Culture of War: Source of Human Suffering and DeathThe New Webster Dictionary of the English Language describes culture as education, improvement by mental or physical training, the way of life of a people. The same dictionary describes war as hostility, a contest between nations or within the same nation, a state of violent opposition. And peace is described as tranquility, freedom from war, cessation to hostilities. Whereas peace is characterized by love and respect, war is characterized by hatred and revenge. Whereas peace leads to healing an... (more)
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BS Alert: White Powder Fear Tactics, AgainToday at 5:00 PM EST a massive protest was scheduled to take place at the Florida, Broward County courthouse. I know because I was supposed to be there, but was running late.
The area, however, has suddenly been evacuated and cornered off as news of "white powder inside the court house" has been announced. Forget tear gas, white powder is so much easier. How truly convenient for the Broward sheriff's office that such a stash of threatening powder was foun... (more)
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Shock and oil: Iraq's billions & the White House connection The American company appointed to advise the US government on the economic reconstruction of Iraq has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Republican Party coffers and has admitted that its own finances are in chaos because of accounting errors and bad management.
BearingPoint is fighting to restore its reputation in the US after falling more than a year behind in reporting its own financial results, prompting legal actions from its creditors and shareholders.
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Reading Bush’The United States, once known as the beacon of democracy, finds itself in a dilemma. It is faced with a President that is deaf to the people. In his address to the nation on January 10, 2007 he left little doubt that he means to rule over the people he was ‘elected’ to serve. In tune with everything else he does, he has devalued the meaning of the word democracy and eroded its ideals; which explains why he is ‘dictating’ democracy to other nations.
“B... (more)
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Bush's Iraq Plan - Goading Iran into WarWASHINGTON, Jan 12 (IPS) - President George W. Bush's address on Iraq Wednesday night was less about Iraq than about its eastern neighbour, Iran. There was little new about the U.S.'s strategy in Iraq, but on Iran, the president spelled out a plan that appears to be aimed at goading Iran into war with the U.S.
While Washington speculated whether the president would accept or reject the Iraq Study Group's recommendations, few predicted that he would do the opposite of what James Ba... (more)
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Did AP cover same Bush speech as major papers?Summary: In its article on President Bush's visit to Fort Benning to promote his plan to increase troops in Iraq, the Associated Press claimed that Bush was "surrounded ... by cheering soldiers." Other media outlets, such as The Washington Post, however, reported that soldiers "saluted smartly and applauded politely" -- "hardly the boisterous, rock-star reception Bush typically gets at military bases."
In a January 11 article on President Bush's appear... (more)
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After the surge ... what next? Baghdad's Residency Office, a bustling maze of corridors and smoky rooms, is a place of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Controlled by a Shia political party, it means foreigners who do not want to pay a bribe shuffle from desk to desk to get the signatures, stamps and counter signatures, and then more stamps, required to leave the country. Only one group is rushed through without a cursory glance: agents who breeze through with arms laden with stacks of passports. All of them from Iran.
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U.S. set to announce plea deal with Israeli on drug chargesThe attorneys of reputed underworld boss Ze'ev Rosenstein and U.S. prosecutors are expected to announce on Friday that they will sign a plea bargain on drug trafficking charges Rosenstein faces.
Under the agreement between the parties, set to be signed Tuesday, Rosenstein will serve 12 years in an Israeli prison. The plea bargain will be brought before a Miami court to be ratified the same day it is signed.
According to Israeli sources familiar with the case, the ... (more)
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Johnny got his gunIn the past year Iran has issued several warnings to the United States about the consequences of an American or Israeli attack. One statement, issued in November by a high Iranian military official, declared: "If America attacks Iran, its 200,000 troops and 33 bases in the region will be extremely vulnerable, and both American politicians and military commanders are aware of it."[1] Iran apparently believes that American leaders would be so deeply distressed by the prospect of their young men an... (more)
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Cheney on Fox News: Criticism of War Plan Undercuts Troops -- And Iran, Watch Out Appearing on Fox News this morning, Vice President Dick Cheney said that criticism of President Bush's new Iraq plan, announced this week, was undercutting U.S. troops in Iraq.
He also said that any "sense of Congress" passed in the days ahead would not halt the president's troop escalation in Iraq, adding that he had not yet heard a "coherent" Democratic plan on Iraq. Bush, after all, is "commander in chief" and "you can't fight a war by committee."
Cheney denied ... (more)
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GOP hits Pelosi's 'hypocrisy' on wage billHouse Republicans yesterday declared "something fishy" about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week.
"I am shocked," said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party's chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. "Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exact... (more)
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Bush's legacy: The president who cried wolf
Only this president, only in this time, only with this dangerous, even messianic certitude, could answer a country demanding an exit strategy from Iraq, by offering an entrance strategy for Iran.
