Cheney's Lap Dogs, Libby and Miller Go Down in Flames on Plame

Judith Miller, defrocked of her NY Times credentials, is clearly feeling the betrayal of being a lap dog tossed by it's master in a self-protective move. Testifying against her past collaborator, Libby, her presentation was described as unusually subdued unlike her aggressive reputation. She avoided all eye contact with Libby.
Libby, on the other hand, glared across the room as he saw his defense undermined by surprise testimony based on Miller's allegedly "lost" notebook.
At this point, they both look like liars, and deserving of their fate, Miller stripped of career and all credibility, Libby facing prison.
Los Angeles Times

Testifying against a source she once went to jail to protect, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller said Tuesday that she had three discussions with former vice presidential aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby in which he told her that the wife of a Bush administration critic worked for the CIA.


Miller described one meeting with Libby that occurred a full two weeks before the time that Libby has told investigators he first learned about CIA operative Valerie Plame from another journalist.


The hourlong appearance by Miller — who spent 85 days in jail rather than reveal her conversations with Libby to a federal grand jury two years ago — was a blow to his defense.


Vice President Dick Cheney's onetime chief of staff is charged with lying about his conversations with Miller and two other prominent journalists in an effort to obstruct a federal investigation into how the identity of Plame became public. She is expected to be followed to the stand by former Time magazine White House correspondent Matthew Cooper and Tim Russert, the moderator of the NBC News program "Meet the Press."


The spectacle of reporters from three major news organizations becoming government witnesses in a criminal prosecution has been a source of dread for media advocates concerned that the legal precedent — and glare of publicity — could make it harder for reporters to gather and report the news from confidential sources.


And Miller, 59, was often on the defensive during a hard-edged cross-examination.


She is one of the trial's most compelling figures because of her high-profile role covering Iraq's alleged weapons programs, her extensive contacts with Libby, and the time she spent in an Alexandria, Va., jail for refusing to reveal his identity as her source.


Miller left the New York Times in 2005 and now works as a freelance journalist.


Her jailing became a media event but also raised questions about how far journalists should go in protecting their sources; essentially, she was refusing to blow Libby's cover — even though Libby was blowing the cover of a CIA operative in their conversations together.

The REAL McCain

John McCain HAD a reputation as a statesman. That was until he began his run for the Presidency. Now he's a rather poor imitation for Doublethink Dubya. See the The REAL McCain.

Iran Already is An Ascendent Power In the Middle East

Here is an angle about the build up in the Persian Gulf I hadn't thought of. Virtually all other Persian Gulf countries are Sunni dominated with significant Shia populations. Iran's threats of retaliation target virtually all of these US allies should the US or Israel attack. Two carriers in the Gulf might be giving the political leaders in the Saudi peninsula further warning that they MUST choose sides and support the American presense.
It is indeed interesting that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have been back peddling, further demonstrating US weakness.
washingtonpost.com

Iranian officials -- emboldened but uneasy over nuclear-armed neighbors in Israel and Pakistan and a U.S. military presence in the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan -- have warned that they would respond to an American attack on Iran's facilities.


"Iran's supporters are widespread -- they're in Iraq, they're in Afghanistan, they're everywhere. And you know, the American soldiers in the Middle East are hostages of Iran, in the situation where a war is imposed on it. They're literally in the hands of the Iranians," said Najaf Ali Mirzai, a former Iranian diplomat in Beirut who heads the Civilization Center for Iranian-Arab Studies. "The Iranians can target them wherever, and Patriot missiles aren't going to defend them and neither is anything else."


"Iran would suffer," he added, "but America would suffer more."
As that struggle deepens, many in the Arab world find themselves on the sidelines. They are increasingly anxious over worsening tension between Sunni and Shiite Muslims across the Middle East, even as some accuse the United States of stoking that tension as a way to counter predominantly Shiite Iran. Fear of Iranian dominance is coupled, sometimes in the same conversation, with suspicion of U.S. intentions in confronting Iran.


[..]Iran has found itself strengthened almost by default, first with the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan to Iran's east, which ousted the Taliban rulers against whom it almost went to war in the 1990s, and then to its west, with the American ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, against whom it fought an eight-year war in the 1980s.


Arab rulers allied with the United States issued stark warnings. Jordan's King Abdullah in 2005 spoke darkly of a Shiite crescent that would stretch from Iran, through Iraq's Shiite Arab majority, to Lebanon, where Shiites make up the largest single community. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt suggested last year that Shiites in the Arab world were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries. And in a rare interview, published Saturday, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia suggested that Iran, although he did not name the country, was trying to convert Sunni Arabs to Shiism. "The majority of Sunni Muslims will never change their faith," he told al-Siyassah, a Kuwaiti newspaper.


Across the region, Iran has begun to exert influence on fronts as diverse as its allies: the formerly exiled Shiite parties in Iraq and their militias; Hezbollah, a Lebanese group formed with Iranian patronage after Israel's 1982 invasion; and the cash-strapped Sunni Muslim movement of Hamas in the Palestinian territories.


[..]"If Iran is bombed, Iran's reaction is a sure thing. They cannot sit idle, and what kind of reaction they will take is a big question," said Abbas Bolurfrushan, the president of the Iranian Business Council in Dubai, a booming city-state on the Gulf that is part of the United Arab Emirates, where an estimated 400,000 Iranians live and work.


[..]Mirzai, the former Iranian diplomat, offered a similar scenario in more threatening terms. Wearing a white turban and the robes of a cleric, he sketched out potential Iranian responses: cutting the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which 20 percent of the world's oil passes; retaliation in Iraq, Afghanistan or Lebanon; attacks on U.S. targets in the Gulf.


[..]In an attempt to contest Iran's influence, the United States has sought to form an axis among Sunni Arab states it considers moderate: Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and smaller countries in the Gulf. Israeli officials have spoken about a possible alignment of their country's interests with those states to arrest both Iran's influence and its nuclear program.


In November, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he would try to deepen ties with those states, some of which have yet to recognize Israel, in what Israeli analysts saw as an opening bid to create an anti-Iranian bloc.


But Zisser, of Tel Aviv University, cautioned that "all of these countries are not very strong, and they have their own problems."


"Iran's threat could do something to bring them together, but I would say that any alliance that comes out of it would be defensive in nature," he said. "These countries are not going to be able to unite in any way that would meaningfully change the face of the Middle East."


Potentially more far-reaching is the sectarian tension that the struggle has ignited. In the Palestinian territories, Israeli officials say, Iran has been increasingly successful in influencing the chaotic political situation, particularly by funding the Hamas-led government.


[..]"It's very bleak and it's very dangerous," said Dakhil, the Saudi writer. "We have a sectarian civil war in Iraq now and this is drawing sectarian lines through the region. This is the most important, the most dangerous ramification of the American war in Iraq."

Iraq Has No Sovereignty When It Comes To Iran

When US forces arrested Iranians, they not only invaded sovereign territory of a consulate, but they broke into the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders, who also happens to be a leader in the Badr militia, part of a group that founded Hezbollah.
How long can the US pretend ignorance to the twisted alliances in Iraq, where high government officials have ties to sectarian ethnic cleansing? How can we support the government and interfere directly with it's sovereign relations with Iran? How can we support a government that engages in ethnic cleansing?
We need to get out of Iraq, ASAP.
New York Times

Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad outlined an ambitious plan on Sunday to greatly expand its economic and military ties with Iraq — including an Iranian national bank branch in the heart of the capital — just as the Bush administration has been warning the Iranians to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs.


Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, said his country hoped to bolster financial and military ties. Iran’s plan, as outlined by the ambassador, carries the potential to bring Iran into further conflict here with the United States, which has detained a number of Iranian operatives in recent weeks and says it has proof of Iranian complicity in attacks on American and Iraqi forces.
The ambassador, Hassan Kazemi Qumi, said Iran was prepared to offer Iraq government forces training, equipment and advisers for what he called “the security fight.” In the economic area, Mr. Qumi said, Iran was ready to assume major responsibility for Iraq reconstruction, an area of failure on the part of the United States since American-led forces overthrew Saddam Hussein nearly four years ago.


[..]Although Mr. Qumi was not given specific questions before the interview, he was made aware of the general topics that would be covered and seemed prepared with detailed answers in many cases. He seemed keen to give his government’s view of what occurred in the early morning of Dec. 21, when American forces raided the Baghdad compound of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders, who had traveled to Washington three weeks before to meet President Bush.


