Iranian Former Minister Abducted or Defected?

There was news this week that sounds like the CIA has snatched a prominent Iranian citizen. Conflicting reports are that he's defecting versus abduction. Given that he is a retired general in the elite Revolutionary Guards, I think it's unlikely that it's a defection. The RG is a religiously oriented elite corp on the order of the SS. Their loyalty is unquestioned. The likelihood of a retired general would defect seems very unlikely. We instead have an attempt to get a smoking gun in the attempt to start a war with Iran.
Haaretz

The Iranian former deputy defense minister who disappeared in neighboring Turkey last month is being questioned in a northern European country under strict supervision, the pan-Arab newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat reported Wednesday.


According to the newspaper, published in London, Ali Reza Asghari is undergoing thorough investigation by intelligence forces before being transferred to the United States. Asghari, who is a retired general in the elite Revolutionary Guards, disappeared in Istanbul about a month ago. A hotel room was booked under Asghari's name, but several reports indicate that he never arrived at the hotel.


On Tuesday, al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that Asghari left for the U.S. to seek asylum shortly after arriving in Turkey. Earlier Tuesday, Iran's top police chief, General Esmaeil Ahmadi Moghaddam, said Iran was investigating Asghari's fate with the cooperation of the Turkish police. "It is likely that Asghari has been abducted by the Western intelligence services," IRNA quoted the Iranian police general as saying. The general did not elaborate. IRNA further quoted Moghaddam as saying Asghari had stayed in Turkey for three days before being abducted.

Islamic Banking

Cuckoo's call: Islamic banking
Three years ago, I delivered a lecture at the Institute of Objective Studies in Calcutta, titled ‘Islamic Banking: An Economist’s Perspective’.
Very few people know what Islamic banking is or what interest-free economy means. Only some devout Muslims who try to adhere strictly to the Islamic stricture against interest follow Islamic economics. We do not find mainstream academic institutions working on this subject. However, this is something that touches everyone’s life, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Hence there is a pressing need for wider awareness among people about what Islamic economics means.
There are three aspects of the subject that merit attention. First, a moral, ethical one, which sees interest as fundamentally unjust because the borrower bears greater risk or loss, or has less security of making a profit than the lender. The lender of money is passive, while the borrowing entrepreneur is active; yet the lender commands a return even before the enterprise yields anything.
Second is the politico-economic or social revolutionary aspect. Interest is the means to protect and perpetuate the socio-economic power of those who represent the past (owners of capital) as opposed to those who seek to become something in future. Credit is the only means through which new, creative economic activity can take place. But the emergence of new enterprises, the creation of new wealth and income, empowerment of the poor and the low income group and the realisation of social justice – are all hostage to the urge of capital-owners to secure maximal returns while bearing minimal risk. Interest breeds speculation, which is the bane of productive economic activities.
The third aspect is the faith-based one, of following scriptural prescriptions.
The vision of interest-free economy has the potential of bringing together under a common movement people of Islamic faith, people of conscience, radicals and social revolutionaries.
One could cite anti-usury thinking in the pre-Christian and early Christian era (Aristotle, Plato etc). One could also highlight the underlying conflict in the American economy and society, between the interests of those with old wealth and those with nothing but their dreams, their zeal for advancement, and their labour. The ‘populist’ movement in the USA, led by Andrew Jackson (President, 1829-37), brought this tension to the fore. The conservative policies of the 1920s and the 1980s Reagan era, with their severely negative social distribution consequences may also be seen in this light.
Islamic banking or interest-free economics means that lenders become risk-sharing business partners. Social ethics, community participation and public accountability are inherent in this vision. A brave new world is waiting to be built, but this cannot happen in isolation, undertaken by one community, in a few countries. It must be a global movement of humanity, seeking to build a just world.
The Economist had recently carried an article on Islamic finance. After summarising some of the technical difficulties involved in "mainstreaming" Islamic banking, the article concluded: "None of these challenges is insurmountable. This is an era of financial innovation where investors delight in exploring new areas of risk. Cultural barriers are there to be crossed. "
Reading this, it struck me that Islamic economics is a conception whose time has now come.

The President is Responsible for Illegal FBI Snooping

When a President uses every means available to circumvent law, the Bill of Rights, and International Treaties, he tacitly gives the go ahead for every arm of government to do the same. Bush is responsible for torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo, rights abuses all over the world, and illegal snooping on American citizens by the FBI.
CNN.com

The FBI is guilty of "serious misuse" of the power to secretly obtain private information under the Patriot Act, a government audit said Friday. The Justice Department's inspector general looked at the FBI's use of national security letters (NSLs), in which agents demand personal and business information about individuals -- such as financial, phone, and Internet records -- without court orders.


The audit found the letters were issued without proper authority, cited incorrect statutes or obtained information they weren't supposed to. As many as 22 percent of national security letters were not recorded, the audit said. "We concluded that many of the problems we identified constituted serious misuse of the FBI's national security letter authorities," Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said in the report. The audit said there were no indications that the FBI's use of the letters "constituted criminal misconduct."


The FBI has made as many as 56,000 requests a year for information using the letters since the Patriot Act was passed in October, 2001, the audit found. A single letter can contain multiple information requests, and multiple letters may target one individual.


