|
 "There
will be no one to the right of Alito on the Court...
No one on the conservative base can be
unhappy with Sam Alito..."
Mon
- 31 Oct - GOING NUCLEAR
WASHINGTON: That's
what NBC commentator Jonathan Turley had to say this morning in the
hour before President Bush's formal announcement of the nomination of
arch-conservative Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
We're all now
headed to the major ideological fight the far right-wing and
Evangelicals have been salivating to bring about for years.
Now it's
here. So the political 'nuclear option' now looms heavy with a
dangerously polarized nation, a very weakened Bush-Cheney
Administration, a public trial of 'Scooter' Libby threatened, a
deteriorating war in Iraq, and potentially explosive conflict with
Syria, Iran and North Korea still very much on the Neocon agenda.
Rosa Parks Lies In State Tonight
Resistance
Is Not Always Futile
 Sun
- 30 Oct - The first woman ever lies in State in
Washington in the Rotunda of the Capital today. She held no
office, had no money, had to flee her home in Alabama after her simple
act of resistance -- staying seated on a bus in
segregationist 1955 rather than getting up for a white man. Her
arrest sparked the American civil rights movement, launched Martin
Luther King's career, changed the constitutional law and the norms of
her country with much impact on the whole world. A totally
unpresumptuous woman of principle and dignity now honored in a
Washington where there are few like her including the 29 other
Americans who before her have shared this ultimate tribute in death --
lying in state on Capitol Hill tonight and tomorrow.
CIAGate and
IRAQGate Trace to Cheney and Rove and ultimately Bush
"I don't know if
we're going to find out the senior administration
official.
Now, this is a large
administration, and there's a
lot of senior officials."
George Bush, 7
October 2003, referring to the CIA leak
investigation with Attorney General Ashcroft then in charge
SUN - 30 Oct - Trace Libby to Cheney, Rove,
Wolfowitz, Feith, Rich, et. al: Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was 'Cheney's
Cheney'. They were literally joined at the hip all the
time. Most mornings in fact they rode to work in the same limo --
until recently that is. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was as well
closest of buddies with Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith -- the top
Pentagon Neocons intimately tied to the Israelis and the major players,
along with Cheney, who orchestrated the Iraq
invasion/occupation. Libby was as well just a few years ago
the lawyer for swindler, fugitive, and Mossad interconnector, Marc Rich
-- the man mysteriously pardoned in the final hours of the Clinton
Presidency, many think as a kind of pay-off to the Israelis in addition
to the major financial contributions from Rich's former wife Denise,
herself known to be 'close' to Clinton personally.
President Bush may have been out of the direct  loop. That's the case with many
thing when it comes to a President like Bush...and Reagan before him in
Iran-Contragate. But even so it was Bush who presided as the
White House Iraq Group was formed and put to work, his top aides -
Rice, Rove, Hughes, and Assistant to the President Lewis Libby -- all
in charge with VP-Cheney acting as top dog. And so in the end it
is really Bush who should bear responsibility, regardless if the actual
legal dots can be traced to his desk in the Oval Office.
Always remember, CIAGate, the legal twist in all this, was
always derivative from IRAQgate and what was a kind of public relations
conspiracy to deceptively sell the coming invasion/occupation of Iraq
based on lies and tricks, most especially at the time the repeated
insistence that Iraq was fast developing nuclear and other weapons of
mass destruction. From that major conspiracy flowed everything
else including Colin Powell's unconscionable speech to the Security
Council, the President's lies in his 2002 State of the Union Speech,
the formation of the Whiter House Iraq Group, the VP's may visits to
CIA Headquarters (accompanied by non other than 'Scooter' Libby), and
the ongoing campaign to discredit and intimidate any and all who dared
oppose which lead to the Special Counsel investigation when Attorney
General Ashcroft was forced to bow out. From a long-overdue Washington Post exposee today here
is the heart of how the whole investigation resulting so far in
'Scooter' Libby's resignation and indictment began:
By summer 2002, the White House Iraq Group assigned Communications
Director James R. Wilkinson to prepare a white paper for public
release, describing the "grave and gathering danger" of Iraq's
allegedly "reconstituted" nuclear weapons program. Wilkinson gave
prominent place to the claim that Iraq "sought uranium oxide, an
essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa." That
claim, along with repeated use of the "mushroom cloud" image by top
officials beginning in September, became the emotional heart of the
case against Iraq.
President Bush invoked the mushroom cloud in
an Oct. 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati. References to African uranium
remained in his speech until its fifth draft, but a last-minute
intervention by Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet
excised them.
Tenet's
success was short-lived. The uranium
returned repeatedly to Bush administration rhetoric in December and
January. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice cited the report in
a Jan. 23 newspaper column, and three days later, at the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
demanded, "Why is Iraq still trying to procure uranium and the special
equipment needed to transform it into material for a nuclear weapon?"
By the time Bush stated the case personally -- in the notorious "16
words" of his Jan. 28 State of the Union address -- the uranium had
been thoroughly integrated into his government's case for impending war
with Iraq.
 Will Scooter Fall
On His Prison Sword
To Protect Cheney and Rove?
The Libby Lies
Were Mostly To Protect Cheney
Sat - 29 Oct - When Special Counsel Fitzgerald finally
talked yesterday about 'Scooter' Libby trying to 'throw sand in his
eyes' to keep him from the truth of the CIAgate matter he had been
charged with investigating, this was really an under-the-table way of
saying the VP's top man and the President's Assistant has been the main
cover-up man as well as one of the key perpetrators in this matter.
Yesterday's nearly unprecedented oh-so-public White
House top aide indictment is not the end of things at all. While
the legal case is about one thing, the political and historical case
which gave rise to it are about far more important things. While
one man has been targeted so far, he was part of a top-level VP-guided
team whose specific task was to 'sell the Iraq war' based on lies,
misrepresentations, and defamation.
'Scooter' Neocon Libby can plead guilty, in which
case he will essentially be forced to cough up the evidence on
others. Or as is most likely he will hang tough, pretend innocence based on amnesia and faulty
memory, hope against hope for a jury acquital (remember O.J. and
Michael Jackson) or political turn of fate, and if the worst happens
expect some kind of pardon down the road. Recall Now: The
man now in the Bush/Cheney National Security Council in charge of the
Middle East was indicted for lying to Congress during the Reagan
second-term Iran-Contra scandal, only to be pardoned by Bush 41 and
brought back to power by Bush 43.
Prosecutor Fitzgerald shows every indication he is
planning to squeeze Libby hard. And he knows very well that the
last thing Bush-Cheney want is a public trial where the VP, Rove, and
maybe Condi and Hughes -- along with journalists Miller, Cooper,
Russert, Novak, et. al --
could all be brought to to the legal stand and the public stage to
testify under oath. Such a trial would dominate and expose
Bush-Cheney far more than the second-term Clinton impeachment trial in
fact. So this scandal has not yet climaxed, not by a long
shot. Indeed...yesterday's oh-so-public indictment is still the
legal-political foreplay state of things.
 ROVE and VP to
REMAIN UNDER INVESTIGATION
Fri - 28 Oct - IT DOESN'T END
TODAY: All the frantics manuevering in
the past few weeks, including Karl Rove's repeated half-day
questionning in front of the Grand Jury, worked it appears, to an
extent. For the moment, so Washington rumors have it early
this morning, while others will be indicted today Karl Rove will
not. BUT...and it's a very big but...he will remain under
investigation as will the Vice-President himself; thus assuring that
the CIAgate, IRAQgate scandal will continue to dominate Washington
affairs for some time to come. Great pressures will not be
brought on Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, and others in the know, to stop
dissembling and protecting and come clear...or face harsher music
themselves. Meanwhile, it's a good time to reflect a
bit. For what Karl Rove has been doing in the Bush #43 White
House has a long history going back as far as Nixon days when in fact
the top players of today -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, and yes Rove, were just
getting started. An excerpt from a forthcoming book:
Meanwhile, Bush's
partner-to-be in many, many dirty tricks, chief political advisor Karl
Rove, had been doing worse for a few years by then. In 1970, Rove posed
as a supporter of Alan Dixon, a Democratic candidate for state
treasurer in Illinois, and stole stationary from the campaign. He then
created a flier that lied about offering free beer, food and women at
Dixon's campaign opening event on the official stationary and
distributed thousands of copies to homeless centers and similar places.
