How The Spooks manipulated The News

People still seem to think that the goal of this war was to win it quickly and get out, while every thing we've done points to just the opposite.

There's money in war, for some...and those people happen to either be in power or are supporting the party in power, all of whom should be in the dock at the Hague.

On the morning of 9 February 2004, The New York Times carried an exclusive and alarming story. The paper's Baghdad correspondent, Dexter Filkins, reported that US officials had obtained a 17-page letter, believed to have been written by the notorious terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi to the "inner circle" of al-Qa'ida's leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war.

The letter argued that al-Qa'ida, which is a Sunni network, should attack the Shia population of Iraq: "It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis."

Later that day, at a regular US press briefing in Baghdad, US General Mark Kimmitt dealt with a string of questions about The New York Times report: "We believe the report and the document is credible, and we take the report seriously... It is clearly a plan on the part of outsiders to come in to this country and spark civil war, create sectarian violence, try to expose fissures in this society." The story went on to news agency wires and, within 24 hours, it was running around the world.

There is very good reason to believe that that letter was a fake – and a significant one because there is equally good reason to believe that it was one product among many from a new machinery of propaganda which has been created by the United States and its allies since the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.

The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news. I've spent the last two years researching a book about falsehood, distortion and propaganda in the global media.

The "Zarqawi letter" which made it on to the front page of The New York Times in February 2004 was one of a sequence of highly suspect documents which were said to have been written either by or to Zarqawi and which were fed into news media.

This material is being generated, in part, by intelligence agencies who continue to work without effective oversight; and also by a new and essentially benign structure of "strategic communications" which was originally designed by doves in the Pentagon and Nato who wanted to use subtle and non-violent tactics to deal with Islamist terrorism but whose efforts are poorly regulated and badly supervised with the result that some of its practitioners are breaking loose and engaging in the black arts of propaganda.

Like the new propaganda machine as a whole, the Zarqawi story was born in the high tension after the attacks of September 2001. At that time, he was a painful thorn in the side of the Jordanian authorities, an Islamist radical who was determined to overthrow the royal family. But he was nothing to do with al-Q'aida. Indeed, he had specifically rejected attempts by Bin Laden to recruit him, because he was not interested in targeting the West.

Nevertheless, when US intelligence battered on the doors of allied governments in search of information about al-Q'aida, the Jordanian authorities – anxious to please the Americans and perhaps keen to make life more difficult for their native enemy – threw up his name along with other suspects. Soon he started to show up as a minor figure in US news stories – stories which were factually weak, often contradictory and already using the Jordanians as a tool of political convenience.

Then, on 7 October 2002, for the first time, somebody referred to him on the record. In a nationally televised speech in Cincinnati, President George Bush spoke of "high-level contacts" between al-Q'aida and Iraq and said: "Some al-Q'aida leaders who fled Afghanistan, went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Q'aida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks."

This coincided with a crucial vote in Congress in which the president was seeking authority to use military force against Iraq. Bush never named the man he was referring to but, as the Los Angeles Times among many others soon reported: "In a speech [on] Monday, Bush referred to a senior member of al-Q'aida who received medical treatment in Iraq. US officials said yesterday that was Abu al Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian, who lost a leg during the US war in Afghanistan."

Even now, Zarqawi was a footnote, not a headline, but the flow of stories about him finally broke through and flooded the global media on 5 February 2003, when the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, addressed the UN Security Council, arguing that Iraq must be invaded: first, to stop its development of weapons of mass destruction; and second, to break its ties with al-Q'aida.

Powell claimed that "Iraq today harbours a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al Zarqawi"; that Zarqawi's base in Iraq was a camp for "poison and explosive training"; that he was "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his al-Q'aida lieutenants"; that he "fought in the Afghan war more than a decade ago"; that "Zarqawi and his network have plotted terrorist actions against countries, including France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany and Russia".

Courtesy of post-war Senate intelligence inquiries; evidence disclosed in several European trials; and the courageous work of a handful of journalists who broke away from the pack, we now know that every single one of those statements was entirely false. But that didn't matter: it was a big story. News organisations sucked it in and regurgitated it for their trusting consumers.

So, who exactly is producing fiction for the media? Who wrote the Zarqawi letters? Who created the fantasy story about Osama bin Laden using a network of subterranean bases in Afghanistan, complete with offices, dormitories, arms depots, electricity and ventilation systems? Who fed the media with tales of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, suffering brain seizures and sitting in stationery cars turning the wheel and making a noise like an engine? Who came up with the idea that Iranian ayatollahs have been encouraging sex with animals and girls of only nine?

Some of this comes from freelance political agitators. It was an Iranian opposition group, for example, which was behind the story that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was jailing people for texting each other jokes about him. And notoriously it was Iraqi exiles who supplied the global media with a dirty stream of disinformation about Saddam Hussein.

But clearly a great deal of this carries the fingerprints of officialdom. The Pentagon has now designated "information operations" as its fifth "core competency" alongside land, sea, air and special forces. Since October 2006, every brigade, division and corps in the US military has had its own "psyop" element producing output for local media. This military activity is linked to the State Department's campaign of "public diplomacy" which includes funding radio stations and news websites. In Britain, the Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations in the Ministry of Defence works with specialists from 15 UK psyops, based at the Defence Intelligence and Security School at Chicksands in Bedfordshire.

In the case of British intelligence, you can see this combination of reckless propaganda and failure of oversight at work in the case of Operation Mass Appeal. This was exposed by the former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who describes in his book, Iraq Confidential, how, in London in June 1998, he was introduced to two "black propaganda specialists" from MI6 who wanted him to give them material which they could spread through "editors and writers who work with us from time to time".

In interviews for Flat Earth News, Ritter described how, between December 1997 and June 1998, he had three meetings with MI6 officers who wanted him to give them raw intelligence reports on Iraqi arms procurement. The significance of these reports was that they were all unconfirmed and so none was being used in assessing Iraqi activity. Yet MI6 was happy to use them to plant stories in the media. Beyond that, there is worrying evidence that, when Lord Butler asked MI6 about this during his inquiry into intelligence around the invasion of Iraq, MI6 lied to him.

Ultimately, the US has run into trouble with its propaganda in Iraq, particularly with its use of the Zarqawi story. In May 2006, when yet another of his alleged letters was handed out to reporters in the Combined Press Information Centre in Baghdad, finally it was widely regarded as suspect and ignored by just about every single media outlet.

Arguably, even worse than this loss of credibility, according to British defence sources, the US campaign on Zarqawi eventually succeeded in creating its own reality. By elevating him from his position as one fighter among a mass of conflicting groups, the US campaign to "villainise Zarqawi" glamorised him with its enemy audience, making it easier for him to raise funds, to attract "unsponsored" foreign fighters, to make alliances with Sunni Iraqis and to score huge impact with his own media manoeuvres. Finally, in December 2004, Osama bin Laden gave in to this constructed reality, buried his differences with the Jordanian and declared him the leader of al-Q'aida's resistance to the American occupation.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

A New Arms Race In The Pacific?

This should make the vendors of death and destruction tickled pink, if they don't run out of energy to power their death machines.

Perils of a New Pacific Arms Race
By Paul Burnell and Andy Denwood
BBC Radio 4

Tuesday 14 August 2007

From the Emperor Ming to Mao Zedong, China's military prowess has been based on large land armies.