The audit found that in 2004 and 2005, more than half of the targets of the national security letters were U.S. citizens. Letter used to track phone calls, FBI says FBI Director Robert Mueller said Friday that 90 percent of the letters are used to access phone records in helping to track U.S. contacts with suspected terrorists overseas.


Mueller took responsibility for the FBI's problems and said steps had been taken to eliminate them. "I am to be held accountable," he said, for failing to provide the proper guidelines, training and tools for agents working with the national security letters.


The inspector general's review identified "26 possible intelligence violations" between 2003 and 2005, 19 of which the FBI reported to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board, the audit said. Of the 26, "22 were the result of FBI errors, while four were caused by mistakes made by recipients of the NSLs," it said.


The audit also found problems with "exigent letters," which are supposed to be used only in emergencies when time may not permit the NSL procedure to be followed. The audit found exigent letters were not used in emergencies and gave the agency access to telephone records it should not have had. Mueller said Friday the FBI stopped using exigent letters in May 2006 after the practice was revealed. He said they were used to obtain information the FBI was entitled to but should have gained in other ways.

Iraqi Surge Is Republican 2008 Election Strategy

Barry Lando has a very interesting angle on the Iraqi troop surge. The Bush Administration has often counted on the public's short memory. Remember when he announced the surge, the extra troops would be withdrawing in Sept 2007. The fact is that they knew all along that the increased numbers wouldn't be on the ground until June. And they knew that the Iraqis won't be in any shape to take on new responsibilities until well into 2008.
And now the real plan is emerging. The actual surge is now up to 28000 troops and they will be there until at least Feb 2008.
Worse yet, the Pentagon has no faith that the surge will be helpful. So why the surge? It's 2008 election strategy. Read on:
AlterNet

According to the New York Times , Lt. Gen Raymond Odierno, “the day-to-day commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has recommended that the heightened American troop levels there be maintained through February 2008.”


That’s if the “surge” is to have any chance of success: bring material benefits to the people of Baghdad, give them a sense of calm and security, put a damper on the civil war and allow Iraqi political leaders a chance to somehow patch thier country together.
Otherwise, the Times article makes clear, the consensus in the Pentagon is that the buildup will fail. Indeed, the surge to date is “little more than a trickle” and will only reach its goal of an additional 28,000 troops on the ground by June. Yet, under previously-announced plans, troops were supposed to be withdrawing from Iraq already by September 2007.


According to many experts, even maintaining troop levels through next February is far from enough. An unclassified version of the latest National Intelligence Estimate states that “the Iraqi Security Forces, particularly the Iraqi police, will be hard pressed in the next 12 to 18 months to execute significantly increased security responsibilities, and particularly to operate independently against Shia militias with success.”

Top Secret Gov't Spying room revealed by AT&T Whistleblower

The Bush Administration is still spying on us. Virtually everything that goes over the internet is monitored by the NSA, weather it is foreign or domestic traffic. This whistleblower, a retired ATT staffer is interviewed for ABC's Nightline. Here is AlterNet's Video feed and excerpted comments below.

In the name of fighting the "war on terror," the Bush Administration has secretly enlisted the help of telecommunications agencies across the nation to do "datamining" -- using pre-programmed criteria to sift through the private information of Americans on the web and telephone lines in search of clues.
There is no oversight despite the existence of a court (FISA) which is designed for just this purpose. Of course, you see the problem; the technology has outgrown the oversight method though the administration has chosen to just push on...


In this clip, former AT&T technician Mark Klein discusses his investigation of a secret room built in conjunction with the National Security Agency through which all customer information was routed.


[..]Judge Walker wrote, "But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security."


The dismissal is now on appeal before the 9th Circuit.

Hurray for Judge Walker. Lets how the courts are still defending our privacy.

Libby's Conviction A Symptom Of A Rotten Core

Today in washingtonpost.com, Peter Baker could have taken this opportunity to review the Bush Administration attacks on rule of law, he does little more than lament the controversy and wonder what the outcome is. It's nauseating. The Bush/Cheney henchmen have been particularly bellicose in their bullying of government staffers from the CIA, DoD, and the Justice Department, gagged whistleblowers with false claims of "national security" to cover up, and gutting habius corpus, turning Guantanamo and other military bases into a gulags for torture and extra-judicial punishments. Then WaPo' Baker wonders if Libby can lie, maybe the Iraq War was based on lies??
While Clinton was impeachable for sexual inpropriety, a president who circumvented the Constitution he's sworn to protect is protected only by a shield called a "war time president" in a war that has no end. Doesn't the press see the implications for our way of life?
Are we content to have the Fourth Reich unfold in our midst out of concern about terrorism? Shame on us for our complacency, for our press corps intimidated to silence, for our lost democracy.

Shortly before he was inaugurated for his second term, President Bush was asked why no one was held responsible for the mistakes of the first. "We had an accountability moment," he replied, "and that's called the 2004 elections."


Two years and a stinging midterm election later, Bush is having another accountability moment, but this one isn't working out as well. The conviction of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby has coincided with a string of investigations into the mistreatment of injured soldiers and the purge of federal prosecutors, putting the operations of his administration into harsh relief.


[..]If Libby lied about his role in the CIA leak case, critics eagerly used that to reinforce their argument that Bush led the nation to war on false pretenses, in effect attacking the centerpiece of his presidency.


