The Worst is Yet to Come
The Third and Final Act: Attacking Iran
By WILLIAM S. LIND
The third and final act in the national tragedy that is the Bush administration may soon play itself out. The Okhrana reports increasing indications of "something big" happening between the election and Christmas. That could be the long-planned attack on Iran.
An attack on Iran will not be an invasion with ground troops. We don't have enough of those left to invade Ruritania. It will be a "package" of air and missile strikes, by U.S. forces or Israel. If Israel does it, there is a possibility of nuclear weapons being employed. But Israel would prefer the U.S. to do the dirty work, and what Israel wants, Israel usually gets, at least in Washington.
That this would constitute folly piled on top of folly is no deterrent to the Bush administration. Like the French Bourbons, it forgets nothing and it learns nothing. It takes pride in not adapting. Or did you somehow miss George W. Bush's declaration of Presidential Infallibility? It followed shortly after the visit to the aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" sign.
The Democrats taking either or both Houses of Congress, if it happens, will not make any difference. They would rather have the Republicans start and lose another war than prevent a national disaster. Politics comes first and the country second. Nor would they dare cross Israel.
Many of the consequences of a war with Iran are easy to imagine. Oil would soar to at least $200 per barrel if we could get it. Gas shortages would bring back the gas lines of 1973 and 1979. Our European alliances would be stretched to the breaking point if not beyond it. Most people outside the Bushbubble can see all this coming.
What I fear no one forsees is a substantial danger that we could lose the army now deployed in Iraq. I have mentioned this in previous columns, but I want to go into it here in more detail because the scenario may soon go live.
Well before the second Iraq war started, I warned in a piece in The American Conservative that the structure of our position in Iraq could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement. That is precisely the danger if we go to war with Iran.
The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil products. Unlike Guderian's Panzer army on its way to the Channel coast in 1940, we could not just fuel up at local gas stations.
There are two ways our supply lines from the south could be cut if we attack Iran. The first is by Shiite militias including the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades, possibly supported by a general Shiite uprising and, of course, Iran's Revolutionary Guards (the same guys who trained Hezbollah so well).
The second danger is that regular Iranian Army divisions will roll into Iraq, cut our supply lines and attempt to pocket us in and around Baghdad. Washington relies on American air power to prevent this, but bad weather can shut most of that air power down.
Unfortunately, no one in Washington and few people in the U.S. military will even consider this possibility. Why? Because we have fallen victim to our own propaganda. Over and over the U.S. military tells itself, "We're the greatest! We're number one! No one can defeat us. No one can even fight us. We're the greatest military in all of history!"
It's bull. The U.S. armed forces are technically well-trained, lavishly resourced Second Generation militaries. They are being fought and defeated by Fourth Generation opponents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third Generation enemies who can observe, orient, decide and act more quickly than can America's vast, process-ridden, Powerpoint-enslaved military headquarters. They can be defeated by strategy, by stratagem, by surprise and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like unsinkable ships. They are unsinkable until someone or something sinks them.
If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq, to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both (the most likely event), the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover.
One of the few people who does see this danger is the doyenne of American foreign policy columnists, Georgie Anne Geyer. In her column of October 28 in The Washington Times, she wrote,
The worst has not, by any means, yet happened. When I think of abandoning a battleground, I think of the 1850s, when thousands of Brits were trying to leave Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and all were killed by tribesmen except one man, left to tell the story.
Our men and women are in isolated compounds, not easy even to retreat from, were that decision made. Time is truly running out.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Bad News for Burns: Montana Paper Set to Publish Letter from Abramoff Pal
"A Republican media consultant and friend of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff recently wrote a letter to a Montana newspaper saying Burns' staff ate so many free meals at Abramoff's restaurant, people joked they would have 'starved to death' without the lobbyist.
"'Frankly, it was widely viewed in D.C. that Mr. Abramoff effectively exerted implicit control over Mr. Burns whenever he and his team needed to get something accomplished,' reads the letter, which was sent to the Whitefish Pilot last week.
"The letter is expected to run in the Pilot's Thursday edition.
"The author, Monty Warner, a GOP media consultant, told the Gazette State Bureau last week that he came across an article in the Pilot recently in which Burns is quoted as saying he only got $5,000 from Abramoff. That, combined with Burns' other statements in which he says he hardly knew Abramoff and, at one point, he wished Abramoff had never been born, compelled him to write the letter, Warner said." (Billings (MT) Gazzette)
MOVIE ON FAR RIGHT
Over the past quarter century, an increasingly influential movement on the far right has waged a sustained war on the Constitution as we know it. Ultra-conservative politicians, judges, professors and activists would overturn decades of precedent to shred the fabric of popular laws protecting workers, consumers and public health, expand executive power at the expense of basic civil liberties, and impose a narrow social agenda on the rest of the body politic.
LINK to Movie: http://www.afj.org/quietrevolution.html
Over the past quarter century, an increasingly influential movement on the far right has waged a sustained war on the Constitution as we know it. Ultra-conservative politicians, judges, professors and activists would overturn decades of precedent to shred the fabric of popular laws protecting workers, consumers and public health, expand executive power at the expense of basic civil liberties, and impose a narrow social agenda on the rest of the body politic.
“If they succeed,” says University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, “we will, without really seeing it happen, end up with a very different country—one that’s both less free and less equal.”
Quiet Revolution traces the growth of the ultra-conservative movement, shines a light on its strategies, and breaks through its rhetoric to expose how it envisions reshaping American law and life.LINK to Movie: http://www.afj.org/quietrevolution.html
Violence returns to Mexican city
Demonstrators and riot police have again clashed in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, the scene of five months of protests against the state governor. Several thousand protesters converged on the main square, vowing to retake the city centre after police moved in at the weekend to restore order.
Striking teachers and leftist activists are demanding that Governor Ulises Ruiz be sacked for abuse of power.
Mexico's lawmakers have urged Mr Ruiz to quit, but he says he will stay on.
Senators unanimously approved a resolution calling on him to "consider resigning from office to help restore law and order" in Oaxaca.
The Senate's motion came hours after a similar measure was approved by the lower house of the congress.
Calls for Mr Ruiz's resignation have been at the heart of a drawn-out protest by Mexican teachers and left-wing activists, who accuse him of authoritarianism and corruption.
Over the weekend, some 4,000 riot police entered Oaxaca, removing demonstrators from the city centre. One man was reported to have died in the operation.
Mexican President Vicente Fox ordered the action on Saturday, a day after unidentified gunmen killed three people, including a US journalist.
BBC WORLD
Monday, October 30, 2006
Sadr City Bombing on Monday Kills 29, wounds 60
At Least 83 Killed Sunday
In Basra, Bombers target Police
Sunni Arab guerrillas killed a US Marine on Sunday, bringing to 100 the death toll for US troops in Iraq during the month of October. It is one of the deadliest months since the war began.
An enormous bomb blasted a city square in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of northeast Baghdad on Monday morning, killing 29 and wounding 60. The victims were poor day laborers lining up in search of work.
On Sunday, hundreds (some reports say thousands) of angry residents had demonstrated against the US military siege of Sadr City, threatening to close down the ministries if it is not lifted. Iraqi members of parliament from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance joined them. They complained that as a result of the US operations, ordinary people cannot circulate and it is difficult to get patients to the hospitals. The situation was therefore already at the boiling point before the bombing, which will have made things worse.
