Saturday, November 17, 2007

Who REALLY Holds the People of the World Nuclear Hostage?
Why a U.S. Attack on Iran Must be Stopped
In his infamous "Axis of Evil" 2002 State of the Union address, Bush put Iraq and Iran in the bullseye of the next phase of the "war on terror." He outlined what were to become the whole set of concocted lies about Iraq's "WMDs"-lies used to justify a war that has brought about-according to documented estimates-over a million deaths and created four million internal and external refugees.

And now, Iran is in the crosshairs. In one possible scenario, Dick Cheney is reported to be cooking up plans for Israel to attack Iran, and then for the U.S. to dive into the war when Iran counter-attacks. Massive U.S. naval power off the coast of Iran puts the U.S. in position to attack at any time. The White House is demanding $88 million to modify B-2 Stealth bombers to carry a newly developed 30,000-pound bunker-buster bomb-very possibly for use in a war on Iran.

Read more
From:
Revolution Newspaper
Issue 109
BEWARE
OF THE
WAR MONGERS!

WILL WE BE LIED INTO WAR WITH IRAN NEXT?!

Scott Horton Interviews Scott Ritter

Scott Ritter: Cheney's Iran Policy Still Stands


A must listen / read

Scott Ritter, former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector, discusses the new Iran NIE,his admiration for Ron Paul and the need of the American people to destroy the careers of their warmonger representatives.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18851.htm



Ahmadinejad Says U.N. Report Vindicates Iran :
Iran said on Thursday it had been vindicated in a report by the U.N. atomic watchdog and there would be no legal basis for further discussion at the U.N. Security Council of its nuclear plans.
http://snipurl.com/1tpm8


Intel Chief Blasts 'Cherry Picked' Intel:
National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell said Tuesday he would resign if administration officials mischaracterized or "cherry-picked" intelligence to support their own political agenda.
http://snipurl.com/1tpma


How Cheney Cooked the Intelligence on Iran :
Dick Cheney has been trying to pressure intelligence analysts who have not drunk the neocon kool-aid on Iran to go along with his line on the issues at stake in a National Intelligence Estimate on Iran that the White House has been holding up for more than a year.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7302



120 US war veteran suicides
a week


From Herald-Sun newspaper, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22762457-5005961,00.html

From correspondents in New York

November 15, 2007 09:47am

THE US military is experiencing a "suicide epidemic" with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.

At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 - an average of 17 a day - the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.

While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.

That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 - almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.

"Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems,'' CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.

CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.

"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total,'' Mike Bowman said.

"They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known.''

There are 25 million veterans in the United States, 1.6 million of whom served in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to CBS.

"Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged,'' Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said on CBS.

The network said it was the first time that a nationwide count of veteran suicides had been conducted.

The tally was reached by collating suicide data from individual states for both veterans and the general population from 1995.

*
One Indian farmer suicides
every 30 minutes :
On average, one Indian farmer committed suicide every 32 minutes between 1997 and 2005. Since 2002, that has become one suicide every 30 minutes. http://www.thehindu.com/2007/11/15/stories/2007111554771300.htm

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Iraq Policy Floating on a Sea of Oil

From: TomDispatch

History… phooey!

....For one thing, the past is often just so inconvenient.

On Monday, for instance, there was a front-page piece in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller on Robert Blackwill, one of the "Vulcans" who helped Condoleezza Rice advise George W. Bush on foreign policy during the 2000 election campaign, Iraq Director on the National Security Council during the reign in Baghdad of our viceroy L. Paul Bremer III, and the President's personal envoy to the faltering occupation (nicknamed "The Shadow"), among many other things.

He is now -- here's a giant shock -- a lobbyist. And, among those he's lobbying for (in this case to the tune of $300,000) is Ayad Allawi, former CIA asset and head -- back in Saddam's day -- of an exile group, the Iraq National Accord.

Bumiller identifies Allawi as "the first prime minister of the newly sovereign nation -- America's man in Baghdad." She also refers to him as having had "close ties to the CIA" and points out that he was not just Bremer's, but Blackwill's "choice" to be prime minister back in 2004.

Now, he's Blackwill's "choice" again. Allawi is, it seems, yet once more on deck, with his own K-Street lobbyist, ready to step in as prime minister if the present PM, Nouri al-Maliki, were to fall (or be shoved aside).

But there's another rather inconvenient truth about Allawi that goes unmentioned -- and it's right off the front page of the New York Times, no less -- a piece by Joel Brinkley, "Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks," published in early June 2004, just at the moment when Allawi had been "designated" prime minister.

In the early 1990s, Brinkley reported, Allawi's exile organization was, under the CIA's direction, planting car bombs and explosive devices in Baghdad (including in a movie theater) in a fruitless attempt to destabilize Saddam Hussein's regime.

Of course, that was back when car bombs weren't considered the property of brutes like Sunni extremists, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Taliban.

(Just as, inconveniently enough, back in the 1980s the CIA bankrolled and encouraged the training of Afghan "freedom fighters" in mounting car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in a terror campaign against Soviet officers and soldiers in Russian-occupied Afghan cities (techniques personally "endorsed," according to Steve Coll in his superb book Ghost Wars, by then-CIA Director William Casey).

But that was back in the day -- just as, to randomly cite one more inconvenient piece of history also off the front page of the New York Times (Patrick Tyler, "Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas," August 18, 2002), years before we went into Iraq to take out Saddam's by then nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, we helped him use them.

The Reagan Pentagon had a program in which 60 officers from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency "were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments" to Saddam's forces, so that he could, among other things, wield his chemical weapons against them more effectively.

("The Pentagon 'wasn't so horrified by Iraq's use of gas,' said one veteran of the program. 'It was just another way of killing people -- whether with a bullet or phosgene, it didn't make any difference.'")

Of course, when it comes to America's oily history in Iraq, there is just about no backstory -- not on the front page of the New York Times, not basically in the mainstream.

Even at this late date, with the price of crude threatening to head for the $100 a barrel mark, Iraqi oil is -- well, not exactly censored out -- just (let's face it) so darn embarrassing to write about.

In fact, now that all those other explanations for invading Iraq -- WMD, freedom, you name it -- have long since flown the coop, there really is no explanation (except utter folly) for Bush's invasion.

So, better to move on, and quickly at that. These last months, however, Tomdispatch has returned repeatedly to the subject as a reminder that history, even when not in sight, matters. And the deeper you go, as Michael Schwartz proves below, the more likely you are to find that gusher you're looking for.

Tom

Why Did We Invade Iraq Anyway?

Putting a Country in Your Tank
By Michael Schwartz

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

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