"This verdict brings accountability at last for official deception and the politics of smear and fear," said Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), Bush's Democratic challenger in 2004.


[..]No senior officials were fired for the missing weapons in Iraq or the Abu Ghraib abuse. Three officials blamed by some for mishandling Iraq were given Medals of Freedom.


[..]"Justice demands that Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn't have lasted beyond its opening act," National Review said within hours of the verdict.

The Coming Rapture

The confrontation between Israel, the US, and Iran has been characterized on both sides as a battle of civilizations and the prophesized Armaggedon. Here is more about one of the leaders of the Christian Right Wing-nuts whose stated intention is to provoke a war with Iran over Israel.
AlterNet

In "Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To war" Hagee has stated that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves by rebelling against God and that the Holocaust was God's way of forcing Jews to move to Israel where, Hagee predicts according to his interpretation of Biblical scripture, they will be mostly killed in the apocalyptic Mideast conflict Hagee's new lobbying group seems to be working to provoke and which John Hagee believes to be a necessary precondition for the "Rapture" that will lift Christians, but not Jews, bodily into Heaven to enjoy physical immortality amidst paradise.


Over the past year, frequent and generally favorable media coverage of a new US national political lobbying group, "Christians United For Israel", and its outspoken founder Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee's has helped cement pastor Hagee's brand recognition, as a steadfast friend to Israel and has cast a favorable light on the new CUFI lobby that is designed to flex the political muscles of tens of millions of American evangelicals, ostensibly on Israel's behalf.

Talk To Action

On July 19, 2006, at a CUFI sponsored Washington DC event called "A Night to Honor Israel", with GOP Party head Ken Mehlman and US GOP Senators Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum ( President George W. Bush sent recorded greetings to the event ) , Pastor John Hagee declared, "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation [...] and [the] Second Coming of Christ."
Hagee's beliefs are actually part of mainstream Christian Zionist thought, which tends to hold that, after Christians are "Raptured" bodily up to heaven, most Jews ( 2/3 to be precise ) will die in a subsequent terrible conflict centered around Israel.


As recounted by Terje Langeland, reporting for the Colorado Springs Independent in 2003, one of Pastor John Hagee's CUFI board members, George Morrison, expresses his sense of how Israeli and Israeli Jews will fare in the apocalytpic scenario Hagee and others long for :


"Morrison, whose casual, folksy manner belies his apocalyptic beliefs, already sees signs that the End is approaching. The European Union, he says, might be the alliance of nations that according to prophecy will join the Arabs to wage war against Israel during the final days.


"Great wars will begin to take place," Morrison says in a matter-of-fact voice. "Those wars are going to involve nukes."


The extent of the destruction will prompt Jesus to return in order to stop it, Morrison believes. Unfortunately, he says, many Jews will be killed.


"It's another Holocaust, if you will," Morrison says."

Israel, desparate as always for allies, blindly stoke the fire of these folks hoping to ensure strong military backing from the US in what they believe is a coming battle with Iran.

SEYMOUR HERSH: More on Plans for Attacking Iran

Here is a partial transcript from an interview by Democracy Now! of Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker writer who has been sounding the alarm about Iran.

No. Israel would never attack Iran. The best they could do is fire some missiles from the Indian Ocean. They have submarines with cruise missiles. No, that’s not nearly enough. What’s a small attack? A major attack, if you’re going to do one, would have to come from the Americans. And Cheney has said internally he will never let the Israelis do it, it’s much better if we do it. But that I feel reasonably rational, I can say with some confidence. I can’t say anything at all about what the President will or will not do.


There are people inside the military -- there’s two aircraft carrier groups in the region right now. One is inside the Straits of Hormuz, which is that narrow straits where all of the oil passes through, going from the Middle East to Asia. And it’s such a narrow channel that the US Navy never even had a carrier go into the Straits of Hormuz, because they’re accompanied by five or six ships, destroyers, etc., and they don’t have much maneuverability. They’re very vulnerable to attack. And I’m told by people that there will be two more carriers sent this spring to relieve the two ships, fleets that are there now. And they will all be kept there for a little while. One off Oman, one in what they call the North Arabian Sea, NAS, one in the Indian Ocean, and one in the Straits of Hormuz. And once those four groups are out there, you’re dealing -- you’re talking about an enormous amount of firepower.


And it’s at that point some people inside the military are worried about what the President might or might not do. I don't think he’s going to do anything next year. It’s an election year. And he’s got to spend -- you know, he’s not an old man. He doesn't want to be hated by the Republican Party all the rest of his life. He’s damaging it enough now. But in ’08, he’s got to be careful. He’s got to give the Republicans a shot at the presidency. And the way he’s carrying on right now, he’s helping the Democrats. So, if he does it, it’ll be this year. And, you know, people worry about spring. And if he is in a position where he can authorize something on short notice, and you could with carriers all over the place -- there’s an awful lot of planes. They carry -- the carrier squadrons have destroyers with cruise missiles that can fire. You can hit a lot of things in Iran if you want.


The Iranians, I should tell you, are absolutely preparing for the worst. They have been digging holes. They’ve been digging what they call bunkers for their leadership, survival bunkers, and not in Tehran, outside. We know where they’re digging. They’re going to move the leadership to underground facilities. The Russians did the same thing during the Cold War, and we, of course, have the same thing, underground bunkers to protect our leaders. They’re reinforcing a lot of buildings. They’ve moved most of the sensitive nuclear stuff, I think, out of the buildings where we think they are into -- probably into Tehran in the very heavily densely populated areas. So if we’re going to bomb nuclear facilities, we’re going to have to take a chance of an awful lot of collateral damage.