Hundreds of the homeless showed up, effectively disrupting the event.
Rove
spent the Watergate years in similar actions and even was paid by
Republican organizations to lead seminars on college campuses,
lecturing young Republicans on how to engage in dirty tricks of their
own. You think all the phony fliers and dirty tricks in Florida in 2000
and Ohio in 2004 and other places were just coincidences? They were
born during Rove's Watergate-era seminars...
...During
Watergate, Bush Sr. headed the Republican National Committee and did
everything he could to keep Watergate quiet. In 1973, Bush even came up
with a phony plan to divert attention by accusing the late Carmine
Bellino, a committee investigator for the U.S. Senate committee
investigating Watergate, of trying to bug the hotel where Nixon stayed
preparing for the 1960 debates with JFK. The investigation into that
lie and dirty trick went on for more than two months, causing delays in
the Watergate committee's proceedings.
Bellino was eventually cleared, of course, but not before Bush almost
helped destroy the Watergate investigation. He might have succeeded had
people like Felt not been there to blow the whistle. That's why people
like Liddy and Buchanan and Bush call Felt a traitor, when he is a real
hero who understood that reporting what he saw through the
normal
channels of the Justice Department was not going to work since the
Justice Department destroyed evidence and worked directly in cahoots
with the criminal Nixon White House.
Many
people also erroneously believe Watergate was only about a relatively
minor burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters. It's
not. The criminal actions of the Nixon administration went way beyond
burglary to threatening to kill people, threatening to bomb liberal
think tanks, poisoning the food of at least one prominent Democrat,
presidential candidate Edmund Muskie, misusing public funds, illegally
abusing campaign contributions, and obstruction of justice, to name but
a few.
Still,
with all that crap that the Nixon adminstration did, those criminals
don't compare with the criminals of this Bush administration, which
only got to where it is by cheating, dirty tricks, lying and criminal
behavior. It's amazing we have sunk so low as a country that these Bush
criminals have the untouchable reputation they have and people are
accused of being traitors simply for telling the truth about them.
It
sickens me. But I continue to scream from my rooftop, to point the
finger, to cry out for more Deep Throats of our own generation, and Bob
Woodwards and Carl Bernsteins to use them, to at least pay attention to
memos like the British one that shows the Bush administration planned
to invade Iraq from the get-go. We need you, whistle blowers and media.
Find your guts. Find your courage, as W. Mark Felt and Bob Woodward
[the prior one, not the present] and Carl Bernstein did more than three
decades previously, before it's too late.
*
Jackson Thoreau, a Washington, D.C.-area journalist, contributed to Big Bush Lies,
published by RiverWood Books and available in bookstores across the
country. Thoreau's latest book, Thou Shalt Not Cheat: How
Bush and Rove Broke the Rules - From the Sandlot to the White House,
is due out later this year.
PREPARING
FOR ESCALATING WORLD CONFLICT
 Thu - 27 Oct - As The World Turns: The Israelis have announced an unrelenting
and continual enhanced assassination campaign -- "broad
and nonstop" -- and the Palestinians have resumed their suicide
bomber assault. The Iranians have re-announced the
intention of bringing about a "world
without Zionism" (i.e., no Jewish State of Israel), and the Israelis
and Americans continue plans to either 'regime change' or
militarily attack Syria and Iran, and by extension Lebanon (Hezbollah)
and Palestine (Hamas). The lulls of the moment mask the
frantic military, covert ops, political, and world opinion preparations
underway. Conflict far beyond the bloody turmoil in Iraq
could break out at any time now.
Add to the 'world opinion' category the news reports
today that the Pentagon's plans for a new generation of bunker-busting
'tactical' nuclear weapons are sidetracked. First the Congress
balked to publicly funding such new nuclear weapons; second the whole
idea of such visible development of still more U.S. nuclear weapons
while a campaign was on against far far smaller arsenals of weapons of
mass destruction by others didn't make much p.r. sense.
Nevertheless, the realities are that when it comes to weapons of mass
destruction the U.S. has more than all the rest of the world
combined. And when it comes to the Middle East, thanks to the
Americans and Europeans the Israelis have more wmd than all the rest of
the contries in the region combined.
Meanwhile the military-industrial
complex has money and power pouring in these days; so much so that
after windfall profits to the owners, managers, and shareholders,
there's plenty left to buy up media companies, hire public relations
firms, and propagandize through incessant clever advertising more than
ever before! Amazingly the current profits reports from
Exxon-Mobil show that the oil giant now has profits greater than
Microsoft, Boeing, and Walmart combined! Looks like Dick
Cheney and George Bush are doing a far better job where it counts --
for those who put them in power and keep them there -- than many of us
have been willing to give them credit for!
"No
it isn't Vietnam. It many ways it's worse than Vietnam"
- BBC Matt Frei yesterday
D-DAY LOOMS FOR BUSH/CHENEY
Wed - 26 Oct - It's D-Day in Washington
but.. You've
just got to love official Washington. While the Pentagon was
'asking'
the media not
to make Death 2000 in Iraq a 'milestone' -- that's of course only
counting American bodies -- the Senate of the United
States, neocon Norm Coleman presiding, did just that with all bowing
their heads in an official momentof silence and prayer.
As for Dick Cheney, whatever his fate, you've got to
admire his
fortitute. Even as his top aide, and maybe he himself, are facing
the
biggest challenge of his years in office -- one he may not hold too
much longer -- even so
he's coming out bigtime in still more opposition
to
the 90 Senators who defied his administration to insist on a legal ban
against torture of prisoners. Having failed even with
Presidential arm-twisting to prevent the legislation, Cheney, very
publicly and in a kind of last minute manuever, is leading the charge
to make the Senate's
anti-torture insistence applicable only to the Pentagon, not to the
CIA or whatever other secret commandos, prisons, gulags, allied
dungeons, etc. exist. In the end then Cheney and the neocons
want to twist the Senate's anti-torture determination to in fact
legalize
torture, as obviously those they want to screw will be dealt in the
future more or less in accordance to the big loopholes now in the
process of being pushed
through.
The Israelis are on a further
assassination rampage, Gaza is more a prison besieged by a foreign
military then ever, and today's quick-response suicide bombing killing
six and injuring dozens more just further underscores all the lies and
duplicity that surround the 'Palestinian issue'...one of the great
originating poisons whose ramifications helped lead to 9/11.
Meanwhile in Iran the new President has escalating
the rhetoric considerably and thrown down the gauntlet so to
speak to Israel and U.S.-patron. The Israelis take this
kind of thing very seriously -- it will only further their desire to
attack, but this time more then eve they lack the ability to do the job
and have to get the U.S. to do it more directly than Washington
prefers. Even so...a much greater Middle East war could
break out now at any time.
Tue - 25 Oct - Bush/Cheney
Dark Days: Bush's real darkest days are
likely now to get still darker, possibly even leading to lights
out. How interesting that Sunday evenings episode of the
popular TV show The West  Wing
featured President Bartlet abruptly firing one of his closest aides for
divulging classified information to a reporter from the New York Times.