Within the compound, the Iranians were seized in the house of Hadi al-Ameri, who holds two powerful positions: he is chairman of the Iraqi Parliament’s security committee and leader of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of Mr. Hakim’s party, which spent years in exile in Iran.


Although the Americans have suggested that the Iranians were providing support for militias like the Badr Organization, Mr. Qumi said that his countrymen were dealing with Mr. Ameri in his government capacity.

Iran Walking a Thin Line

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency has called for a “timeout” for both Tehran and Western nations to head off a larger confrontation. He notes recent moves by either side have represented little more than "flexing muscles" and "calling names” Dr. ElBaradei said “It’s time to engage.”
He proposes a suspension of the sanctions against Iran, while the Iranians simultaneously suspend enrichment of uranium. Iran says it needs time to review the idea of a "timeout" from it's drive to accellerate it's enrichment of uranium.
But it may be that Iran's announcement is little more than a bluff. Iran has been stonewalling for the past year with negotiations. There is no indication this is little more than more of the same. Besides Tehran has fallen behind it's own timetable for assembling centrifuges to enrich uranium. It predicted a year ago it would have 3,000 centrifuges running by now.In fact it is just getting the installation underway at Natanz.
But clearly once construction begins, the world will be hard pressed to stop Iran. Any new construction would instantly become a military target for the United States or Israel.
ElBaradie calls any such strike “absolutely bonkers,” Not only would it not deprive Iran of the technological expertise to pursue any nuclear ambitions, it would strengthen the hand of the hardliners in the Iranian government, and further destabilize the Middle East.
Everyone seems to agree that Iranians are three to eight years away from being able to manufacture a nuclear device. Apparently, the US is thinking like ElBaradie and wanting to stop them at the gate. So far the US negotiators have not discouraged ElBaradie's attempt at getting key players to the table.
PINR agrees with me that Tehran has been emboldened since the US invaded Iraq. And the US is scrambling desperately to regain leverage.
One way the US has been attempting to gain traction has been with a direct threat of military force. Despite repeated insistence it has no intention of using force, it soon will have two aircraft carrier fleet in the Persian Gulf, calling this development a "warning to Syria and Iran." Then the US military arrested six Iranians in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, accusing them of being part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and having an active role in the insurgency. This repeats the ridiculous assertion that Shiite Iran would aid Sunnis. Even the Kurds, no friends of Iran attacked the American move as violating the sovereign soil of an Iranian consulate, an accusation denied by US generals.
There are also ominous reports from Turkey that the United States moved 16 F-16 fighter aircraft into the Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey as well as a squadron of F-117 to South Korea, presumable to discourage North Korea of taking advantage of an increasingly engaged US military in the Persian Gulf.
PINR makes an interesting point that even though the attack militarily may not be in the interests of the US, it may be the ONLY path available to influence the current track of events in the Middle East towards a region dominated by Iran. Such an attack would prove detrimental to Iran's regional ambitions.
This could be why there appears to be movement in Iran to rein in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The New York Times has an excellent article giving an in depth review of a topic I've mentioned before, Khamenei is balancing competing forces within political Iran. Rued in America, honored in Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini built his revolution on balancing the forces of democracy and fascistic theocracy. He drew support from both. It was only after the revolution that it became clear the left would be left wanting for a true democracy. His successor, Khamenei, supreme Imam of Iran, leads what is called the "traditional conservatives".

As president, Ahmadinejad looked to the extreme right rather than seeking allies among the traditional conservatives, and in so doing, he exposed himself politically. “They were very arrogant,” Hadian said of Ahmadinejad and his camp. “They didn’t want to make any compromises. He has stood against the entire political structure in Iran, not inviting any of them, even the conservatives, to be partners. You don’t see them in the cabinet; you don’t see them in political positions.”


And for that there was a price to be paid. This fall, Rafsanjani, who had suffered a humiliating defeat at Ahmadinejad’s hands in the presidential election of 2005, was reportedly persuaded to run again for the Assembly of Experts by the supreme leader or people close to him. Rafsanjani is a divisive figure in Iranian politics. He is widely perceived as a kingmaker, the power behind the rise of Khamenei to the position of supreme leader and that of Khatami to the presidency. But though he remains highly respected among clerics, Rafsanjani is not a beloved figure in Iranian public life. During his presidency, he adopted an economic liberalization program that involved extremely unpopular austerity measures; meanwhile, through pistachio exports, he had himself become one of the richest men in Iran. Political and social repression did not ease until Khatami, his successor, came into office.


Nonetheless, in the Assembly of Experts elections in December, Rafsanjani emerged as the compromise candidate of the reformists and traditional conservatives. One reformist activist described him to me as the very last line of defense against the extreme right. And Rafsanjani delivered a staggering blow, winning nearly twice as many votes as Mesbah-Yazdi [extreme right-wing ally of Ahmadinejad and would be replacement of Khamenei as supreme leader]. The neoconservatives, it seemed, had been slapped down much the same way the reformists had: the traditional conservatives had decided that the threat they posed was intolerable, and the voters had decided that the president associated with them could not deliver on his promises.


[...]Sadegh Zibakalam, a reformist Tehran University professor, reflected when I visited him at his mother’s home in north Tehran in December. “Trying to make an amalgam of Western, liberal, democratic ideas and Shiite theology is nonsense. It doesn’t work." Later, he added: “Either Khamenei is infallible, or he’s not. If he’s not, then he is an ordinary person like Bush or Blair, answerable to the Parliament and the people. If he is, then we should throw away all this nonsense about Western values and liberal democracy. Either we have Western liberal philosophy, republican government and checks and balances, or we should stick to Mesbah. But to combine them? Imam Khomeini was so popular and charismatic. People rallied behind him and believed he was infallible. We never thought, What if the supreme leader is not supported by the people? The answer to this was brilliantly made by Mesbah: to hell with them.”


Zibakalam described Mesbah-Yazdi’s reading of velayat-i-faqih as a radical version of the one first proposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But when I looked back through the lectures in which Khomeini first delineated the theory in Najaf in 1970, I found a vision strikingly similar to Mesbah-Yazdi’s. At that time, Khomeini had little truck with popular sovereignty. He quoted the Koran and sayings attributed to Muhammad: “The prophet has higher claims on the believers than their own selves” and “The scholars are the heirs of the prophet.” The only legitimate legislation was that which had already been made by God, and this would be administered by the learned jurist, who would rule over the people like a guardian over a child.


Nine years later, from his Paris exile during the revolution, Khomeini would approve a constitution drafted by more liberal associates. It was the blueprint for a parliamentary democracy, in which a council of clergymen would play an advisory role. This draft became the basis for the debate that occupied the first Assembly of Experts, convened to revise and approve a final constitution. After much discussion of the contradictions it engendered, the experts, many of them clerics, nonetheless yoked velayat-i-faqih to the republican structure they had been handed.


To this day, the structure of the Iranian state remains too liberal for the authoritarians and too authoritarian for the liberals, but the traditional conservatives at the center of power cannot resolve this obvious paradox at the republic’s heart without relinquishing their own position. The best they could do was to revise the Constitution after Khomeini’s death, greatly expanding the powers of the clerical councils and of the supreme leader at the expense of the elected offices.


[...]After eight years in power, the reform movement found itself blocked by the conservative establishment, hamstrung by its own mistakes and unwilling or unable to shore up the failing economy. Ahmadinejad rose in its wake, campaigning not on ideological extremism but on populist blandishments. He would ease the financial pain of his countrymen, he promised, by bringing Iran’s oil wealth to the people’s tables.


As Omid Malekian had intimated to me at the Mahestan shopping mall, however, this was not a promise to make lightly. The Iranian economy has been mismanaged at least since the revolution, and to fix it would require measures no populist would be willing to take. Under Ahmadinejad, inflation has risen; foreign investors have scorned Iranian markets, fearing political upheaval or foreign invasion; the Iranian stock market has plummeted; Iranian capital has fled to Dubai. Voters I talked to pointed to the prices of ordinary foodstuffs when they wanted to explain their negative feelings about the government. According to Iranian news sources, from January to late August 2006 the prices of fruits and vegetables in urban areas rose by 20 percent. A month later, during Ramadan, the price of fruit reportedly doubled while that of chicken rose 10 percent in mere days. Housing prices in Tehran have reached a record high. Unemployment is still widespread. And Ahmadinejad’s approval rating, as calculated by the official state television station, had dipped to 35 percent in October.