And there’s also the possibility -- this is always raised -- that all of this is just some big send-up, that people like me are being used, stories are planted, that this is all part of a propaganda operation by the White House to put pressure on Iran. The only argument against that is, of course, it’s not going to work, and the Iranians will never back off.

Two Faced US Foreign Policy with China

The US spends more on it's military than the whole world combined, but China increases their expenditures up 17%, but amounting to 7% of the US military budget and already, the US is worried. Perhaps DoD is aware of all of it's $2 millon dollar toilet seats?
washingtonpost.com

China announced Sunday that it will increase military spending at a sharply higher rate this year, budgeting a rise of nearly 18 percent, and a senior U.S. official immediately called for clarity on the planned expenditures.


Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte said at a news conference at the end of his maiden visit to Beijing in his new post that the Bush administration is dissatisfied with China's unwillingness to share such information. "We think it's important in our dialogue that we understand what China's plans and intentions are," he said.


Negroponte has been assigned the lead role in managing that relationship, a mission he emphasized by calling on Chinese officials so soon after his Feb. 13 swearing-in. Apparently by coincidence, the Chinese government chose the same moment to announce that its declared military expenditures for 2007 will amount to $44.94 billion, an increase of 17.8 percent.


According to Pentagon estimates, that declared total represents about a third of actual military spending if equipment purchases are taken into account. But even that would amount to only a fraction of the U.S. military budget, which is proposed to rise to about $623 billion for fiscal 2008.

Giuliani, A Most Unlikely Frontrunner, Pulls Ahead for ‘08

Former Mayor of New York, Rudy Guiliani has defied all pundits and surged ahead in what has been call the popularity contest portion of the Republican campaign.
Newsweek

Maybe it is Giuliani time, after all. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has pulled far ahead of Arizona Sen. John McCain in a hypothetical head-to-head GOP presidential primary matchup, according to the latest NEWSWEEK Poll—beating McCain 59 percent to 34 percent. Giuliani's lead over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney is even more formidable (70 percent to 20 percent).


But perhaps the best news for the man once dubbed "America's Mayor" for his role in seeing New York through the 9/11 attacks is the lead he's opened up on his potential Democratic rivals for the White House. According to the survey, Giuliani outpolls Illinois Sen. Barack Obama by 5 points (48 percent to 43 percent), former senator John Edwards by 2 points (47 percent to 45 percent) and Sen. Hillary Clinton by 1 point (47 percent to 46 percent). Last month Clinton led Giuliani by 3 points (49 percent to 46 percent), as did Obama (47 percent to 44 percent). Thirteen percent of registered Democrats say they would cross party lines to support Giuliani, while only 4 percent of Republicans say they would do the same for Clinton. Perhaps more important, among independent voters, Giuliani leads Clinton 49 percent to 42 percent.


[...]Among Democrats, Sen. Clinton remains a formidable front runner. She leads Obama by a double-digit margin (52 percent to 38 percent) and handily outpaces Edwards (63 percent to 32 percent). In a general-election heat against McCain, the Vietnam war hero who announced this week his intention to run for president on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” Clinton leads by only 1 point (47 percent to 46 percent). Interestingly, both Obama and Edwards fare slightly better against the Arizona senator—Obama by 2 points (45 percent to 43 percent) and Edwards, the Democrats' 2004 vice presidential nominee, by 5 points (48 percent to 43 percent).


Despite his lead in the NEWSWEEK Poll, Giuliani’s road to nomination may not necessarily be free and clear, especially among Republican hard-liners. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds that 58 percent of registered Republicans and “Republican leaners” describe themselves as social conservatives. Only a quarter (26 percent) of Republican voters claim to know “a lot” about the pro-choice and pro-gun-control Giuliani, while a full third (34 percent) admit to knowing little or nothing about him. A large number say that knowing where he stands on those issues and his opposition to a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage will hurt his chances with them: half (50 percent) of self-identified social conservatives say the candidate’s support of Roe v. Wade would at least make them less likely to support him. Almost half (44 percent) say the same of his opposition to a ban on same-sex marriage, and nearly a third (30 percent) say his stance on gun control could lead them to support someone else.

Why would a social policy liberal become a darling of Republicans? The reasons are imbedded in the detail of his history. He is thought of as a hero of 9/11, the man who rallied a City to respond to the first war-like attack on American soil. But Guliani made his reputation before 9/11.
Newsweek

Giuliani wouldn't rest until New York was safe. He ordered the NYPD to scale back its feel-good community-liaison projects and simply patrol the streets. As his police commissioner he recruited William Bratton, a media-friendly Boston police commissioner who subscribed to the "broken windows" approach to enforcement. The theory held that areas that tolerated small-time crime would eventually become havens for more-serious offenses. (A single broken window would lead to more broken windows, which would lead to squatters' breaking into a building.) Graffiti artists, loiterers and prostitutes became the targets of the swift hand of the law. Bratton introduced CompStat—a system for mapping real-time crime statistics to allocate policing resources more precisely and keep track of officers' performance. Questions persisted about whether pursuing squeegee men—panhandlers who washed the windows of cars waiting in traffic—was the best use of the mayor's and his police force's time. But the strategies seemed to work: by the end of Giuliani's first year, homicides in the city were down 18 percent.


