Bush FREE FALL!

Go to http://www.planetdan.net/pics/misc/georgie.htm

Your chance to have some fun with George W !!!
When he gets stuck, drag him with your mouse for futher decline.

Oh, if it were only so!

Now, this might look like torture to you...

However, if we use the Rumsfeld definition of torture

we can do so with a clear conscience.

Remember, it is only torture if your INTENTION is to cause pain -

if your intention was something else

(like getting information, or having fun) it doesn't count as torture!

Something like that.....anyway have fun!!!!!

Islip and Liberation - another excellent free, daily, email alternative news bulletin from George Anthony. Having discovered the esoterica of blogging, with a little help from friends, it occurred to yours truly, that a blog was not enough. One needs to take proactive action and give the occasional blog reader the nudge that there is more to life than reading the Guardian and the lesser purveyors of distortion. So every day, incidentally as happened during the invasion of Iraq, a bulletin is issued after culling useful information from the CeeFax, the Morning Star, the Financial Times, aljazeera news on Sky and website, and the daily emailings to midhurst14@aol.com. On Sunday's the Observer. The service is free, but yours truly and those at the Arkwright Road office, like to think it might build the circulation of the Liberation journal and the Islip newsletter. The whole exercise takes about two hours a day, the Islip bulletin concentrated on economic and political news, that Islip readers tastes are well known for. The Liberation bulletin concentrating on international news and human rights events, something it has been famous for, for over fifty years. Please join up by emailing to liberation@btinternet.com or midhurst14@aol.com for your delectation and information. George Anthony

Farewell Dave Cline

Extract of email from David Zeiger,
film maker of Sir! No Sir!
Wednesday, September 19, 2007

I am very sad to have to report the news that Dave Cline died this past weekend.

There are many wonderful tributes to Dave being written
( http://www.veteransforpeace.org ), and I would like to add some personal reflections on the part of his life with which I was deeply connected - the
GI Movement against the Vietnam War.

I hope you will indulge some nostalgic reminiscing here-there really is a point to it.

Let me say up front that without Dave Cline, Sir! No Sir! would not have been made.

I met Dave in the Spring of 1970, when I joined the staff of the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse outside Ft. Hood in Killeen, Texas. My introduction to him and the GI Movement was riding in a broken down Chevy with Dave driving 120 mph through central Texas and me convinced I would never get out of there alive. I'm not sure anything defines Dave Cline better than that wild ride.

Dave and I were from different worlds. I was a middle class kid who came to my opposition to the war and growing radicalism intellectually. Dave, a working class kid from Buffalo, had joined the army and been wounded three times in Vietnam. It was his last wound, from an NLF soldier at point blank range, that changed everything.

The soldier shattered Dave's knee, and Dave killed him with a bullet in the chest. His first realization was it was "pure luck" that he was alive and the other guy was dead. Then it hit him that there was no real difference between the two of them.

Finally, the epiphany: It was the NLF soldier who was fighting for a just cause, while Dave and his comrades were fighting for a lie. In typical Dave Cline fashion he concluded in 1970, "I had to kill a revolutionary to become a revolutionary."

And revolutionaries we were. . .

In 1971 - with literally thousands of GIs rebelling against the war and joining groups like the Black Panther Party - planning demonstrations by day and hotly debating the writings of Marx, Lenin and Mao by night was a very practical thing to do. And boy could Dave debate. Even in his sleep. It wasn't uncommon for him to jolt up from his bed at 2 am to continue a discussion from earlier that day, only to have no memory of it the next morning (Dave claimed he had even slept through a mortar attack in Vietnam) . . .

Then the war ended, and we all moved into other arenas, believing deeply in the possibility of revolution right here in the United States. For a while we stayed close, but through the years political disagreements developed, and in those heady times that meant a lot. By the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s we weren't in contact any more. Those were very difficult times. In one of the last conversations I had with Dave back then he told me that every morning he woke up thinking "Oh fuck, another day!"

So when I started to make Sir! No Sir! Dave was the first person I wanted to talk to, but I had no idea what or whom I would find. What I found was the person so many have been writing about these last few days. Wracked by illness, he was extraordinarily energetic and eager to tell his story. The day of our interview, he had just come home from a grueling three-day VFP convention and was worried he wouldn't have much energy. We talked for four hours.