Iran is not a poor country. It is highly urbanized and modern, with a sizable middle class. Oil revenues, which Iran has in abundance, should be channeling plenty of hard currency into the state’s coffers, and in fact the economy’s overall rate of growth is healthy and rising. But as Parvin Alizadeh, an economist at London Metropolitan University, explained to me, what ultimately matters is how the state spends its influx of wealth. The Iranian government has tried to create jobs swiftly and pacify the people by spending the oil money on new government-run projects. But these projects are not only overmanned and inefficient, like much of the country’s bloated and technologically backward public sector; they also increase the demand for consumer goods and services, driving up inflation.


Ahmadinejad has continued this trend. He has generated considerable personal good will in poorer communities, but hardly anyone I asked could honestly say that their lives had gotten better during his presidency. He fought to lower interest rates, which drove up lending, leading to inflation and capital flight. The government cannot risk infuriating the public with the austerity measures that would be required in order to solve its deep-rooted economic problems. But as long as its short-term fixes continue to fail, the government will go on being unpopular. The last two presidents have lost their constituencies over this issue. And so officials seek to distract people from their economic woes with ideological posturing and anti-Western rhetoric. Not only has this lost its cachet with much of the Iranian public, it also serves to compound Iran’s economic problems by blackening its image abroad. “Iran has not sorted out its basic problem, which is to be accepted in the international community as a respectable government,” Alizadeh said. “Investors do not take it seriously. This is a political crisis, not an economic crisis.”

The rulers of Iran live on borrowed time. Their popular revolution has turned sour for the poor and is gradually turning off the the oil barons and the middle class. It's just a matter of time that the flagging support of the people will undo the rule of the Imams and bring into power the reformers. Bush and Israel seems so determined to strengthen the hand of our enemies in Iran. All military assessments agree that it is a useless attack on infrastructure that will simply delay the nuclear program and strengthen the hand of the Imams and President Ahmadinejad.

Tens of Thousands Rally Against the War

New images of war protest conjured recollections of Vietnam War protests as 10s of thousands rallied today in Washington DC against the war in Iraq. Jane Fonda and Jesse Jackson stood together with a sampling of Congressment on a podium again to protest an unpopular war.
Perhaps the most persuasive speaker of the day was a 12 year old girl.
Los Angeles Times

Standing on her toes to reach the microphone, 12-year-old Moriah Arnold told the crowd: "Now we know our leaders either lied to us or hid the truth. Because of our actions, the rest of the world sees us as a bully and a liar." The sixth-grader from Harvard, Mass., the youngest speaker on the National Mall stage, organized a petition drive at her school against the war.

2008 AND THE MEDIA MYTH MACHINE

Sam Smith has an outstanding and unfortunately rare editorial on his blog UNDERNEWS today. Its a commentary about the Democratic field for the 2008 election. His at times caustic cynacism is a welcome contrast to the "feel good" media mythology that helps create talking head images on TV that wins elections.

ONE THING is clear about the 2008 Democratic primary: there will be little room for reality. The media story line is already being driven by a mythology that in more trivial times would only be annoying but, given America's collapse as a constitutional society and as a respected nation, merely adds to the extraordinary danger the country faces today.


It used to be that the length of the Democratic primary season at least allowed time for reflection and for recovery from illusions shattered in scattered states as presumed victors stumbled or fell. Now not even that is possible.


[..]The Times politely notes that "Democrats and Republicans said that the changes would be the latest step in the evolution of a presidential nominating system that increasingly seems resistant to the kind of dark-horse presidential bid that was possible back when small states like Iowa and New Hampshire enjoyed such influence over the nominating process."


What is really happening is that the primary system is being nationalized and compressed for the benefit of those with the most money and the best early standings in the media mythology.


Money at every level in American politics has already replaced the importance of the voter because money combined with media mythology makes voters do what the money wants them to. And in the last election cycle 48% of this money came from zip codes with a high proportion of households making over $100,000 a year.


Two items give a good feel for what's going on this year:


From ABC News: Movie moguls Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg want their Hollywood peers to join them at a Feb. 20 fundraiser the three are throwing for Obama. For $2,300 a person and $4600 a couple, they can meet the candidate at a reception at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Those who commit to raising $46,000 (10 couples/20 tickets) for the evening will be invited to a private dinner at Geffen's Malibu, Calif., home.


From the Jewish journal Forward: Democratic activists and operatives said Clinton will pull in large quantities of cash among Jewish donors not only because of what they described as her strong positions on Israel and domestic matters of interest to Jews, but also because of longtime ties with these activists dating back to her husband's administration. The haul is important: Strategists say that serious candidates will need to raise at least $50 million -- and probably more like $100 million -- by the end of the year. They say that money from Jewish donors constitutes about half the donations given to national Democratic candidates.


This is not democracy. This is a cattle auction.


But the money's not enough. The media, which is, after all, part of the money, has to provide a myth to replace any troubling intrusions by reality. Hence we have the lovely story of an iconic feminist running against an iconic black with, by our count, two-thirds of the candidate headlines this month going to Clinton and Obama. The third placed candidate, John Edwards, has gotten just six percent of the headlines this month despite being ahead in Iowa and tying Clinton for second place in the last New Hampshire poll.


Edwards, once a darling of the Democratic Abandonship Council, has done the unforgivable. He has strayed from the flock and is playing his own game. It matters not that this game is the most realistically Democratic one of any major candidate in the past few decades or that his opponents often seem to be trying to prove how conservative they can be. For them it's not a matter of being the best Democrat; it's a matter pleasing the media and the money.


So you won't hear much about Hillary Clinton once being a Goldwater Republican or that Barack Obama offers little to write about, let alone justify electing him to the White House. To a media that otherwise produces soap operas and American Idol, Clinton and Obama are ideally simple to present in their mythcasts.


[..]On the other hand it's hard to think of anyone since as far back as Fred Harris who has been willing to run for president sounding so much like a real Democrat, which is to say one centered on making life better for the most number of Americans.


And I would rather deal with Edwards' straight-forward error on the death penalty than with Hillary Clinton's attempt to make all sides think she agreed with them.


I may be unduly optimistic, but Edwards seems an unusual politician in another way. He seems to have learned something along the way. That doesn't happen often in politics. But then Edwards lost a son in a car accident and his wife had breast cancer. It's hard to retain the sort of hubris one finds in a Clinton or a Kerry when life intrudes like that.


[..]And it's also possible that Obama might turn out to be something other than a somewhat sanctimonious pop star trying to make us feel good about him. Certainly he's a vast improvement over the most corrupt and dishonest Democrat to seek the presidency since her husband.


But at the moment, whatever his faults and given the realities of America's sick politics, Edwards is the best we've got, the best chance to hold the line against the money and the myths, against the corrupters and the corroders. And we don't have a hell of a lot of time. Both the money and the media want this settled soon and weeks to them would be better than months.


The SUV liberals will stick with Clinton and Obama but, as Howard Dean showed the last time round, there's still a little room for an unanticipated rebellion, a demand for Democrats to be Democrats, for decency to go before power, and for the myth makers and the money shakers to be taught the lesson that reality still matters.

I like Edwards too. Obama just doesn't have the experience. That doesn't mean he can't be a good president, but I want to make sure we have a winner.

Anti-Science Movement Turns on "Inconvenient Truth"

The anti-science sentiment in the community continues now with Gore's thoroughly documented presentation on global warming. Apparently some people are so caught up in right wing propaganda that global warming is a liberal conspiracy that they will not be confused with the facts. Worse yet, some see global warming as representing the coming rapture and see no reason to intervene!
washingtonpost.com

Frosty E. Hardiman is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary. "Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced.


Hardiman, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class.


"No you will not teach or show that propagandist Al Gore video to my child, blaming our nation -- the greatest nation ever to exist on this planet -- for global warming," Hardiman wrote in an e-mail to the Federal Way School Board. The 43-year-old computer consultant is an evangelical Christian who says he believes that a warming planet is "one of the signs" of Jesus Christ's imminent return for Judgment Day.


His angry e-mail (along with complaints from a few other parents) stopped the film from being shown to Hardiman's daughter. The teacher in that science class, Kay Walls, says that after Hardiman's e-mail she was told by her principal that she would receive a disciplinary letter for not following school board rules that require her to seek written permission to present "controversial" materials in class.