This year China is celebrating the 80th anniversary of the Peoples' Liberation Army.

But its traditional strategic thinking is undergoing a huge shift, prompting fears in the United States that China might pose a threat to American diplomatic and military power with a naval arms race in the Pacific.

The capitulation of Sadam Hussein's army in the face of a hi-tech American onslaught in Desert Storm, with land, air and sea forces enabling a rapid US advance across large areas of land, gave a fresh impetus to military modernisation, according to Christian Lemiere, China expert at Jane's Country Risk.

"China had always relied upon the idea that if attacked it had large areas of land. It could fall back with these areas but if one power is able to take that and very quickly, it rapidly negates any advantage."

China has been looking to match US military technology and launched an anti-satellite missile as part of this process.

Joseph Lin, a military affairs analyst with the Jamestown Foundation in Washington said this development has unnerved the Pentagon.

"The United States is heavily dependent upon satellites for all matters of communications, especially the military, which would be crippled and completely ineffectual without any sort of satellite coverage either for imaging, navigation or for communications."

At the same time, China's naval build-up has alerted American military officials to the previously unthinkable possibility that they might face competition in the Pacific Ocean, where the US has enjoyed naval dominance since the World War Two.

Richard Lawless, Deputy Undersecretary of Defence for Asia and Pacific Security Affairs, believes it is the biggest shift in the region's power balance for more than 60 years.

And he is especially concerned with the development of new classes of submarine, including two of them nuclear: one an attack submarine class, the other a ballistic missile submarine. Since 2000 China's official military budget has leaped from $15bn to $45bn.

Some US estimates say these figures exclude a range of defence-related outlays such as arms purchases from abroad and put the true figure for China's annual military spending at up to $122bn.

Deterrence Tactic

Professor Yan Xuetong, director of the International Studies Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and an analyst whose voice is heard by Chinese and American decision makers, said China needs submarines to deter the US Navy.

"Every major power when they increase the military budget will bring about this kind of suspicion," he added.

China's official pronouncements stress a commitment to "peaceful development".

Prof Ne Lex Yong, of Shanghai Normal University is an influential advocate of building up China's navy for economic security.

"A country that depends on sea-trading faces the greatest threat to its survival in areas outside its own borders. Because of this, we need to have a stronger navy to protect our trading interests."

Some Chinese observers feel their vulnerability is most clearly demonstrated by "the Malacca Dilemma."

More than 80% of the imported oil which fuels China's expanding economy has to pass through the narrow Straits of Malacca which link the Indian and Pacific oceans.

One school of thought in Beijing worries that if relations with the US were to break down, Washington might block the Straits and cut off its oil.

Others warn that developing a much more powerful Chinese navy capable of keeping the oil flowing might unnecessarily provoke America.

Professor Zha Daojiong, director of the Centre for International Energy Security at Renmin University, concedes that opinion is divided.

But he is not convinced by the blockade threat, pointing out that this would also hit supplies to American regional allies like Japan and Korea.

Nonetheless, China's navy is growing, with the acquisition of new missile destroyers and submarines.

This process is sparking a new arms race in the Pacific, according to naval expert Paul Kennedy, Professor of History at Yale University.

"When I was in South Korea recently I quizzed the Naval Ministry about the construction of some very large, 7000 ton missile guided destroyers. They said: 'Well look at how many destroyers Japan is building', and if you ask the Japanese Navy they would say: 'Well look how many destroyers China is building.'"

Dr John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said Japan - China's historic enemy - is also quietly strengthening its navy, which will soon be larger than Britain's Royal Navy.

This naval build-up is fuelling the debate in Washington about how the US should respond to China.

One side, seizing on Pentagon warnings, argues that the United States needs to act decisively to halt the rise of the "China threat."

Rick Fisher of the International Assessment and Strategy Centre, said: "The United States has a period in which it can expand upon its current military technical superiority and form a kind of hard basis for deterring conflict, but that requires that the United States understands that we're now in an arms race.

"The United States must invest especially in the technologies and in the science that will allow us to maintain the superiority that will impress the communist leadership in Beijing that wars are futile."

But others, like Congressman Adam Smith from Washington state, argue the danger is that the United States will create an enemy and talk itself into another Cold War. "I see no reason that we need to view them as a military threat and to get involved in an arms race build up."

A concerned Pentagon, however, made its anxieties clear to the US Congress this spring in its latest report on China's military capabilities.

No official Chinese government spokesman accepted the BBC's invitation for an interview.

However, earlier this summer, Lieutenant General Zhang Qinsheng, a senior general in the Peoples' Liberation Army responded to American anxieties at an international conference in Singapore.

He said the Pentagon report was unreliable, a product of "the Cold War mindset" and detrimental to China-US relations.

IISS director John Chipman, who chaired the conference said: "I think the majority of people in the conference were reassured by his attempt to demonstrate that Chinese defence expenditure was uniquely for self-defence, but the same majority were also certain that increased Chinese force projection capabilities ... would help China to confront - if it ever came to that - larger navies around the region which would include the United States."

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Al Qaeda and Iran

Saying that Iran and al Qaeda are in cahoots is just about as non-sensical as saying that Osama and Saddam were buddies.


Published on Wednesday, June 6, 2007 by Inter Press Service

Could al Qaeda Attack Trigger War With Iran?
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Following revelations of a George W. Bush administration policy to hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the U.S. that could be portrayed as planned on Iranian soil, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksi warned last week that Washington might use such an incident as a pretext to bomb Iran.

Brzezinski, the national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 through 1980 and the most senior Democratic Party figure on national security policy, told a private meeting sponsored by the non-partisan Committee for the Republic in Washington May 30 that an al Qaeda terrorist attack in the United States intended to provoke war between the U.S. and Iran was a possibility that must be taken seriously, and that the Bush administration might accuse Iran of responsibility for such an attack and use it to justify carrying out an attack on Iran.

Brzezinski suggested that new constraints were needed on presidential war powers to reduce the risk of a war against Iran based on such a false pretense. Such constraints, Brzezinski said, should not prevent the president from using force in response to an attack on the United States, but should make it more difficult to carry out an attack without an adequate justification.
Brzezinski’s warning came a few weeks after the publication in late April of former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet’s memoirs, which revealed that CIA officials had told Iranian officials in a face-to-face meeting that the Bush administration would hold Iran responsible for any al Qaeda attack on the United States that was planned from Iranian territory.

The Bush administration has made persistent claims over the past five years that Iran has harboured al Qaeda operatives who had fled from Afghanistan and that they had participated in planning terrorist actions — claims that were not supported by intelligence analysts.

Pentagon officials leaked information to CBS in May 2003 that they had “evidence” that al Qaeda leaders who had found “safe haven” in Iran had planned and directed terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Then Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld also encouraged that inference when he declared on May 29, 2003 that Iran had “permitted senior al Qaeda officials to operate in their country.”

The leak and public statement allowed the media and their audiences to infer that the “safe haven” had been deliberately provided by Iranian authorities.

But most U.S. intelligence analysts specialising on the Persian Gulf believed the al Qaeda officials in Iran who were still communicating with operatives elsewhere were in hiding rather than under arrest. Former national intelligence officer for Near East and South Asia Paul Pillar told IPS in an interview last year that the “general impression” was that the al Qaeda operatives were not in Iran with the complicity of the Iranian authorities.

