Henry See
Signs of the Times
Tue, 30 Jan 2007 08:45 EST
©Middle East Online
Victim of Israeli Cluster Bomb in Lebanon
In an article published this week in the New York Times on Israel's use of cluster bombs on a civilian population in their illegal war last summer on Lebanon (carried out under the guise of attacking Hezbollah) -- although the Times did not quite phrase it that way -- we read the following justifiction given by Sean McCormack of the US State Department:
"It is important to remember the kind of war Hezbollah waged," he said. "They used innocent civilians as a way to shield their fighters."
Read More...Labels: illegal war = Lebanon
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.
Propaganda
read moreLabels: US plans to fight the net + bloggers beware
Joe Quinn
Signs of the Times
Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:29 EST
While the Israeli government has turned the Gaza strip and West Bank regions of Palestine into virtual prison camps, there is one section of the Palestinian community that appears to enjoy unhindered freedom of movement and a blind eye form the Israeli camps guards: "suicide bombers".
Read More...
Labels: Palestinian Suicide bomber
LucasGray.com
Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:09 EST
Iran: do you believe the lies and disinformation sown by the US and Israeli governments? Do you believe that Iran is a closed, fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship? A country full of potential terrorists eager to attack American citizens? If you believe this, will you be more likely to turn a blind eye to the predicted US and Israeli attack on the citizens of that country?
But what if Iran and the Iranian people are not as they have been portrayed? What if there is no threat from Iran? What if Iran is just a Middle Eastern country with 86 million people - people just like you and me?
What then?
Would you stand up for your fellow human beings against the predations of a small cabal of psychopaths in power and say "NO MORE!"
Consider the following short presentation:
Read More...
Labels: images from Iran
Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized Monday after complications from his gruesome breakdown at last year's Preakness, ending an eight-month ordeal that prompted an outpouring of support across the country.
"We just reached a point where it was going to be difficult for him to go on without pain," co-owner Roy Jackson said. "It was the right decision, it was the right thing to do. We said all along if there was a situation where it would become more difficult for him then it would be time."
A series of ailments, including laminitis in the left rear hoof and a recent abscess in the right rear hoof, proved too much for the gallant colt.
Barbaro battled in his ICU stall for eight months. The 4-year-old colt underwent several procedures and was fitted with fiberglass casts. He spent time in a sling to ease pressure on his legs, had pins inserted and was fitted at the end with an external brace. These were all extraordinary measures for a horse with such injuries.
Roy and Gretchen Jackson were with Barbaro on Monday morning, with the owners making the decision in consultation with chief surgeon Dr. Dean Richardson.
"I would say thank you for everything, and all your thoughts and prayers over the last eight months or so," Jackson said to Barbaro's fans.
On May 20, Barbaro was rushed to the New Bolton Center, about 30 miles from Philadelphia in Kennett Square, hours after shattering his right hind leg just a few strides into the Preakness Stakes. The bay colt underwent a five-hour operation that fused two joints, recovering from an injury most horses never survive. But Barbaro never regained his natural gait.
He suffered a significant setback over the weekend, and surgery was required to insert two steel pins in a bone - one of three shattered in the Preakness but now healthy - to eliminate all weight bearing on the ailing right rear foot.
The procedure Saturday was a risky one, because it transferred more weight to the leg while the foot rests on the ground bearing no weight.
The leg was on the mend until the abscess began causing discomfort last week. Until then, the major concern was Barbaro's left rear leg, which developed laminitis in July, and 80 percent of the hoof was removed.
Richardson said Monday morning that Barbaro did not have a good night.
Brilliant on the race track, Barbaro always will be remembered for his brave fight for survival.
The story of the beloved 4-year-old bay colt's fight for life captured the fancy of millions.
When Barbaro broke down, his right hind leg flared out awkwardly as jockey Edgar Prado jumped off and tried to steady the ailing horse. Race fans at Pimlico wept. Within 24 hours the entire nation seemed to be caught up in a "Barbaro watch," waiting for any news.
Well-wishers young and old showed up at the New Bolton Center with cards, flowers, gifts, goodies and even religious medals for the champ, and thousands of e-mails poured into the hospital's Web site just for him.
"I just can't explain why everyone is so caught up in this horse," Roy Jackson, who owned the colt with his wife, Gretchen, has said time and again. "Everything is so negative now in the world, people love animals and I think they just happen to latch onto him."
Devoted fans even wrote Christmas carols for him, sent a wreath made of baby organic carrots and gave him a Christmas stocking.
The biggest gift has been the $1.2 million raised since early June for the Barbaro Fund. The money is put toward needed equipment such as an operating room table, and a raft and sling for the same pool recovery Barbaro used after his surgeries.
The Jacksons spent tens of thousands of dollars hoping the best horse they ever owned would recover and be able to live a comfortable life on the farm - whether he was able to breed or not.
The couple, who own about 70 racehorses, broodmares and yearlings, and operate the 190-acre Lael Farm, have been in the horse business for 30 years, and never had a horse like Barbaro.