New York was emerging from adversity and Giuliani wanted the credit. It was widely reported that he was enraged when Bratton appeared on the cover of a January 1996 Time magazine under the headline finally, we're winning the war against crime. Bratton stepped down from the NYPD within months. (Giuliani denied publicity was the issue; "Bratton didn't understand that he had a boss," says Giuliani friend Powers. "It's not a question of credit.") By this time, New Yorkers had grown accustomed to a mayor who loved combat—with allies and adversaries alike. "For Rudy, governing New York was conquering New York," says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. "He thrived on confrontation." As long as Rudy got results, the public didn't particularly care how he did it, or how many fights he picked. The squeegee men were gone, as were turnstile jumpers and the more notorious pornographic emporiums. In terms of quality of life, he delivered. The rest was just drama—drama that exhausted those involved, yes, but what mattered was New York was livable again. Suburban parents no longer automatically vetoed children's trips into the city. By the end of his first term, Giuliani had cut 20,000 workers from the city's payrolls, was dramatically reducing the welfare rolls and had violent crime approaching a 30-year low. The public rewarded him with 55 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election in 1997.


His city delivered from strife, Giuliani went, in John Quincy Adams's phrase, in search of monsters to destroy. Sometimes the mayor created them when a lot of people didn't think they really existed. Where to begin? First, there was the New York Magazine ad campaign in which the magazine called itself "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for." Giuliani banned the ad from city buses, prompting the magazine to sue, successfully, on the ground that the mayor had violated its First Amendment rights. Then there was the risqué Brooklyn Museum exhibit that included a portrait of the Virgin Mary that the artist had stained with a clump of elephant dung. Whatever one might think of the exhibit's artistic merits—and reasonable people could disagree—Giuliani went to war in a way even some of his friends found rhetorically extreme. Outraged, he responded as though the museum was poised to destroy Christendom. "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating someone else's religion," the mayor said. Some old supporters wondered if he'd lost his sense of proportion. "It was almost as if he became so enamored of his press," says Floyd Flake, a former Democratic congressman from Queens who supported Giuliani in 1993, "that he had to be solving something, even if there wasn't any problem to solve."

Guiliani is a scrapper, someone the hawks expect to continue the so-called war on terror. He appears to be a neo-con, someone who believes in the Bush Doctrine. Neo-cons see the fight with Al Qaeda as a distraction. Their target remains rogue nations, the Axis of Evil and any other country that supports the bad guys. Of course, there is a limit to this logic. While they focus on Iranian support of the Shia militias like the Mahdi Army of Sadr, they ignore the support Saudi Arabia sends to the Sunni insurgents. That is unlikely to change without a monumental shift to renewable sources of energy.
MercuryNews.com

The former two-term mayor held the packed hotel ballroom's attention as he gently attacked Democrats on the Iraq war and spoke generally on economic and education themes. He wrapped himself in the tax-cutting, evil-fighting "morning in America'' mantle of former President Ronald Reagan. "If we do it right with the spirit of America, the enemies that we think we have now in this war on terror are going to be friends of America'' (like post-war Germany and Japan became). "We'll get there with a Ronald Reagan kind of spirit -- peace through strength,'' he said to applause.

From conservative icon Weekly Standard:

"For a majority of the GOP primary electorate, it is the war, the war, the war (and judges)," writes the influential radio host and blogger Hugh Hewitt. "The war on terror hasn't just changed Giuliani's profile as a crisis-leader," writes columnist Jonah Goldberg. "It's changed the attitudes of many Americans, particularly conservatives, about the central crisis facing the country. It's not that pro-lifers are less pro-life. . . . It's that they really, really believe the war on terror is for real. At conservative conferences, on blogs, and on talk radio, pro-life issues have faded in their passion and intensity. . . . Taken together, terrorism, Iraq, and Islam have become the No. 1 social issue." And the earth surely moved on February 21, when the writer Maggie Gallagher, as tough and principled as they come on abortion and marriage, allowed in her syndicated column that she just might consider the mayor. "I never voted for Rudy when I lived in New York City for one simple reason: abortion. . . . Why would I even think of changing my mind? Two things: national security, and Hillary Clinton's Supreme Court appointments." Keep your eyes out for more of these eye-popping moments. This one will not be the last.

From a supposed liberal newspaper, the Los Angeles Times:

Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph W. Giuliani praised President Bush's war leadership on Saturday and mocked supporters of a nonbinding congressional resolution condemning the U.S. troop buildup in Iraq. The former New York City mayor came to Bush's defense as he promoted his White House candidacy at a California Republican convention. Drawing parallels between Iraq and America's Civil War, Giuliani compared Bush's political troubles to Abraham Lincoln's. When the Civil War was unpopular, Giuliani said, Lincoln "kept his eye ahead." "He was able to say, 'I know my people are frustrated, and I know my people are angry at me.' " But after weighing public opinion, Lincoln had "that ability that a leader has — a leader like George Bush, a leader like Ronald Reagan — to look into the future," Giuliani said.