Former CIA analysts Ken Pollock, who was a Persian Gulf specialist on the National Security Council staff in 2001, wrote in “The Persian Puzzle”, “These al Qaeda leaders apparently were operating in eastern Iran, which is a bit like the Wild West.” He added, pointedly, “It was not as if these al-Qaeda leaders had been under lock and key in Evin prison in Tehran and were allowed to make phone calls to set up the attacks.”

Although most elements in the Bush administration appear to oppose military action against Iran, Vice President Dick Cheney has reportedly advocated that course. He has also continued to raise the issue of al Qaeda officials in Iran.

Cheney told Fox News in an interview May 14, “We are confident that there are a number of senior al Qaeda officials in Iran, that they’ve been there since the spring of 2003.

About the time that we launched operations into Iraq, the Iranians rounded up a number of al Qaeda individuals and placed them under house arrest.”

Cheney did not say that the al Qaeda officials who were communicating with other operatives outside Iran were under house arrest.

As recently as last February, Bush administration officials were preparing to accuse Tehran publicly of cooperating with and harbouring al Qaeda suspects as part of the administration’s strategy for pushing for stronger U.N. sanctions against Iran. The strategy of portraying Iran as having links with al Qaeda was being pushed by an unidentified Bush adviser who had been “instrumental in coming up with a more confrontational U.S. approach to Iran,” according a report by the Washington Post’s Dafna Linzer on Feb. 10.

As Linzer revealed, the neoconservative faction in the administration was still pushing to link Iran with al Qaeda despite the fact that a CIA report in early February had reported the arrest by Iranian authorities of two more al Qaeda operatives trying to make their way through Iran from Pakistan to Iraq.

The danger of an al Qaeda effort to disguise an attack on the U.S. as coming from Iran was raised in an article in Foreign Affairs published in late April by former NSC adviser and counterterrorism expert Bruce Reidel.

In the article, Reidel wrote that Osama bin Laden may have plans for “triggering an all-out war between the United States and Iran,” referring to evidence that al Qaeda in Iraq now considers Iranian influence in Iraq “an even greater problem than the U.S. occupation”.

“The biggest danger,” Reidel wrote, “is that al Qaeda will deliberately provoke a war with a ‘false-flag’ operation, say, a terrorist attack carried out in a way that would make it appear as though it were Iran’s doing.”

In a briefing for reporters about the article, Reidel said al Qaeda officals have “openly talked about the advisability of getting their two great enemies to go to war with each other”, hoping that they would “take each other out”.

Reidel, now a senior fellow with the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, was one of the leading specialists on al Qaeda and terrorism, having served in the 1990s as national intelligence officer, assistant secretary of defence and NSC specialist for Near East and South Asia up to January 2002.

Supporting the warnings by Brzezinski and Reidel about an al Qaeda “false flag” terrorist attack is a captured al Qaeda document found in a hideout of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in 2006. The document, translated and released by the Iraqi National Security Adviser Mouwafek al-Rubaie, said “the best solution in order to get out of this crisis is to involve the U.S. forces in waging a war against another country or any hostile groups”.

The document, the author of which was not specified, explained, “We mean specifically attempting to escalate tension between America and Iran, and America and the Shiite[s] in Iraq.”

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in June 2005.

© 2007 Inter Press Service


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Our Fellow Earthlings Do Not Want Us To Be Global COPs

Well, trust us when we say, we don't want to be; at least a large majority of us don't care for being COPs of any kind.

Actually, Bush and Cheney don't care about the law either. They do, however care about resources and money. But you already knew that, eh?

Why would someone who cared about international law have best friends like that savage in Uzbekistan, who boils his political opponents in oil.?

Why would Bush want to be best buddies with the House of Saud?

Why would enforcers of the law try to overthrow duly elected officials of other countries?

If Bush wants to overthrow tyrants, let him not make friends with some and overthrow others. As a matter of fact, let him begin by resigning!

No, No...the Bushites don't care about being cops, just about forcing us to be an empire.

I can speak for our blog:

We do not want to be an empire. We want to be genuinely helpful to all people in all nations, if we can and if we are asked, but we do not want to be an empire. Being an empire is not helpful to anyone, especially people, who are burdened with a conscious soul, in the belly of the beast.

It is a hell of a different kind than those in Iraq are enduring, but it is a hell, nevertheless.

It is a hell that involves heartbreaking, soul devastating, psychological shame and disgust.

Let it be known that vast numbers of Americans are suffering; grief, loss, heartbreak, shame, disgust with our own government and many of our own countrymen/women, frustration and psycho-emotional turmoil.

Let it also be known that we will not give up nor surrender to the criminals and idiots who have taken our country, and possibly the world, close to the abyss.

Just ask the Brits, the Germans, the French......... about the horrors of being an empire.


Published on Thursday, April 19, 2007 by Inter Press Service

World Opposed to U.S. as Global Cop
by Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON - The world public rejects the U.S. role as a world leader, but still wants the United States to do its share in multilateral efforts and does not support a U.S. withdrawal from international affairs, says a poll released Wednesday.The survey respondents see the United States as an unreliable “world policeman”, but views are split on whether the superpower should reduce its overseas military bases.

The people of the United States generally agreed with the rest of the world that their country should not remain the world’s pre-eminent leader or global cop, and prefer that it play a more cooperative role in multilateral efforts to address world problems.

The poll, the fourth in a series released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org since the latter half of 2006, was conducted in China, India, United States, Indonesia, Russia, France, Thailand, Ukraine, Poland, Iran, Mexico, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Israel, Armenia and the Palestinian territories.

The three previous reports covered attitudes toward humanitarian military intervention, labour and environmental standards in international trade, and global warming. Those surveys found that the international public generally favoured more multilateral efforts to curb genocides and more far-reaching measures to protect labour rights and combat climate change than their governments have supported to date.

Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org, notes that this report confirms other polls which have shown that world opinion of the United States is bad and getting worse, however this survey more closely examines the way the world public would want to see Washington playing a positive role in the international community.

Although all 15 of the countries polled rejected the idea that, “the U.S. should continue to be the pre-eminent world leader in solving international problems,” only Argentina and the Palestinian territories say it “should withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems.”

The respondents tend to agree that the US should do “its share in efforts to solve international problems together with other countries” in: South Korea (79 percent), United States (75 percent), France (75 percent), China (68 percent), Israel (62 percent), Peru (61 percent), Mexico (59 percent), Armenia (58 percent), Philippines (55 percent), Ukraine (52 percent), Thailand (47 percent), India (42 percent) and Russia (42 percent).

In a majority of countries — 13 out of 15 — publics believe Washington is “playing the role of world policeman more than it should,” including France (89 percent), Australia (80 percent), China (77 percent), Russia (76 percent), Peru (76 percent), Palestinian territories (74 percent) and South Korea (73 percent).

Seventy-six percent of those polled in the United States also agree that their country plays too big a role as a global cop, but 57 percent of Filipinos disagreed with the statement, and Israelis were evenly split on the issue.

Majorities think that the United States cannot be trusted to “act responsibly in the world” in: Argentina (84 percent), Peru (80 percent), Russia (73 percent), France (72 percent) and Indonesia (64 percent). But majorities or large percentages in the Philippines (85 percent), Israel (81 percent), Poland (51 percent), and Ukraine (49 percent) say the superpower can be at least “somewhat” trusted to act responsibly.