. . . Dave knew the tremendous importance of telling the story of the GI Movement today, in this world and with this war.

Because of him, several people are in the film alongside others they wouldn't have been in the same room with a few years ago. And he carried that spirit into the dozens of screenings and Q&As he participated in these past couple of years. He has played a tremendous role in making Sir! No Sir! the spark for today's GI Movement that it has been. And that's on top of his superhuman energy in building the work of Veterans for Peace.

In these last years of his life, I don't think Dave was saying "Oh fuck, another day!" anymore.

This has been a tough year. Along with Dave, two other veterans of the GI Movement who were integral parts of the film have also died-Oliver Hirsch of the Nine for Peace, and Terry Whitmore, who deserted to Sweden after watching federal troops invade his home town of Memphis as he lay wounded in a hospital bed in Japan. Along with Dave, their lives had deep historic meaning.

For more about Dave, and information on funeral and memorial plans, please go to http://www.veteransforpeace.org

Signed,

David Zeiger

USA equipping a private army in preparation for an invasion of Venezuela

Someone is building and equipping a private Army in South America and we get to pay for it. Congress knows nothing about this. It looks like preparation for an invasion of Venezuela, if we had to take a guess.

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=75673

Pentagon 'Three-Day Blitz' Plan For Iran

By Sarah Baxter

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians' military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18290.htm



The War Criminal in the Living Room

By Paul Craig Roberts

The media is silent, Congress is absent, and Americans are distracted as George W. Bush openly prepares aggression against Iran. - US war doctrine has been altered to permit first strike nuclear attack on Iran and other non-nuclear countries.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18287.htm



Hillary Clinton Is Willing to Nuke Iran
1 Minute Video
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18285.htm



Are We 'Good Germans'?

By Ed Ciaccio

Bush wants our always-accommodating Congress, Democrats and Republicans, to declare a part of Iran's military as "terrorists." This will enable him to attack Iran without Congressional authorization.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18291.htm



U.S. Obsessed With Using Force

By Reason Wafawarova

SINCE the United States assumed global leadership from Britain at the end of the Second World War; when it emerged as the biggest beneficiary of the war, a development that saw it declare the era of "the American century", Washington has been obsessed with using force to thwart small countries.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18284.htm

Some useful Viet Nam sites worth a look


Cultural Profiles:
http://www.culturalprofiles.net/Viet_Nam/Directories/Vi_ACYAIw-7879_ADs-t_Nam_Cultural_Profile/-1497.html

Vietnam Pictorial:
http://vietnampictorial.vnanet.vn

Excellent maps & location info:
www.vinacarta.com

Citizens Arrest of Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock as a War Criminal.

"...as Philip Ruddock was about to address a symposium on Law & Liberty in the War on Terror, an anti-war activist confronted Ruddock with a formal Warrant, charging him with various war crimes.

Peter McGregor, a retired academic from Newcastle, was himself then arrested, & charged with 'unlawful entry on inclosed lands'.

McGregor also had criticized UNSW, the Law Faculty, & all present, for welcoming such a war criminal. "Ruddock's abandoning of Habeas Corpus, as both Minister for Immigration, & Attorney-General should make him a social pariah, & especially with academics & those who believe in the rule of law & human rights. In order for evil to triumph, it is enough for good people to do nothing."

Contact: Peter McGregor


Is the Empire's Economy Starting to Crumble?

The Vietnam war was basically financed by printing more dollars. The inflation that followed in the 1970s was exported around the world. The current war in Iraq is again being financed in a similar fashion. But it would seem that after 4 years of expenditure on the war that is now running at more than $US 12 billion per month that things may be starting to come apart.