Giuliani's defense of the currently unpopular president comes as he is portraying himself as a decisive leader unafraid to buck public opinion. "The great moral issue of Ronald Reagan's time was defeating communism, and he understood that," said Giuliani, whose national popularity burgeoned after he led New York through the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The great moral issue of our time is defeating terrorism."

Back to a conservative bellweather, the National Review Online:

Republican primary voters should rally around the GOP field’s most accomplished supply-sider, the all-but-announced Rudolph W. Giuliani. Having sliced taxes and slashed Gotham’s government, New York’s former mayor is the leading fiscal conservative among 2008’s GOP presidential contenders.


[...]Conservatives seeking a proven leader to lasso taxes and rein in runaway spending have a natural choice for president: Rudolph W. Giuliani.

With John McCain well documented as a waffler, Republican voters could very well support Guiliani, if there is another terrorist attack, or if the confrontation with Iran heats up. The latter possibility seems the most likely outcome. Should the radical Right-wing Christians get their "clash of civilizations", Guiliani may be their standard bearer.

Most Support U.S. Guarantee of Health Care

Now this is a gratifying piece of news. A majority of Americans support a tax guarantee of health care for everyone, even if it costs $500 more taxes! How is that for social justice!
New York Times

A majority of Americans say the federal government should guarantee health insurance to every American, especially children, and are willing to pay higher taxes to do it, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.


Only 24 percent said they were satisfied with President Bush’s handling of the health insurance issue, despite his recent initiatives, and 62 percent said the Democrats were more likely to improve the health care system.


Americans showed a striking willingness in the poll to make tradeoffs to guarantee health insurance for all, including paying as much as $500 more in taxes a year and forgoing future tax cuts.


But the same divisions that doomed the last effort at creating universal health insurance, under the Clinton administration, are still apparent. Americans remain divided, largely along party lines, over whether the government should require everyone to participate in a national health care plan, and over whether the government would do a better job than the private insurance industry in providing coverage.


Looking ahead to the presidential campaign, 36 percent of Americans polled said they had confidence in the ability of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, to “make the right decisions on health care,” while 49 percent said they were uneasy about her.


But Mrs. Clinton retained the confidence of nearly 6 in 10 Democrats on the issue, despite the politically devastating collapse 13 years ago of the national health initiative she helped develop early in her husband’s presidency.

Has The US Managed To Split the Iraqi Insurgency?

In what may be the first good news in a long time, US/Iraqi/Sunni tribesman joined forces to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq near Fallugah. Such a coordinated effort publically reported is as far as I know, unprecidented. If it's true and not disinformation from PsyOps, it may well spell a big difference in the outcome in Anbar province which had been all but conceded to Al Qaeda months ago.
I could see a limited operation while withdrawing dedicated to this sort of effort, bringing together Iraqi troops and Sunni Tribesman in Anbar province, something the predominantly Shia Army is unlikely to pull off. As for the US plans to begin operations in Sadr City, that seems to me to be creating more cannon fodder for the Mahdi Army to show it's stuff. It's their neighborhood. We need to be focusing our efforts in Sunni areas and leave the Shias to their own areas.
washingtonpost.com

Iraqi security forces backed by Sunni tribesmen killed dozens of suspected Sunni insurgents over several hours of fighting Wednesday in a village in western Iraq, Iraqi police officials said Thursday.


The fighting was unusually fierce for an Iraqi-led operation and was also notable because of the collaboration of tribesmen in volatile Anbar province. In recent months, the U.S. military has aligned itself with dozens of tribal sheiks who are collaborating in an effort to drive the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq from the vast desert territory.


The clashes on Wednesday began about 1 p.m. when insurgents attacked a village near Fallujah, about 35 miles west of Baghdad, and ended about six hours later when Iraqi soldiers, police and the tribal fighters killed 50 suspected insurgents and captured 80 others, according to Abdul-Karim Khalaf, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. Khalaf declined to say how many Iraqi security personnel were killed or injured.


"This is part of the Interior Ministry strategy to support the Baghdad security plan in targeting terrorism in the areas surrounding Baghdad," he said. "The tribes in this area refused to join al-Qaeda."

What North Korea Does, Iran Will Do

You can bet that Iran is watching everything that happens between North Korea and the US. It's very likely they believe the only way they can maintain their territorial integrity is to have a nuclear deterrant. If they follow a course of negotiation and stalling, they may well succeed in arming themselves with Nukes and preventing forever an attack by the US or Israel.
There are only two ways to stop Iran from going nuclear. We can nuke them into the ground at the cost of millions of their people, and thus triggering a world wide Jihad of hundreds of millions of Muslims against the US. No one in their right mind can consider a "measured" military response able to do anything but redouble the Iranian commitment to go nuclear.
Do we have the moral imparative to kill millions because of what their leaders might do? Only if we think we are God.
The only other way is to convince the Iranian leadership that they have no reason to arm themselves to protect their country. The only viable option is to offer an olive branch.
AlterNet