The inhabitants of Sadr City, with a population of perhaps 3 million, maintain that they do not have the captured US soldier, and say they are upset at the 5-day long siege of their district by the US military, which is alleged to have closed off most routes from Sadr City into Baghdad and to have been engaged in invading offices of clerics associated with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Apparently they believe that a unit of the Mahdi Army kidnapped a GI, for whom they are conducting a manhunt. The US is seeking rogue guerrilla commander Abu Deraa, who has broken with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.
Baghdad government officials announced Sunday that they had discovered 25 dead bodies in the capital over the previous 24 hours.
Guerrillas kiled 5 policemen in Baquba.
US troops killed 17 guerrillas near Balad on Sunday. The US military said that the guerrillas were planning to attack a US convoy.
Altogether guerrillas killed 33 policemen on Sunday. In Basra, armed men pulled 17 police trainees and 2 translators out of a van and their dead bodies were later found around the city. In Basra, such actions are frequently taken by Shiite militias or Marsh Arab tribsemen, though there have been allegations that Sunni Arab death squads operate there, funded by fundamentalist Sunnis in the Gulf.
Iraq's Sunni Arab vice president is threatening to resign if Prime Minister al-Maliki does not confront head on the problem of dissolving the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army, Shiite militias. Such a move by Tariq al-Hashimi could well signal the end of the Maliki "national unity" government.
Constant mortar attacks have forced the British to abandon their consulate in downtown Basra.
The US military has lost track of hundreds of thousands of weapons the US purchased for the Iraqi military and security forces. The only good news in the article is that many of the weapons are useless to Iraqis because of lack of spare parts or difficulty of upkeep. At least those won't do the guerrillas any good if they fall into their hands.
Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks some good questions about how the Bush administration squandered most of the $18 billion that Congress ear-marked for Iraq reconstruction and whether there will be any accountability.
Op-Ed Columnist
The System’s Broken
Greencastle, Ind.
The middle-aged woman filling her gas tank on a day of endless rain laughed when a reporter asked her about the coming elections. “Politics,” she said, “are for silly people. Those ads come on television and I reach for the remote.”
I asked if she was planning to vote on Nov. 7.
“No,” she said. “That stuff really turns me off.”
If you pay close attention to the news and then go out and talk to ordinary people, it’s hard not to come away with the feeling that the system of politics and government in the U.S. is broken. I spent the past week talking to residents in Chicago, southern Michigan and Indiana. No one was happy about the direction the country has taken, but not even the most faithful voters were confident that their ballot would make any substantial difference.
“I vote,” said Angela Buehl, who lives in a suburb of Indianapolis, “but I don’t think anybody in Washington is listening to me.” She mimicked talking into a telephone: “Hello ... Hello ...?”
The politicians, special interests and the media are in a state of high excitement over next week’s midterm elections. They are addicted to the blood sport of politics, and this is a championship encounter. But that excitement contrasts with what seems to be an increasing sense of disenchantment and unease that ordinary Americans are feeling when it comes to national politics and government. For far too many of them, the government in Washington is remote, unresponsive and ineffective.
Voters and nonvoters alike expressed frustration with the fact that we are stuck in a war in Iraq that hardly anyone still supports but no one in government knows how to end.
Several people mentioned that their families were struggling financially at a time when the stock market had soared to all-time highs and the Bush administration was crowing about how well the economy was doing.
Nearly all said they were repelled by the relentless barrage of tasteless and idiotic campaign commercials. “Talk to me,” said a woman in Mishawaka, Ind. “Don’t assume I’m an imbecile.”
A pair of front-page articles in The Times last week showed the stark contrast in the way that insiders and outsiders view the off-year elections. Corporations, reacting to the possibility that the Republicans might lose control of one or both houses of Congress, are hedging their bets by pumping up campaign donations to Democratic candidates. One way or another, they will be in the loop. That story ran on Saturday.
A day earlier, The Times reported on Democratic concerns that black voters, disillusioned by voter suppression efforts and a pervasive belief that their votes will not be properly counted, may not turn out in the numbers that the party was hoping for.
The system is broken. Most politicians would rather sacrifice their first born than tell voters the honest truth about tough issues. Big money and gerrymandering have placed government out of the reach of most Americans. While some changes in the House are expected this year, the Brookings Institution and the Cato Institute tell us (in a joint report) that since 1998, House incumbents have won more than 98 percent of their re-election races.
Millions of thoughtful Americans have become so estranged from the political process that they’ve tuned out entirely. Voters hungry for a serious discussion of complex issues are fed a steady diet of ideological talking heads hurling insults in one- or two-minute television segments.
DePauw University held a two-day conference last week on issues confronting the U.S. I was struck by the extent to which the people who attended the forums were interested in seeking out practical, nonpartisan, nonideological solutions to the wide range of problems discussed.
The frustration with the current state of government and politics was palpable. One man, Ned Lamkin, asked me if it wouldn’t be a good idea to create some sort of national forum for a serious extended discussion of ways to fix, or at least improve, the system. He’s on to something. Among other things, I’d love to see a nonpartisan series of high-profile, nationally televised town hall meetings that would explore ways of making government and politics fairer, more open and more responsive to the will of the people.
American-style democracy needs to be energized, revitalized. The people currently in charge are not up to the task. It’s time to bring the intelligence, creativity and energy of the broader population into the quest for constructive change.
Why I Am Not a Liberal... (Leiter)
...at least if this embarrassing moral waffling counts as liberalism. I am sorry that people I rather like, and some of whom I know would have written a far better statement, signed on to this feeble statement of "principles" [sic] by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin. How they got past the first substantive paragraph, I really do not know:
We have all opposed the Iraq war as illegal, unwise, and destructive of America's moral standing. This war fueled, and continues to fuel, jihadis whose commitment to horrific, unjustifiable violence was amply demonstrated by the September 11 attacks as well as the massacres in Spain, Indonesia, Tunisia, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Rather than making us safer, the Iraq war has endangered the common security of Americans and our allies.
So this is liberalism: to oppose criminal wars of aggression against defenseless nations when they aren't in America's interests?
That's a principle?
How else, after all, to interpret Ackerman's and Gitlin's opposition to the war on the grounds that it is "unwise" and "destructive of America's moral standing" as anything other than saying it isn't in America's interests? (And must liberals really be committed to silliness about America having "moral standing"? Can't liberals be realistic enough to observe that America has pursued the strategic interests of ruling elites like every other nation in human history, with the more-or-less predictable consequences for peoples and countries that fell afoul of those interests?)
About the closest these tepid "liberals" come to articulating a real, principled objection to the war of aggression against Iraq is to call it "illegal": but even that is far too weak, given that lots of illegal actions are morally correct, and lots of legal actions morally reprehensible. Why not "criminal"? Why not "illegal and unjust"? Why not "morally craven and indefensible"? Those are words that evoke, in my mind at least, principled opposition to what will be recalled as one of the great international crimes at the dawn of the 21st century, as opposed to evoking opposition that is based on merely strategic and prudential considerations.
If the first waffling and unprincipled paragraph about the war of aggression against Iraq left any doubts about the actual point of this exercise--namely, like John Kerry's Presidential bid in 2004, to show that Democrats are tough guys too, capable of pandering to the self-interest of the middle classes and ruling elites--then we need only skip past the next (oddly placed) paragraph on Israel to come to the following declaration:
Make no mistake: We believe that the use of force can, at times, be justified. We supported the use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. But war must remain a last resort. The Bush administration's emphatic reliance on military intervention is illegitimate and counterproductive. It creates unnecessary enemies, degrades the national defense, distracts from actual dangers, and ignores the imperative necessity of building an international order that peacefully addresses the aspirations of rising powers in Asia and Latin America.