Senator Jim Webb Rebuts Bush

This is well worth the listen. It's great to see one of our veterans just elected to the represent his country so well. I want to see more of him.

Dubai Think-tank Tells US to Tend to Iraq and Israel Before Messing with Iran

Here is a good example of the credibility gap the world has with the Bush Administration. U.S. undersecretary of State Burns makes a get tough speech about Iran and he gets publically lectured on how the US needs to clean up it's messes before starting another war with Iran.
Los Angeles Times

R. Nicholas Burns, U.S. undersecretary of State for political affairs, ruled out direct negotiations with Tehran and said rapprochement was "not possible" until Iran halted its uranium enrichment program.


"The Middle East isn't a region to be dominated by Iran," Burns said in an address to the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, a think tank. "The [Persian] Gulf isn't a body of water to be controlled by Iran. That's why we've seen the United States station two carrier battle groups in the region."


[..]The aircraft carrier John C. Stennis and accompanying ships are headed toward the Persian Gulf to join the carrier group already in the region, the Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Stennis is expected to arrive in late February.


Some members of the audience in Dubai complained that American wars in the Middle East were threatening the region's stability and asked Burns and the U.S. to sort out Iraq and the Israel-Palestinian conflict before focusing on Iran.


"What we are not interested in is another war in the region," Mohammed Naqbi, who heads the Gulf Negotiations Center, told Burns. "Iraq is your problem, not the problem of the Arabs. You destroyed a country that had institutions. You handed that country to Iran. Now you are crying to Europe and the Arabs to help you out of this mess."

Bangladesh: A New Hub for Terrorism?

Remember Bangladesh? First immortalized when George Harrison sang of it's misery and starvation in the early '70s. Bangladesh had just broken free from Pakistani rule with the help of the Indian army. During the 70's the government was beset by multiple coups and attempts at restructuring. With India's support it emerged as a democracy. But like India, it's economic disparity is extremely broad, with the large majority of the population very poor.

Bangladesh has recently had considerable controversy about the upcoming national elections forcing a postponement and a new caretaker government.
WaPo recently questioned whether Bangladesh could become a haven for terrorists.

While the United States dithers, a growing Islamic fundamentalist movement linked to al-Qaeda and Pakistani intelligence agencies is steadily converting the strategically located nation of Bangladesh into a new regional hub for terrorist operations that reach into India and Southeast Asia.


With 147 million people, largely Muslim Bangladesh has substantial Hindu and Christian minorities and is nominally a secular democracy. But the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) struck a Faustian bargain with the fundamentalist party Jamaat-e-Islami five years ago in order to win power.


In return for the votes in Parliament needed to form a coalition government, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia has looked the other way as the Jamaat has systematically filled sensitive civil service, police, intelligence and military posts with its sympathizers, who have in turn looked the other way as Jamaat-sponsored guerrilla squads patterned after the Taliban have operated with increasing impunity in many rural and urban areas.

PINR has a different view. Despite the election controversy, somethings have been going well. All bets are off when global warming raises the ocean and displaces 100 million of the population.

The B.N.P.-led coalition claims to have performed well during its tenure, although its assertions have been contested by many. On October 27, Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, in a speech delivered on the last day of her government's tenure, outlined the economic progress achieved by the country under her leadership. She said that the coalition government assumed power with a foreign exchange reserve of US$1 billion, but had maintained a level of over $3 billion for the last five years. She disclosed that remittance inflows had increased to $4.2 billion in 2005, rising from $1.88 billion in 2002. She also stated that per capita income had risen to $482 and per capita G.D.P. increased to $456 in 2005-06. The country's trade deficit with India has narrowed by 14 percent in the last financial year with increased exports and declining imports.


Similarly, Bangladesh, which appeared to be rapidly consolidating its position as a potential refuge for Islamist extremist and terrorism in the early years after the September 11 attacks, has shown definite signs of recovery. The high point of Islamist extremism in Bangladesh was reached with the August 14, 2005 countrywide explosions, and further demonstrated through a series of attacks targeting judicial institutions in the country between October and December 2005. The government, however, not only managed to arrest the entire top brass of the Jama'atul Mujahideen Bangladesh (J.M.B.), but also secured the final judicial verdict on their fate. On November 28, 2006, the Supreme Court rejected the petitions of six militant leaders and cadres of the J.M.B. seeking permission to appeal against a High Court judgment upholding the death sentences awarded to them by a trial court. Critics, however, allege that the regime has neither bothered to address the fundamentals that led to the growth of militancy, nor has it targeted the thriving terrorist network and their international supporters.

Dirty Moonie Politics And Fox Spreads the Manure

Media Matters

Melanie Morgan, Lee Rodgers, Rush Limbaugh, and John Gibson all forwarded the accusation made by a website controlled by Rev. Sun Myung Moon that Sen. Hillary Clinton was responsible for spreading information linking Sen. Barack Obama to a madrassa, or Muslim school. None of the four cited any evidence, other than the article, that Clinton was responsible for promoting the madrassa story, and the article cited no one by name.

Fox News "Fair and Balanced" Report

Update: When Jimmy Carter Speaks The Truth

Jimmy Carter is one of most highly respected former presidents we have. He spent considerable prestige saying something no one else has been willing to say. Disagreeing with Israel is NOT anti-semitism.
Israel is not a modern Democracy in the sense of the one we cherish. Israel has something more akin to a caste system. The more "Jewish" you are in a genetic sense, the more rights you have. At the bottom of the citizen ladder is the Israeli Arabs. They are truly "second class" citizens in the classic sense. While they have many rights, they have much less than Jewish citizens. Even further down the list is residents of the "territories". They have no rights as citizens. They have a few rights as a occupied countries citizen would, they have more rights in Palestine and almost none in any part of Israel. They are truly "third class" citizens. For example, all abandoned land in Palestine is subject to be claimed for Jewish settlements. There are laws whose specific purpose was to drive Arabs off their land and make it "abandoned".
While this is not exactly like apartheid, it is very similar. And it is a system of privileges based on heritage, not hard work. Jimmy Carter just points this and many other problems out.
Update: Another statesman has spoke up.
AlterNet

The head of Israel's largest Holocaust memorial, Holocaust-survivor Yosef Lapid, said that the behavior of some of Israel's settler's toward Palestinians reminded him of the anti-semitism before WWII.

Hurray for Jimmy and Yosef, statesmen among statesmen. Both will pay a heavy cost for their honesty and courage.
AlterNet

Its title -- drawing a not-terribly-subtle parallel between the former president who put human rights squarely in the middle of U.S. foreign policy and Adolph Hitler, a genocidal maniac -- was: "Jimmy Carter's Jewish Problem."


Lipstadt accuses Carter of giving "inadvertent comfort" to Holocaust deniers -- the subject of much of Lipstadt's scholarship and two of the three books she's authored. Carter, she wrote, has responded to "criticism" -- "witch-hunt" would be a more appropriate description -- by "reflexively" offering up "innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government." She adds, "When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder."

Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards. In the Los Angeles Times last month, he declared it "politically suicide" [sic] for a politician to advocate a "balanced position" on the crisis.

Of course, saying that the political climate in the U.S. is such that just about any vocal criticism of Israel's policies in the Occupied Territories -- that's the subject at hand, although one would be hard-pressed to discern it from Lipstadt's Op-Ed -- guarantees a firestorm of indignant howls is certainly not a "traditional anti-Semitic canard"; it's a fairly accurate description of the pitfalls inherent in modern America's polluted discourse around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One need look no further for confirmation of that than Lipstadt's own toxic response to Carter's book.

Iranian sees border danger

While a BBC poll finds US foreign policy unpopular at home and worldwide, Iran claims the instability in Iraq is spilling across it's borders.

The view of the US's role in the world has deteriorated both internationally and domestically, a BBC poll suggests.
The World Service survey, conducted in 25 nations including the US, found that three in four respondents disapproved of how Washington had dealt with Iraq. The majority of the 26,381 respondents also disapproved of the way five other foreign policy areas had been handled. The poll, released ahead of President Bush's State of the Union speech, was conducted between November and January.