As the days passed, it seemed Barbaro would get his happy ending. As late as December, with the broken bones in his right hind leg nearly healed and his laminitis under control, Barbaro was looking good and relishing daily walks outside his intensive care unit.
But after months of upbeat progress reports, including talk that he might be headed home soon, news came Jan. 10 of a serious setback because of the laminitis. Richardson had to remove damaged tissue from Barbaro's left hind hoof, and the colt was placed back in a protective sling.
On Jan. 13, another section of his left rear hoof was removed. After Barbaro developed a deep abscess in his right hind foot, surgery was performed Saturday to insert two steel pins in a bone.
This after Richardson warned last December that Barbaro's right hind leg was getting stronger and that the left hind foot was a "more formidable long-term challenge."
Even before the injury that ended his career, Barbaro had earned his fame for simply being a magnificent racehorse.
Foaled and raised at Sanborn Chase at Springmint Farm near Nicholasville, Ky., Barbaro always stood out in the crowd. "He was an enormous foal," recalled breeder Bill Sanborn. "He was a tall and leggy horse, and when he grew it was like in two-inch spurts."
When the Jacksons sent Barbaro to trainer Michael Matz over a year ago, exercise rider Peter Brette climbed aboard and said "I thought he was a 3-year-old."
A son of Dynaformer, out of the dam Le Ville Rouge, Barbaro started his career on the turf, but Matz knew he would have to try his versatile colt on the dirt. He reasoned that if he had a talented 3-year-old in America, he'd have to find out early if his horse was good enough for the Triple Crown races.
Barbaro was good enough, all right. He won his first three races on turf with authority, including the Laurel Futurity by eight lengths and the Tropical Park Derby by 3 3/4 lengths.
That's when Matz drew up an unconventional plan for a dirt campaign that spaced out Barbaro's race to keep him fit for the entire Triple Crown, a grueling ordeal of three races in five weeks at varying distances over different tracks.
Barbaro won the Holy Bull Stakes at Gulfstream Park on Feb. 4, but his dirt debut was inconclusive since it came over a sloppy track. After an eight-week break, an unusually long time between races, Barbaro came back and won the Florida Derby by a half-length over Sharp Humor despite an outside No. 10 post.
The deal was sealed - on to the Derby, but not without criticism that Barbaro couldn't win coming off a five-week layoff. After all, it had been 50 years since Needles won the Derby off a similar break. But Matz was unfazed, and stuck to his plan, saying all the time he was doing what was best for the horse.
Not only did Barbaro win the Derby, he demolished what was supposed to be one of the toughest fields in years. The 6 1/2-length winning margin was the largest since 1946, when Assault won by eight lengths and went on to sweep the Triple Crown.
The 55-year-old Matz, meanwhile, was living a charmed life. Before turning to thoroughbreds eight years ago, he was an international show jumping star, and a three-time Olympian and silver medal winner who carried the U.S. flag at the closing ceremony at the 1996 Atlanta Games. He also survived a plane crash in Iowa in 1989 and became a hero by saving three children from the burning wreckage. The crash killed 112 of the 296 people on board United Flight 232.
In Barbaro, Matz truly believed he was training a Triple Crown winner. He often said Barbaro was good enough to be ranked among the greats and join Seattle Slew as the only unbeaten Triple Crown champions.
But two weeks later after the Derby Barbaro took a horrible misstep and one of the most extraordinary attempts to save a thoroughbred was under way. The injury was considered to be so disastrous that many thought the horse would be euthanized while still at Pimlico Race Track.
Instead, Barbaro was transported that night to the New Bolton Center's George D. Widener Hospital for Large Animals and was operated on the next day by Richardson.
The injuries were as serious as everyone feared: Barbaro sustained a broken cannon bone above the ankle, a broken sesamoid bone behind the ankle and a broken long pastern bone below the ankle. The fetlock joint - the ankle - was dislocated. Richardson said the pastern bone was shattered in "20-plus pieces."
Barbaro, who earned $2,302,200 with his six wins in seven starts, endured the complicated five-hour surgery in which Richardson inserted a titanium plate and 27 screws into the broken bones. After calmly awakening from anesthesia, he "practically jogged back to his stall" looking for something to eat.
At the time, Richardson stressed Barbaro still had many hurdles to clear, and called chances for a full recovery a "coin toss."
Afterward, though, things went relatively smoothly. Each day brought more optimism: Barbaro was eyeing the mares, nickering, gobbling up his feed and trying to walk out of his stall. There was great hope Barbaro somehow would overcome the odds and live a life of leisure on the farm.
But by mid-July, Richardson's greatest fear became reality - laminitis struck Barbaro's left hind leg and 80 percent of the hoof was removed. Richardson recalled recently what it was like when he met with the Jacksons, and Matz, and his wife, D.D., to deliver the news.
"It was terrible," Richardson said. "I wouldn't have blamed anyone at that point for saying they just couldn't face the prospects of going on."
But Barbaro responded well to treatment, and his recovery was progressing until a final, fatal turn.