Although most of the countries involved in the poll had majorities who believe the U.S. was too involved in policing issues of international concern, there were mixed views about whether it should reduce its military presence around the world. Only five out of 12 publics favoured decreasing the number of overseas U.S. military bases: Argentina (75 percent), Palestinian territories (70 percent), France (69 percent), China (63 percent) and Ukraine (62 percent).
Majorities in the Philippines (78 percent), United States (68 percent), Israel (59 percent) and Poland (54 percent) favour maintaining or increasing the current levels of U.S. military bases. Armenia and Thailand lean in favour of maintaining current levels or reducing base locations, while India was divided. No country favoured increases.

The survey clearly shows that the perception of the U.S. role in the world is negative and getting worse, but some publics did have significant numbers who felt relations between their country and the United States are getting better.

Most of the respondents in India (58 percent) and China (53 percent) felt relations were improving, while pluralities agree in Australia (50 percent), Armenia (48 percent), Indonesia (46 percent), and Thailand (37 percent). Majorities or pluralities in Poland (60 percent), South Korea (56 percent), Israel (52 percent), Ukraine (52 percent) and Russia (45 percent) say relations with the U.S. are about the same.

No countries had majorities or pluralities who say relations with the United States are getting worse.

Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Cluster Munitions Shoud Be Out-lawed, Period!

Published on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 by The Hill (Washington, DC)

Senators Eye Curbs on Cluster Bombs, Widening Matter beyond Israel’s Use

by Elana Schor

Several Senate Democrats are renewing their push to curb the U.S. military’s use of weaponry responsible for civilian casualties in conflicts around the world — notably during the summer war between Israel and Lebanon — a proposal that has split the party’s presidential frontrunners.

98% OF CASUALTIES FROM CLUSTER BOMBS ARE NON-COMBATANTS

File picture shows an unexploded cluster bomblet. Forty-six countries - but not the US - pledged on Friday to aim for an international ban next year on cluster bombs, blamed for thousands of civilian casualties around the world.

REUTERS/Ruben SprichHuman rights groups long have lobbied to curtail the use of cluster bombs, which disperse “bomblets” over wide areas that can cause civilian deaths years after they are dropped. Democratic lawmakers joined the cause last fall amid growing controversy over Israel’s firing of older U.S.-supplied cluster bombs into Lebanon.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) offered a bill earlier this month that allows U.S. sales and transfers only of newer bombs with low error rates, expanding on a cluster-curbing amendment they offered last year.

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) backed that plan while his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sens. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), Joseph Biden (Del.) and Chris Dodd (Conn.), opposed it – a vote that looms as potential attack ad fodder in a 2008 campaign that is kicking off and going negative especially early.


“Perhaps unfortunately, the issue of cluster munitions came about so prominently by Israel’s use or misuse of cluster munitions in its conflict with Hezbollah,” Colby Goodman, a program manager at Amnesty International, said. “It was seen by some as a focus on criticizing Israel, but that wasn’t the intent.”

Bomblets have killed thousands of civilians in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Vietnam and during the current Iraq war. Yet international criticism of the estimated 100,000 Israeli bombs that failed to detonate in Lebanon have led many to associate Washington’s No. 1 ally in the Middle East with the weapons, complicating the task for Democrats who support Feinstein-Leahy while cozying up to Jewish-American voters.

“For Jewish-American activists who are active because of their concerns about Israel, they are, generally speaking, not going to want to see additional restrictions placed on Israel’s use of U.S. weaponry,” a source close to the Obama camp said.

Yet, the source noted, cluster munitions are “not by any means the highest-profile issue the community is concerned about,” pointing to Obama’s strong support for pressuring Iran on its nuclear program and placing conditions on aid to the new Palestinian government.

Clinton and former Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) have courted the Jewish community in recent years, but Obama hardly is ceding ground to his primary rivals. The Illinoisan’s campaign recently signed a formal adviser on Jewish-American policy, and Obama will appear Friday at a Chicago policy forum of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the capital’s most influential pro-Israel group.

The conservative buffeting Obama recently endured over his childhood in majority-Muslim Indonesia has helped perpetuate the perception that Obama has a tougher row to hoe with Jewish voters. A survey last week by the Jerusalem newspaper Ha’aretz ranked him 17th out of 17 presidential candidates on a scale of friendliness to Israel.

The Washington director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Hadar Susskind, observed that Jewish-American groups have a heightened awareness of cluster weapons limits after human-rights groups called on Israel to cease deploying the bombs without mentioning other countries that use them.

“They are sensitive to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty reports that, for better or for worse, are often seen as one-sided or skewed by folks within the Jewish community,” Susskind said.
This weekend brought a leap forward on cluster-bomb curbs, as 46 countries at an international conference in Norway set a 2008 deadline for a pact ending use of the weapons.

The treaty gives a crucial boost to the Feinstein-Leahy bill. Both senators have criticized U.S. transfers of older, error-prone cluster bombs since before the Israel-Lebanon war, and began their legislative effort with their amendment to last year’s defense appropriations bill, which aimed to block the Pentagon from approving cluster bomb detonation in civilian or refugee areas. Feinstein said this month that Israel’s misuse of the weapons partly inspired the bill.
Facing stiff opposition from the Bush administration, the amendment failed on the floor, with every Republican and 15 Democrats voting no, including Clinton, Biden and Dodd. Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), now majority leader and majority whip, joined Obama in backing the proposal.

The director of Human Rights Watch’s arms division, Steve Goose, said the first Feinstein-Leahy push failed “primarily because it was depicted as an anti-Israel amendment.” Advocates of the new bill have begun outreach to Jewish-American groups to tamp down any misperceptions that the measure targets Israel, he added.

“This bill is aimed at U.S. policy, to make sure the U.S. takes a humanitarian stand when it comes to cluster munitions,” Goose, who attended the Norwegian conference, said.

Feinstein hailed that anti-clusters summit with a statement urging the Pentagon “to join in this effort and protect civilians from this lethal relics of war,” expressing disappointment that the U.S. joined Israel, Russia and China in boycotting the conference.

AIPAC is not taking a position on the cluster-bomb curbs this year, according to a spokesman for the group. Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein offered conditional approval of the Feinstein-Leahy bill: “I have no problem ensuring that our allies receive more effective and efficient cluster bombs … unless it would impact on our allies receiving cluster bombs they need at critical times.”

The cluster-weapons bill expands on last year’s language with a national security waiver that the president may invoke when bomb sales are deemed integral to the defense capability of U.S. allies. Bill supporters believe the waiver could win over 2008 hopefuls concerned about being portrayed as weak on national security for backing the ban.

For Leahy, who is also the Senate’s top foreign-operations appropriator, the crusade against clusters is a natural sequel to his longtime campaign to ban landmines. The Judiciary Committee chairman wrote the first anti-landmine legislation in 1992 and created the Leahy War Victims

Fund to help civilians disabled by mines.

For Biden, who chairs the Foreign Relations panel to which the bill was referred, having jurisdiction over cluster bomb curbs may complicate the issue. He voiced support for the principles of the amendment last fall but called for an Armed Services Committee hearing on its effects on the military.