The Bush Administration has been accusing Iran of arming death squads and insurgents. While it's clearly true that both Sadr' Mahdi Army and Badr Corps have Iranian weapons that they are using for death squads, there is no way Iranians would be arming Sunnis.
An Iranian diplomat's report that Arab Iran is destabilizing is much more likely true. And it's also likely that American Special Ops is in part responsible. And guess what they are most interested in? Iranian oil is largely limited to this Arab region.
Los Angeles Times

A ranking Iranian diplomat on Monday said the chaos of Iraq was spilling over into his country, spreading a destabilizing influence to its Arab population.


The assertion by Mohammad Reza Baghban, the Iranian consul in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, runs counter to the Bush administration analysis that violence and instability flow the opposite direction — from Tehran to Baghdad.


"If you take a look at the discoveries of the Iranian police, you will find arms, ammunitions and other illegal equipment smuggled from Iraq to Khuzistan and other Iranian provinces," Baghban said in a rare interview.


Khuzistan is an oil-rich, ethnically Arab province in mostly Persian Iran that has experienced outbreaks of violence over the last few years by suspected separatists.


Allegations that weapons flow from Iran into Iraq are unsubstantiated, despite a strong presence of British and American troops in the border region of southern Iraq, Baghban added.


"The Americans are used to speaking nonsense and none of their allegations are documented," Baghban said. "Can they offer any evidence of what they say?"


[..]The diplomatic stations have granted tens of thousands of visas to Iraqis, even as Americans permit only tiny numbers of Iraqis to travel to the U.S., Baghban said. In Basra alone, 10,000 to 30,000 visas are issued every month, he said.


"They travel to Iran for different purposes like pilgrimage, visiting their relatives or for medical treatment," Baghban said. "There also are Iranians coming to Iraq for pilgrimage, commerce or family visits, and they might pass by Basra. But currently, they are not numerous."

Ominous Sign of a Wider War

Now why would our new Defense Secretary Gates appoint a specialist in combined air and naval operations to oversee the military theater in Iraq? Could it be he has other plans beyond the quagmire in Iraq? Maybe Iran?
The Nation

On January 5 Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced that he was replacing Gen. John Abizaid as commander of the Central Command (Centcom)--the body responsible for oversight of all US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and the greater Middle East--with Adm. William Fallon, currently the commander of the Pacific Command (Pacom). Fallon is one of several senior officers recently appointed by Gates to oversee the new strategy for Iraq now being shaped by President Bush.


The choice of Fallon to replace Abizaid was highly unusual in several respects. First, this is a lateral move for the admiral, not a promotion: As head of Pacom, Fallon commanded a larger force than he will oversee at Centcom, and one over which he will exercise less direct control since all combat operations in Iraq will be under the supervision of Gen. Dave Petraeus, the recently announced replacement for Gen. George Casey as commander of all US and allied forces. Second, and more surprising, Fallon is a Navy man, with experience in carrier operations, while most of Centcom's day-to-day work is on the ground, in the struggle against insurgents and warlords in Iraq and Afghanistan.


If engagement with Iran and Syria was even remotely on the agenda, Abizaid is exactly the man you'd want on the job at Centcom overseeing US forces and strategy in the region. But if that's not on the agenda, if you're thinking instead of using force against Iran and/or Syria, then Admiral Fallon is exactly the man you'd want at Centcom.


Why? Because combined air and naval operations are his forte. Fallon began his combat career as a Navy combat flyer in Vietnam, and he served with carrier-based forces for twenty-four years after that. He commanded a carrier battle wing during the first Gulf War in 1991 and led the naval group supporting NATO operations during the Bosnia conflict four years later. More recently, Fallon served as vice chief of naval operations before becoming the head of Pacom in 2005. All this means that he is primed to oversee an air, missile and naval attack on Iran, should the President give the green light for such an assault--and the fact that Fallon has been moved from Pacom to Centcom means that such a move is very much on Bush's mind.


The recent replacement of General Abizaid by Admiral Fallon, along with other recent moves announced by the Defense Secretary, should give deep pause to anyone concerned about the prospect of escalation in the Iraq War. Contrary to the advice given by the Iraq Study Group, Bush appears to be planning for a wider war--with much higher risk of catastrophic failure--not a gradual and dignified withdrawal from the region.

Is Bolivia on the Brink of a Civil War?

Bolivia continues in turmoil. President Evo Morales, a darling of the left, has been leading leftist "revolution" in Bolivia similar to Chavez in Venezuela. In the past few weeks, conditions have drifted towards civil war. Political differences between the indigenous coca farmers and the natural gas rich landed class and their middle class workers have exploded into street fighting in Cochabamba. This was provoked by the local Governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, who made what proved to be a dangerous play to position himself as the key national opponent of the President.
NAM

When Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, socialist Evo Morales, a year ago, the country's poor and marginalized could now claim a president as their own. It was also clear, however, that Bolivia's transformation would not end with an election, and that it would continue to provoke serious political conflict.


On Thursday, that conflict turned into open battle on the streets of the nation's third-largest city, Cochabamba, leaving two men dead and more than 150 people wounded.


"Manfred provoked this," Teodoro Sanchez told me, a 36-year-old man from the rural Chapare region outside Cochabamba. "The majority of people are tired of being cheated. We are asking for his resignation and we will continue marching until he leaves."


He was speaking of Manfred Reyes Villa, the governor of Cochabamba, who is at the center of the battle in the streets. A former presidential candidate, Reyes Villa has emerged as one of the leading opposition figures to Morales.


In December, Reyes Villa joined with four other governors to call for "regional autonomy," a demand that Bolivia's states be given wide independence from Morales' national government. The autonomy demand is primarily backed by the eastern departments that sit on top of the country's vast oil and gas reserves and is designed mainly to give those states a bigger share over the revenues that come from that oil and gas. Last July "autonomia," as it is called here, was voted on in national elections. In the state of Cochabamba, 63% of the electorate rejected it.


Last week, several thousand union members and people from the countryside descended on Cochabamba's colonial central plaza and demanded the governor's resignation. When protesters began throwing rocks at the police guarding the state building, those police responded with a barrage of tear gas. After the gassing, some in the crowd (protest leaders claim they were infiltrators seeking to provoke conflict) set fire to the building's front doors and bottom floor offices.


For more than a week a crowd of a thousand -- many of them members of the coca growers union that Morales has long led -- have occupied the Central Plaza and stood vigil over the charred doors of the abandoned state building.


"We want Manfred to leave. Autonomy will divide the people," Sabina Claros said as she squatted next to me. The 45-year-old housewife who came to the city from a rural town hours away said she was prepared to stay two months in necessary. "We have no fear, we don't even fear death."


On Thursday, Cochabamba was a city divided. While Claros, the coca growers and their allies occupied the shut-down city center, backers of Reyes Villa blockaded and occupied the streets of the Cochabamba's more affluent northern neighborhoods.


[...]Two hours later peace on the streets of Cochabamba was hard to find. All day the two sides, each armed with sticks, bats and other makeshift weapons, was separated by a wide bridge over a river and a thin line of 25 nervous police.


At 4:15, a sudden surge of as many as a thousand young, male backers of Reyes Villa broke through the police lines and began beating several hundred coca farmers -- men and women -- sitting on the lawns that mark the entrance to the city center. Television footage showed young men beating wide-skirted indigenous women with two-by-fours. Eyewitnesses say that the state police gassed the coca growers just before the young men attacked.


The targeted coca farmers ran seven long blocks toward the city's center, where 2,000 to 3,000 of their allies remained in force. Behind them raced huge bands of Reyes-Villa supporters, who carried sticks and threw a hailstorm of rocks. When word of the beatings spread to the Central Plaza, stick- and rock-wielding bands from the other side ran to engage their adversaries.


For more than an hour the streets in the city center turned into a scene of open battle. Nicómedes Gutiérrez, a 42-year-old farmer, was killed by a bullet that pierced his heart. Cristian Urrestia, the 20-year-old cousin of a Reyes-Villa aide, died after being attacked with a machete. More than 150 others were wounded.

The conflict has served to further polarize the country. The middle class that had been largely supportive of Morales may be now lost to him. Villa on the other hand appears at this point to have greatly benefited by the street fighting that by all accounts was started by his supporters. Here is a series of excerpts from the Blog from Bolivia over the past week that offers some inside information from Cochabamba.

At the news conference of the governors yesterday Manfred announced that Bolivian Cardinal Julio Terrazas has agreed to mediate a dialogue between the governors and Morales (or whomever he sends).