Uncle Sam, Your Banker Will See You Now by Paul Craig Roberts
Iran steps up petro-dollar war with U.S. by J. R. Corsi

From:
Irregular Gippsland Peace Newsletter Summary
(No. 38 September 2007)

Price: free /Donation
Copyright: the Author.
Feel free to send / copy / proliferate all or in part
Peter Gardner (ed) c/-PO Swifts Creek Australia 3896
ngarak@bigpond.com to receive full newsletter by email

Tomgram: Juan Cole, The Republic Militant at War, Then and Now
To send this to a friend, or to read more dispatches, go to tomdispatch.com

It was the highest-tech military of its moment and its invasion of the Arab land was overwhelming. Enemy forces were smashed, the oppressive ruling regime overthrown, the enemy capital occupied, and the country declared liberated… then the first acts of insurgency began…

George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003?
No, Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in June 1798. !!!!!!

There are times when the resonances of history are positively eerie. This happens to be one of them.

We all deserve a history lesson about the Napoleonic beginnings of our present catastrophe. (Too bad you-know-who didn't get one before ordering that March 2003 invasion.)

I got mine from a man whose blog, Informed Comment, I read every morning without fail and whose flow of commentary on Bush's war in Iraq has been invaluable. I'm talking, of course, about Juan Cole who (evidently in his spare moments) has completed a history of the Napoleonic moment of "spreading democracy" to Arab lands, just published as Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East.

Some of the parallels are enough to make you jump out of your chair (if not your skin). For instance, Napoleon wrote a letter to one of his generals, well into the occupation, forbidding the beating of insurgents to extract information: "It has been recognized at all times that this manner of interrogating human beings, of putting them under torture, produces nothing good." Okay, at least Napoleon could learn from experience, an ability our President seems to lack, but the issue, put that way, rings a terrible bell 200 years later.

Napoleon's Egyptian moment lasted a mere three years. We are already into our fifth year in devolving Iraq with no obvious end in sight.

Last Sunday, the New York Times printed a remarkable op-ed by an Army specialist, four sergeants, and two staff sergeants of the 82nd Airborne Division, now on duty in Iraq (one of whom was shot in the head while the piece was being prepared).

In it, they wrote, "Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal… [W]e are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day."

Of the military mission of which they are a part they wrote: "In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are -- an army of occupation -- and force our withdrawal."

Whether these soldiers know the history of Bonaparte in Egypt or not, they have grasped the essence of what lurks behind the fine liberatory words of the leaders of the republic militant.

Let's hope it's not too late to learn the lesson of Napoleon and slip out of "Egypt," while it's still possible. Though it hardly scatches the surface of his new book, here is a little taste from the Napoleonic lesson plan of Juan Cole.

Tom

Pitching the Imperial Republic
Bonaparte and Bush on Deck
By Juan Cole

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

NEED SOME TRUTH?
CHECK OUT TRAVELING SOLDIER

Telling the truth - about the occupation or the criminals running the government in Washington - is the first reason for Traveling Soldier. But we want to do more than tell the truth; we want to report on the resistance - whether it's in the streets of Baghdad, New York, or inside the armed forces. Our goal is for Traveling Soldier to become the thread that ties working-class people inside the armed services together. We want this newsletter to be a weapon to help you organize resistance within the armed forces. If you like what you've read, we hope that you'll join with us in building a network of active duty organizers.

http://www.traveling-soldier.org/

And join with Iraq War vets in the call to end the occupation and bring our troops home now! www.ivaw.org/

Another excellent AGENT ORANGE site to check out! :

http://theagentorangeproject.blogspot.com/

IWT - International World Television
The Real News is an alternative to the corporate mainstream television

Dear Supporters,

We just hit 101,000 views of The Promise on YouTube!

We want to thank you for helping us reach this milestone by viewing the video, sending it to friends and spreading the word about The Real News vision.

Now help us promote a new video with Eric Margolis.
This video is the first test of a new program called, The Real Story.

Eric Margolis, contributor to The Real News, says television news is misleading people about the responsibility of the U.S. in fueling the Iraq civil war.

Click on the link, rate it and send it to your friends.

Together we are making The Real News a reality.

..........................................................................

Join us at www.therealnews.com as we begin our "Think" programming, presenting a seven-part interview with legendary author Gore Vidal. Hear tales of grotesque adventures, the end of empires, the demise of democracy and much more.

Says Vidal, "I was born 80 years ago in a country called the United States of America and now I live in a Homeland - an expression we haven't heard since Hitler."