AP Racing Writer Richard Rosenblatt contributed to this report.
Comment: A great horse, fallen due to the excesses of human greed and the damage it causes. Many people will say that the horses love to run like that, they love to run together, and there may be some truth to that in its simplest terms. But the fact is, in the sport of horse racing, with the unbelievable pressure, the unnatural ways the horses are trained, designed to push them to their limits, it is just simply a horrible abuse of animals. What happened to Barbaro would not have happened in nature.
Very sad.
Go
HERE to seem some beautiful photos of Barbaro.
LINKLabels: Barbaro Euthanized
The Sunday Observer
Sun, 28 Jan 2007 08:09 EST
Boasts of a nuclear programme are just propaganda, say insiders,
but the PR could be enough to provoke Israel into warIran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology.
Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved. The country denies developing weapons, saying its pursuit of uranium enrichment is for energy purposes.
Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace - in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the US - a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production.
read more...Labels: Iran Nuclear Programme in Chaos
Israel Shamir
www.israelshamir.net
Sun, 28 Jan 2007 12:01 EST
Publication of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is a great event for America and for all of us. It's not that Carter had said something we did not know about Palestine. Before Carter came,
we knew that the Zionists established a racist apartheid regime in the Holy Land where Jews have rights, and goyim have duties. Before Carter came
we knew a native Palestinian has no right to vote, move, work freely in his land, that he is locked up behind the twenty-foot wall. Before Carter came
we knew that the US support allowed the atrocities to occur and the apartheid regime to entrench.
But we did not know that there are prominent Americans who would dare the wrath of organised Jewry and spell it out loud.Read More...
Labels: Carter: Peace Not Apartheid
By Uri Avnery
Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably
01/28/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- "IF ARAFAT were alive…" one hears this phrase increasingly often in conversations with Palestinians, and also with Israelis and foreigners.
"If Arafat were alive, what's happening now in Gaza wouldn't be happening…" - "If Arafat were alive, we would have somebody to talk with…" - "If Arafat were alive, Islamic fundamentalism would not have won among the Palestinians and would have lost some force in the neighboring countries!"
In the meantime, the unanswered questions come up again: How did Yasser Arafat die? Was he murdered? If so, who murdered him?
On the way back from Arafat's funeral in 2004, I ran into Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset. I asked him if he believed that Arafat was murdered. Zahalka, a doctor of pharmacology, answered "Yes!" without hesitation. That was my feeling, too. But a hunch is not proof. It is only a product of intuition, common sense and experience.
Recently we got a kind of confirmation. Just before he died, Uri Dan, who had been Ariel Sharon's loyal mouthpiece for almost 50 years, published a book in France. It includes a report of a conversation Sharon told him about, with President (George W.) Bush.
Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably. When Dan asked Sharon whether it had been carried out, Sharon answered: "It's better not to talk about that." Dan took this as confirmation.
read moreLabels: Arafat + Bush + Sharon
Why Can’t Americans See it?
By Paul Craig Roberts
“Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc. . . . The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high"
01/27/07 "ICHBlog" -- - The American public and the US Congress are getting their backs up about the Bush Regime’s determination to escalate the war in Iraq. A Massive protest demonstration is occurring in Washington DC today, and Congress is expressing its disagreement with Bush’s decision to intensify the war in Iraq.
This is all to the good. However, it misses the real issue--the Bush Regime’s looming attack on Iran.
Rather than winding down one war, Bush is starting another. The entire world knows this and is discussing Bush’s planned attack on Iran in many forums. It is only Americans who haven’t caught on. A few senators have said that Bush must not attack Iran without the approval of Congress, and postings on the Internet demonstrate world wide awareness that Iran is in the Bush Regime’s cross hairs. But Congress and the Media--and the demonstration in Washington--are focused on Iraq.
What can be done to bring American awareness up to the standard of the rest of the world?
In Davos, Switzerland, the meeting of the World Economic Forum, a conference where economic globalism issues are discussed, opened January 24 with a discussion of Bush’s planned attack on Iran. The Secretary General of the League of Arab States and bankers and businessmen from such US allies as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all warned of the coming attack and its catastrophic consequences for the MIddle East and the world.
Writing for Global Research (January 24), General Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy on Geopolitical Affairs and former Joint Chief of Staff of the Russian Armies, forecast an American nuclear attack on Iran by the end of April. General Ivashov presented the neoconservative reasoning that is the basis for the attack and concluded that the world’s protests cannot stop the US attack on Iran.
There will be shock and indignation, General Ivashov concludes, but the US will get away with it. He writes:
“Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc. . . . The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high. It does remain unclear, though, whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war. It may take a provocation to eliminate this obstacle (an attack on Israel or the US targets including military bases). The scale of the provocation may be comparable to the 9-11 attack in NY. Then the Congress will certainly say “Yes” to the US President.”