[...]There is no straight answer, which leads me to believe that Evo did not engineer this but also did not prevent it from happening when he could have. I believe that Morales will pay a huge political cost for all this. He began 2006 with a vast reservoir of political capital and a strong base of middle class support to add to his natural base among the poor and rural. After this week, in Cochabamba at least, what was left of that middle class base is gone and it isn’t coming back.


[...]Vice President Garcia Linera blamed Manfred for provoking the violence and also called for peace. More interesting was a long declaration on the radio this morning by the Vice Minister of Government who said the solution to the crisis needed to be a compromise that "respected democracy." That compromise, he said, meant that the cocaleros and others in the plaza needed to respect the democratic legitimacy of Reyes-Villa as governor and Reyes-Villa needed to respect, in turn, the democratic will of the people of Cochabamba who voted strongly against the regional autonomy Reyes-Villa is now backing. The prospects of either side backing down seem pretty slim at this point.


[...]The issues of political power at hand in Bolivia at this moment are important. I am not disputing that. But both Manfred and Evo bear responsibility for letting the conflicts involved become bloody battles in the streets that took a huge human toll. Neither seems to be taking the role of peacemaker right now either.

Saudi Arabia Would Support An Attack On Iran

We already know Israel has made it clear to the world they will attack Iran if the US doesn't, for the first time perhaps ever, Saudi Arabia finds itself siding with Israel on many issues in the Middle East, especially about the dangers of Iran.
With Iraq in the Iranian camp, Venezuela coalescing with Tehran, Iran could come to dominate OPEC. That is something Saudi Arabia and the Bush Administration can't afford. This problem is largely the creation of the Bush Administration. With Sunni still in power in Iraq, Iran is still contained. Bush et al has loose upon the world the real bad guys.
PINR

[...]although official statements appear to be oriented toward positive relations, the geopolitical and ideological struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a reality inside the Middle East. Iran is on its way to becoming a major regional power, and it has joined forces with those entities that are unsatisfied with the present balance of power in the Middle East: Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi'a factions.


Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, is searching for a new, more incisive strategy to counter the Iranian challenge. Riyadh is allegedly supporting Sunni actors in Iraq and is supporting the enemies of Hezbollah and Hamas. Saudi Arabia has also tried to prevent the United States from engaging Iran diplomatically since such a development would reward Iran by allowing it to achieve U.S. recognition as a permanent player in the region.


Therefore, as Iran continues to pursue increased power in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia will continue its attempts to subvert that power. The clash of power and interests between these two states will likely grow in the coming future.

Hillary Is In

The Presidential contest is getting crowded. Hillary threw her hat into the race. This is going to be very interesting. McCain is suffering under his support of the President. Will Hillary suffer under her past support for the war in Iraq? Only time will tell. She hasn't said anything coherent about Iraq in many months.
HillaryClinton.com

I'm in. And I'm in to win.


Today I am announcing that I will form an exploratory committee to run for president.


And I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country -- about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.


I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I'm starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of web chats over the next few days.


The stakes will be high when America chooses a new president in 2008.


As a senator, I will spend two years doing everything in my power to limit the damage George W. Bush can do. But only a new president will be able to undo Bush's mistakes and restore our hope and optimism.


Only a new president can renew the promise of America -- the idea that if you work hard you can count on the health care, education, and retirement security that you need to raise your family. These are the basic values of America that are under attack from this administration every day.


And only a new president can regain America's position as a respected leader in the world.


I believe that change is coming November 4, 2008. And I am forming my exploratory committee because I believe that together we can bring the leadership that this country needs. I'm going to start this campaign with a national conversation about how we can work to get our country back on track.


This is a big election with some very big questions. How do we bring the war in Iraq to the right end? How can we make sure every American has access to adequate health care? How will we ensure our children inherit a clean environment and energy independence? How can we reduce the deficits that threaten Social Security and Medicare?


No matter where you live, no matter what your political views, I want you to be a part of this important conversation right at the start. So to begin, I'm going to spend the next several days answering your questions in a series of live video web discussions. Starting Monday, January 22, at 7 p.m. EST for three nights in a row, I'll sit down to answer your questions about how we can work together for a better future. And you can participate live at my website. Sign up to join the conversation here.

Military Will Be Prepared To Attack Iran By End of February

Gradually, the US will be in position to strike at Iran militarily. This military expert predicts that the US will be ready at the end of February. Clearly, the Bush Administration has been trying to provoke Iran into rash actions. And since no one seems to support the "surge" of troops to Iraq, this "strategy" may well be a cover to have some flexibility to place troops at the Iranian border.
Sam Gardiner is a Retired Air Force Colonel and an expert in military strategy, who has taught at the National War College, the Air War College, the Naval War College and as visiting scholar at the Swedish Defense College. His paper Truth In These Podia (pdf) explains the Pentagon propaganda machine used sell the war in Iraq.
GlobalResearch.ca

The pieces are moving. They’ll be in place by the end of February. The United States will be able to escalate military operations against Iran.


The second carrier strike group leaves the U.S. west coast on Tuesday. It will be joined by naval mine clearing assets from both the United States and the UK. Patriot missile defense systems have also been ordered to deploy to the Gulf.


Maybe as a guard against North Korea seeing operations focused on Iran as a chance to be aggressive, a squadron of F-117 stealth fighters has just been deployed to Korea.


This has to be called escalation. We have to remind ourselves, just as Iran is supporting groups inside Iraq, the United States is supporting groups inside Iran. Just as Iran has special operations troops operating inside Iraq, we’ve read the United States has special operations troops operating inside Iran.


Just as Iran is supporting Hamas, two weeks ago we found out the United States is supporting arms for Abbas. Just as Iran and Syria are supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon we’re now learning the White House has approved a finding to allow the CIA to support opposition groups inside Lebanon. Just as Iran is supporting Syria, we’ve learned recently that the United States is going to fund Syrian opposition groups.


We learned [last] week the President authorized an attack on the Iranian liaison office in Irbil.


The White House keeps saying there are no plans to attack Iran. Obviously, the facts suggest otherwise. Equally as clear, the Iranians will read what the Administrations is doing not what it is saying.


It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we’ll see a few more steps unfold.


First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff.


The Patriot missiles going to the GCC states are only part of the missile defense assets. I would expect to see the deployment of some of the European-based missile defense assets to Israel, just as they were before Gulf II.


would expect deployment of additional USAF fighters into the bases in Iraq, maybe some into Afghanistan.


I think we will read about the deployment of some of the newly arriving Army brigades going into Iraq being deployed to the border with Iran. Their mission will be to guard against any Iranian movements into Iraq.


As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike.


The White House could be telling the truth. Maybe there are no plans to take Iran to the next level. The fuel for a fire is in place, however. All we need is a spark. The danger is that we have created conditions that could lead to a Greater Middle East War.

Prosecutory Incompetence Convicts an Innocent Teacher

I just don't understand why prosecutors are elected. It would seem to me that the sensitivity and objectivity of the situations that involve the job would require an objective attorney without a political ax to grind. Here is an example of what can go wrong. Here a Detective over his head in a computer porn case gets an innocent woman convicted.
AlterNet

Julie Amero, a 40-year-old substitute teacher from Connecticut is facing up to 40 years in prison for exposing her seventh grade class to a cascade of pornographic imagery. Amero maintains that she is a victim of a malicious software infestation that caused her computer to spawn porn uncontrollably.


Amero's attorney, John F. Cocheo, argued that malware was responsible for the pornographic images, not his client.


Detective Mark Lounsbury, a computer crimes officer at the Norwich Police Department testified as an expert witness for the prosecution. He maintained that Amero was intentionally surfing for pornography while her seventh grade class busied itself with language arts.


Lounsbury told the court that Amero musts have "physically clicked" on pornographic links during class time in order to unleash the pornographic pictures. However, he admitted under cross-examination that the prosecution never even checked the computer for malware.


[..]Why didn't the police check for malicious software? According to prosecutor David Smith, the police didn't check for malware because the defense didn't raise the possibility of a malware attack during the pretrial phase, as required by law. Defense attorney Cocheo could not be reached for comment as of press time.


Herb Horner, the proprietor of the consulting firm Contemporary Computing Solutions, testified as an expert witness for the defense. His exhaustive independent forensic analysis of Amero's hard drive showed that the machine had been infected with multiple pieces of malicious software before she arrived at the school, and that these hidden programs were responsible for the pornographic deluge.