A Biden spokeswoman said the lawmaker will review the bill thoroughly before deciding how to approach it. Other sponsors of the cluster-weapons limits include Sens. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

U.S. Using Terrorism? Nothing New Here...

Only 16 new copies of this out of print hardcover editon available at a special BuzzFlash value price.

Why is it important to remember the U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Allende and the placement of a torturer, Pinochet, in power in Chile?

For one thing, the key architect of using terror to dislodge democratically elected regimes, notably Chile, is Henry Kissinger. He is still, according to news reports, a key advisor to George W. Bush and Cheney.

Central to Kissinger's Machiavellian assertion of U.S. power for the sake of dominance alone is the use of terror. Yes, that is not some sort of radical, far left assertion. It is fact.

Take this excerpt from a cable during the Kissinger orchestration of the overthrow (and "suiciding") of Allende, as included in a New Yorker review of this book written a few years back: "For Chileans, September 11th marks a different tragedy -- the anniversary of the 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

This timely book weaves together thirty years of declassified documents with a gripping narrative of America's involvement in the affair. At a National Security Council meeting in 1970, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said of Allende, "We want to do everything we can to hurt him and bring him down," and a C.I.A. memo from the same year describes efforts of a key ally "to increase the level of terrorism in Santiago."

This terrorism included the assassination of René Schneider, the constitutionalist commander-in-chief of Chile's armed forces, which was carried out with C.I.A.-provided funds and submachine guns. The evidence that Kornbluh has gathered is overwhelming."

In short, the use of terrorism to overthrow a Democratically-elected regime in Chile was unofficial U.S. policy. And once Pinochet was installed, with Kissinger's blessing, a reign of terror was visited upon the people of Chile.

This is the reality: the U.S. replaced a Democratically-elected government with military terrorists.That, again, is just the fact, not some wild theorizing.

READ THE COMPLETE REVIEW >>>


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Can It Happen Here?

Well of course it can!

It is happening!

Serious, thoughtful people have been predicting that it would, for years.

"It's only a matter of time, " my own mother once said, some 40 years ago.


In an excerpt from his new book, Salon's columnist explains why, for the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon, Americans have reason to doubt the future of their democracy.

By Joe Conason


Feb. 19, 2007 Can it happen here? Is it happening here already? That depends, as a recent president might have said, on what the meaning of "it" is.

To Sinclair Lewis, who sardonically titled his 1935 dystopian novel "It Can't Happen Here," "it" plainly meant an American version of the totalitarian dictatorships that had seized power in Germany and Italy. Married at the time to the pioneering reporter Dorothy Thompson, who had been expelled from Berlin by the Nazis a year earlier and quickly became one of America's most outspoken critics of fascism, Lewis was acutely aware of the domestic and foreign threats to American freedom. So often did he and Thompson discuss the crisis in Europe and the implications of Europe's fate for the Depression-wracked United States that, according to his biographer, Mark Schorer, Lewis referred to the entire topic somewhat contemptuously as "it."

If "it" denotes the police state American-style as imagined and satirized by Lewis, complete with concentration camps, martial law, and mass executions of strikers and other dissidents, then "it" hasn't happened here and isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

For contemporary Americans, however, "it" could signify our own more gradual and insidious turn toward authoritarian rule. That is why Lewis's darkly funny but grim fable of an authoritarian coup achieved through a democratic election still resonates today -- along with all the eerie parallels between what he imagined then and what we live with now.

For the first time since the resignation of Richard M. Nixon more than three decades ago, Americans have had reason to doubt the future of democracy and the rule of law in our own country. Today we live in a state of tension between the enjoyment of traditional freedoms, including the protections afforded to speech and person by the Bill of Rights, and the disturbing realization that those freedoms have been undermined and may be abrogated at any moment.

Such foreboding, which would have been dismissed as paranoia not so long ago, has been intensified by the unfolding crisis of political legitimacy in the capital. George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted and exercised authority that he does not possess under the Constitution he swore to uphold. He has announced that he intends to continue exercising power according to his claim of a mandate that erases the separation and balancing of power among the branches of government, frees him from any real obligation to obey laws passed by Congress, and permits him to ignore any provisions of the Bill of Rights that may prove inconvenient.

Whether his fellow Americans understand exactly what Bush is doing or not, his six years in office have created intense public anxiety. Much of that anxiety can be attributed to fear of terrorism, which Bush has exacerbated to suit his own purposes -- as well as to increasing concern that the world is threatened by global warming, pandemic diseases, economic insecurity, nuclear proliferation, and other perils with which this presidency cannot begin to cope.

As the midterm election showed, more and more Americans realize that something has gone far wrong at the highest levels of government and politics -- that Washington's one-party regime had created a daily spectacle of stunning incompetence and dishonesty. Pollsters have found large majorities of voters worrying that the country is on the wrong track. At this writing, two of every three voters give that answer, and they are not just anxious but furious. Almost half are willing to endorse the censure of the president.

Suspicion and alienation extend beyond the usual disgruntled Democrats to independents and even a significant minority of Republicans. A surprisingly large segment of the electorate is willing to contemplate the possibility of impeaching the president, unappetizing though that prospect should be to anyone who can recall the destructive impeachment of Bush's predecessor.

The reasons for popular disenchantment with the Republican regime are well known -- from the misbegotten, horrifically mismanaged war in Iraq to the heartless mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster. In both instances, growing anger over the damage done to the national interest and the loss of life and treasure has been exacerbated by evidence of bad faith -- by lies, cronyism, and corruption.

Everyone knows -- although not everyone necessarily wishes to acknowledge -- that the Bush administration misled the American people about the true purposes and likely costs of invading Iraq. It invented a mortal threat to the nation in order to justify illegal aggression. It has repeatedly sought, from the beginning, to exploit the state of war for partisan advantage and presidential image management. It has wasted billions of dollars, and probably tens of billions, on Pentagon contractors with patronage connections to the Republican Party.

Everyone knows, too, that the administration dissembled about the events leading up to the destruction of New Orleans. Its negligence and obliviousness in the wake of the storm were shocking, as was its attempt to conceal its errors. It has yet to explain why a person with few discernible qualifications, other than his status as a crony and business associate of his predecessor, was directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By elevating ethically dubious, inexperienced, and ineffectual management the administration compromised a critical agency that had functioned brilliantly during the Clinton administration.

To date, however, we do not know the full dimensions of the scandals behind Iraq and Katrina, because the Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives abdicated the traditional congressional duties of oversight and investigation. It is due to their dereliction that neither the president nor any of his associates have seemed even mildly chastened in the wake of catastrophe. With a single party monopolizing power yet evading responsibility, there was nobody with the constitutional power to hold the White House accountable.

Bolstered by political impunity, especially in a time of war, perhaps any group of politicians would be tempted to abuse power. But this party and these politicians, unchecked by normal democratic constraints, proved to be particularly dangerous. The name for what is wrong with them -- the threat embedded within the Bush administration, the Republican congressional leadership, and the current leaders of the Republican Party -- is authoritarianism.

The most obvious symptoms can be observed in the regime's style, which features an almost casual contempt for democratic and lawful norms; an expanding appetite for executive control at the expense of constitutional balances; a reckless impulse to corrupt national institutions with partisan ideology; and an ugly tendency to smear dissent as disloyalty. The most troubling effects are matters of substance, including the suspension of traditional legal rights for certain citizens; the imposition of secrecy and the inhibition of the free flow of information; the extension of domestic spying without legal sanction or warrant; the promotion of torture and other barbaric practices, in defiance of American and international law; and the collusion of government and party with corporate interests and religious fundamentalists.