The Bush Regime has made it clear that it is convinced that Bush already has the authority to attack Iran. The Regime argues that the authority is part of Bush’s commander-in-chief powers. Congress has authorized the war in Iraq, and Bush’s recent public statements have shifted the responsibility for the Iraqi insurgency from al-Qaeda to Iran. Iran, Bush has declared, is killing US troops in Iraq. Thus, Iran is covered under the authorization for the war in Iraq.
Both Bush and Cheney have made it clear in public statements that they will ignore any congressional opposition to their war plans. For example, CBS News reported (Jan. 25) that Cheney said that a congressional resolution against escalating the war in Iraq “won’t stop us.” According to the Associated Press and Yahoo News, Bush dismissed congressional disapproval with his statement, “I’m the decision-maker.”
Everything is in place for an attack on Iran. Two aircraft carrier attack forces are deployed to the Persian Gulf, US attack aircraft have been moved to Turkey and other countries on Iran’s borders, Patriot anti-missile defense systems are being moved to the Middle East to protect oil facilities and US bases from retaliation from Iranian missiles, and growing reams of disinformation alleging Iran’s responsibility for the insurgency in Iraq are being fed to the gullible US Media.
General Ivashof and everyone in the Middle East and at the Davos globalization conference in Europe understands the Bush Regime’s agenda.
Why cannot Americans understand?
Why hasn’t Congress told Bush and Cheney that they will both be instantly impeached if they initiate a wider war?
LINKLabels: war in iran
The end of the year means the release of serious films jockeying for Oscar contention. This year, violence and gore play the leading roles in many heavyweights: Apocalypto, Blood Diamond, The Departed and Flags of Our Fathers.
These movies excel in make-believe violence that keeps getting more graphic and extreme over time. Hollywood is forever chasing realism even though we see the movies to escape. No matter how real the bloodletting – the screams of anguish, the reverberations of explosions – we know it’s staged.
Yet we block out the real violence in front of us. Even as the Iraq War dominates the news month after month, we have insulated ourselves from it.
Recently, Bob Herbert commented on this in the New York Times. He noted that the media images the day after Thanksgiving were of more than 200 Iraqis massacred by car bombs in Sadr City the previous day juxtaposed with “holiday shopping zealots… storming the department store barricades.”
We don’t want to know what the war looks like. That’s why, when I heard about nowthatsfuckedup.com last year, I had to see it. Part of it was voyeurism, but I also wanted to see the sordidness of the Iraq War, the military and America all at once: soldiers trading pictures of war gore for access to amateur pornography.
More than that, I simply wanted to see what the war looked like. I’ve been writing about the Iraq War for four years running. I’ve read well over 30,000 articles about Iraq in that time, but the war still seemed distant and antiseptic. I wasn’t disappointed.
read more
By Daan de Wit
01/25/07 "ICHBlog" -- - Given the presence of four American submarines off the coast of Iran, Eduard Baltin, former commander of the Russian fleet, reasons that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran.
Bush and Cheney have less than two years to go in their current role and want to go down in the history books as the heroes of the Pax Americana, as the men who managed to conquer the Middle East and its oil, as the men who took full-spectrum dominance seriously, while in their own country booking successes through exorbitant profits for the military-industrial complex and the realization of radical legislation. The prelude was long and the path was full of obstacles, but the goal of a third great war - a war with Iran - is increasingly within sight. Dan Plesch in The Guardian sums it up in one sentence: 'All the signs are that Bush is planning for a neocon-inspired military assault on Iran'.
read moreLabels: war + Iran
By Greg Palast
There was that tongue again. When the President lies he's got this weird nervous tick: He sticks the tip of his tongue out between his lips. Like a little boy who knows he's fibbing. Like a snake licking a rat. In his State of the Union tonight the President did his tongue thing 124 times - my kids kept count. But it wasn't all rat-licking lies
read moreLabels: state of the union
a. saccus
Signs Of The Times
Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:00 EST
The Associated Press published a story over the weekend on President Jimmy Carter's new book 'Peace, Not Apartheid':
Carter defends controversial book
AP
20/01/2007
Former President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that the storm of criticism he has faced for his recent book has not weakened his resolve for fair treatment of Israelis and Palestinians.
"I have been called a liar," Carter said at a town hall meeting on the second day of a three-day symposium on his presidency at the University of Georgia.
"I have been called an anti-Semite," he said. "I have been called a bigot. I have been called a plagiarist. I have been called a coward. Those kind of accusations, they concern me, but they don't detract from the fact the book is accurate and is needed."...
"Not one of the critics of my book has contradicted any of the basic premises ... that is the horrible persecution and oppression of the Palestinian people and secondly that the formula for finding peace in the Middle East already exists," the 82-year-old Carter said.
A President of the United States an anti-Semite?
The unquestionably and most eminently Christian Jimmy Carter a "liar" and "bigot"? What's going on here?
Alexander Cockburn of Counterpunch commented on the slander and libel against Carter and his book in an article entitled '
First bomb Carter, then nuke Iran':
But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter's book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, reaching number 4 on Amazon itself. This doesn't prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb....