After watching the Gore Vidal interview, return to the homepage and click on "Join the Conversation" to talk with us at The Real News Junkies. The Real News Junkies is where The Real News community can discuss political topics of interest with each other, and learn more about our development as a network.

Part 1 of our interview with Gore Vidal is posted today. We look forward to knowing what you think!

Thanks again,
Paul Jay
CEO & Senior Editor IWT/The Real News

Democratic or Republican ... the U.S. has no intention to really withdraw from Iraq!

From TomDispatch.com
a project of the Nation Institute


To send this to a friend, or to read more dispatches, go to tomdispatch.com

Tomgram: Ira Chernus, Democratic Doublespeak on Iraq

Start with the simplest, most basic fudge. Newspapers and the TV news constantly report on various plans for the "withdrawal of American troops" from Iraq, when what's being proposed is the withdrawal of American "combat troops" or "combat brigades."

This isn't a matter of splitting hairs; it's the difference between a plan for full-scale withdrawal and a plan to remain in Iraq in a different military form for the long term.

American combat brigades only add up to perhaps half of the troops we presently have in that country.

There is, in fact, quite a gap between withdrawal from that embattled land and the withdrawal of some American troops, while many of the rest hunker down on the enormous, all-but-permanent military bases the Pentagon has built there over the last four years -- while defending the largest embassy on the planet, now nearing completion (amid the normal woes that seem to go with American construction and "reconstruction") in Baghdad's heavily fortified but distinctly insecure Green Zone.

And yet, thanks to the carefully worded statements of leading Democratic (and Republican) politicians now criticizing the Bush administration, as well as generally terrible reporting in the mainstream media, most Americans who don't make it to the fine print or who don't wander widely on the political Internet, would have no way of knowing that withdrawal isn't withdrawal at all.

Ira Chernus, Tomdispatch regular and author of Monsters To Destroy, takes a careful look at the leading Democratic candidates for president and raises a few crucial, if largely unasked, questions about the nature of the positions they are taking on the Iraq War. - Tom

The Democrats' Iraqi Dilemma
Questions Unasked, Answers Never Volunteered

By Ira Chernus

Pity the poor Democratic candidates for president, caught between Iraq and a hard place. Every day, more and more voters decide that we must end the war and set a date to start withdrawing our troops from Iraq. Most who will vote in the Democratic primaries concluded long ago that we must leave Iraq, and they are unlikely to let anyone who disagrees with them have the party's nomination in 2008.

But what does it mean to "leave Iraq"? Here's where most of the Democratic candidates come smack up against that hard place. There is a longstanding bipartisan consensus in the foreign-policy establishment that the U.S. must control every strategically valuable region of the world -- and none more so than the oil heartlands of the planet. That's been a hard-and-fast rule of the elite for some six decades now. No matter how hard the task may be, they demand that presidents be rock-hard enough to get the job done.

So whatever "leave Iraq" might mean, no candidate of either party likely to enter the White House on January 20, 2009 can think it means letting Iraqis determine their own national policies or fate.

The powers that be just wouldn't stand for that.

They see themselves as the guardians of world "order." They feel a sacred obligation to maintain "stability" throughout the imperial domains, which now means most of planet Earth -- regardless of what voters may think.

The Democratic front-runners know that "order" and "stability" are code words for American hegemony. They also know that voters, especially Democratic ones, see the price of hegemony in Iraq and just don't want to pay it anymore.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.

Malcolm Fraser, former Prime Minister of Australia,
speaks for withdrawal from Iraq

"The situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate with more loss of lives, with even more hardship to Iraqi civilians.

The serious divisions within Iraq, unleashed by the war itself, have not been reduced. The Iraqi government has made no significant steps towards reconciliation and accommodation between the warring parties.

This is a situation that cannot be controlled by military force.

The troop surge, such as it was, failed.

There were over half a million Americans in Vietnam. They failed. With only a fraction of that number in Iraq it should be no surprise that continued reliance on military means is not succeeding.

More and more Americans are coming to accept that withdrawal must take place.
Senior and highly respected Republican Senators are deserting President Bush on this issue. The original objectives are almost entirely forgotten. There is no talk of Iraq establishing a benign, American style democracy that will spread to the rest of the Middle East.