What worries many Americans even more is that the authoritarians can excuse their excesses as the necessary response to an enemy that every American knows to be real. For the past five years, the Republican leadership has argued that the attacks of September 11, 2001 -- and the continuing threat from jihadist groups such as al Qaeda -- demand permanent changes in American government, society, and foreign policy. Are those changes essential to preserve our survival -- or merely useful for unscrupulous politicians who still hope to achieve permanent domination by their own narrowly ideological party? Not only liberals and leftists, but centrists, libertarians, and conservatives, of every party and no party, have come to distrust the answers given by those in power.

The most salient dissent to be heard in recent years, and especially since Bush's reelection in 2004, has been voiced not by the liberals and moderates who never trusted the Republican leadership, but by conservatives who once did.

Former Republican congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, who served as one of the managers of the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives, has joined the American Civil Liberties Union he once detested. In the measures taken by the Bush administration and approved by his former colleagues, Barr sees the potential for "a totalitarian type regime." Paul Craig Roberts, a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal and a former Treasury official under Reagan, perceives the "main components of a police state" in the Bush administration's declaration of plenary powers to deny fundamental rights to suspected terrorists. Bruce Fein, who served as associate attorney general in the Reagan Justice Department, believes that the Bush White House is "a clear and present danger to the rule of law," and that the president "cannot be trusted to conduct the war against global terrorism with a decent respect for civil liberties and checks against executive abuses." Syndicated columnist George Will accuses the administration of pursuing a "monarchical doctrine" in its assertion of extraordinary war powers.

In the 2006 midterm election, disenchanted conservatives joined with liberals and centrists to deliver a stinging rebuke to the regime by overturning Republican domination in both houses of Congress. For the first time since 1994, Democrats control the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the Democratic majority in the upper chamber is as narrow as possible, depending on the whims of Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a Republican-leaning Democrat elected on an independent ballot line, who has supported the White House on the occupation of Iraq, abuse of prisoners of war, domestic spying, the suspension of habeas corpus, military tribunals, far-right judicial nominations, and other critical constitutional issues. Nor is Lieberman alone among the Senate Democrats in his supine acquiescence to the abuses of the White House.

Even if the Democrats had won a stronger majority in the Senate, it would be naive to expect that a single election victory could mend the damage inflicted on America's constitutional fabric during the past six years. While the Bush administration has enjoyed an extraordinary immunity from Congressional oversight until now, the deepest implication of its actions and statements, as explored in the pages that follow, is that neither legislators nor courts can thwart the will of the unitary executive. When Congress challenges that presidential claim, as inevitably it will, then what seems almost certain to follow is not "bipartisanship" but confrontation. The election of 2006 was not an end but another beginning.

The question that we face in the era of terror alerts, religious fundamentalism, and endless warfare is whether we are still the brave nation preserved and rebuilt by the generation of Sinclair Lewis -- or whether our courage, and our luck, have finally run out. America is not yet on the verge of fascism, but democracy is again in danger. The striking resemblance between Buzz Windrip [the demagogic villain of Lewis's novel] and George W. Bush and the similarity of the political forces behind them is more than a literary curiosity. It is a warning on yellowed pages from those to whom we owe everything.

From "It Can Happen Here" by Joe Conason. Copyright (c) 2007 by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press.
-- By Joe Conason


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Let's All Go Crazy!

This touches close to home. I am extremely familiar with the many cases of PTSD which followed Vietnam. As a matter of fact, the Iraq war has triggered a lot of left over nigtmares for Vietnam Vets.

It never really goes away, PTSD; though with the proper treatment, and education of the patient and his/her family, it can be greatly ameliorated. It takes time. It takes money. The VA is being slashed to the bone, again, and they never were all that good at treating the disorder anyway

American citizens, in general, are being affected. Certainly those Americans who are the most vulnerable to relapse into a chronic condition, began showing up at hospitals first. As time wore on, Psychiatrists began being swamped, psyhotropic drug sales grew steadily upward. Rehab centers have certainly had a good-size uptick in admissions in the last couple of years.

This shouldn't suprise anyone.

Decent, compassionate, caring people must do one of two things at times like these: Tune it all out or endure the pain of it; see the stark reality of it all, for just what it is, no less no more.

When the truth starts to seep in through the cracks in a person's psychic wall, there is indescribale pain; psychic pain. There is fear, rage, seething anger, Depression, anxiety, phobias, panic attacks and Bipolor patients who are suddenly no longer maintainable on their medication.

These folks are not the ones who keep me up at night.

It's the ones who are cheering on the violence in Iraq and want more in Iran.

It is the ones who couldn't care less.

It's the soldier who comes home unchanged, by killing people; by death in general.

February 11, 2007 at 08:06:16

Let's Go Crazy: The Decline in US Mental Health under Bush

by Heather Wokusch

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Factors linked with mental illness (including poverty, homelessness, violence and social uncertainty) have run rampant during the Bush years while psychiatric treatment options have disappeared. Nowhere has this trend been more prevalent – and more heartbreaking - than with Katrina survivors and veterans of Bush's wars.

Suicide levels in the Big Easy soared 300% in the four months following Katrina, and hurricane-related mental disorders remain widespread today. Yet with hospitals still shuttered and psychiatric clinics closed, those suffering from chronic mental illnesses or post-Katrina depression and post-traumatic stress disorder have few options.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey found that while 26% of respondents reported at least one family member needing mental health support following Katrina, less than 2% was receiving any.

New Orleans' mental health crisis exacerbates its already debilitating crime rate, with police reporting a 15% higher incidence of psychiatric-related emergency calls than before Katrina. But instead of receiving treatment, many of the mentally ill end up in local prisons – a trend repeated across the country.

In Florida, for example, over 250 prisoners who should have been transferred to state mental hospitals languish in prisons unequipped to handle their special needs. As The St. Petersburg Times reported last month, mentally-ill inmates "play poker with ghosts, climb the bars like bats or dump their lunch trays into the toilet and eat the food like soup. They will slam their heads against the wall, slice themselves with razors or plunge head-first off their bunks onto the concrete floor."

With no psychiatric beds available due to funding cutbacks, inmates charged with only misdemeanors end up deteriorating in jails one Floridian official called "a dumping ground for the mentally ill."

Veterans face a similar lack of support. An estimated one out of every five service members returning from Iraq suffers from psychiatric problems and, with a backlog of 400,000 cases, the Department of Veterans Affairs has proven incapable of handling the deluge. Veterans subsequently have to wait an average of five and a half months for an initial decision on disability benefits and an appeal can take years.

That's not supporting our troops.The number of veterans trying to get mental health support doubled to 9,103 between October 2005 and June 2006. The Government Accountability Office recently found, however, that most who show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are not referred for treatment, no doubt due to the VA's lack of capacity to meet demand. Considering that combat PTSD can take years to surface and that over a million troops have been deployed, it's safe to say the US will soon be facing a mental health crisis of ominous proportions.