What a revelation it must be to people in the
Middle East to read in today's Washington
Post that in his arguments with the former National
Security Adviser, now Secretary of State, another former National
Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, believes past U.S. Middle East
policies were so very successful that they resulted in fact in "50
years of peace". The millions dead from Algeria to Egypt to
Lebanon to Iran and Iraq, not to mention occupied Palestine, Chechnya,
and Afghanistan, must marvel at such a crazy distortion of their
history, their suffereing, their bloodletting -- most with so much
American complicity if not outright responsibility.
Meanwhile of course it is the current
Washington political bloodletting over the neocon foreign policy, the
Iraq War, and the still-escalating plans for further strikes, 'regime
changes', and military assaults in the Middle East that has occassioned
such vicious exchanges and back-stabbing among the Washington
'conservative' powerful. Today's short Washington
Post article is but a limited partial summary of the extraordinary
feuding now underway within Republican ranks -- there are many
additional insights and links provided in previous days here at BW.
Meanwhile as well Mahmoud Abbas -- the
Palestinian annointed by the U.S., Israel, and primarily Egypt among
the Arab 'client regimes' -- was used and abused as a prop for the
cameras last week at the White House. Abbas attempted to maintain
his composure -- he's pretty good at that actually -- but it was really
a disastrous Washington visit, coming soon after his chat with Ariel
Sharon got abruptly canceled. Abbas was not only quite
publicly stiffed and humiliated when Bush -- impromptu and not planned
Abbas insists -- chose not only to publicly put off the 'Palestinian
State' again, this time into the distant uncharted future, but
annnounced it wasn't going to be while he was President. But then
the so-called 'roadmap' was always another rhetorical trick and
delaying tactic -- now it has been reduced to a road to nowhere other
than increased worse-than-apartheid realities for the barricaded
Palestinians. Now this kind of political two-step has really been
going on in Washington with regard to the 'Palestinian issue' since the
Carter years; yet the VIP Palestinians keep coming back time after time
for more deceptions, lies and tricks from Washington -- and oh
yes...their money and CIA help staying in power, let's not forget that.
"Scooter"
Libby, Judy Miller, and the Israel
Connection
Mon
- 24 Oct - The Israeli
Connection: It's a question that needs to be asked
much more loudly now. Why aren't the big newspapers and TV news
networks investigating the Israeli connection
to the CIAgate/IRAQgate scandal now dominating Washington? With
the close connections of at least Libby, and maybe Miller as well, to
Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, and with their super close connections
to the Israelis, this Israeli connection
should have been long ago a major subject of inquiry. Could it be
they just don't want to know? Could it be that the connections
are too damning to too many? Could it be that there are in fact
many powerful Jewish Israeli-connected persons at the highest levels of
press ownership and party politics who keep protecting the Israelis
from being exposed for their role in all that has happened, most
especially the false 'intelligence' that was used to justify the Iraq
invasion and all the political intrique surrounding U.S. Middle East
policies?
And if we needed any more hard pushing to look into
all this take into account that before coming back to government with
Cheney and Wolfowitz in 2001 "Scooter" Lewis Libby was the attorney for
non other than Marc Rich. Remember him? The reclusive
billionaire so mysteriously and so controversially pardoned by Bill
Clinton in his last days practically as he went out the door at the
White House. Among other things Mr. Rich is thought to have had
considerable entangling Mossad connections over the years; and in fact
it was those connections to the Israelis me thinks which got Clinton to
fulfill his promise and do the pardon -- which he did at the last
minute against everyone's advice including his own Justice Department
which he mostly kept in the dark to the end.
And oh yes, one further piece to the puzzle.
Remember Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon "analyst" caught earlier this
year conspiring with the Israeli-Jewish Lobby (AIPAC in this case) and
who recently pleaded guilty to a kind of spying for the
Israelis? Franklin was brought into the Pentagon by Doug
Feith, #3 in the Pentagon since departed, who worked for Paul
Wolfowitz, #2 in the Pentagon since departed -- both of whom have a
long history of multiple entanglements with the Israelis as well as
being the primary Bush/Cheney Administration officials who pushed and
pushed and pushed to make sure the Iraq invasion took place damn the
facts.
Maybe Patrick Fitzgerald did not consider this
Israeli connection within his assigned pervue. If not,
either Fitzgerald should now be asking for more powers to expand his
investigation into such important political historical terrain; or
maybe the world's international big media should start doing its job
much better than has been the case to date.
Judy Miller, Israel Lobby, 'Bogus Intelligence', and Iraq Invasion
Sun
- 23 Oct - The public
CIAgate scandal is really about the still largely hidden IRAQgate
scandal: It's only because of the very
unusual circumstances of a Grand Jury and a Special Counsel like
Patrick Fitzgerald that after these critical years we only now find
about about Judy Miller's many once-secret meetings with top government
officials who planted crucial stories through her into the New York Times. But the
scandal now publicly unfolding in Washington is just a resultant once
dealing with a CIA operative and lying about meetings and
strategies. The still largely hidden and much more important
scandal deals with who planted and manipulated the 'bogus intelligence'
that brought about the Iraqi invasion...the 'intelligence' that was
used to lie and distort to the U.S. Senate, to the U.N. Security
Council, and continually to the American public. And who
except for the New York Times
itself is now in a position to push Judy to answer the following and
other questions or do something much worse for her than her VIP
jail-time...fire her! 
* Judy, did you ever meet with people connected with the Israeli lobby
or think-tank Near East Institute about Iraq?
* Judy, did you ever meet with people
connected with JINSA or other such groups about weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq?
* Judy, who originally introduced you to Ahmed
Chalabi and with such a past as his why were you so amazingly gullible?
* Judy, have you ever met with any Mossad
officials, or persons you thought might be connected with Mossad, or
Uzi Arad?
* Judy, did you ever meet with Paul Wolfowitz,
Doug Feith, or others working with them in the Pentagon?
Political Tsunami About to Hit
Official Washington
Send Hariri Assassination to the World Court
Sat
- 22 Oct - Washington
Holding Breadth as Bush Tries More Diversions: The Special Council has  launched a website,
clearly it seems in anticipation of being the center of attention in
the weeks ahead as indictments of top officials in the Bush/Cheney
Administration looms.
What's happening at American University is so sadly
telling about how a major university can be so corrupted by the ways of
Washington. It's not just that the current President has been
such a hustler and now has to be fired with a big multi-million dollar
'please go away' package. This is the same university that took
so much money from Adnan Kashoggi and put his name up high on campus
for all to see. This is the same university that houses former
Arab League Ambassador Clovis Maksound with all of his shenanigans over
the years. This is the same university that for years before 9/11
made a secret deal wih the Saudis to take in so many of the rich and
powerful sons and daughters, most of whom didn't have a chance of being
admitted based on any scholastic criteria. I could go on but
let's move on...
Send the Hariri Killing to the World Court
indeed. It's a good idea, whatever the politics and that it is Harari's
son calling for this bold step. Washington will object -- the
self-centered hubristic crusading Americans always do when it comes to
anything international that they can't control and manipulate.
But so what this time. It's an international matter indeed and
rather than playing patsy all the time the U.N. should in fact take up
the Lebanon on this one. And while we're at it what about that
nearly unanimous World Court ruling that Israel's worse-than-apartheid
policies are illegal and must be ended? And while we're at it
where was the U.N. when it came to investigating the assassination of
the paralyzed-blind sheik who founded Hamas, the alleged assassination
of Yasser Arafat, or even the terrible Qana massacre where the U.N.
itself has promised protection to hundreds of civilians who were
massacred by the Israelis?