The Israel lobby may be many things, but it is not 'dumb'. We are dealing with something much more alarming here:
A.M. Lobaczewski, in his seminal book "
Political Ponerology" commented thusly:
Paranoid Character Disorders:
...arguments begin to undermine their overvalued ideas, crush their long-held stereotypes of reasoning, or forces them to accept a conclusion they had subconsciously rejected before. Such a stimulus unleashes...a torrent of pseudo-logical, largely paramoralistic, often insulting utterances which always contain some degree of suggestion. (p.110)
Look at the response from the Israel lobby to Carter's book; could there be a better description than: "a torrent of pseudo-logical, largely paramoralistic, often insulting utterances which always contain some degree of suggestion"?
This soon to be commonplace concept, "paramoralism", is so pivotal for understanding the triumphs and tragedies being enacted on the world stage today, that it merits a closer look.
Lobaczewski continues:
...Unfortunately, it has become a frequent phenomenon for...oppressive groups, or patho-political systems to invent ever-new moral criteria ("paramoralisms") ... Paramoralisms somehow cunningly evade the control of our common sense, sometimes leading to acceptance or approval of behavior that is openly pathological. ... Paramoralisitic statements and suggestions so often accompany various kinds of evil that they seem quite irreplaceable. Anything which threatens autocratic rule becomes (is labelled) deeply immoral. (pps 150, 205)
Examples of this tactic abound in modern politics, particularly in relation to the US and Israel, for example: "You are with us, or you are against us", being "against us" meaning that "you are a terrorist" and thus, immoral."
Now you know what to call such psychobabble: 'Paramoralisms'.
Cockburn continued:
The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it's starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why?
Lobaczewski, in "Political Ponerology", answers this question:
... time and experience confirm what a psychologist may have long foreseen: the entire effort "the goal - forcing human minds to incorporate pathological experiential methods and thought-patterns, and consequently accepting such rule - only results in producing a general stifling of intellectual developments and deep-rooted protest against affront-mongering "hypocrisy". The authors and executors of this program are incapable of understanding that the decisive factor making their work difficult is the fundamental nature of normal human beings - the majority. (p.195-6)
Cockburn continues:
You can't brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents....
Himself a victim of both the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland, Prof. Lobaczewski not only lived through these horrors, but used them to forge the most penetrating analysis of the psychological and social mechanisms behind these evil chapters of recent history that I have ever read. I count this as the most important book I have ever read. His concepts hold the key to our future, if we will but grasp it.
Lobaczewski speaks of the life cycle of such episodes of societal "ponerization" or "evilizing" and their inevitable outcome:
Lobaczewski, in "
Political Ponerology":
The achievement of absolute domination by pathocrats in the government of a country cannot be permanent since large sectors of the society become disaffected by such rule and eventually find some way of toppling it. This is part of the historical cycle, easily discerned when history is read from a Ponerological point of view. Pathocracy at the summit of governmental organization also does not constitute the entire picture of the "mature phenomenon". Such a system of government has nowhere to go but down.
Political Ponerology -
A Science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes -Andrew M. LobaczewskiOriginalLabels: Isreal Lobby + Carter+ponerology
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA | Sunday January 21, 2007
Islands appear off Greenland as polar ice melts away
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF The New York Times
LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland — Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.
When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.
"It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn’t it?" Dennis Schmitt said.
Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 645 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: He had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.
Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orleans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island’s distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.
Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as one-fifth of a hectare; every hour or so, several more tonnes of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — "lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.
"We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now."With 44,400 kilometres of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by almost seven metres.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
"That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Boggild said. "If you lose that much volume you’d definitely see new islands appear."
He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometres away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometres."
The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial earthquakes" have been detected within the ice sheet.
"The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate," said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible."
A study in the Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.
Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of global warming, based its conclusions about sea-level rise on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.
"When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work. Which puts us on shaky ground," said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.
There is no consensus on how much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near future, Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.
"Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario," said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.
On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just a third of a metre would send water hundreds of metres inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
"Here in Miami," Leatherman said, "we’re going to have an ocean on both sides of us."
Such ominous implications are not lost on Schmitt, who says he hopes that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an international symbol of the effects of climate change. Schmitt, who speaks Inuit, has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.
Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland’s northwest, have disappeared for good.
"There is a dark side to this," he said about the new island. "We felt the exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something new. But of course, there was also something scary about what we did there. We were looking in the face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the dire consequences."
LINKLabels: greenland ice sheet +global warming
Posted: Saturday, January 20, 2007
Washington
The steadily rising Iraq war price tag will reach about $8.4 billion a month this year, Pentagon spokesmen said
Heavy replacement costs for lost, destroyed and aging equipment are mounting.
The Pentagon has been estimating last year's costs for the increasingly unpopular war at about $8 billion a month, having increased from a monthly 'burn rate' of around $4.4 billion during the first year of fighting in fiscal 2003.
more...