After the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of veterans either committed suicide, became drug addicts or ended up on the streets. Today, the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans reports that almost 200,000 veterans are homeless each night, roughly one in three adult homeless males. Half of today's homeless vets suffer from substance abuse problems and 45% from mental illness. Yet the administration continues to fund military escalation instead of providing them with shelter and treatment.The psychiatric needs of active-duty service members have also been ignored. A tragic example is Steven Green, the former Army private charged in the March 2006 murder of an Iraqi family and the rape/murder of their 14-year-old daughter. In December 2005, Green had tried to get help from an Army Combat Stress Team in Iraq, claiming that he was enraged and wanted to kill Iraqi citizens. Doctors diagnosed Green with "homicidal ideations," gave him a psychoactive drug, told him to rest – and sent him back to fight.

It took Army mental health officials a full three months to contact Green again (over a week after the family had been murdered) due to reports he had thrown a puppy off a roof and set its body on fire.

It's safe to say that many other US service members are like Green, walking time bombs in desperate need of psychiatric care they may never receive.Bush has, unfortunately, been pro-active in one mental health area: the push for mandatory screening of US citizens. In April 2002, Bush set up the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, ostensibly to "eliminate inequality for Americans with disabilities" but whose recommendations include broad-based mental health screening for US adults/children and the prescription of psychoactive medication.

Civil rights advocates fear the disturbing implications of comprehensive mandatory psychological testing and therapists question the Commission's emphasis on psychiatric drugs over other forms of therapy.

Put bluntly, big-donor pharmaceutical companies are slated to profit at the expense of US citizens' rights.

David Oaks, Director of the advocacy group Mind Freedom International, had this to say about the administration's screening plans: "President Bush wants to test all Americans for 'mental illness.' We demand that President Bush start with himself first. We will provide the mental health professional to do the screening."

Virginia-based physician Patch Adams even volunteered to screen Bush, adding, "He needs a lot of help. I'll see him for free."

The National Alliance on Mental Illness recently conducted an analysis of mental health care systems across the US, incorporating factors such as infrastructure and information access. The national average grade was D, a shameful record for such a wealthy nation.

Factoring in the long-term psychiatric implications of Bush's ongoing military adventurism, the future looks even worse. That is for everyone but pharmaceutical companies.

Action ideas:

1. Visit the National Alliance on Mental Illness site (www.nami.org) for information on everything from "Public Education and Information Activities" to "Advocacy on Behalf of People Living with Mental Illness." Find out how your state ranks on mental health care and consider signing up for their fundraising walks. Also check out the terrific MindFreedom International site (www.mindfreedom.org) dedicated to "defending human rights and promoting humane alternatives in mental health."

2. Urge your congressmembers to provide more mental-health support to those hit by Katrina.3. Learn about the plight of homeless veterans at the National Coalition of Homeless Veterans site (www.nchv.org), which offers legislation information, support for homeless veterans and service providers and opportunities to get involved.

http://www.heatherwokusch.com

Heather Wokusch is the author of The Progressives' Handbook: Get the Facts and Make a Difference Now (Volumes 1 and 2).

Heather can be reached at http://www.heatherwokusch.com/, where each recent article is accompanied by a 3-minute podcast summary.


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

More on False Flag Operation in Karbala.

By Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
Inter Press Service
Wednesday 31 January 2007

Najaf - Iraqi government lies over the killing of hundreds of Shias in an attack on Sunday stand exposed by independent investigations carried out by IPS in Iraq.

Conflicting reports had arisen earlier on how and why a huge battle broke out around the small village Zarqa, located just a few kilometres northeast of the Shia holy city Najaf, which is 90 km south of Baghdad.

One thing certain is that when the smoke cleared, more than 200 people lay dead after more than half a day of fighting Sunday Jan. 28. A U.S. helicopter was shot down, killing two soldiers. Twenty-five members of the Iraqi security force were also killed.

"We were going to conduct the usual ceremonies that we conduct every year when we were attacked by Iraqi soldiers," Jabbar al-Hatami, a leader of the al-Hatami Shia Arab tribe told IPS.

"We thought it was one of the usual mistakes of the Iraqi army killing civilians, so we advanced to explain to the soldiers that they killed five of us for no reason. But we were surprised by more gunfire from the soldiers."

The confrontation took place on the Shia holiday of Ashura which commemorates Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and the most revered of Shia saints. Emotions run high at this time, and self-flagellation in public is the norm.

Many southern Shia Arabs do not follow Iranian-born cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They believe the religious leadership should be kept in the hands of Arab clerics. Al-Hatami and al-Khazaali are two major tribes that do not follow Sistani.

Tribal members from both believe the attack was launched by the central government of Baghdad to stifle growing Shia-Sunni unity in the area.

"Our convoy was close to the al-Hatami convoy on the way to Najaf when we heard the massive shooting, and so we ran to help them because our tribe and theirs are bound with a strong alliance," a 45-year-old man who asked to be referred to as Ahmed told IPS.

Ahmed, a member of the al-Khazali tribe said "our two tribes have a strong belief that Iranians are provoking sectarian war in Iraq which is against the belief of all Muslims, and so we announced an alliance with Sunni brothers against any sectarian violence in the country. That did not make our Iranian dominated government happy."

The fighting took place on the Diwaniya-Najaf road and spread into nearby date-palm plantations after pilgrims sought refuge there.

"American helicopters participated in the slaughter," Jassim Abbas, a farmer from the area told IPS. "They were soon there to kill those pilgrims without hesitation, but they were never there for helping Iraqis in anything they need. We just watched them getting killed group by group while trapped in those plantations."

Much of the killing was done by U.S. and British warplanes, eyewitnesses said.

Local authorities including the office of Najaf Governor Asaad Abu Khalil who is a member of the pro-Iranian Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) had claimed before the killings that a group of primarily foreign Sunni fighters with links to al-Qaeda had planned to disrupt the Ashura festival by attacking Shia pilgrims and senior ayatollahs in Najaf. The city is the principal seat of religious learning for Shias in Iraq.

Officials claimed that Iraqi security forces had obtained intelligence information from two detained men that had led the Iraqi Scorpion commando squad to prepare for an attack. The intelligence claimed obviously had little impact on how events unfolded.

Minister of Interior Jawad al-Bolani announced to reporters at 9 am Sunday morning that Najaf was being attacked by al-Qaeda. Immediately following this announcement the Ministry of National Security (MNS) announced that the dead were members of the Shia splinter extremist group Jund al-Sama (Army of Heaven) who were out to kill senior ayatollahs in Najaf, including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

Iraq's national security advisor Muaffaq al-Rubaii said just 15 minutes after the MNS announcement that hundreds of Arab fighters had been killed, and that many had been arrested. Rubaii claimed there were Saudis, Yemenis, Egyptians and Afghans.

But Governor Khalil's office backed away from its initial claims after the dead turned out to be local Shia Iraqis. Iraqi security officials continue to contradict their own statements. Most officials now say that the dead were Shia extremists supported by foreign powers.

The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has a pattern of announcing it is fighting terrorists, like its backers in Washington. Many Iraqis in the south now accuse Baghdad of calling them terrorists simply because they refuse to collaborate with the Iranian dominated government.

Ali al-Fadhily is our Baghdad correspondent. Dahr Jamail is our specialist writer who spent eight months reporting from inside Iraq and has been covering the Middle East for several years.


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

U.S./Iran Nuclear Row has Europe Anxious

OMG!