Rita Hauser Blocks 'New America' from
calling it straight on Israel &
Jews
Fri
- 21 Oct - Mentioning JEWS
and ISRAEL Still OFF LIMITS at New
America despite escalating Republican Civil War: Wednesday at the New  America Foundation
in downtown Washington was not the first time the Republican
'moderates' lashed out at the Republican
neocon 'cabal' with special
darts aimed at VP Cheney and Pentagon
chief Rumsfeld. It was however the first time New America made such big news,
largely thanks to the Financial Times
which featured both the story, and the transcript, pushing the Washington
Post and others
to join in.
New America
some time ago purposefully became a sounding board
for those hoping to take back the Republican party from its far
right-wing crusading ideologues. Like Brookings for liberals and AEI for neocons, New America has aspirations of
power for its people in new administrations to come. And as
activist think-tank holding-tanks go New
America even enjoys mixing mainly conservative Democrats with
mainly liberal Republicans -- a very centrist approach in polarized
Washington.
BUT there is a big BUT to New America's self-professed
allegiance to serious and open discussion about what's gone so wrong
with the current America. Even though the key Washington neocons
are intimately linked to the Israelis
in general and Ariel Sharon specifically; you'd never know this from
listening to New America
forums. Even though the neocons
are primarily Jewish by religion, right-wing Zionists by ideology, and
intimately tied to a number of leading
American Jewish lobbying and propaganda organizations by politics,
you'd never know this from listening to New America discussions.
These
crucial subjects are off limits at New
America just like at
other corporate and foundation sponsored think-tanks in
Washington. There's the considerable fear factor operating
here;
and of course the money factor as well.
One of the reasons
for New America's blockage is
a woman
by the name of Rita Hauser (that's her in the picture at a Mayflower
Hotel New America forum she helped sponsor and control last
month).
Hauser has long been part of a 'cabal' herself -- this one associated
with a number of key Jewish organizations and tied to the Council on
Foreign Relations which itself is now hooked big-time into Washington
affairs. On the whole
those associated with this other 'cabal' have long fronted in the U.S.
for Israel's Labor-party; just as others provide a similar service for
Israel's Likud party. With money
grants coming from the Hauser Foundation among like-minded others New America
has essentially allowed itself to be bought off when it
comes to open and honest discussion about the Israeli and
Jewish influences and connections that are a major aspect to how the
U.S. got pushed into pursuing such disastrous policies. So even
when New America's speakers
and writers loudly
castagate the crusading neocons -- as Colin Powell's former Chief of
Staff did so boldly Wednesday
at New America -- any
serious and oh-so-needed focus on the Jewish and Israeli aspects to who
is whom and who is behind what is off limits
at New America.
Not so different after all from the old America -- just a little more
hypocritical, 'bi-partisan', and
quasi-intellectual.
"Colin
Powell, Have you no shame?"
- Univ Photographer, Univ of Buffalo yesterday
Thu
- 20 Oct - SHAMELESS WASHINGTON
FRACTURING AT THE TOP: With Colin Powell's former Chief
of Staff at the  State
Department and long-time friend breaking ranks and viciously
assaulting the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Bush 'cabal' in public yesterday,
it's more clear then ever that we have a government exploding from
within not witnessed here since the second-term Nixon
days. Colonel Wilkenson unloaded
on the 'cabal' at the New American Foundation in downtown
Washington yesterday. Then Colin
Powell himself raced forward to salute one more time last evening,
once again trying to deflect the attacks on those he so dutifully
served. As a black man there is the inescapable Uncle Tom ring to
things, no matter how few dare to say so in public.
Noteably Wilkenson did comment about how 'loyalty to country' should
trump loyalty to government or personal career -- but apparently after
all those years of Pentagon saluting and being a token black man at the
highest levels of white power in Washington Powell just doesn't get
it...even now (see 14 Oct).
Meanwhile Mahmoud
Abbas is in town to get his marching orders, more money, more CIA
help...and just about anything the Americans can think of to keep him
in power against Hamas. But the more they embrace him the more
there is fear about the 'kiss of death'...
Wed - 19 Oct - JUSTICE DENIED and IMPERIALISM
ASSAULTED:
In 1982 after an assassination attempt the brutal ruthless Saddam
Hussein had maybe 150 Iraqi men and boys arrested, tortured and
killed. For
that today he f inally goes on
trial. In 1982 after very public American promises to
protect
Palestinian refugees in Israeli-invaded Lebanon, the brutal and
ruthless Ariel Sharon coordinated the massacre of thousands of
defenseless Palestinian woman and children by the Christian Lebanese
Phalange fighting on Israel's side. Though an official Israeli
Commssion of Inquiry found Sharon 'indirectly responsible' and
recommended he never again serve in government Sharon is today the
Prime Minister of Israel. More recently in 1988 Saddam
Hussein ordered chemical weapons used on the Kurdish city of Hallabjah
and many thousands of civilians were horribly killed. But
Saddam is not being tried for this more horrendous crime, and that may
be because Saddam was not only then the ally of the United States but
the weapons he used were purchased from, and the money he used to do so
came from, the U.S. and other western countries. Selective crimes
and prosecutions make the trial of Saddam Hussein that begins today
more than problematical. And what is taking place today in
heavily occupied by American troops Baghdad is hardly to be considered
justice.
Meanwhile brigades are training in Venezuela, Iran,
and Syria for anticipated U.S. attacks if further CIA 'regime-change'
efforts fail, as they did in Iraq for more than a decade.
Two days after he probably watched Louis Farakhan
denounce U.S. imperialism in front of the U.S. capitol -- along with a
far milder and much more diplomatic Prime Minister of Jamaica who
himself followed Fidel Castro's man, Ricardo Allarcon, from Havana -- Robert
Mugabe of Zimbabwe lashed out at the U.S. and Great Britain from a
U.N. forum in Rome. Hugo Chavez did much the same from the
rostrum of the General Assembly at the U.N. in New York last
month. Mugabe's ruthless and abominable policies in his own
country notwithstanding, these are speeches deserving of being read and
the underlying realities need to be far more openly discussed and
debated.
Tue
- 18 Oct - Washington Smelling,
Bumbling, Fearing: Everywhere there are so many
forms of duplicity and corruption now in official as well as unofficial
Washington. Finally Judith Miller is being exposed for what
she really has been for some time -- an on-the-take and on-the-make agenda-driven deceitful 'journalist' propagating shit
loads of neocon disinformation through the lead pages of the NYTimes causing so much harm to
world affairs, to her newspaper, and finally so deservedly to
herself. It's time journalistic complicity and corrupting
connections to big power, big money, and special interest lobbies were
themselves the subject of some big media investigations.
"Commanders
had sought to play down the role of the U.S. military
in the
referendum, portraying the vote as a critical step in the transfer
of
authority to Iraqi forces. But when the day finally arrived...it showed
precisely the reverse: how the U.S. military remains an
all-encompassing
presence in Iraq's political process."
The
purging and coveruping at the CIA is ongoing and far more important
at th end of the day than JudyGate. From the White House, State
Department and Pentagon it's one distortion and misrepresentation after
another -- I'm purposefully choosing the most charitable expressions
for the dastardly realities. Nearly every day now if one
carefully reads even the Washington
Post it's one scandal, lie, corruption seeping out after
another. Sunday
on the front page for instance there was the sorry tale of one of
Washington's top lobbyists exposing -- in a way rarely done in such
detail -- the legalized legislative corruption and the miserable
campaign finance 'system' that have so badly undermined government
credibility and American democracy. As for Iraq the
American imposed Constitution, with the American military pretending
to be 'invisible', has already partitioned the country in reality
if not yet on the map, with an escalating civil war already the
result. A generation ago the Americans did much the same in
Southeast Asia killing 50,000+ of their own and many millions of
'gooks' in those days...all based on the gross lies, deceptions, and
hubristic imperialism now recreated even worse than before.