It is a pathetic "principled" objection to a war of aggression that, almost immediately, must be conjoined with an affirmation of the propriety of military force! That qualification is all the more damning because, once again, the objection to slaughter and destruction is couched purely in prudential terms--it "creates unnecessary enemies, degrades the national defense, distracts from actual dangers" and so on. That doesn't look at all like a rejection of military force except as a "last resort;" it looks like a rejection of military force whenever there might be imprudent consequences, otherwise not. On this rendering of the debate, the dispute between "liberals" and Bush is not over principles at all, but simple strategic calculations.
Ackerman and Gitlin then turn to a series of perfectly fine domestic policy talking points (they are well-summarized on the numbered list here), and even manage to articulate one actual principle ("every citizen is entitled by right to the elementary means to a good life," a principle to which I'm more confident Marxists, than liberals, are committed, but never mind), but they are soon back to revealing the moral bankruptcy of their liberalism:
We insist that America be defended vigorously against its real enemies -- the radical Islamists who organize to attack us. But security does not require torture or the rejection of basic guarantees of due process. To the contrary, this administration's lawless conduct and its violations of the Geneva Conventions only damage our moral standing and our ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues.
In the first sentence, they immediately signal their acquiescence to the basic Bush fear-mongering central to the fake war on terror, only to offer, yet again, a series of tepid strategic objections to torture and adherence to the Geneva Conventions. Why the hesitation to simply say that it is the height of moral depravity and craven villainy to defend torture and undermine the Geneva Conventions? Why not say plainly that the U.S. is now run by war criminals, who, if there were an actual international legal system, would be facing an international tribunal at the Hague, like their soulmates in other nations who ran less powerful criminal enterprises and so could be brought to "justice"? Why, in short, must any weight, at all, be given to "moral standing" and the "ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues"?
If this is liberalism, then it deserves to die.
Someone interested in liberalism and in principles, as opposed to political pandering, would do far better to look over this list of ten liberal principles by Geoffrey Stone from the University of Chicago Law School. Among other things, Professor Stone actually states some principles which have something to do with the post-Enlightenment liberal tradition, rather than a series of policy wonk talking points that might have been put out by the Democratic National Committee.
I hope some of my friends who signed Ackerman's and Gitlin's ironic confirmation of aspects of Tony Judt's critique (especially his observation that "America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end...[and] who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection") will rethink the value of signing on to such displays and have their names removed.
Friday, October 27, 2006
Chomsky On "Terrorism"
By Saad Sayeed
10/26/06 "Excalibur" -- -- Known in academic circles for his contribution to the field of linguistics, MIT professor Noam Chomsky is widely recognized as one of the most influential political dissidents of our time. In this interview, Chomsky talks about the roots of terrorism and the role of the intellectual in society.
"The problem lies in the unwillingness to recognise that your own terrorism is terrorism"
Excalibur (Ex): How important is an understanding of the role of states such as the U.S. and the U.K. when examining the question of terrorism?
Chomsky (Ch): It depends on whether we want to be honest and truthful or whether we want to just serve state power ( . . . ) We should look at all forms of terrorism.
I have been writing on terrorism for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration came in 1981 and declared that the leading focus of its foreign policy was going to be a war on terror. A war against state directed terrorism which they called the plague of the modern world because of their barbarism and so on. That was the centre of their foreign policy and ever since I have been writing about terrorism.
But what I write causes extreme anger for the very simple reason that I use the U.S. government's official definition of terrorism from the official U.S. code of laws. If you use that definition, it follows very quickly that the U.S. is the leading terrorist state and a major sponsor of terrorism and since that conclusion is unacceptable, it arouses furious anger. But the problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism. This is not just true of the United States, it's true quite generally. Terrorism is something that they do to us. In both cases, it's terrorism and we have to get over that if we're serious about the question.
Ex: In 1979, Russia invades Afghanistan. The U.S. uses the Ziaul Haq regime in Pakistan to fund the rise of militancy. This gives Zia a green light to fund cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. Now we allegedly have some of those elements setting off bombs in Mumbai. Clearly, these groups are no longer controlled by any government.
Ch: The jihadi movements in their modern form go back before Afghanistan. They were formed primarily in Egypt in the 1970s. Those are the roots of the jihadi movement, the intellectual roots and the activist roots and the terrorism too.
But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Regan administration saw it as an opportunity to pursue their Cold War aims. So they did with the intense cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and others ( . . . ) so the Reagan administration organized the most radical Islamic extremists it could find anywhere in the world and brought them to Afghanistan to train them, arm them.
Meanwhile, the U.S. supported Ziaul Haq as he was turning Pakistan into a country full of madrassahs and fundamentalists. The Reagan administration even ( . . . ) kept certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons, which of course they were, so that U.S. aid to Pakistan could continue. The end result of these U.S. programs was to seriously harm Pakistan and also to create the international jihadi movement, of which Osama bin Laden is a product. The jihadi movement then spread ( . . . ) they may not like it much but they created it. And now, as you say, it's in Kashmir.
Kashmir, though, is a much more complex story. There are plenty of problems in Kashmir and they go way back, but the major current conflicts come from the 1980s. In 1986, when India blocked the election, it actually stole the election, and that led to an uprising and terrorist violence and atrocities, including atrocities committed by the Indian army.
Ex: The colonial legacy is generally dismissed by the media. What role does this legacy play in the emergence of home-grown terrorists in countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Canada as well as to the creation of terrorism as a whole? Ch: It's not brought up in the West because it's inconvenient to think about your own crimes. Just look at the major conflicts going on around the world today, in Africa, the Middle East, in South Asia, most of them are residues of colonial systems.
Colonial systems imposed and created artificial states that had nothing to do with the needs and concerns and relations of the populations involved. They were created in the interests of colonial powers and as old fashioned colonialism turned into modern neo-colonialism, a lot of these conflicts erupted into violence and those are a lot of the atrocities happening in the world today.
How can anyone say colonialism isn't relevant? Of course it is and it's even more directly relevant.
Take the London bombing in 2005. Blair tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq. That's completely ridiculous. The British intelligence and the reports of the people connected in the bombing, they said that the British participation in the invasion and resulting horrors in Iraq inflamed them and they wanted to do something in reaction.
Ex: What is the role of the intellectual when dealing with imperialism and are the intellectuals doing they job?
Ch: Unfortunately, intellectuals are doing their historic job. The historic role of intellectuals if you look, unfortunately, as far back as you go has been to support power systems and to justify their atrocities. So the article you read in the National Post for the production of vulgar Stalinist connoisseurs, that's what intellectuals usually do as far back as you go.
If you go back to the Bible, there's a category of people who were called prophets, a translation of an obscure word, they were intellectuals, they were what we would call dissident intellectuals; criticising the evil king, giving geopolitical analysis, calling for the moral treatment of orphans, decent behaviour. They were dissident intellectuals. Were they treated well? They were prisoned and driven into the dessert and so on, they were the fringe. The people who were treated well were the ones who centuries later, like in the gospel, were called false prophets. So it goes through history. The actual role of the intellectual has been supportive of power.
Should they do that? Of course not; they should be searching for truth, they should be honest, they should be supporting freedom and justice and there are some who do it. There is a fringe who do it, but they're not treated well. They are performing the task that intellectuals ought to perform.