Published on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 by the Guardian / UK

Europeans Fear US Attack on Iran as Nuclear Row Intensifies· Transatlantic rift emerges over how to handle crisis·

America builds up its naval forces in the Gulf
by Ian Traynor in Brussels and Jonathan Steele

Senior European policy-makers are increasingly worried that the US administration will resort to air strikes against Iran to try to destroy its suspect nuclear programme.

As transatlantic friction over how to deal with the Iranian impasse intensifies, there are fears in European capitals that the nuclear crisis could come to a head this year because of US frustration with Russian stalling tactics at the UN security council. "The clock is ticking," said one European official. "Military action has come back on to the table more seriously than before.
The language in the US has changed."

As the Americans continue their biggest naval build-up in the Gulf since the start of the Iraq war four years ago, a transatlantic rift is opening up on several important aspects of the Iran dispute.

The Bush administration will shortly publish a dossier of charges of alleged Iranian subversion in Iraq. "Iran has steadily ramped up its activity in Iraq in the last three to four months. This applies to the scope and pace of their operations. You could call these brazen activities," a senior US official said in London yesterday.

Although the Iranians were primarily in Shia areas, they were not confined to them, the US source said, implying that they had formed links with Sunni insurgents and were helping them with booby-trap bombs aimed at Iraqi and US forces, new versions of the "improvised explosive devices".

Senior members of the US Congress have raised concerns that the US will attack Iran in retaliation for its alleged activities in Iraq. The official said there were no plans for "cross-border operations" from Iraq to Iran. But he said: "We don't want a progressively more confident and bolder Iran ... The perception that Iran is ascendant in the region and that there are no limits to what Iran can do - that's what is destabilising."

The Americans and Europeans have sought to maintain a common front on the nuclear issue for the past 30 months, with the European troika of Britain, France and Germany running failed negotiations with the Iranians and the Americans tacitly supporting them.

But diplomats in Brussels and those dealing with the dispute in Vienna say a fissure has opened up between the US and western Europe on three crucial aspects - the military option; how and how quickly to hit Iran with economic sanctions already decreed by the UN security council; and how to deal with Russian opposition to action against Iran through the security council.

"There's anxiety everywhere you turn," said a diplomat familiar with the work of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. "The Europeans are very concerned the shit could hit the fan."

A US navy battle group of seven vessels was steaming towards the Gulf yesterday from the Red Sea, part of a deployment of 50 US ships, including two aircraft carriers, expected in the area in weeks.

"No path is envisaged by the EU other than the UN path," the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, told the Guardian yesterday. "The priority for all of us is that Iran complies with UN security council resolutions."

The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, called at the weekend for a "timeout" in the worsening confrontation in an attempt to enable both sides to save face and climb down. But the Americans rejected the proposal and European officials involved in the dispute also believe the Iranians cannot be trusted to stick to a deal.

Despite recurring tensions on the Middle East between the US and France, the French are the most hawkish of the Europeans on Iran and are said to back a US drive to tighten the noose on Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The populist and recalcitrant leader is perceived to have been weakened recently, in part because of a mishandling of the nuclear row. "One group of western countries thinks it's a good time to step up the pressure on Ahmadinejad. All options are on the table. Others are worried we might be stumbling into a war," said another diplomat familiar with the dispute.

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and my country seems to be leading the way.

This should make every American furious, if not nauseous or both!

There is no damned excuse for this.

The end of American Empire is being talked around the media and the NET. Perhaps that will be the redeeming blesssing in all of this, but not without a fight, I am afraid.

The NeoCons are hell bent.

We should see that they find their way to hell, and fast. As a matter of fact, we should make it the goal for the rest of our lives to send them to hell and grind their miserable faces in the brimstone.

Published on Friday, January 12, 2007 by OneWorld.net

EU Urged to Lead on Human Rights as U.S. Loses Moral Authority

by Haider Rizvi

NEW YORK - The Bush administration's failure to address international human rights concerns has prompted an unusual call from one of the world's leading human rights organizations.

With U.S. credibility undermined by the use of torture and detention without trial, the European Union must fill the global leadership void on human rights, New York-based Human Rights Watch said Thursday in releasing its World Report 2007.

"Since the U.S. can't provide credible leadership on human rights, European countries must pick up the slack," said the organization's executive director Kenneth Roth, who observed that instead, "the European Union is punching well below its weight."

The organization urged European countries to overcome bureaucratic obstacles that leave its leaders "mired in procedures," effectively tying the hands of those seeking a tougher approach to serious rights abuses.

The call came on the day that marked five years since the United States started sending terrorism suspects to Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military base located in Cuba.

The authors of the 556-page report, which documents worldwide violations of human rights, said the U.S. abuses against detainees in Washington's so-called "war on terror" remained a major concern, as the Bush administration continued to defend torture by referring to it as "an alternative set of [interrogation] procedures."

Though a few prisoners have been released, more than 600 people are still locked up in the Guantanamo camp, where many have complained of severe torture and inhumane and degrading treatment at the hands of their captors.

Human Rights Watch and many other rights advocacy groups made fresh calls for the closure of the camp Thursday, noting that it was "long past time" to either bring to trial or set free the detainees who remain there.

Last October, when the international community and human rights organizations demanded fair trials for the prisoners, the Republican-led U.S. Congress flatly refused to entertain such requests.

But with the change of leadership in the Congress, it seems organizations like Human Rights Watch may find some reason to be hopeful about their demands.

"The U.S. Congress must act now to remedy the worst abuses of the Bush administration," said Roth. "Without firm and principled congressional action, the loss of U.S. leadership will likely persist."

Responding to a question Wednesday, new UN chief Ban Ki-moon, like his predecessor Kofi Annan, refused to accept the Bush administration's line of reasoning on indefinite detentions.
"(The) prison at Guantanamo should be closed," he told reporters at his first-ever formal news conference. Ban is due to meet Bush at the White House next week.

In addition to its criticism of U.S. behavior, authors of the Human Rights Watch report said worldwide many human rights challenges were in need of urgent action.

That includes the killing of innocent civilians in Iraq as a result of sectarian violence and frequent abuses of human rights by repressive regimes in Burma and Turkmenistan.

While deploring the persistence of dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Syria, the authors note that China is "moving backwards" and there has been no end to crack downs against non-governmental organizations in Russia and Egypt.

The report is also highly critical of human rights violations of various descriptions in Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Colombia, Israel, and Lebanon.

Noting that no situation is "more pressing" than the bloody crisis in Darfur, where estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to nearly half a million, the report chastised the UN Security Council for its inaction.

"Civilians in Darfur are under constant attack, and the conflict is spilling across Sudan's borders," said Roth, "yet the five permanent members of the Security Council managed little more than to produce stacks of unimplemented resolutions."

The report's authors said they noted "some positive developments" coming out of the global South, including African leaders' support for the trials of former Liberian president Charles Taylor and Chad's Hissene Habre. They also praised Latin American support for the International Criminal Court.

However, they also urged southern democracies to "do more" to protect human rights, such as breaking with abusive regional leaders to play a "more constructive role" at the UN Human Rights Council.

"Because many new democracies of the South have emerged from periods of extreme repression, whether colonialism, apartheid, or dictatorship, they could have special moral authority on human rights," Roth said. "But few have shown the consistency and commitment to emerge as real human rights leaders."

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