Only this president could look out over a vista of 3,008 dead and 22,834 w... (more)
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This is a US torture camp It would be the ideal spot for a beachside birthday party. Surrounded by a turquoise sea, palm trees and white sand, the US detention camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba was five years old yesterday. Tony Blair calls it an "anomaly", but the evidence is overwhelming. Camp Delta, which still houses 470 men never convicted of any crime, is a torture camp. That should be the starting point of any debate about what is acceptable in the west's fight with Islamist extremists. More than 750 men have... (more)
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US accuses Iran of arming Iraqi insurgents America has accused five Iranians detained by its forces in Iraq last week of involvement in Teheran’s efforts to supply insurgent militias with financing, training and weapons.
Iran angrily rejected the claims and demanded the release of the officials, who were working a liaison office in Irbil, the capital of Kurdish northern Iraq.
A statement from the US military said: “Preliminary results revealed the five detainees are connected to the Iranian Revo... (more)
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US sends warplanes to Turkey's Incirlik military baseANKARA, Jan 11 (KUNA) -- U.S. F-16 jet-fighters arrived Thursday in Incirlik Air base in southern Turkish city of Adana after, the first time in three years.
According to Local Cihan News Agency, at least 16 F-16 jets joined by early warning system AWACS airplane, as well as tanker airplanes landed here at Incirlik coming from an American base in Germany.
An official at the U.S. embassy in Ankara announced that the planes arrived here for purpose of conducting exerc... (more)
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100,000 Mercenaries, the Forgotten "Surge"What is striking about the current debate in Washington - whether to "surge" troops to Iraq and increase the size of the U.S. Army - is that roughly 100,000 bodies are missing from the equation: The number of American forces in Iraq is not 140,000, but more like 240,000.
What makes up the difference is the huge army of mercenaries - known these days as "private contractors." After the U.S. Army itself, they are easily the second-largest military force in the country. Yet no one se... (more)
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Darn those IraqisTo the People of Iraq: Now I get it. This war is all your fault.
Darn you. We had a perfectly good invasion and occupation going until you had to ruin it with your sectarian violence and civil war. How dare you react to our bombings, shootings, torture and imprisonment with mayhem and carnage of your own? How boorishly uncivilized.
And after all we’ve done. Haven’t we restored electricity to about four hours a day? So what if you’re afraid to s... (more)
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Who Rules America?In the broadest and deepest sense, understanding how the US political system functions, the decisions of war and peace are taken, who gets what, how and why, requires that we address the question of ‘Who rules America?’ In tackling the question of ‘ruling’ one needs to clarify a great deal of misunderstandings, particularly the confusion between those who make governmental decisions and the socio-economic institutional parameters which define the interests to be se... (more)
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Bush Issues Fatwa Against IranI truly believed that President George W. Bush was at least going to announce that Condi Rice was going on a shoe-buying tour of Tehran and Damascus, and I was also fully confident such a "diplomatic" trip would have been just another Karen Hughes-type PR campaign. If Bush were a sane person he would have taken the simple Karl Rovian step of an opening of negotiations, heeded that one tiny piece of the Baker-Hamilton study, and taken a little wind out of the war oppositio... (more)
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Police Entrapment in Terror Case? NYC Subway Bomb Plotter Says He Was Set Up By Paid NYPD InformantA high-profile case here in New York is raising questions around police tactics and sting operations in pursuing terror cases.
On Monday, a twenty-four year-old Pakistani immigrant was sentenced to 30 years in prison for plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station. Shahawar Matin Siraj was arrested days before the Republican National Convention in 2004 and held without bail. This past May, he was convicted on four counts of conspiracy, including the most serious, plotting to... (more)
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Blood Meridian: Bush's High Crimes of Torture and WarIf you want to see the depravity and filth that festers in the core of the Bush Administration made plain , read the story below. The regimen of torture and suffering being inflicted on captives in Bush's War of Terror is not some sort of aberrant overreaction to concerns about national security and public safety: these specifically designed, deliberately induced tortures are the expression of... (more)
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The Real Agenda Of The Global Elite In Somalia This week has seen the latest example of the US power elite bombing a broken-backed country in the name of the global 'war on terror'. The phantom menace of 'Al Qaeda' has again provided a pretext for the further destruction and destabilization of struggling state, this time Somalia, in order that the Western elite power-mongers can move in and control its valuable resources.
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Mild In The StreetsNEW YORK--Another year in Iraq, another thousand dead soldiers. This grim milestone passed as the wasteful nature of the carnage finally registered with the public; only nine percent of Americans, "dead-enders" in Rumsfeld-speak, still think the war was a wonderful idea.
At long last, five years after 9/11, we stand united: Americans want out of Iraq. Not in 18 months, not "peace with honor," not the week after next--now. But representative democracy has failed us. The message vot... (more)
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Media Under Growing SiegeBAGHDAD, Jan. 10 (IPS) - The U.S. administration continues to tout Iraq as a shining example of democracy in the Middle East, but press freedom in Iraq has plummeted since the beginning of the occupation.
Repression of free speech in Iraq was extreme already under the regime of Saddam Hussein. The 2002 press freedom index of the watchdog Reporters Without Borders ranked Iraq a dismal130th. The 2006 index pushes Iraq down to 154th position in a total of 168 listed countries, though... (more)
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