Ex: And what keeps you motivated?
Ch: I'll just tell you a brief story. I was in Beirut a couple of months ago giving talks at the American university in the city. After a talk, people come up and they want to talk privately or have books signed.
Here I was giving a talk in a downtown theatre, a large group of people were around and a young woman came up to me, in her mid-'20s, and just said this sentence: "I am Kinda" and practically collapsed. You wouldn't know who Kinda is but that's because we live in societies where the truth is kept hidden. I knew who she was. She had a book of mine open to a page on which I had quoted a letter of hers that she wrote when she was seven years old.
It was right after the U.S. bombing of Libya, her family was then living in Libya, and she wrote a letter which was found by a journalist friend of mine who tried to get it published in the United States but couldn't because no one would publish it. He then gave it to me, I published it. The letter said something like this:
"Dear Mr Reagan, I am seven years old. I want to know why you killed my little sister and my friend and my rag doll. Is it because we are Palestinians? Kinda". That's one of the most moving letters I have ever seen and when she walked up to me and said I am Kinda, and, like I say, actually fell over, not only because of the event but because of what it means.
Here's the United States with no pretext at all, bombing another country, killing and destroying, and nobody wants to know what a little seven-year-old girl wrote about the atrocities. That's the kind of thing that keeps me motivated and ought to keep everybody motivated. And you can multiply that by 10,000. -This interview previously appeared in the News of Pakistan.
COPYRIGHT © EXCALIBUR 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Oliver North, back in Nicaragua, takes on Ortega again
Revived leftwing election prospects prompt US cold war warrior's 'private visit'
Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
Wednesday October 25, 2006
The Guardian
Almost a pensioner now, he was in town for a brief visit to catch up with old buddies and maybe see some sights, just like any other tourist from the US. Over breakfast at his hotel his hosts filled him in on their news, which was not especially good, and afterwards he strolled through the war monument at Plaza de la Paz, soaking up sunshine and history.
Revived leftwing election prospects prompt US cold war warrior's 'private visit'
Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
Wednesday October 25, 2006
The Guardian
Almost a pensioner now, he was in town for a brief visit to catch up with old buddies and maybe see some sights, just like any other tourist from the US. Over breakfast at his hotel his hosts filled him in on their news, which was not especially good, and afterwards he strolled through the war monument at Plaza de la Paz, soaking up sunshine and history.
More than once he said he was a private citizen on a private visit. But when your name is Oliver North and you are in Nicaragua on the eve of an election, there might, not for the first time, be a credibility problem.
The cold war warrior and former White House aide returned to the country with which he is indelibly linked last Sunday to do what he does best: champion a "fight for freedom" and warn of a leftwing menace to the US.
"It's good to be back," said Mr North, 62, crinklier and greyer than his 1980s heyday but still a fit former marine lieutenant-colonel. A round of media interviews and political statements ended the pretence that it was a private visit.
To supporters it was indeed good to welcome a hero who risked his career to funnel dollars to Contra rebels during their war against the Sandinista government, a covert part of Ronald Reagan's cold war strategy which morphed into the Iran-Contra scandal. To critics, it was like witnessing a criminal return to the scene of the crime: a conflict which cost 30,000 Nicaraguan lives, destroyed the economy and left the country polarised.
"You wouldn't think that someone who had been forgotten by history 20 years ago would show up at this point," said Jaime Morales, a former Contra spokesman who now says he was used by Washington.
Like one of the volcanoes which circle Managua, Mr North has erupted back on to the scene out of fear that the small central American nation will once again slide into the enemy camp.
Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, has a strong chance of returning to power in next month's presidential election. Opinion polls give him around 33% support which, in a splintered field of candidates, could be enough to win in the first round on November 5.
Finish the Article at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1930780,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12
Britain to Restrict Workers From Bulgaria and Romania
LONDON, Oct. 24 — Britain plans to severely restrict the ability of people from Bulgaria and Romania to work here after those two countries join the European Union in January, the government said Tuesday.
The new policy represents an enormous change for Britain, which has been one of Europe’s main champions of expansion and openness in the European job market. In 2004, Britain, Ireland and Sweden were the only three European countries that granted unfettered access to their job markets to immigrants from the eight Eastern European countries, as well as Cyprus and Malta, that joined the European Union that year.
Ireland made a similar announcement on Tuesday, saying that it, too, would offer only limited jobs to Bulgarians and Romanians.
After the new members were admitted to the European Union in 2004, Britain was shocked by the number of people from Eastern European countries, particularly Poland, who poured across the borders, looking for jobs.
The government had predicted that no more than 13,000 arrivals would come each year, but in the past two years, about 500,000 Eastern Europeans have registered as workers here, the government said. Migration experts say that tens of thousands more found off-the-books jobs, or remained unemployed.
Employers and the government say the new arrivals have benefited the British economy, mostly by filling the need for lower-skilled workers. But immigrants are viewed with suspicion by many Britons, and the populist newspapers dwell on stories about how the new arrivals have strained resources at hospitals and schools.
“This is essentially a political decision, because there’s massive public hostility to immigration in the U.K.,” said Nick Pearce, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank. “If it came down to diplomatic considerations, the result would have been different.”
Mr. Pearce said during an interview that it was unlikely that immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, which have far lower unemployment rates than, for example, Poland, would rush to Britain once their countries joined the European Union.
Under the new system, Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants will be allowed to work in Britain only if they meet strict criteria, the home secretary, John Reid, told Parliament. Some unskilled laborers will be able to take seasonal agricultural jobs or work in the food-processing industry under a plan that allows 19,750 such jobs to be filled by foreigners a year. Starting next year, Mr. Reid said, that program will be open only to Romanians and Bulgarians.
In addition, highly skilled workers from the two countries will be allowed to take jobs here, as will workers who obtain permits after their employers demonstrate that their jobs cannot be filled by British citizens. Under European regulations, self-employed immigrants will be allowed to work in Britain, provided they prove that they are supporting themselves and not secretly working for someone else.
Students from Bulgaria and Romania will be able to work part time if they are enrolled in college.
“We look forward to welcoming Romanian and Bulgarian workers here, provided that they comply with our rules and obey the law,” Mr. Reid said.
The British government has long argued for openness in the European job market, and has said that the economy can benefit only if workers are willing to take lower-paying jobs, as many of the Eastern European immigrants have.
Mr. Reid said studies of the new workers showed that they had had a positive impact on the economy. But, he said, the influx of people has put a strain on housing and schools in some communities where many immigrants, particularly Poles, had settled.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, a group that argues that Britain is already overcrowded and should limit new arrivals, said in an interview that the government’s announcement was “a step in the right direction.” He added, “This is the first time that the government has made even a half-serious effort to reduce immigration.”
But Sir Andrew said the policy was rife with loopholes and criticized the government for not doing enough to enforce regulations. Under the new plan, employees working illegally and employers who hire illegal workers will be subject to on-the-spot fines.
At the same time, Keith Vaz, a former minister for Europe under Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor government, criticized the new policy as a step backward for European openness.
“These restrictions will be unworkable, undesirable and unnecessary, and of lasting damage to the reputation of the U.K. as a champion of the enlargement,” he told the Press Association, the domestic news agency.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
The government of Niger has ordered around 150,000 Arabs who live in the east of the country to leave.