As for Christian Evangelist Harriet Miers, now that
we know she thinks George Bush was 'the greatest governor ever' in
Texas, not to mention 'the smartest person she's ever known', such
stupidities ought to be enough for everyone to conclude this is a woman
not up to the Supreme Court job regardless of her views, assuming she
has them, about specific Constitutional issues. As I said quite
some time ago now the likelihood is Ms. Miers will find one way or
another to pull out of this mess before she is subjected to a
ruthlessly grueling public dissection. But then, who knows, she
just might conclude that if Clarence Thomas could get through it all
with such terrible embarrassments so can she. For the sheer
spectacle of it all let's hope she does come to the fight...and then
let's pray she gets knocked out before the bell
sounds.
INSULTING CHINA
Mon
- 17 Oct - Insulting
China + the real CIA scandals:
At last check the Communist Party still ruled in the world's most
populous country. Even so the Americans are intent on rubbing
more salt into the 'defeat of communism' with a new Washington monument
near Capitol Hill. They haven't however chosen a replica of
the Berlin Wall, or for that matter of Sputnik or the U-2. The
haven't chosen anything relating to the Soviet Union of old at all in
fact. They've instead chosen the "Goddess
of Democracy" to cast in bronze.
Now the "Goddess", otherwise known as
Lady Liberty, was a crude Statue of Liberty off-shoot. It was
erected by protesting students in 1989 in Tianamen Square. That's
in the heart of Beijing. It was destroyed in a ruthless bloody
suppression which history records as one of the dark moments of
resurgent post-Cultural Revolution China. Yet at last check a big
portrait of Mao
and lots of big red flags continue to fly over Tianamen, regardless of
the pretentions and presumptions of Evangelical Neocon Crusading
Washington. And just who is on course to defeat whom in
this contempoary world of ours is not very clear at all anymore.
Meanwhile, Washington is all abuzz about the
MillerGate/CIAgate Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame affair that is threatening
to bring down the top Presidential and Vice-Presidential aides Rove and
Libby. As tintillating interesting as this buzz is it's really
quite a sideshow masking the purging, the expanding, and the
covering-up that is actually redefining the CIA's role in world affairs
and in American foreign policy for some time to come. With the
agency on a big-time hiring and infiltrating binge more and more all
Americans abroad -- and many right here at home -- are going to be
suspect...and treated accordingly. Read
more...even if I do have to refer to a Wash Times Op Ed in this
case.
HOW
MANY MEETINGS DID MILLER HAVE WITH ROVE, SCOOTER, NEOCONS ABOUT IRAQ?
Sun
- 16 Oct - Washington and Middle
East Exploding: Now we learn that neocon
Israeli-connected NYTimes journalist Judy Miller had at least three
private meetings with the Vice-President's Chief of Staff, including a
private two-hour breakfast at the St. Regis two blocks from the White
House, about the Ambassador  Wilson-wife-WMD-CIA
scandal. But the real
question that should be asked and answered in view of the role
Miller, the NYTimes, and top
officials in the Bush Administration jointly played in stacking the
deck with lies to push the invasion/occupation of Iraq is HOW MANY PRIVATE MEETINGS did Miller
have with leading Bush/Cheney/Pentagon/CIA officials in the months
leading up to the Iraq invasion and which lead to all the disingenuous
and deceitful and falacious stories published in the NYTimes at that crucial period of
history.
The Bush/Cheney Administration has never been
more unpopular nor more afraid. It's all about power and politics
in Washington, not really about 'terrorism' or 'demoracy' or
'freedom'...all disengenuous conceptual smokescreens in
fact. Iraq is effectively partitioned in reality even if
one name still remains on the map -- escalating ongoing civil war is
the most likely future now. The two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is essential over; apartheid
the actual reality and escalating civil war more and more likely
there as well.
Today on ever-more-fearful
PBS another leading neocon and Israeli-appologist, Ben Wattenberg of
AEI (American Enterprise Institute), interviewed his own boss who
heads up AEI, and did quite a job of whitewashing and obscuring the
realities of the Neocon conservative corporate-sponsored AEI
think-rank that has played such a role in hyping and promoting
Bush/Cheney policies, as well as masking and obscuring the important
think-tank phenomena in Washington. The program Think-Tank is
itself another of the increasingly inadequate and right-wing programs
on PBS, the result of a withering right-wing assault on the once far
more independent public network. Wattenberg himself is getting
olding and more bumbling as he goes, was clearly unwilling and maybe
unable, to ask really serious and probing questions with his follow-ups
pathetic when even existent.
A few days ago the Bush propaganda machine was
publicly exposed more than usual. The Persident had been
portrayed having an improptu discussion with troops in Iraq by
sattelite hook-up. But shortly after it was touted and
squeezed for political gain a video emerged of the scripting, coaching,
and set-up of questions and answers that took place with the troops
prior to the discussion with the President.
Sat
- 15 Oct - Abdullahs of Arabia
and the CIA: The al-Saud Dynasty knows from whence
it came, and knows who keeps it in power and in sub-control. It's
a complicated subject of course but at the end of the day the answer is
the CIA. And with so many advisers, public relations types,
and former diplomats and agents on the Saudi American payroll in
Washington the explanation for why King Abdullah 'chose' a prominent
American Jewish journalist for his first television interview as King
is not such a mystery really. The other Abdullah of course is the
Hashemite King of Jordan, even more directly tied to and kept in power
by 'the company', 'the agency', you know who. The following
from a very concerned observant reader in Florida about the Barbara
Walters interview with Abdullah of Arabia broadcast on ABC's 20/20 last
evening. I'll have abit to say about my own trip with Barbara to
Egypt nearly twenty years ago later this:
As I watched
Barbara Walter's interview with King Abdullah, I was reminded of what
is so wrong with U.S media, why Americans are so
misinformed with regard to our history of involvement in the Middle
East and why the world views us with such distrust!
In tonight's segment, Barbara Walters
placed a great deal of emphasis on the repression, subjugation and
general mistreatment of women in Arab
countries. In short, it was more of the same negative images of
Arab peoples which are so pervasive in this society.
Images which have helped reinforce the many
negative stereotypes and made it impossible for serious dialogue and
cross-cultural understanding to occur between Americans and Arabs.
What I found interesting (if not appalling!)
during this interview, was the fact Ms. Walters neglected to mention
both Karen Hughes and Mrs. Bush's visits to the Middle East.
Visits in which both Ms. Bush and Ms. Hughes received an earful from
Arab women for the negative images of them and Arabs in general
presented by U.S media as well as the wars in Iraq and a foreign policy
which has created enemies for generations to come.
But perhaps what was most telling was that
at the end of the interview, the host asked Ms. Walters if Arabs
(specifically in Saudi Arabia) were influenced by American
television. She commented on the number of television sets (34)
that were located in the Palace and that U.S television has had a
profound effect of Arabs. At the end of her comment, the host
chimed in with "maybe we can make a difference (in reference to
creating change in Arab culture)".
Not only did I find these comments
condescending and arrogant, but also a grossly overvalued image of
America in the region and an outright denial of reality!
International research and opinion polls world wide consistently show
an increasing hostility of the U.S not only in Arab countries, but
African, Asian, Latin American and European countries as well.
Until we face up to our actions and take a
serious approach to correcting behaviors which, have resulted in these
negative opinions of this country at the international level, world's
anger of us will continue to persist if not worsen.
The only way that these changes are going to
occur is if, our political leadership and our media become willing to
assume their responsibilities and somehow find the moral courage to
tell us the truth about ourselves!
Timothy Stinson
Miami Lakes, Florida
"Make no mistake about it,
information is a weapon...
Information
dominance. Defining the future."