Labels: war cost 8.4 billion
Document
Arash Norouzi
www.aljazeera.com
Fri, 19 Jan 2007 14:54 EST
Across the world, a dangerous rumor has spread that could have catastrophic implications. 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, as the following article will prove.
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Labels: wiped off the map + Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Mike Whitney
Fri, 19 Jan 2007 15:48 EST
We've heard a lot about the bombing of Samarra's Golden Mosque lately. Bush has brought it up twice in the last week alone. It's a critical part of the administration's rationale for the occupation of Iraq, so we can expect to be reminded of it nearly as often as 9-11.
The destruction of the Golden-dome Mosque took place in February 2005 and has been identified as the "catalyzing event" that plunged the country into sectarian violence. That, at least, is just the official version. No one knows really what happened because the administration refused to conduct an independent investigation and the media excluded any account that didn't square with the Pentagon's spin on events.
What we're left with is mere speculation.
read moreLabels: golden mosque
By Ray McGovern
Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any U.S. intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October 2002, when a formal National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) was rushed through in order to trick Congress into giving its
nihil obstat for the attack on Iraq.
read moreLabels: troop surge
Juan Cole
Informed Comment
Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:47 EST
Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state says that Iran in 2003 offered to help stabilize Iraq and to cut off aid to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Hamas. Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of "talking to evil." As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney's lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).
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Labels: Impeach Cheney
EUROPE'S WARM WINTER
Frogs have started mating, wild hamsters can't sleep, and the mild climate intimates spring. How dangerous is Europe's warm winter for animals and plants? A look at the miracle of biological clocks. By Rafaela von Bredow
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Labels: europe's warm winter
A day after "Kyrill" battered Europe with hurricane-force winds, the continent is struggling to get back to normal. With oil spills, ships threatening to sink, computer viruses and damage estimates in the billions, that may take awhile.
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Labels: Europe storms
Joe Quinn
Signs Of The Times
Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:57 EST
Today's
Boston Globe ran an editorial by the editorial page director, H.D.S. Greenway. It was a typical apparently "left of center" piece on a possible attack on Iran, with Greenway urging everyone to "step back and take a deep breath". Towards the end of the piece however, Greenway makes a comment where he momentarily strikes at the heart of the matter only to then gloss it over with a line taken directly from the Zionist book of truisms.
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Labels: Zionist Israel
LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland :
Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.
When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.
"It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn't it?" Dennis Schmitt said.
Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, California, had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.
Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island's distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.
Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — "lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland's ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.
"We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now."
In August, Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.
"We saw it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going," he said.
With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.
Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which produces topographical maps for mining and oil companies. (Greenland is a largely self-governing region of Denmark.) Last summer, he spotted several new islands in an area where a massive ice shelf had broken up. Jepsen was unaware of Schmitt's discovery, and an old aerial photograph in his files showed the peninsula intact.
"Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when the connecting glacier-bridge retreated southward," Jepsen said, adding that future maps would take note of the change.
The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
"That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Boggild said. "If you lose that much volume you'd definitely see new islands appear."
He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers."
read moreLabels: greenland ice sheet
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day In The Empire
Fri, 12 Jan 2007 11:57 EST
Speaking through the unitary decider "sort of like a ventriloquist speaking through a dummy "the neocons have once again issued threats against Iran and Syria.
“In his speech to the American nation yesterday, President George W. Bush issued a warning to Iran and Syria, accusing them of taking deliberate action against U.S. forces in Iraq and enabling aid transfers to insurgents,” reports Haaretz.
“Bush said the U.S. intends to take action against Iranian proxies in Iraq, and vowed to find and destroy the networks supplying these groups with weapons and training.” In addition, and ominously if not predictably, Bush “also promised that the U.S. would work ‘with others’ in order to block Iran from developing nuclear arms and dominating the region.”
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Labels: Iran Attack
Laura Knight-Jadczyk
Signs of the TimesWed, 10 Jan 2007 11:07 EST
A few months ago a member of the
SOTT Forum posted a link to the following article about investigations into climate change. I wasn't too sure what the contradictory term "Tropical Ice Cores" meant, but the article seemed to explain all that:
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a.saccus
SOTT
Tue, 09 Jan 2007 01:45 EST
"Failure by American non-Jews to recognize that Zionist Israel has nothing to do with America’s best interests and really nothing to do with the form of Judaism practiced by their next door American neighbor; and failure by American Jews to look deeply enough into their own tradition to recognize that Israeli imperialism and violence is contrary to everything their religion has stood for for 2000 years, will lead to the Third Irony:
Themselves the victims of a holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, some psychopaths disguising themselves as Jews are, in the course of only two generations and in the name of the Jews, perpetrating a holocaust upon the Palestinian people."
read moreLabels: Zionist Israel
BUSH'S NEW IRAQ STRATEGY"The Most Dangerous Foreign Policy Blunder Since Vietnam"
George W. Bush's last attempt to win the war in Iraq is meeting with strong resistance. His own party is criticizing him with brutal openness, calling his new ideas for Iraq a disaster. Bush is almost completely isolated -- like Richard Nixon during his final days in office. By Marc Pitzke
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Labels: bush + blunder+ iraq strategy
By Paul Craig Roberts
01/12/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Bush’s “surge” speech is a hoax, but members of Congress and media commentators are discussing the surge as if it were real.