Most of the Arabs, known as Mahamid, are nomads who have fled conflict in Chad. A BBC correspondent says many have lived in Niger for decades.
The governor of Diffa State, where most of the Mahamid live, told them it was "high time" to pack and return to Chad.
No reason for the order has been given, but government officials are meeting local elders in the capital, Niamey.
The BBC Idy Baraou in Niamey says many Mahamid are citizens of Niger and hold senior positions in the army, government and business.
Others look after camels and donkeys around Lake Chad.
But other communities in Niger often accuse the Mahamid of theft and rape.
Our correspondent says police have rounded up several hundred Mahamid at Kabalewa village, 75 km east of Diffa.
$6300 a Second
by Meteor Blades
Tue Oct 24, 2006 at 03:02:53 AM PDT
I'm only a sometimes fan of Nicholas Kristof, and today's number, like many of his columns, is only a partial winner. It's behind the NYT firewall:
Iraq and Your WalletFor every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.
So aside from the rising body counts and all the other good reasons to adopt a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, here's another: We are spending vast sums there that would be better spent rescuing the American health care system, developing alternative forms of energy and making a serious effort to reduce global poverty.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to "finance its own reconstruction."
But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion -- perhaps more than $2 trillion. The higher sum would amount to $6,600 per American man, woman and child.
{snip}
Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush's financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project. ....
Kristof notes that there are other hidden costs not included in that per capita figure:
* $600,000 to $5 million over the lifetime of the 3,000 U.S. Iraq War veterans (so far) with severe head injuries
* Disability payments for the next 50 years for an unknown - but large - number of Iraq War veterans
* Re-enlistment bonuses, some as high as $150,000
* Replacing armor, aircraft, et cetera
* Interest costs of the war being paid for by borrowing from China, et al., estimated at $264 billion to $308 billion
* Higher oil costs, possibly a half-trillion-dollar drag on the economy
The bottom line is that not only have we squandered 2,800 American lives and considerable American prestige in Iraq, but we're also paying $18,000 per household to do so. ...We're spending $380,000 for every extra minute we stay in Iraq, and we can find better ways to spend that money.
Unsurprisingly, not every agrees with all the underlying assumptions that go into those numbers. You can read The Economic Costs of the Iraq War, the oft-cited study put together 10 months ago by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, which Kristof references. And you can adjust the assumptions on your own (up to a point) at this site.
Looking at the cost of this concocted war solely in terms dollars and American blood, as Kristof does, misses one obvious factor: the cost to Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of whom have been displaced, maimed and killed, and had their economy crunched for probably two decades into the future.
As George McGovern and William R. Polk cogently argue in the October issue of Harper's (subscription only), a withdrawal of troops (to be completed at the end of 2007) would not only save American lives but tens of billions of dollars. A hefty chunk of that savings, they say, should be spent on compensating those Iraqis who were tortured or lost family in the war, rebuilding the public health system, de-mining and cleaning up depleted uranium from artillery shells, and rebuilding pieces of the infrastructure using Iraqi contractors. They suggest this might be done for $17.25 billion. That sounds a tad light. I'd call it double that. But what they propose is the right thing to do. Which is something the Bush Regime hasn't managed in Iraq since it dropped the first bomb 43 months ago.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Monday, October 23, 2006
Guerrillas Kill 5 GIs
Bombings, Attacks, Kill 44 Iraqis
UN: Nearly 1 Million Displaced since US Invasion
5 US GIs were killed or announced killed on Sunday in Iraq and guerrillas killed some 44 persons in political violence.
83 US military personnel have been killed by guerrillas in Iraq since October 1.
AP's intrepid Hamza Hendawi reports on how the violence has ruined the Festival of the Breaking of the Fast (Id al-Fitr) for most Iraqi Muslims.
*Guerrillas near Baquba northeast of Baghdad ambushed a bus full of police recruits, killing 15 and wounding 25.
*Several bombers targeted Shurjah Market in Baghdad, killing 9 persons and injuring dozens. It was crowded with shoppers picking up gifts and food for the holy day.
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] in southeast Baghdad, clashes broke out between a Shiite clan and a Sunni Arab clan that left 9 persons dead.
AP adds:
' Sunday's killings raised to at least 950 the number of Iraqis who have died in war-related violence this month, an average of more than 40 a day. The toll is on course to make October the deadliest month for Iraqis since April 2005, when the AP began tracking the deaths. Until this month, the daily average had been about 27. The AP count includes civilians, government officials and police and security forces, and is considered a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual number is likely higher, as many killings go unreported. '
Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that [Ar.] Salih al-Maliki, and adviser to the Ministry of Defense, has laid the blame for the failure of the current Battle of Baghdad on fifth columnists inside the Iraqi security forces.
He seems to be arguing that guerrillas and militiamen are getting tipped off when the sweep will come to their neighborhood. Also, he said, the security forces are still very badly equipped.
CBS news is reporting that corrupt arms deals cost Iraq $800 million. Nearly a billion dollars worth of embezzlement is a lot of fraud. Hat tip to The Democratic Underground.
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that 3 million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes during the past 36 years.
About 1 million have been displaced since the US invasion a little over 3 years ago.
*1.5 million have been internally displaced to other parts of Iraq. About half of these have been forced from their homes since the US invasion in 2003.
*1.6 million have been displaced abroad, mainly to Jordan and Syria. Of these:
*About 800,000 are in Syria
*About 700,000 are in Jordan (over 10% of the population!)
*100,000 are elsewhere in the region.
Some of those forced abroad have been there for years.
But the proportion of recent arrivals is rising quickly. Another 40,000 Iraqis arrive in Syria every month! That is half a million a year.
Syria only has 19 million people, so 800,000 is nearly 5 percent! Jordan, with 700,000, is over 10 percent Iraqi now. Iraqis are to Jordan as the Latino wave of immigration has been to the US. One problem: The US is an advanced economy and is growing. Jordan and Syria are both economically messes and there is no way they can absorb such a big influx economically without help. But the budget of the UNHCR for Iraqi refugees has actually been falling rapidly in the past 2 years.
AP reports on the Iraqis in Syria.
John Amato at "Crooks and Liars" points out that Bush actually peddled to George Stephanopolous the line that "we've never been 'stay the course'"!
Eastern Europe in Political Disarray
Email this Story
Oct 22, 12:58 PM (ET)
By VANESSA GERA
WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Anti-government rallies rock the Hungarian capital. Political intrigue in Poland holds up new roads and housing. Populists take power in Slovakia, vowing to undo economic reforms. And the Czech Republic goes without a functioning government for months.
Political life has fallen into disarray in Eastern Europe, and many are asking what has gone wrong in the 2 1/2 years since these former communist countries joined the European Union, expecting to reap the fruits of democracy and open markets.
Many experts say people are simply exhausted after years of economic sacrifices made to join the EU and NATO. They now lack the clear goals that drove them toward the West after the fall of communism in 1989.
And their discontent is mounting as the instant riches many believed would come from EU membership have failed to materialize.
"The common phenomenon in all these countries is transition fatigue," said Gergely Hudecz, a political analyst with the DZ Bank in Budapest. "The electorate has had enough of reforms."
Gone is the strong external pressure that pushed governments in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Bratislava to shutter unproductive factories and sell off state companies, in the face of opposition from newly unemployed workers hurt by rising costs.
All four countries have replaced the leaders who took them into the bloc, and some have opted for parties pledging to restore the welfare benefits that were slashed to qualify for membership.