- Northrup Grumman Ad on WTOP Radio this
morning
Fri
- 14 Oct - Incestuous, Inbred,
Controlling Washington: More and more the war corporations,
the profiteering oil conglomerates, and the
government-sponsored-and-or-manipulated think-tanks, NGOs, and 'private
organizations', are collectively attempting to dominate and control the
major media, especially in so far as how Washington is covered.
Owning and controlling the means of information has become a
sub-category of owning and controlling the means of production.
Crafting and hyping, spinning and projecting 'the message' has become
more and more an integral part of policy formulation and implimentation
in corporate Washington.
When a few thousand of the well-healed Washington insiders gathered
last night at the Washington Hilton this too was a part of the
ever-expanding increasingly incestuous Washington game -- one filled
with incessant self-congratulations, with awards exchanged with each
other, and with making sure the darker and much more truthful side of
contemporary affairs both at home and abroad remain heavily fogged from
view. Last night at the Hilton it was the Black
establishment's turn to pay
tribute to themselves, proclaim they are indeed significantly helping
the
desperately ill and dying on the African continent, and annoint one of their own,
former Secretary of State General Colin Powell, as Africare's great
'humanitarian' champion. No matter that just the day before an
astounding poll revealed that just 2% of American Blacks approve
of the policies of the regime General Powell not only served, but the
one for which he so disastrously prostrated himself in front of the
whole world at the United Nations Security Council. Indeed
you know that political incest and
inbreeding have reached rather unconscionable levels in Washington when
there's the blatant and unchallenged 'chutzpah' to give a
'humanitarian' award to a man like General Powell. True, he's
quite
a salesman and showman. True he knows how to politically dance
the
two-step. True he has projected himself as far more personable
than many of the others around him. But after all there's a grim
and bloody historical record and result to what Powell and his have
actually done and to what Powell, even after being pushed out of Foggy
Bottom, continues to front for as he did again last evening.
Ironically, upon leaving the Hilton dinner and driving home up
Connecticut Avenue I found myself behind a late model SUV with a
prominent bumper sticker (the picture on the right, Powell is on the
left) proclaiming 'ReDefeat Bush'. I found myself
actually laughing out loud...but sighing
inside.
MIERS NOMINATION, CHENEY INDICTMENT, and IRAQ could sink BUSH/CHENEY
REGIME
Thu
- 13 Oct - Bush/Cheney
CIA/Pentagon Deceptions and Manipulations Everywhere:
From Washington to Iraq the
heavy-handed propaganda orchestrated from official Washington and
associated groups and organizations has never been more
extensive. But even so, and despite so much money and
effort, the poll numbers for the Washington officials have rarely been
more ominous -- at home as well as abroad. Amazingly,
'astoundingly' according to NBC Meet the Press Host Tim Russert, only
2% of Black Americans -- that's
right 2% it's not a misprint -- approve of the way George Bush
is leading the country. Overall only 39% of all Americans
approve.
Things are so bad for Bush Washington now that unprecedented low poll
numbers are resulting in unprecedentedly controversial Presidential
steps. A few days ago (see 11 Oct) there was the 6am rather corny
TV photo op in Khakis on the Today
Show. But earlier today things reached a new unprecedented
low level. With the Harriet Miers confirmation in doubt, and with
the Bush/Cheney Presidency now on the line, for the first time in
anyone's memory a President said in public he had selected a Supreme
Court nominee because of religion!
Just weeks ago the White House was loudly and repeatedly insisting that
a person's religion was off-limits when talking about the Supreme Court
and the confirmation process. Now, facing a humiliating
defeat that would in essence mark the effective end of the Bush/Cheney
Presidency, Bush
himself came forward to applaud his lawyers religion -- which, by
the way, is for many Americans a rather far-right extreme
Evangelicism...you know, the the born-again, Apacalypse-coming,
Left-behind kind of thing which also includes a kind of near-fanatical
adherence to 'life at conception' and rabbid anti-abortionism.
It still seems hard to imagine this really happening next year, BUT it
now does seem possible the Democratic party could take control of the
House, and at least narrow the gap in the Senate. And if
such a reversal of political fortunes should really occur with the
Bush/Cheney administration unable to reverse the harshly negative
polls, the whispered talk of impeachment might quickly become much more
mainstream and primetime.
 Wed
- 12 Oct - 'Don't Worry Be Happy'
Bush Assures Gullible VIP Palestinians:
Gullible indeed for they have been sold such lies and tricks for so
long by so many...now with George Bush handing out lots of meaningless
reassurances and the VIP on-the-take Palestinians sitting in their
assigned seats. Especially when it comes to Bush, words and
photo-ops and gestures are all he's really got to offer. And so
he and his
keep right on going with the political-historical charade bringing
about so much death
and destruction and hatred as a result. The latest 'impromptu'
White House meeting last week with 'Palestinian Authority' types
was first reported yesterday. While these VIP types were serving
the Bush
Administration's needs in Washington their weakman, Mahmoud Abbas, was
getting stood up stood up again by Ariel Sharon in the
shriveled/cut-to-pieces homeland -- the guns and bombs, the fences and
walls, speaking the actual apartheid realities that the Americans have
not only brought about but paid for and covered up.
As for the involvement
of Karen Hughes in all this here's a bit of what has been said
about her recent 'listening tour' -- her first and only visit ever to
the Middle East by the way.
"Painfully
clueless . . . pedestrian . . . vapid . . . gushy." Arab News
"The marquee clown [in] America's
circus diplomacy . . . total ineptitude . . . total disconnect." Al-Jazeerah
"Preachy, culturally
insensitive, superficial PR blitz." USA Today
"Faux
Pas Trifecta; saying too much, saying the wrong thing, saying anything
at all." Washington Times
op-ed page
"Non-answers,
canned message,
macabre." Los Angeles Times
"Fiasco,
lame attempt at bonding." Slate.com
As for Bush's
overall credibility, these quotes today from a Washington Times story about the
White House selling of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court sum things
up. The
Palestinian VIPs should, but with past history the guide won't, take
note:
"I don't know anybody who is buying
what the White House is selling here," said one Republican
staffer.
"They're putting out a bunch of positive rhetoric, but they're not
putting any substance behind it," said another.
Miserable U.N. Failures:
Disaster
after disaster - most recently the worst earthquake disaster since the
U.N.'s founding - the world organization just can't seem to get its
act together. If ever there was something the 'United
Nations' should have come forward to prepare for and coordinate it's
natural disasters -- especially those that occur in the poorest and
most needy areas of the world. Yet 60 years after being founded
the U.N. is hardly involved in any serious and independent way, always
falling back on the pathetic excuse that 'we can only do what the
member states let us and tell us'.
Tue
- 11 Oct - Bush at
6am:
When George Bush is up at 6am dressed in khakis, wife Laura giving him
the nods and cues, very much acting as the 'Twit' he is -- to quote
Kurt Vonnegut again (see 9 Oct) -- you know he's in the biggest
trouble
of his Presidency. There he was this morning hammer in his
pocket pretending to be a workman building a house in the devastated
areas he so badly neglected and mismanaged until his poll numbers
skydived on him. There he was this morning bright and early on
the Today Show from Louisiana speaking and gesturing more twit-like
than usual in fact as it was all live and semi-spontaneous for maybe 10
minutes or so. But if the polls don't start bouncing back, if
Iraq continues to explode (regardless of 'election' outcome on
Saturday), if Rove and/or Libby or underlings are indicted in
CIAgate/IRAQgate, and maybe if something further 'unexpected' should
happen, we better all fear what a wounded and bleeding Bush/Cheney
White House might try to do in this world sooner rather than later.
BUSH DEPRESSED AND DRINKING?