Horner arrived in court with two laptops filled with the voluminous records of his investigation. However, the judge only let him present two slides. Prosecutor Smith objected because his team hadn't been previously informed about the malware defense.


On Jan. 5, 2007, a Norwich jury found Amero guilty of four felony counts of "injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children." Each count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years and while it is unlikely that Amero will receive the maximum penalty, incarceration remains a very real possibility. Even if Amero avoids jail, she will be stripped of her teaching credentials unless the convictions are reversed.


News of the guilty verdict sparked widespread outrage, particularly in the IT community. How could a 40-year-old woman with no prior criminal record be facing such serious charges over a few pop-up ads?


"The fact that the machine was never scanned for spyware by the investigating authorities is outrageous. In fact, this alone should have resulted in the case being dismissed, as the defense found a major spyware infection by their expert forensic evidence," wrote Alex Eckelberry, the president of Sunbelt Software, a Florida-based firm that makes anti-spyware products.


Detective Lounsbury has completed two two-week FBI training seminars on computer security and other continuing education programs. He is also a certified user of the computer monitoring software ComputerCOP Pro.


[..]Lounsbury says he is satisfied that Amero intentionally viewed porn in class because the logs show that her computer accessed various inappropriate sites while she was sitting at the computer.


"I take that at face value," Lounsbury told Alternet. "It's evidence. It speaks for itself. The pop-up defense is a Twinkie defense."


Lounsbury said that Amero must have navigated to pornographic sites in order to have infected her computer with obscene popups. "You've got to get that ball rolling," he said.

Rumors of An Attack on Iran By April 2007

The ARAB TIMES reported today that Bush promises to attack Iran before April. This smells of disinformation. Clearly, no government would deliberately telegraph their actual intentions. But they would release in accurate information to demoralize and overwork an opponent for a better negotiated outcome, or to attempt to exhaust the defensive forces before an actual attack.
I think all the signs are that Bush fully intends to attack. The only thing that will stop him is an impeachment process begun in Congress. He simply doesn't care what anyone thinks. Cheney thinks he's the only one who understands, and Bush is his front man.

Washington will launch a military strike on Iran before April 2007, say sources. The attack will be launched from the sea and Patriot missiles will guard all oil-producing countries in the region, they add. Recent statements emanating from the United States indicate the Bush administration’s new strategy for Iraq doesn’t include any proposal to make a compromise or negotiate with Syria or Iran. A reliable source said President Bush recently held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.


According to the source, Vice President Dick Cheney highlighted the threat posed by Iran to not only Saudi Arabia but the whole region. “Tehran is not playing politics. Iranian leaders are using their country’s religious influence to support the aggressive regime’s ambition to expand,” the source quoted Dick Cheney as saying. Indicating participants of the meeting agreed to impose restrictions on the ambitions of Iranian regime before April 2007 without exposing other countries in the region to any danger, the source said “they have chosen April as British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said it will be the last month in office for him. The United States has to take action against Iran and Syria before April 2007.”


Claiming the attack will be launched from the sea and not from any country in the region, he said “the US and its allies will target the oil installations and nuclear facilities of Iran ensuring there is no environmental catastrophe or after effects.” “Already the US has started sending its warships to the Gulf and the build-up will continue until Washington has the required number by the end of this month,” the source said. “US forces in Iraq and other countries in the region will be protected against any Iranian missile attack by an advanced Patriot missile system.”


He went on to say “although US Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Dr Condoleezza Rice suggested postponing the attack, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on attacking Tehran without any negotiations based on the lesson they learnt in Iraq recently.” The Bush administration believes attacking Iran will create a new power balance in the region, calm down the situation in Iraq and pave the way for their democratic project, which had to be suspended due to the interference of Tehran and Damascus in Iraq, he continued. The attack on Iran will weaken the Syrian regime, which will eventually fade away, the source said.

China tests anti-satellite weapon, unnerving U.S.

Clearly China continues to let the US know that it's aggressiveness will be met in kind. In a move that some call very un-Chinese in it's blunt force, the Chinese have made it clear they will counter the Bush Administration moves to militarize space.
International Herald Tribune

China successfully carried out its first test of an anti-satellite weapon last week, signaling Beijing's resolve to play a major role in military space activities and bringing expressions of concern from Washington and other capitals, the Bush administration said today.


[...]At a moment that China is modernizing its nuclear weapons, expanding the reach of its navy and sending astronauts into orbit for the first time, the test appears to mark a new sphere of technical and military competition. American officials complained today that China made no public or private announcements about its test, despite repeated requests by American officials for more openness about their actions.


[...]Michael Krepon, cofounder of the Washington-based Henry L. Stimson Center, a private group that studies national security, called the Chinese test very un-Chinese.


"There's nothing subtle about this," he said. "They've created a huge debris cloud that will last a quarter century or more. It's at a higher elevation than the test we did in 1985, and for that one the last trackable debris took 17 years to clear out."


Mr. Krepon added that the administration has long argued that the world needs no space-weapons treaty because no such arms exist. "It seems," he said, "that argument is no longer operative."

Smoke and Mirrors About Wiretaps

The Bush Administration is doing his dance again to make his secret plan appear less secret, but there has been no substantive changes. Requests for wiretap surveilance will proceed with "blanket" review rather than the secret court reviewing each case. Remarkably, Congressional Republicans aren't silent about his sidestepping court oversight. The article linked below lists a number of comments by Congress, a few are excerpted.
There is no change. Bush still can jail you indefinitely, tap your phone, kidnap you off the streets without contacting anyone, all by the word of the President that you are a terrorist. We all trust the President, right?
washingtonpost.com

The Bush administration said yesterday that it has agreed to disband a controversial warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, replacing it with a new effort that will be overseen by the secret court that governs clandestine spying in the United States.


The change -- revealed by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- marks an abrupt reversal by the administration, which for more than a year has aggressively defended the legality of the NSA surveillance program and disputed court authority to oversee it.


Under the new plan, Gonzales said, the secret court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, will oversee eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mails to and from the United States when "there is probable cause to believe" that one of the parties is a member of al-Qaeda or an associated terrorist group.


Under the previous approach, such intercepts were authorized by intelligence officers without the involvement of any court or judge -- prompting objections from privacy advocates and many Democrats that the program was illegal.


[...]But many details of the new approach remained unclear yesterday, because administration officials declined to describe specifically how the program will work.


Officials would not say, for example, whether the administration will be required to seek a warrant for each person it wants to monitor or whether the FISA court has issued a broader set of orders to cover multiple cases. Authorities also would not say how many court orders are involved or which judge on the surveillance court had issued them.


[...]"The issue has never been whether to monitor suspected terrorists but doing it legally and with proper checks and balances to prevent abuses," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Providing efficient but meaningful court review is a major step toward addressing those concerns."


[...]Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), a member of the House intelligence panel, also referred to the new approach as "programmatic approval" and said it "does not have the protections for civil liberties" in FISA or in a bill she introduced last year.


[..]Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been sharply critical of the NSA spying program, called the decision "an adroit back flip" by the Bush administration.


"It's clearly a flip-flop because they saw the writing on the wall," Romero said. "But it still does not address questions about whether the president broke the law. Complying with FISA now does not make his actions over the last 4 1/2 years legal."


Even before it was revealed publicly, the NSA program had infuriated [FISA Justice] Kollar-Kotelly and some other members of the FISA court, who questioned the program's legality and who warned the Justice Department that it could not use information from such monitoring to obtain warrants under FISA.

Bush's Drive To Enshrine The Imperial Presidency

Bush seems to have shifted gears with the removal of key players in his Administration. He seems no longer interested in opinion polls, the Iran Study Groups recommendations on Iraq, the leadership of the Republican Party, or even the election of 2008. He's a man on a mission to accomplish his agenda before time runs out.
Recent event suggest what is agenda is. Clearly he wants to widen the war to include Iran. Since the US is already using much of its reserve force, he'd counting on air power to propagate that part of the war. But since conventional air power is unlikely to end Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, he's positioning the US and Israel to use nuclear weapons.
On the home front, his agenda is equally frenzied. He continues to make bill signing statements in defiance of public opinion and constitutional scholars. He insists he can imprison anyone, even a citizen without due process or charges indefinitely. He's moving to consolidate these gains in show court cases outlined below.
The Congress has yet to slap down this Imperial President. Are they afraid of a backlash against the Democratic leadership based on the Teflon shield of a war time president?
AlterNet

What we saw the other night, when he proposed more war against more "foes" was the madman the last six years have created. This time, in his war against Iran, he doesn't even feel the need for minimal PR, as he did before attacking Iraq. All he is bothering with are signals -- ships moving here, admirals moving there, consulates being raided in this other place. He no longer cares about the opinions of the voters, the Congress, the generals, the press, and he especially disdains the opinions of B/S/and B [Bush Sr, Scrowcroft, Baker]. Thanks to Gerson, he identifies his own little ideas with God (a blasphemy, of course, but hey, there's lots of precedent on this), so there's no telling what he will do.