The greatest disruption has been in Hungary, where Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany outraged the country by saying in a recording leaked last month that the government had "lied morning, evening and night" about the economy. That sparked weeks of daily anti-government protests, including two nights of riots.
To the north in Poland, twin brothers with prickly nationalist views - President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - lead a country bogged down in frequent Cabinet reshuffles and convoluted political maneuverings.
The bickering has slowed down construction to ease a housing shortage, and modernization of the dilapidated road system.
In the latest twist, the prime minister brought back into his Cabinet Andrzej Lepper, a fiery populist known for organizing anti-EU protests, less than a month after booting him out for demanding more spending.
In Prague, politics have been stalemated since a June election delivered a lower house of parliament divided evenly between left and right.
And in neighboring Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico took power this summer on pledges to undo many of the economic reforms that have made his nation the darling of foreign investors.
More at: http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fapnews.myway.com%2Farticle%2F20061022%2FD8KTQ6K00.htmlSunday, October 22, 2006
Iraq Is Coming Apart at the Seams
Iraq is splintering along a dozen fault lines, and the prospects for a political solution are slim. Experts in conflict negotiation -- veterans of civil strife in places like Northern Ireland and Cambodia -- talk about the need for a clash to "ripen," to come to a point when combatants are exhausted with the violence and see that whatever they might gain from continued fighting is outweighed by the costs. Before they get to that place, a political settlement is all but impossible.
Iraq's armed factions, sadly, aren't close to that point. The stakes are too high -- Shiites are fighting for the majority rule that has long eluded them, Sunnis are fighting to hang on to some political influence and retain a piece of the country's oil wealth and the Kurds are fighting for some degree of independence. Iraqis are fighting against occupation by foreign troops, and they're fighting to keep their country together. Neither government troops nor coalition forces have been able to protect civilians; they're being cut down by death squads and plagued by rampant criminality. Iraqis are battling for their homes and for their lives.
This week saw the first signs of open civil war, as Shiite and Sunni militias battled it out in Balad, a city north of Baghdad, as well as a sharp spike in violence in the Iraqi capital. In the south, Shiites battled Shiites in Amarah, while Sunni militias held military parades in Haqlaniyah and Haditha. There are at least 23 independent militias operating in Baghdad alone.
It's hard to imagine what policy makers here or in Iraq can do to change the risk-benefit calculations to a degree that would lead dozens of armed factions to lay down their weapons and trust their futures to a political process. In Washington, those tasked with trying to come up with the right policy are hobbled by a stunning degree of ignorance about the region -- essentially viewing the Middle East as roiled in a conflict between "good" and "bad" Arabs. The New York Times' Jeff Stein found that most policy makers overseeing the U.S. effort don't even know which countries in the region -- or which armed groups in Iraq -- have Shiite or Sunni majorities.
Today the government elected last December is hanging by a thread. Iraqi lawmakers reached by phone earlier this week reported that Baghdad is awash in rumors of an impending coup. There's widespread anticipation that a "government of national salvation" -- a junta -- will seize power and dissolve Iraq's Parliament at any time. Those rumors are being echoed in Washington.
More at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43278/Google's New PAC Skews Republican
Looks like Google's been watching Fox News — its new Google NetPAC, launched last month, made contributions to three Republicans congressional candidates, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The Merc's Frank Davies reports $1,000 contributions to each of Reps. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, Deborah Pryce of Ohio, and James Sensenbrenner, head of the House Judiciary Committee and sometime gavel-wielding control freak. At least two of the candidates, Wilson and Sensenbrenner, have porfolios that implicate the use and regulation of the Internet.
Three of Google's new lobbyists were drawn from Republican rankss: Jamie Brown, former legislative liaison in the Bush administration, and former GOP senators Connie Mack and Dan Coats (Davies does not mention what proportion of Google's lobbying staff that comprises). According to Davies, in the past Google executives have donated "overwhelmingly to Democrats and liberal groups" (he also notes that Google employees skew Democratic). Google lobbyist Alan Davidson says PAC donations are intended for the building of "long-term relationships with policy-makers" supported "across party lines." To that end, Google also donated $1,000 each to two Democrats candidates, Rep. Anna Eshoo* of Palo Alto (where Google HQ is located) and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. More here.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Microbe discovery that may be more precious than gold
THEY are the microbes from hell, or at least hell's postcode.
A team of scientists has found bacteria living almost three kilometres underground, dining on sulfur in a world of steaming water and radioactive rock - completely independent of the sun.
The organisms, which have been there for millions of years, will probably survive as long as the planet does, drawing energy from the stygian world around them.
Found in water spilling out of a fissure in a South African goldmine in 2003, they are among the most primitive life forms described, researchers reported in yesterday's issue of the journal Science.
What is unusual is that their underground home contains no nutrients traceable to photosynthesis, the sunlight-harnessing process that fuels all life on earth's surface. Such a community is an oddity on this planet - and is of interest to people looking for life on other ones.
"There is an organism that dominates that environment by feeding off an essentially inexhaustible source of energy, radiation," said Tullis Onstott, a geoscientist at Princeton University who led the team.
"The bottom line is: water plus rocks plus radiation is enough to sustain life for millennia."
The research was mainly done by Li-Hung Lin, of National Taiwan University.
Professor Li-Hung descended three times to the fissure in East Driefontein Gold Mine, south-west of Johannesburg, to get samples. It was 2.7 kilometres underground, and the temperature of the rock was 50 degrees.
MOre at http://www.smh.com.au/news/science/microbe-discovery-that-may-be-more-precious-than-gold/2006/10/20/1160851142263.html
Friday, October 20, 2006
Shawn Stuart (Montana)
Office sought: State House of Representatives
How does a Republican candidate for the Montana House of Representatives get his own party to disown him and back the Democrat, even before a Democrat has been nominated? Ask Shawn Stuart. The 24-year-old Iraq veteran from Butte neglected to mention his involvement in the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement during his interview with local Republican leaders. When reports of Stuart's extremist activities surfaced in the March 25 issue of the Montana Standard, it was too late for his affiliation to be changed; he and the state Republican Party were stuck with each other. On April 10, the Montana GOP announced it would back the Democratic candidate in District 76, which contains around 3,000 registered voters.
Chuck Butler, a state Republican spokesman, told the Missoula News that had the party known about Stuart's extremist ties, it would not have welcomed him.
Stuart's activities were not that deep a secret. In the first weeks of 2006, two months before he announced his candidacy to applause at a Republican event, Stuart was openly listed as the contact for the newly established Montana chapter of the NSM, the nation's largest neo-Nazi organization. Stuart had by then also posted numerous articles on extremist websites and appeared as a guest on "The Hal Turner Show," a violently neo-Nazi shortwave program beamed out of New Jersey.
More Racists on the ballat at............ http://www.alternet.org/rights/43227/
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Why has Bush bought 150 square miles in northern Paraguay? (Hellie)
Paraguay is a landlocked country in South America, with a population of 6 million. It's one of the least densely populated countries, and has a super-high Gini index. Back in the day, its economy was dominated by a small number of landlords, with big loads of the population squatting on the fringes of their huge estates. The Gini index (the standard measure of income inequality) is predictably high -- 56, by comparison the US is at 45, France at 32, Brazil at 59.
Sounds like a great place for disgraced dictators to hide out.
Apparently also the US has been planning to put up an air base near the Bolivian gas fields, near to Mariscal Estigarribia, close to the Brazilian and Bolivian borders.