Mon
- 10 Oct - White House
Depression:
If indicted Karl Rove, a.k.a. 'Bush's Brain', and the key political
operative in Bush Washington, will have to leave the
White House...and that just might push the President over the edge.
Add to what to expect in the weeks ahead the growing possibiity
that Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers may
well be forced to withdraw rather than attempt to stand up to murderous
questions in a Senate hearing. On her own things would be dicey
enough, but following so soon after John Roberts it's hard to imagine
her coming out very well with so many knives out to get her.
Meanwhile rumors
of collective chaos and depression in the Bush/Cheney White House,
and in the Oval
Office itself, are growing in visibility and credibility. At the
same time more
and more the 'rumors' about striking
Iran seem to be taking on a life of there own even as other
whispers
of a Bush
Booze Crisis escalate. Back in 1973 a beleaguered Nixon
White House set up mechanisms of control and double-check so that a
drinking and
increasingly paranoid President could not ignite World War III -- with
Henry Kissinger monitoring and the Secretary of Defense himself
alerting the Chiefs that he personally had to verify any orders that
might come from the Commander-in-Chief. More
soon.... This Washington crisis is hardly over...it
is in fact really just beginning.
BUSH THE "TWIT" -
HAMAS
TAKEOVER?
Sun
- 9 Oct - Bush the "TWIT":
Kurt Vonnegut (remember him from SlaughterHouse Five, et.
al.?) showed  what you can do when
you're 83, just about finished, and decide to have your say. On
PBS during Prime-Time in fact on Friday eve Vonnegut in fact summed
up
things with our God-instructed President with a single word, uttered
quite a few times in fact...he's
a "twit".
And it took Vonnegut only a few more words to describe the bleak
realities of our current American polity - sham democracy indeed.
Vonnegut is as close to a modern-day Mark Twain as we're ever going to
get.
Meanwhile the contradictions inherent in
U.S./Israeli policies in the Middle East are becoming more evident as the days go on. The civil
war in Iraq is now well underway; indeed it's no longer likely the
country can hold together other than maybe on the map, though the
Americans will insist they did all they could with the
Washington-imposed Constitution said to be the best that was
possible. In Palestine as well civil war lurks more than
ever -- something the Israelis have tried for years to bring about and
now with Bush's help, masked by all his duplicitously sanctimonious
rhetoric about a false 'Palestinian State' -- it is nearly
here. Palestinian
groups in Gaza came together yesterday (see picture above) for a rare
joint Press Conference letting it be known, however obliquely, that if
the U.S., Israel, and P.A. push any further for civil war they will get
it with all the popular opposition groups united in an alignment
against them. Meanwhile weak and corrupted Mahmoud Abbas,
who still must appear in public with pictures of Arafat to maintain his
marginal legimacy (see picture to right also yesterday), has been
put on notice many times by his own, but never so publicly, and never
with the situation so near ignition. In Washington a
private newsletter is circulating saying that private the U.S.
government is warning on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that a Hamas
take-over of the U.S.-Israeli established and funded 'Palestinian
Authority' is now possible, maybe even likely.
Sat
- 8 Oct - Bush's Stupid Veto
Threat:
The political wobbliness of the current
Bush/Cheney/Rove White House is evident in
many ways these days, but never more than the meaningless and rather
stupid 'veto' threat in the past few days. With a Senate
vote of
90 out of a 100 in favor, for the White House to publicly threaten
to
veto the Pentagon spending bill over an anti-Abu Ghraib anti-torture
anti-prisoner abuse provision is a remarkably sloppy
blunder. True the White House is still hoping to
manuever things on Capitol Hill in conference committee to either
water-down or eliminate the
anti-torture provision; but even so doing it in public in such a way
while at the same time sending Karen Hughes to the Middle East to
'repair' America's image shows how confused and bumbling the Bush team
is at this point, even after so many years of practice. Like a
boxer in the ring hit from many sides -- still standing,
but noticeably dizzy -- the Bush Presidency itself is now at
stake. With
Iraq deadlocked in quasi-civil war, more indictments of top Bush/Cheney
officials looming, just 37% of the public now approving of Bush's
reign, a major challenge from the right over Harriet Miers the
President's friend for the Supreme Court, and the national budget way
out of wack -- another big
hurricane, or terrorist success, or further oil price escalation, or
political scandal
-- could do more than just neuter what's left of the Bush/Cheney
Presidency; such could even bring down the current Washington Regime or
alternatively push it to light the fuse for a much bigger yet Middle
East imbloglio.
 Fri
- 7 Oct - God, Bush, American
Hubris Extraordinaire:
"Imagination run amok" says one federal
official about the latest NYC "subway alert" that began last night with
a prime-time press conference. Sooner or later of course
something somewhere will happen, whether in a subway or movie theatre
or restaurant, and they will say "we told you so". Meanwhile a
huge expenditure of manpower and money is draining American resources
for "security" and causing growing alarm and confusion from the
public. When the next blowup does come after all the steps taken
and money spent to prevent it, the public's confidence will be further
eroded and the
cycle will start all over again at an even more heightened
level.
George Bush 2003: 'I am driven
with a
mission from God'. God would tell me, 'George go and
fight these
terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me
'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I
did... And
now, again, I
feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get
the Palestinians their state and
get the Israelis their security, and
get peace in the Middle East'.
And, by God, I'm gonna do it."
George Bush 2005:
"We're facing a radical ideology with unalterable objectives:
to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world."
Meanwhile the BBC is once again exposing for
the world the realities of
the Bush/Cheney/Neocon/Evangelical regime -- this time it's the Bush-God connection.
Of course the Bush White House quickly jumped in to say oh
no...but then we all have known for a long time now that something
basic is quite wrong with the psyche of GB and with the purist
crusading zealotry of his confounding regime,
haven't we? Meanwhile GB's big
speech yesterday at what is called the National
Endowment or Democracy -- one of the original Reagan-Era Neocon
creations funded by Congress -- didn't talk directly about God
personally...but from what we can tell he was definitely thought to be
there in spirit if not in person.
Actually though you've got to sympathize
a bit with this particular American President, a man so limited in so
many ways yet a man holding such power for eight long years.
First of all he did in fact tell us more than once as he campaigned for
the office that he had personally found Jesus Christ and been 'saved'
by him. And then, in rare moments of reflection, surely GW must
continually wonder how in the world he could ever have become the
President of the American Empire were it not for special devine
intervention on his behalf.
Thu
- 6 Oct - WAR Industry
Propaganda: If we had a really mature and more
honorably decent country in world affairs the war industries (yes let's
call them what they really are) would be prevented from propagandizing
like a 'Ministry of Information and Thought Control' -- at least they
would be prevented from deducting their considerable and growing
'public affairs advertising' expenses from their taxable income and
double-dipping, not to mention double-dupping, the citizens of this
terribly misguided quasi-partial-democracy.
But then we have a very different kind of country in
reality than is self-image; not to mention the great reluctance by so
many to talk about in public what is really going on. Not to
mention further how fewer and fewer serious big-media ways there are
for those who do understand what is happening and who are willing/able
to speak up about it have even in this age of the internet -- with the
major news media itself now largely owned and controlled by the same
big multinational conglomerates, including many of the same big war
industries.
For instance just turn on Washington's biggest
talk radio WTOP like at drive time and its a non-stop barrage of
war industry advertising/sloganeering. "Defending freedom and
safegarding our nation" rants Raytheon; and a few minutes later
"Controlling the skies, Defining the future" comes Northrupt
Grumman.
Oh yes, a few weeks ago I just happened to
notice at the Washington Convention Center that even the Congressional
Black Caucus was enlisted at their annual convention this year --
Northrupt Grumman provided customized backpacks, complete with both CBC
and NG logos.