Our withdrawal must be carefully planned, as a precipitous withdrawal in a week or a month would add to the chaos. And as the Baker-Hamilton Committee reported to Congress, all regional players, including Iran and Syria, must be drawn into discussions before we leave. Diplomacy now offers the only chance of a withdrawal accompanied by relative calm and peace.

One of the things we should say to the Americans, quite simply, is that if the United States is not prepared to involve itself in high level diplomacy concerning Iraq and other Middle East questions, our forces will be withdrawn before Christmas.

I encourage you to support GetUp's campaign for a change in policy.

Add your voice below to the thousands who have spoken already.
If enough speak, the Government has to listen."

https://www.getup.org.au/campaign/OurOwnPlanForIraq

Malcolm Fraser AC CH
Former Prime Minister of Australia

'AGENT ORANGE' VIDEO

An urgent appeal from Len Aldis!

Seeking Justice for the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange !

The worst chemical warfare in history!

Millions of innocent people still affected, into the 3rd generation already!

Dear Friends,

Recently I was videoed on the issue of Agent Orange.

You can view the video by going to:

http://www.friction.tv/debate.php?debateno=672

Although short, it is an important video and part of our campaign seeking Justice for the Victims of Agent Orange. When you have finished viewing there are a few actions I would like you to take.

1/ Please make a comment on what you have seen, this is very easy to do and due to the issue of Agent Orange extremely important. The more comments people make, the longer the video will be on view.

2/ Please circulate the site’s address to all your friends and contacts asking them to view it. If you or your friends have a website, please ask them to put a link to the Video.

3/ Please sign and again ask your friends to sign the online petition:

www.petitiononline.com/AOVN/

Finally, let’s get the message on the Video across to people all over the world. We can, with your help, win Justice for the Victims of Agent Orange.

Regards,
Len Aldis

PS. Now, as they say, a word from the director of the video Jeremy Smith:

“I want to thank each and every one of you who does make a comment, as we really want this video to get noticed and they way that happens on our site is when people comment.” - Jeremy.

Len Aldis.

Secretary Britain-Vietnam Friendship Society

Flat 2, 26 Tomlins Grove

London E3 4NX

Tel & Fax: 0208 980 7146

Mobile: 0779 657 1017
Website: www.lenaldis.co.uk

Please help the victims of Agent Orange by signing the petition at:

www.petitiononline.com/AOVN

Donald Rumsfeld's Long March

"The Undertaker's Tally"
By Roger Morris


At a press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels in June 2002, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said:

"Now what is the message there? The message is that there are no 'knowns.' There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."

Strangely enough, Rumsfeld's own career, which catches so much of the political history that has led us into our present catastrophe, qualifies -- or at least did until today -- as either a "known unknown" or even one of those mystifying "unknown unknowns."

Every now and then, we need a little history to make sense of our world....

Roger Morris, a member of the National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon (he resigned in protest over the invasion of Cambodia) and bestselling author of biographies of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the Clintons, explores both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns of Donald Rumsfeld's emblematic history and legacy, of his long march to power, and what he did with that power once it was in his hands.

Morris' two-parter on Rumsfeld's legacy, long as it is, is actually a miracle of historical compression, packing into a relatively modest space an epic history none of us should avoid. Call it a necessary reckoning with disaster.

Donald Rumsfeld himself may be front and center, but the supporting cast of rogues -- Dick Cheney, George Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Robert Gates, and so many others -- makes this a summary meditation on some of the most costly lessons of our times.

As a prophet, Rumsfeld may not have been exactly Delphic, "I can't tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks, or five months," he said in an interview on November 14, 2002, "but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that." Nonetheless, he remains an emblematic figure of our age.

If you don't understand Rumsfeld, you can't fully grasp the unprecedented ruin which is American foreign policy today....
(Tom)

The Undertaker's Tally (Part 1)
Sharp Elbows
By Roger Morris

Click here to read more of this dispatch.


The Undertaker's Tally (Part 2)
The Power and the Glory
By Roger Morris
Click here to read more of this dispatch.



From Tomgram:
a project of the Nation Institute
to read more dispatches, go to tomdispatch.com