18-investigator team. That inquiry comes at the behest of Sen. John Warner (R-VA), the former chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and it's most likely only the first salvo of a broader Pentagon anti-corruption effort.
Corruption is a way of life in the new Iraq. Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, labeled the country the second-most-corrupt business environment on the planet in 2005. Just yesterday, McClatchy reported that any Iraqi doing business in Anbar Province -- including Iraqi contractors with the U.S. -- pays an "insurgent tax" to militant groups who partially finance their fight against the U.S. through shakedowns. All that raises doubt about how much good a new anti-corruption effort can accomplish at this point.



Great reporting from Ward Harkavy's (non-print) blog for Village Voice.com:

Tattoo You
Art is alive in Baghdad. And just in case you aren't . . .
Amid the sweltering heat, bomb blasts, curfews, fleeing aid workers, and lack of electricity in Baghdad, artistic expression flourishes. But it's for a practical reason: People are getting tattooed so that if they get killed their families will at least be able to identify their corpses. The news service IRIN puts it another way: "Grim Tattoo Subculture Emerges Amid Daily Violence":
"My age is the same as the olive tree," reads the blue tattoo on Qaisar Tariq al-Essawi's left shoulder. Al-Essawi, 36, got the tattoo so his family and close friends could recognise his remains if he ended up in a morgue.




Profit of Doom
Hackneyed headline fits: Ex-Iraq czar Bremer peddles armor technology to military while armor contracts go unfilled.
This morning's New York Times story on the widening weapons scandal in Iraq is shocking — the biggest shock is that the Pentagon's special investigator has been saying this for a long time and we're just now sending teams of investigators from numerous agencies to check it out.
Still awaiting investigation is war profiteering related to weapons and armor. One of the people planning to profit from the continuing Iraq war is ex-czar and Medal of Freedom winner Jerry Bremer, and not just from his book tours.
Meanwhile, we never have found out what happened to the $9 billion in Iraqi oil revenue that Bremer's regime oversaw but which can't be exactly accounted for. Just one of many oil-for-slush scandals in Iraq, that story was broken by the British NGO Christian Aid in June 2004
Back to the present: The latest quarterly report by Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, revealed that numerous contracts for weapons and armor have gone unfulfilled.
An audit last October by Bowen's office revealed that we weren't even keeping track of — or prepared to maintain — the thousands of weapons we were handing out to Iraqi and U.S. soldiers.

Puppet Show
Zelikow's role in anti-Maliki agitprop raises 9/11 Commission questions

From the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, this June 2005 cartoon from the Baghdad newspaper Al-Mada: The man on the left, peering into the head of a government official, says, "There is nothing in there."

What else is embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nourial-Malikisupposed to do but counterattack the American politicians who are blasting him? He can't very well agree with their calls for his ouster. And he's already seen as a U.S. puppet by his own populace.

But Salon's Glenn Greenwald summarizes well the murky politics behind the attacks on Maliki by Hillary Clinton and other senators: Former 9/11 Commission executive director Philip Zelikow has been lobbying on behalf of Tony Soprano lookalike (and former CIA stooge) Ayad Allawi, who wants to seize the reins from Maliki.

Greenwald notes how this slimy episode destroys Zelikow's credibility, and after all, Zelikow directed the 9/11 Commission. Now Zelikow pulls strings for Allawi, and everybody dances on Maliki's grave.
So I have a related question, or questions: What happened to the numerous juicy tidbits the staff under Zelikow dug up about the Bush regime's machinations before 9/11? For instance, why were morsels about Brian Sheridan, the government's chief counterterrorist adviser, not being replaced until after 9/11 and related stuff about dual-disloyalist Doug Feith not included in the final commission report? I wrote about some key differences between the staff reports (prepared by Zelikow's underlings) and the final report in June 2004.
Now we have an idea why some of that good stuff was left out of the final report: Zelikow was, after all, running the commission staff and no doubt had a major hand in OK'ing the final version of the report.
And here's another question: Why was the commission report initially released without an index? Another nice piece of stonewalling. Zelikow got some 'splainin' to do. That will never happen, at least not in our lifetime.

Shock and awful: Turn to page 17 of your haven't-got-a-prayer book (otherwise known as "Tab K") for this exciting and formerly secret map of Iraq from the U.S. military's August 2002 invasion plans.

Iraq Government at Death's Door
We already knew that the government of Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was grinding to a halt when cabinet members stopped showing up. Now U.S. pols want to kick out Maliki himself, papers are reporting this morning.
The only question is whether this stooge will flee before he's kicked out.
That's because we're in the strange situation of having stooges over there in chaotic Iraq but not being able to control anything — even them. It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Hey, in August 2002, our top leaders were being told what they wanted to hear: that we were supposed to have only 5,000 troops in Iraq by December 2006. Instead, we have more than 25 times that number in August 2007.
...
Check out the plan's "Tab K" (which includes the above slide) for a look at the 2002 map of Iraq overlaid with U.S. generals' testosterone. It's all full of "shock and awe" and "exploit" and "gain control" and "seize oil." Brother.