I invite the reader to examine the speech. The “surge” content consists of nonsensical propagandistic statements. The real content of the speech is toward the end where Bush mentions Iran and Syria.
Bush makes it clear that success in Iraq does not depend on the surge. Rather, “Succeeding in Iraq . . . begins with addressing Iran and Syria.”
Bush asserts that “these two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.”
Bush’s assertions are propagandistic lies.
The Iraq insurgency is Sunni. Iran is Shi’ite. If Iran is supporting anyone in Iraq it is the Shi’ites, who have not been part of the insurgency. Indeed, the Sunni and Shi’ites are engaged in a civil war within Iraq.
Does any intelligent person really believe that Iranian Shi’ites are going to arm Iraqi Sunnis who are killing Iraqi Shi’ites allied with Iran? Does anyone really believe that Iranian Shi’ites are going to provide sanctuary for Iraqi Sunnis?
Bush can tell blatant propagandistic lies, because Congress and the American people don’t know enough facts to realize the absurdity of Bush’s assertions.
read moreLabels: Iraq Surge
Mark From Ireland
Gorillas Guides
Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:41 EST
Maysan: Five People Die Amongst Them A Teenager and Two Children Die Scavenging For Copper
Five people were killed today by exploding ordinance from previous wars in two separate incidents.
In the first incident in West Amarah three brothers Hussein Sabri Matanch (Aged 18) and Rafael Qasim (Aged 12) and Jasim (Aged 9) were trying to dismantle a mortar shell to get at the copper inside it so that they could sell it to scrap dealers. Here’s how eyewitnesses to their deaths describe what happened:
Maysan: Five People Die Amongst Them A Teenager and Two Children Die Scavenging For Copper
Five people were killed today by exploding ordinance from previous wars in two separate incidents.
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Mission accomplished…
Via: CNN:
As up to 50,000 Iraqis flee their homes every month, the U.N.’s refugee agency said Monday that it will seek $60 million this year to help the roughly 3.7 million people displaced by violence in the war-ravaged nation.
The problem is larger than mere displacement, A U.N. news release states, as women are increasingly forced to resort to prostitution and reports of child labor problems are on the rise.
Also, in Syria, where hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are seeking refuge, about 30 percent of Iraqi children are not in school and more than 10 percent of Iraqi families are headed by women.
Many Iraqis were displaced before the United States launched the Iraq war in 2003, but “increasing numbers of Iraqis are now fleeing escalating sectarian, ethnic and generalized violence,” according to the Web site of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The office estimates about 1.7 million Iraqis are currently displaced within the country, while another 2 million have fled to neighboring nations. The UNHCR estimates that 2.3 million people will be internally displaced by year’s end.
In 2006 alone, almost 500,000 Iraqis fled to other areas inside the country, the UNHCR estimated.
Three hundred thousand refugees have been displaced both internally and externally just since November, according to UNHCR reports. About 2,000 a day were arriving in Syria and about 1,000 a day were arriving in Jordan, according to a November report.
In a nation of about 26 million, “the current exodus is the largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948,” according to the UNHCR Web site.
Wayne Madsen
Wayne Madsen Report
Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:24 EST
According to U.S. maritime industry sources, tanker captains are reporting an increase in onboard alarms from hazard sensors designed to detect hydrocarbon gas leaks and, specifically, methane leaks. However, the leaks are not emanating from cargo holds or pump rooms but from continental shelves venting increasing amounts of trapped methane into the atmosphere. With rising ocean temperatures, methane is increasingly escaping from deep ocean floors. Methane is also 21 more times capable of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
In fact, one of the major sources for increased methane venting is the Hudson Submarine Canyon, which extends into the Atlantic 400 miles from the New York-New Jersey harbor. Another location experiencing increased venting is the Santa Barbara Channel on the California coast.
Meanwhile, a strong natural gas odor was reported this morning in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, and Newark. Last August, a similar unexplained gas odor sent people to the hospital in Staten Island and Queens. Although methane is odorless, natural methane venting is often accompanied by the venting of acrid hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of bacterial decomposition.
The US Coast Guard sent a message to ships and tugs in the bay and ocean south of New York requesting any reports of the odor being detected at sea. There were also an unconfirmed report of a similar strong odor being detected this morning on the Delaware coast near Lewes. This morning, the prevailing winds in New York and New Jersey were southerly at 5 to 10 miles per hour.
In other global warming news, the warm temperatures on the U.S. East Coast are resulting in early blooming of the cherry trees and azaleas in Washington, DC and New York City, apple and peach trees in Maryland, and roses, forsythias, and crocuses in Connecticut. A number of people along the East Coast are suffering from allergies usually experienced in April. Monk parakeets from South America have invaded the Chicago area.