We can tell by the evidence of the last two months that whatever it is, it will be exactly the thing that the majority of the voters do not want him to do, exactly the thing that James Baker himself doesn't want him to do. The propaganda that Bush's sponsors and handlers have poured forth has ceased to persuade the voters but succeeded beyond all measure in convincing the man himself.


He will tell himself that God is talking to him, or that he is possessed of an extra measure of courage, or he that he is simply compelled to do whatever it is. The soldiers will pay the price in blood. We will pay the price in money. The Iraqis will pay the price in horror. The Iranians will pay the price, possibly, in the almost unimaginable terror of nuclear attack. Probably, the Israelis will pay the price, too.


Little George isn't the same guy he was in 2000, the guy described by Gail Sheehy in her Vanity Fair profile -- hyper-competitive and dyslexic, prone to cheat at games, always swinging between screwing up and making up, hating criticism and disagreement, careless of others but often charming. He is no longer the guy who the Republicans thought they could control (unlike, say, McCain).


The small pathologies of Bush the candidate have, thanks to the purposes of the neocons and the religious right, been enhanced and upgraded. We have a bona fide madman now, who thinks of himself in a grandiose way as single-handedly turning the tide of history. Some of his Frankensteins have bailed, some haven't dared to, and others still seem to believe. His actions and his orders, especially about Iran, seem to be telling us that he will stop at nothing to prove his dominance. The elder Bush(es), Scrowcroft, Baker, and their friends, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gerson, and the neocons have made the monster and in the process endangered the country, the Constitution, and the world, not to mention the sanity of wretches like Jose Padilla (for an analysis of the real reason Gitmo continues to exist, see Dahlia Lithwick's article in Slate, [excerpt below].


Maybe the bums planned this mess for their own profit, or maybe they planned to profit without mess; maybe some of them regret what they have wrought. However, they all share the blame for whatever he does next.

Slate Magazine

Willing to give the benefit of the doubt, I once believed the common thread here was presidential blindness—an extreme executive-branch myopia that leads the president to believe that these futile little measures are somehow integral to combating terrorism. That this is some piece of self-delusion that precludes Bush and his advisers from recognizing that Padilla is just a chump and Guantanamo merely a holding pen for a jumble of innocent and half-guilty wretches.


But it has finally become clear that the goal of these foolish efforts isn't really to win the war against terrorism; indeed, nothing about Padilla, Guantanamo, or signing statements moves the country an inch closer to eradicating terror. The object is a larger one, and the original overarching goal of this administration: expanding executive power, for its own sake.
Two scrupulously reported pieces on the Padilla case are illuminating. On Jan. 3, Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio interviewed Mark Corallo, spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, about the behind-the-scenes decision-making in the Padilla case—a case that's lolled through the federal courts for years. According to Totenberg, when the Supreme Court sent Padilla's case back to the lower federal courts on technical grounds in 2004, the Bush administration's sole concern was preserving its constitutional claim that it could hold citizens as enemy combatants. "Justice Department officials warned that if the case went back to the Supreme Court, the administration would almost certainly lose," she reports, which is why Padilla was hauled back to the lower courts. Her sources further confirmed that "key players in the Defense Department and Vice President Cheney's office insisted that the power to detain Americans as enemy combatants had to be preserved."


Deborah Sontag's excellent New York Times story on Padilla on Jan. 4 makes the same point: He was moved from military custody to criminal court only as "a legal maneuver that kept the issue of his detention without charges out of the Supreme Court." So this is why the White House yanked Padilla from the brig to the high court to the federal courts and back to a Florida trial court: They were only forum shopping for the best place to enshrine the right to detain him indefinitely. Their claims about Padilla's dirty bomb, known to be false, were a means of advancing their larger claims about executive power. And when confronted with the possibility of losing on those claims, they yanked him back to the criminal courts as a way to avoid losing powers they'd already won.


This need to preserve newly won legal ground also explains the continued operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay. Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the camp that—according to Donald Rumsfeld in 2002—houses only "the worst of the worst." Now that over half of them have been released (apparently, the best of the worst) and even though only about 80 of the rest will ever see trials, the camp remains open. Why? Civil-rights groups worldwide and even close U.S. allies like Germany, Denmark, and England clamor for its closure. And as the ever-vigilant Nat Hentoff points out, new studies reveal that only a small fraction of the detainees there are even connected to al-Qaida—according to the Defense Department's own best data.


But Guantanamo stays open for the same reason Padilla stays on trial. Having claimed the right to label enemy combatants and detain them indefinitely without charges, the Bush administration is unable to retreat from that position without ceding ground. In some sense, the president is now as much a prisoner of Guantanamo as the detainees. And having gone nose-to-nose with the Congress over his authority to craft stripped-down courts for these "enemies," courts guaranteed to produce guilty verdicts, Bush cannot just call off the trials.


The endgame in the war on terror isn't holding the line against terrorists. It's holding the line on hard-fought claims to absolutely limitless presidential authority.


Enter these signing statements. The most recent of the all-but-meaningless postscripts Bush tacks onto legislation gives him the power to "authorize a search of mail in an emergency" to ''protect human life and safety" and "for foreign intelligence collection." There is some debate about whether the president has that power already, but it misses the point. The purpose of these signing statements is simply to plant a flag on the moon—one more way for the president to stake out the furthest corners in his field of constitutional dreams.

Obama Will Explore Running for President

Well, at least he's tentative. For any African American candidate, it's an uphill struggle. But Obama also has little experience. However, he has incredible charisma.
Realistically, an Edwards-Obama ticket may be irresistable.
AlterNet: Blogs: Video: Obama makes announcement about '08 [VIDEO]

And that's why I wanted to tell you first that I'll be filing papers today to create a presidential exploratory committee. For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about the challenges we face as a nation, the opportunities that lie before us, and the role that a presidential campaign might play in bringing our country together. And on February 10th, at the end of these decisions and in my home state of Illinois, I'll share my plans with my friends, neighbors and fellow Americans.

Greenland Melts As Science Sees the Budget Ax

We will be feeling the Bush Administration anti-science crusade for decades, if not centuries. Greenland is rapidly emerging from it's sheet of ice. That means the oceans will rise at least one foot world wide, and very likely a couple more. Just one foot will displace 100 million people worldwide, affecting coastal communities in the US as well.
New York Times

The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.


Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
“That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps,” Dr. Boggild said. “If you lose that much volume you’d definitely see new islands appear.”


[..]The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime “glacial earthquakes” have been detected within the ice sheet.


[..]A study in The Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.


[..]“Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario,” said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.


On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just one foot would send water thousands of feet inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.


“Here in Miami,” Dr. Leatherman said, “we’re going to have an ocean on both sides of us.”

Just as it's becoming clear to the most reluctant believers that global warming is here and the consequences catastrophic, the ability of government to study and monitor the weather has taken an unprecidented hit. Both NOAA, who monitors the weather, and NASA who puts satelites in orbit that gives NOAA the eyes to see, have taken a major hit.
washingtonpost.com

The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.


The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans for a manned mission to the moon and Mars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has experienced enormous cost overruns and schedule delays with its premier weather and climate mission.


As a result, the panel said, the United States will not have the scientific information it needs in the years ahead to analyze severe storms and changes in Earth's climate unless programs are restored and funding made available.


"NASA's budget has taken a major hit at the same time that NOAA's program has fallen off the rails," said panel co-chairman Berrien Moore III of the University of New Hampshire. "This combination is very, very disturbing, and it's coming at the very time that we need the information most."


NOAA officials announced last week that 2006 was the warmest year on record in the United States -- part of a highly unusual warming trend over several decades that many scientists attribute to greenhouse gases. Some climate experts think that the atmospheric warming could bring more extreme weather -- longer droughts, reduced snowfall and more intense hurricanes such as the ones experienced along the Gulf Coast in 2005.