Which of these facts best explains this intriguing news item?
An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.
Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.
The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.
D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.
He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."
The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.
As for me,
Well since my last personal post, I do not think to much has changed. The weather is gradually getting colder and you can feel winter peaking around the corner. I try and stay busy via hiking, fishing, biking and the large amount of reading that comes with Grad School. Last Friday I went to a party that was mostly parents (because it was homecoming and that is a big deal here) at first untill later in the night when the parents left. I had brought my backpack because I had tequilla and a extra jacket and my numerous accesseries for my bike. So the party went on and at about one a.m. or so we left to go downtown to get a night cap! I then realized that someone had stolen my backpack....the interesting thing however...was they removed all by biking stuff...I guess friendly theives. So it was not a big deal because it was a old bag. I wake up early the next morning and realize that my flash drive (memory disk) with two finsihed projects was in the bag. This led to my wonderful weekend of redoing my 14 page paper and GIS project all day Saturday.
On Tuesday playing in my soccer game, I thought I hurt my knee bad. I woke up yesterday, called the school doctor and a friend to give me a ride. Luckily, because I could not imagine a winter with no skiing, it looks like I just twisted or sprained my knee. No swealing but annoying enough I had to use a crutch yesterday. Hopefully it heals fast because the intermural tournament starts next week, if it has not healed I will just have to go and chear.
Besides those two exciting stories life is still the same. Hiking, Biking and Fishing!!!
The world is very crazy right now and hopefully we can make a difference and change this coming election. I will say, I am glad that my vote will be in Montana because it seems democrats in Texas will never have a chance at the national offices, for the most part. If only Kinky could really pull it off!!! Well thats all for now, enjoy the different political and new post to come!!
Peace, Love and Courage
TY
Well since my last personal post, I do not think to much has changed. The weather is gradually getting colder and you can feel winter peaking around the corner. I try and stay busy via hiking, fishing, biking and the large amount of reading that comes with Grad School. Last Friday I went to a party that was mostly parents (because it was homecoming and that is a big deal here) at first untill later in the night when the parents left. I had brought my backpack because I had tequilla and a extra jacket and my numerous accesseries for my bike. So the party went on and at about one a.m. or so we left to go downtown to get a night cap! I then realized that someone had stolen my backpack....the interesting thing however...was they removed all by biking stuff...I guess friendly theives. So it was not a big deal because it was a old bag. I wake up early the next morning and realize that my flash drive (memory disk) with two finsihed projects was in the bag. This led to my wonderful weekend of redoing my 14 page paper and GIS project all day Saturday.
On Tuesday playing in my soccer game, I thought I hurt my knee bad. I woke up yesterday, called the school doctor and a friend to give me a ride. Luckily, because I could not imagine a winter with no skiing, it looks like I just twisted or sprained my knee. No swealing but annoying enough I had to use a crutch yesterday. Hopefully it heals fast because the intermural tournament starts next week, if it has not healed I will just have to go and chear.
Besides those two exciting stories life is still the same. Hiking, Biking and Fishing!!!
The world is very crazy right now and hopefully we can make a difference and change this coming election. I will say, I am glad that my vote will be in Montana because it seems democrats in Texas will never have a chance at the national offices, for the most part. If only Kinky could really pull it off!!! Well thats all for now, enjoy the different political and new post to come!!
Peace, Love and Courage
TY
A Dangerous New Order
Within hours, Justice Department lawyers notified the federal courts that they no longer had the authority to hear pending lawsuits filed by attorneys on behalf of inmates of the penal camp at Guantánamo Bay. They cited passages in the bill that suspend the fundamental principle of habeas corpus, making Mr. Bush the first president since the Civil War to take that undemocratic step.
Not satisfied with having won the vote, Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, quickly issued a statement accusing Democrats who opposed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 of putting “their liberal agenda ahead of the security of America.” He said the Democrats “would gingerly pamper the terrorists who plan to destroy innocent Americans’ lives” and create “new rights for terrorists.”
This nonsense is part of the Republicans’ scare-America-first strategy for the elections. No Democrat advocated pampering terrorists — gingerly or otherwise — or giving them new rights. Democratic amendments to the bill sought to protect everyone’s right to a fair trial while providing a legal way to convict terrorists.
Americans will hear more of this ahead of the election. They also will hear Mr. Bush say that he finally has the power to bring to justice a handful of men behind the 9/11 attacks. The truth is that Mr. Bush could have done that long ago, but chose to detain them illegally at hidden C.I.A. camps to extract information. He sent them to Guantánamo only to stampede Congress into passing the new law.
The 60 or so men at Guantánamo who are now facing tribunals — out of about 450 inmates — also could have been tried years ago if Mr. Bush had not rebuffed efforts by Congress to create suitable courts. He imposed a system of kangaroo courts that was more about expanding his power than about combating terrorism.
While the Republicans pretend that this bill will make America safer, let’s be clear about its real dangers. It sets up a separate system of justice for any foreigner whom Mr. Bush chooses to designate as an “illegal enemy combatant.” It raises insurmountable obstacles for prisoners to challenge their detentions. It does not require the government to release prisoners who are not being charged, or a prisoner who is exonerated by the tribunals.
The law does not apply to American citizens, but it does apply to other legal United States residents. And it chips away at the foundations of the judicial system in ways that all Americans should find threatening. It further damages the nation’s reputation and, by repudiating key protections of the Geneva Conventions, it needlessly increases the danger to any American soldier captured in battle.
In the short run, voters should see through the fog created by the Republican campaign machine. It will be up to the courts to repair the harm this law has done to the Constitution.
Via the New York Times Editorial
Texan Friend of Bush
Rips Iraq War
by Paul Sperry
Rips Iraq War
by Paul Sperry
A former Department of Homeland Security official who also worked for George W. Bush in Texas says his old friend exaggerated the threat from Saddam Hussein and only made America less safe by attacking Iraq.
Before serving as Bush's first Homeland Security inspector general, Clark Kent Ervin worked for the former governor in Texas as assistant secretary of state and deputy attorney general. He also was an aide in Bush Sr.'s White House last decade.
Ervin says it was the "thrill of a lifetime" to return to Washington to work for "a man I counted as a friend." He was a Bush loyalist, to be sure.
But then his old pal invaded Iraq in the middle of a war on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and Ervin feared the worst. He saw special forces, intelligence assets, and other resources diverted to an unnecessary war, buying time for bin Laden to regroup on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. At the same time, he worried the unjustified Iraq war would inspire more anti-American jihadists and enlarge the recruiting pool for bin Laden.
His fears were recently confirmed by the U.S. intelligence community in a partially declassified report on Iraq, which concludes the U.S. occupation there is the "cause célèbre" among jihadists around the world.
"The war in Iraq has actually increased the pool of violently anti-American Islamic fundamentalists from whom al-Qaeda and like-minded groups can recruit jihadists to strike our homeland," laments Ervin, author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack.
He says bin Laden might be in custody today if Bush had stayed focused on al-Qaeda and not sent troops to a false front in Iraq, where al-Qaeda wannabes are now getting on-the-job training in how to kill Americans.
"Had we stayed on the hunt in Afghanistan and not diverted time, attention, and resources to an exaggerated threat in Iraq, Osama bin Laden might be dead or in custody today," Ervin says. "And Iraq might not have become a terrorist training camp and recruiting ground."
He asserts that al-Qaeda is, and always has been, the real threat to America; Saddam and his Ba'athist bullies had been declawed in the first Iraq war.