"You will have stories to cover --
Iraqi elections and suicide bombers,
biological threats
and the Iranian nuclear program. Out West, where you
vacation, the aspens will already
be turning. They turn in clusters,
because their roots connect them. Come back to work -- and life."
- Neocon Scooter from Cheney's
Office to Neocon Judy of the NYTimes
Wed
- 5 Oct - Neocon Washington
Journalists - The Strange Case of Judy Miller: Everything about the Judy Miller case
gets stranger and stranger -- with the letter from VP Cheney's Chief of
Staff Lewis Libby to Judy now topping the cake. Seems Scooter is
at pains to remind Judy -- and to do so in such a public however
confusing and deniable way -- that their roots are all
intertwined. Might he be suggesting that if he and his go down
she and hers do so as well? Whatever, the really big thing
about Miller and her NYTimes
is not really what's so much in the news at the moment; rather it is so
much what is not. In the built-up to the Iraqi
invasion/occupation the big issue was WMD. And now we are just
learning how buddy-close was the Miller relationship to the top
Washington neocons, how much they used her, and she them, to propagate
the false information about WMDs that made the war possible and which
hood-winked the U.N., and how much her editors at the NYTimes, along with the publisher
most recently seen arm and arm with Judy departing from jaill, did
nothing to step in and prevent this egregious violation of journalistic
standards and integrity for which they have yet to explain not to
mention atone in a serious way. As for the official
Washington take on all this read this punches pulled take from David
Ignatius on the Op
Ed pages of the Washington Post today.
Tue
- 4 Oct - Regime Change Fever in
'Titanic' Washington: Even as the U.S. and Israel
feverishly
conspire to 'regime change' in Damascus and Tehran and Beirut -- the
predicament of the Bush/Cheney regime grows more precarious in
Washington all the time. Some think this lessens the chance
of escalating warfare in the Middle East; others like myself conclude
that the weaker and more troubled the Neocons and Evangelicals feel the
greater the likelihood that soon after the 2006 mid-term election the
Pentagon and CIA will be further unleashed to enforce the 'New World
Order' that still eludes the American Empire and the Israeli
interlocutors. Last year no less an establishment figure
than Harlan Ullman, now at CSIS, put forth the Titanic analogy, warning
that those in power are heading toward a major crash and maybe sinking
-- for Titanic here is not in reference to great strength but rather to
the super-ship thought to be invinceable until in sunk in
hours Just yesterday in fact no less a figure than
the former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan years, and
a former editor of the Wall Street Journal, had
the following to say about the Bush/Cheney White House:
[according to] one White
House aide: "It’s like working in an insane asylum. People walk around
like they’re
in a trance. We’re the dance band on the Titanic, playing out our last
songs to people who know the ship is
sinking and none of us are going to make it. If POTUS [that's
President of The United States for non-insiders]
is on the road, you can breathe a little easier," says an aide.
Otherwise it is one temper tantrum after another
from Bush, whose "cakewalk war" has turned into interminable conflict,
whose idiocy in diverting funding for
New Orleans’ levees to war in Iraq was disastrous for the famous city,
and whose Social Security privatization
has been rejected by the electorate.
Mon
- 3 Oct - U.S. Twists Occupied
Iraq and Palestine Toward Greater Civil War: One
has to say 'greater' at this point because the civil wars the Americans
have brought through their invade-and-occupy, divide-and-rule,
kill-and-rebuild imperialistic adventures are already well
underway. Soon they may erupt into still far more bloody
affairs even as the crusading Americans carefully prepare their next
conquests -- Iran, Syria, North Korea, Lebanon (Hezbollah), and
Palestine (Hamas). Read about breaking developments in Palestine
-- where the Israelis and Americans are doing all they can to crush
Hamas and promote the P.A. --
then about Iraq -- where the latest geremandering
of the political process may yet cause both a Sunni and a Shi'ite
revolt -- then about what is being planned -- as the big
prize, Iran, is manuevered into the Pentagon/CIA target-sites.
Fearing their imposed constitution may
collapse, and even at the risk
of igniting an even more brutal civil war, the U.S. pro-consul
Ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, has now pushed
further to
ensure his Constitution will not be defeated in the electoral ruse
his own country the U.S. devised and imposed. And while
we're at it add a little
extra context as India is drawn in to American designs in
the subcontinent area and Japan is pushed to re-arm and prepare for
military conflict in the Asian theatre.
Meanwhile Washington prepares for a major
escalation of its own political warfare that still has the potential to
sidetrack the Neocon determination to pursue their 'New World Order',
and even the potential to bring the Bush/Cheney/Neocon/Evangelical
regime to its knees. It is quite possible now that this
month one or both of the highest officials, Karl Rove at Bush's side
and Lewis Libby at Cheney's, may be indicted in CIAgate,
pushing this scandal to a greater danger level than Contragate and
Irangate ever reached in
the Reagan second term. Then, if just one branch of the
Congress should pass into Democratic hands next year the political
blood-letting could start spilling over the rampart floodgates of
Washington just as
the waters poured over the faulty New Orleans levees.
Sun - 2 Oct - PENTAGON
PROPAGANDA BLITZ: The propaganda blitz expanded
today on the corporate network talk shows, with very little, hardly
any, serious counter-analysis. General George Casey, the top dog
4-star,
was featured on ABC's "This Week", and General John Abizaid, another
4-star was featured on NBC's "Meet The Press".
The White House
is worried more than ever with all the political crises they already
face and new ones still likely soon -- so the Commander-In-Chief has
ordered the
senior Generals onto TV to spread the good news -- including General
Petraeus and his "we're doing so much so well" slide-show at Princeton
yesterday.
Washington Meltdown
Delay, Bush, Frisk, FEMA Brown
Unshown: Rove, Libby, Cheney
Sat
- 1 Oct - Princeton Bows
Bigtime to Washington: With a big public relations blitz
underway Washington's most presentable senior imperialist neocons found
a suitable
Ivy League university interlocutor at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School
this weekend; and they cashed in big time. The school's new
dean, Anne- Marie Slaughter, is herself a kind of smiling stealth
neocon
-- though considerably more accomplished than former SAIS Johns Hopkins
Dean Paul
Wolfowitz at pretending otherwise. Slaughter orchestrated and
choreographed this Washington political rape of Princeton; and she did
so so successfully that few of
the gathered alumni even understood what was happening right
in front of their eyes. In less than 24-hours Princeton
provided
a major P.R. coup to no less than Secretary of State Condi Rice,
Homeland
Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and top General David Petraeus -- recently of Fallajuh infamy --
each of whom spewed forth big-time with more polished than ever verbage
and none of whom were
challenged in any serious way, Slaughter personally making sure of
that. Worst of all, at one of America's major universities
at this crucial time in history,
not a single significant independent academic, journalist or
historian -- or even a serious political analyst for that matter --
not
one, was invited to speak at the Wilson School's 75th
anniversary which featured this Rice-Chertoff-Petraeus
trio. Said
one of Princeton's tenured Professors about the intellectually sordid
affair -
"Slaughter is hopeless and what has happened to the Woodrow
Wilson School is terribly tragic and maddening." One
long-time astute journalist commented upon hearing the line up:
"There's no other major university in the country, certainly not
Harvard or Stanford or Berkeley, that would have allowed this kind of
thing to happen as Princeton did - how shameful!".
Thu
- 29 Sept - Royal
Hashemites On Parade: The political hacks have taken over
just about all the Washington international affairs centers and
think-tanks.... Read
More...
Wed
- 28 Sept - Dan Rather's
Chilling but Unheard and Unheeded Warning: Former
CBS News Anchor Dan Rather,
like his predecessor
Walter Cronkite, is now free to speak his mind.... Read More...
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