George W. Bush continues to insist that global warming is "silly science" based on "fuzzy math." Corporate news media masters are pressuring plastic-faced and neatly-coiffured TV weathermen to treat the current abnormal warm weather as an unexpected "gift" for their viewers. The latte-sipping and SUV-driving yuppies in Washington, DC are certainly taking the current weather abnormality in stride -- they almost appear ecstatic about the weather, obviously unaware that the future of our planet is hanging on a thread.
LINK
08/01/2007 - 16:14:32
British health and safety inspectors are investigating an incident at a recently closed nuclear power station in Suffolk which led to the escape of 40,000 gallons of radioactive water, it has been revealed.
The incident happened at the Sizewell A station, one of the oldest in the world, which closed eight days ago.
Its reactors, which had been producing electricity for 40 years, are now being decommissioned.
A Sizewell spokesman said there had been a "breakage" in a pipe, which led to the water escape.
"The escape was stopped rapidly," said the spokesman.
The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate confirmed it was investigating the incident, adding that no water had left the site and there had been no contact with members of the public or workers.
A spokesman said the water contained traces of a radioactive substance.
Gary Smith, national officer of the GMB union, said: "The incident highlights decades of chronic under-investment in our nuclear industry.
"It also comes at a time when the Government is proposing to cut funding to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
"The Government gave a commitment that it would clean up the nuclear legacy, and proposals to cut NDA funding will ultimately impact on investment in training and maintenance, which can only further exacerbate problems that we have as a result of neglect.
"Any cuts in the NDA budgets will severely undermine public confidence in the future of the industry."
more
Mon Jan 8, 2007 7:03pm ET27
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. helicopter gunship conducted a strike against two suspected al Qaeda operatives in southern Somalia, but it was not known whether the mission was successful, CBS News reported on Monday.
The U.S. Air Force helicopter, operated by the Special Operations Command, flew from its base in Djibouti to the southern tip of Somalia, where the al Qaeda suspects were believed to have fled from the capital Mogadishu, the U.S. network reported.
A Pentagon spokesman said he had no information on the report.
The al Qaeda operatives, who were not named, included a suspect in the car bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the report said.
LINK
THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA; FOUR AMERICAN PETROLEUM GIANTS HAD AGREEMENTS WITH THE AFRICAN NATION BEFORE ITS CIVIL WAR BEGAN. THEY COULD REAP BIG REWARDS IF PEACE IS RESTORED.
Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside.
That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.
According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.
Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.
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Kurt Nimmo
Wednesday January 03rd 2007, 10:13 pm
Another Day in the Empire
Is John "Keating Five" McCain sincerely clueless? Or is he simply a politician playing a cynical numbers game with Iraq and thus eventually condemning to certain death more troops that should be here at home, protecting our borders?
McCain told General John Abizaid he didn't understand why the United States cannot "control" al-Anbar province and was flummoxed the general would suggest the "mission" is to train Iraqis to fight the "insurgency," actually a popular resistance against both occupation by foreign troops and their hand-picked Iraqi proxy.
McCain expressed frustration that said "insurgents" have taken back al-Anbar, thus demonstrating you can't teach an old dog new tricks, or at least teach him a bit of history and the inevitability of defeat for those who invade and attempt to occupy, as the French lost Vietnam at Diem Bien Phu and the British lost Afghanistan at the Gandamak pass. In Iraq, the Brits were unable to contain continual uprisings against occupation, even though they used mustard gas, a weapon favored Winston Churchill for the likes of "uncivilized" tribes. John McCain, the Manchurian candidate for president in 2008, does not even seem vaguely aware of such historical realities:
moreLabels: iraq, troops
By Glenn Kessler
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.
continue...Labels: biden, iraq
By Ray McGovern and W. Patrick Lang
01/05/06
"Information Clearing House"
Lies have consequences . All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran.
“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to “intelligence” on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.
Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.” In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003.
After the war began, those same analysts, still “leaning forward,” misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, then working for NBC News, obliged by pointing out the equipment “where the biological process took place... Literally, there is nothing else for which it could be used.”
George Tenet knows a good man when he sees him. A few weeks later he hired Kay to lead the Pentagon-created Iraq Survey Group in the famous search to find other (equally non-existent, it turned out) “weapons of mass destruction.” (Eventually Kay, a scientist given to empirical evidence more than faith-based intelligence, became the skunk at the picnic when, in January 2004, he insisted on telling senators the truth: “We were almost all wrong—and I certainly include myself here.” But that came later.)
read moreLabels: iraq study group
By Keith Olbermann
Countdown
5 Jan 07
President Bush may not be very good at dealing with reality, but he is still gifted at letting American troops be killed, and then turning their deaths to his own political advantage.
If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?
Would you at least protest?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them -- and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?
This is where we stand [with] President Bush's "new Iraq strategy," and his impending speech to the nation, which, according to a quoted senior American official, will be about troop increases and "sacrifice."
The president has delayed, dawdled and deferred for the month since the release of the Iraq Study Group.
He has seemingly heard out everybody, and listened to none of them.
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