Finished at http://www.antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=9886
Bush Accepts Iraq-Vietnam Comparison
George Stephanopoulos Interviews President Bush on Iraq, the Midterms and His Legacy
George Stephanopoulos Interviews President Bush on Iraq, the Midterms and His Legacy
By ED O'KEEFE
WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2006 — President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News' George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.
Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.
"He could be right," the president said, before adding, "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."
"George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we'd leave," Bush said. "And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here's how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they're trying to foment sectarian violence. They believe that if they can create enough chaos, the American people will grow sick and tired of the Iraqi effort and will cause government to withdraw."
Bush said he could not imagine any circumstances under which all U.S. troops would be withdrawn from Iraq before the end of his presidency.
"You mean every single troop out? No," he told Stephanopoulos.
Bush also had some tough words for Democrats, saying that pulling troops from Iraq would be the equivalent of surrender.
"If we were to leave before the job is done, in my judgment, the al Qaeda would find a safe haven from which to attack. This is exactly what they said," Bush said. The president insisted he was not disparaging his opponents.
"It's not questioning their patriotism. I think it's questioning their judgment," he said....
More at http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2583579
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Wal-Mart's Rapidly Shrinking Benefits
The mega-store is sinking to a new low by further limiting health insurance options for its lowest-paid employees.In what seems to be an emerging annual ritual, an internal Wal-Mart memo detailing employee benefit cuts recently surfaced. According to news reports, Wal-Mart plans to limit its 2007 health insurance options for new hires to two choices, both high deductible plans, in an effort to squeeze benefit costs.
While it isn't news that Wal-Mart's benefits are skimpy -- and Wal-Mart certainly isn't the only employer looking to trim its health care costs -- the mega-retailer's abandonment of traditional health insurance in favor of high-deductible health insurance takes the benefits squeeze to a whole new level: it puts a dagger through the heart of the very concept of insurance.
Wal-Mart's health insurance options for 2007, dubbed the "value plan" and the "freedom plan," feature deductibles reaching as high as $6,000 for family coverage under the "freedom plan" -- meaning that a Wal-Mart employee selecting that plan would have to fork over $6,000 before insurance started covering their family's medical bills. That's a lot of money for a cashier earning Wal-Mart wages, and it begs some serious questions about how a deductible that high can be met without going into debt.
According to an analysis by Wake-Up Wal-Mart, which supplied the internal corporate memo to the media, a full-time Wal-Mart worker could spend as much as 60 percent of his or her income on family health expenses before reaching the out-of-pocket maximum. Of course, most workers will be relatively healthy most of the time and won't incur health expenses quite so high in any given year. As a result, while serious financial hardship will occur among some Wal-Mart workers who become ill, it won't be the norm. And for Wal-Mart, that fact is the key to their cost-cutting benefits strategy.
In a backdoor way, Wal-Mart's strategy is to do what many insurers have always done: get into the game of cherry-picking. Insurance companies have long been aware that one of the best ways to turn a profit is to enroll people with low health risk. Large nationwide employers, however, have never really been in the game of hiring workers based on health status. Typically, ability to perform the job in question is the deciding factor, making Wal-Mart's entry into the cherry-picking game revolutionary. And as the nation's largest private employer, Wal-Mart's employee benefit decisions will reverberate throughout the economy.
Full Article At: http://www.alternet.org/story/43094/Forced evacuations point to lawless state
By Fatih Abdulsalam
Azzaman, October 15, 2006
The failure to halt the forced evacuation of people on sectarian grounds in Baghdad is yet another indication that the situation in the country is out of control.
It points to the fact that the centers of power in Baghdad are isolated from their surroundings and that their only trappings of power are their futile statements and political rhetoric.
Nearly four years after the U.S.-led occupation, Baghdad is a wild city. Government and U.S. troops have failed to develop a civilized system of government.
The troops, both Iraqi and American, heavily rely on military operations and raids, which they conduct day and night, in their policing of Baghdad.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the failure of these techniques, both sides are apparently adamant to proceed with them.Therefore, instead of turning Baghdad into a success story for the rest of the country to follow, the city has become one of the most violent places in the world.
We believe that without government implication, forced evacuations on this large-scale will be impossible to take place amid the presence of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and U.S. Marines.
We cannot accept claims by the authorities that the troops are not strong enough to have Baghdad under control and put an end to the current carnage.
Many Iraqis now believe both the government and the occupiers have hidden agendas and conditions on the ground are the best proof, they say.
Those wanting to create a new, civil and democratic Iraq must have first set their eyes closely to have Baghdad secured by turning it into an example of social justice and security.
Instead, they have divided Baghdad into ‘terrorist’ quarters and ‘loyal’ districts and began implementing a murderous and bloody liquidation under official or semi-official policies.
The result has been massive displacement of people in Baghdad to the extent that certain quarters have been emptied of their original inhabitants.
These policies are doomed to failure and even the most of tyrannical regimes in the world have found them futile.
It is Baghdad, stupid. So long as Baghdad does not enjoy peace, the rest of Iraq will not have it. Baghdad has always been Iraq’s mirror of failure or success.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
130 Killed in Wave of Sectarian Attacks
Bush called Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Monday to reassure him that it was not true that the US planned to dump him if he had not produced better results in two months.
Bush hasn't dumped Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has not produced better results for 3 years, so al-Maliki need not have worried.
Shiite militia reprisal killings against Sunni Arabs in the largely Shiite town of Balad north of Baghdad continued on Monday. 91 Sunnis have been randomly killed by Shiite death squads since Saturday. Other Sunni families have been ethnically cleansed and forced to take refuge in Dhuluiyyah. The rampage was provoked by the murder of 17 Shiite laborers at nearby Dhuluiyah on Friday. What is amazing is that Iraqi police and military forces seem to just be standing aside and letting the bloodletting and attacks go on. Either they are collaborating or afraid, and either way they are not doing their jobs. As long as they don't, the bloodletting in Iraq, which is killing 200,000 a year, will go on.
In addition to the further killings in Balad, of some 20 or 30 persons, Reuters reports another 50 deaths from political violence throughout the country, including 20 (some reports say 30) dead from two major bombings in the capital. Also, police found 63 bodies in the capital on Monday. Some 40 of them were found in the Sunni Arab districts and were presumably Shiites, while about 20 were found in Shiite districts and were probably Sunni Arabs. Monday's war of the corpses in the capital appears to be a response to the murders of Sunnis by Shiite death squads at Balad.
A transcript of my appearance on the Lehrer News Hour Monday evening is here. I called for a phased withdrawal of US troops because I despair of getting Shiites and Kurds to compromise with Sunni Arabs in any other way. I realize that they still might not compromise, but at least there is a chance they would come to their senses if they couldn't have the Marines keep their enemies down for them.
Iraq at home:
Iraq vet Tammy Duckworth has a fighting chance of occupying Henry Hyde's seat in Congress.
Michigan media ignored Jim Marcinkowski, the Democratic candidate for congress facing Republican Congressman Mike Rogers. Marcinkowski, a career intelligence officer with a background in law, is passionate about what the Bush administration has done to the US Constitution. But he could not get a hearing unless he bought one. But that is a chicken and an egg proposition; if he had a hearing, he could have perhaps raised more money. The lazy US media, most often owned by Republicans or lacking in public spirit, shouldn't be permitted just to ignore a whole congressional race to the benefit of a well-heeled incumbent.
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