Five years and an outlaw nuke test after President Bush blew up the peace process with Pyongyang so he could look tougher than his predecessor, he capitulated completely earlier this month in accepting a negotiating framework that tacitly accepts the huge surge in the communist state's estimated nuclear arsenal. Bush blinked big-time. The carrot replaced the stick, and that is a good thing, carrying the hope that through diplomacy North Korea will end its isolation and follow the modernizing path of communist China. But six years of presidential haranguing about rogue regimes derailed previous efforts at arms control, allowing the dangerously unstable North Korea to join the nuclear club.
In particular, Bush's rejection of the Clinton administration's alleged pandering to North Korea gave that country's erratic rulers a believable rationale to cut the international monitoring seals on their super-dangerous plutonium stores. Now Bush has had to go back, hat and heating oil in hand, to beg for a restart to negotiations with a nuked-up Pyongyang, which now is in an exponentially better bargaining position.
After all, this is an administration that lifted the sanctions on Pakistan the U.S. imposed after that nation developed a nuclear arsenal. Why? Ostensibly because we needed Pakistan's support in "the war on terror" after 9/11. But aid in that war has not been forthcoming, as Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have just conceded in rare condemnations of Pakistan. Taliban supporters are thriving in the Pakistan-Afghan border region that Pakistan's dictator abandoned to local tribal chiefs sympathetic to the militants.
The hardliners insist Pyongyang will never live up to its pledge, made in the September 2005 round of six-party talks, to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." How can they be so sure? In fact, nobody knows (with the possible exception of Kim Jong-il), and the only way for Washington to find out is to proceed, reciprocal step by reciprocal step, in sustained negotiations.
If it were up to the hardliners, Washington would never know how far it can get with Pyongyang. They identified diplomatic give-and-take as rewarding bad behavior. This stance rests on a fiction they propagated that North Korea duped President Clinton in halting its plutonium program while starting a covert uranium enrichment effort. As President Bush put it on March 6, 2003, "My predecessor, in a good-faith effort, entered into a framework agreement. The United States honored its side of the agreement; North Korea didn't. While we felt the agreement was in force, North Korea was enriching uranium."
In fact, it was the United States that first reneged on the 1994 Agreed Framework by failing to reward North Korea's good behavior. Washington got what it most wanted up front -- a freeze of Pyongyang's plutonium program, a program that by now could have generated enough plutonium for at least fifty bombs. Washington did not live up to its end of the bargain, however. When Republicans won control of Congress in elections just days after the October 1994 accord was signed, many of them denounced the deal as appeasement. Unwilling to take on Congress, President Clinton backpedaled on implementation. He did little easing of sanctions until 2000. Washington pledged to provide two nuclear power plants "by a target date of 2003," but concrete for the first foundation was not poured until August 2002. It did deliver heavy fuel oil as promised but seldom on schedule. Above all, it did not live up to its promise in Article II of the Agreed Framework to "move toward full normalization of political and economic relations" -- end enmity and lift sanctions.

AlterNet

Hardliners like former U.N. envoy John Bolton and former Under Secretary of State Robert Joseph immediately pounced on the deal, saying it did nothing to stop the North's uranium enrichment program, dismantle its plutonium facilities, or capture the seven to nine bombs worth of plutonium that the North is believed to have. Yet they themselves had long fought to deny negotiator Hill the bargaining chips he needed to negotiate even this first-stage deal, never mind achieving further disarming. Delaying a freeze to seek a more far-reaching deal would give the North time to generate more plutonium, fabricate bombs, and increase its bargaining leverage.
When Washington was slow to fulfill the terms of the accord, Pyongyang threatened in 1997 to break it. Its acquisition of gas centrifuges to enrich uranium from Pakistan began soon thereafter -- in 1998, according to Secretary of State Colin Powell. That was barely enough for a pilot program, not the operational capability U.S. intelligence says it moved to acquire in 2001 after the Bush administration refused talks and instead disclosed that the North was a target for nuclear attack. The administration retaliated in November 2002 by halting shipment of heavy fuel oil promised under the Agreed Framework. North Korea, in turn, restarted its plutonium program.
Pyongyang's tactics convinced many in Washington it was determined to arm and should be punished for brazenly breaking its commitments. It convinced others it was trying to extort economic aid without giving up anything in return. It was doing neither. It was playing tit for tat -- cooperating whenever Washington cooperated and retaliating when Washington reneged, in an effort to end enmity. It still is.

Rice Couldn't Snub Maliki; Will Meet with Syria and Iran

The Prime Minister of Iraq has called a regional conference to build an alliance for stability. Rice could hardly say no. That would signal that the US no longer supports that government. There is no change in policy here.
What will be interesting is if Rice actively sabatoges the talks, or actually participates in a meaningful way. This actually presents a unique opportunity for Rice to define herself as a leader, or a Bush henchman. Meanwhile, the military pressure will continue in the Gulf.
washingtonpost.com

The United States agreed yesterday to join high-level talks with Iran and Syria on the future of Iraq, an abrupt shift in policy that opens the door to diplomatic dealings the White House had shunned in recent months despite mounting criticism.
The move was announced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in testimony on Capitol Hill, after Iraq said it had invited neighboring states, the United States and other nations to a pair of regional conferences.


"I would note that the Iraqi government has invited all of its neighbors, including Syria and Iran, to attend both of these regional meetings," Rice told the Senate Appropriations Committee. "We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve the relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region."


The first meeting, at the ambassadorial level, will be held next month. Then Rice will sit down at the table with the foreign ministers from Damascus and Tehran at a second meeting in April elsewhere in the region, possibly in Istanbul.


The Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel whose recommendations were largely ignored by the administration, had recommended such a regional meeting in its December report. Rice and other administration officials emphasized, however, that these conferences would be led and organized by the Iraqi government and not, as the study group suggested, by the United States. Still, Democrats seized on the announcement as a long-overdue change in direction by the administration.

Bush Administration Conflicted Middle East Policy

In the ultimate Double-Think, Dubya does seem to be coming around to the realization that the regime they deposed in Iraq was more their friend than enemy. While they have not been openly supporting the Sunni insurgency, they are looking the other way while Saudi Arabia supports the insurgents. While they single out Hezbollah as dangerous, they count among their allies the Iraqi Daiwa sect, founders of Hezbollah.
The Administration position is coming closer to the realization of my bizarre speculation that the US may well switch sides in Iraq.
The New Yorker

But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran.


[..]The policy shift has brought Saudi Arabia and Israel into a new strategic embrace, largely because both countries see Iran as an existential threat. They have been involved in direct talks, and the Saudis, who believe that greater stability in Israel and Palestine will give Iran less leverage in the region, have become more involved in Arab-Israeli negotiations.


[..]“It seems there has been a debate inside the government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has written widely on Shiites, Iran, and Iraq, told me. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”


Martin Indyk, a senior State Department official in the Clinton Administration who also served as Ambassador to Israel, said that “the Middle East is heading into a serious Sunni-Shiite Cold War.”


[..]The Administration’s new policy for containing Iran seems to complicate its strategy for winning the war in Iraq. Patrick Clawson, an expert on Iran and the deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued, however, that closer ties between the United States and moderate or even radical Sunnis could put “fear” into the government of Prime Minister Maliki and “make him worry that the Sunnis could actually win” the civil war there. Clawson said that this might give Maliki an incentive to coöperate with the United States in suppressing radical Shiite militias, such as Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.


Even so, for the moment, the U.S. remains dependent on the coöperation of Iraqi Shiite leaders. The Mahdi Army may be openly hostile to American interests, but other Shiite militias are counted as U.S. allies. Both Moqtada al-Sadr and the White House back Maliki. A memorandum written late last year by Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, suggested that the Administration try to separate Maliki from his more radical Shiite allies by building his base among moderate Sunnis and Kurds, but so far the trends have been in the opposite direction. As the Iraqi Army continues to founder in its confrontations with insurgents, the power of the Shiite militias has steadily increased.


Flynt Leverett, a former Bush Administration National Security Council official, told me that “there is nothing coincidental or ironic” about the new strategy with regard to Iraq. “The Administration is trying to make a case that Iran is more dangerous and more provocative than the Sunni insurgents to American interests in Iraq, when—if you look at the actual casualty numbers—the punishment inflicted on America by the Sunnis is greater by an order of magnitude,” Leverett said. “This is all part of the campaign of provocative steps to increase the pressure on Iran. The idea is that at some point the Iranians will respond and then the Administration will have an open door to strike at them.”

Iran: Attack or Not?

What is going on with Iran? The mainstream press is pounding a steady beat towards war with Iran. Israel has pulled out all stops to persuade the world that Iran must be dealt with NOW.
Los Angeles Times

Israeli leaders rarely invoke the Holocaust in the face of enemies. The Jewish homeland founded after Adolf Hitler's genocide has, for the last generation, felt secure enough to fight its many battles with little or no help.


But the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran has rattled Israel's self-confidence. Its politicians and generals warn of a "second Holocaust" if, as in the 1930s, the world stands by while a heavily armed nation declares war against the Jews.


Spelling out that scenario, Israeli officials have begun an unusually open campaign to muster international political and economic pressures against Iran. They warn that time is growing short and hint that they will resort to force if those pressures fail to prevent Iran's development of an atomic weapon.


Israeli leaders fear that an Iranian bomb would undermine their nation's security even if Tehran never detonated it. That Israel has its own nuclear arsenal would not counteract the psychological and strategic blow, they believe.


Israel began secretly preparing in the early 1990s for a possible air raid on Iran's then-nascent nuclear facilities and has been making oblique public statements about such planning for three years.


What is new is Israel's abandonment of quiet diplomacy to rally others to its side. Until a few months ago, Israeli leaders worried that high-profile lobbying would backfire and provoke accusations that they were trying to drag the United States and its allies into a war.


Israel's new activism coincides with a recent drumbeat of U.S. threats against Iran, including President Bush's vow to "seek out and destroy" Iranian and Syrian networks he said were arming and training anti-American forces in Iraq, and his dispatch of a second aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf.


Several factors have contributed to Israel's more assertive campaign, Israeli officials and defense analysts said.


Israel's war against Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon last summer brought Tehran's hostility alarmingly close to home. At the same time, the war made relatively moderate Sunni-dominated Arab nations more wary of Shiite Iran, easing Israel's isolation and creating a de facto anti-Iran coalition.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. And while denying any plan to build an atomic weapon, Iran has continued to enrich uranium and acquire long-range missiles.

However, it looks more and more like some of the evidence provided by US intelligence to provide Iran's intent were fabricated. In particular, the laptop that allegedly contains bomb plans was in all English. Wouldn't at least some of the information on the laptop be in the owners native language?
Now, Los Angeles Times comes out with an article that seems to be exaggerate the imminence of the threat.

Iran has accelerated its program to enrich uranium and defied a United Nations Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said here Thursday.


The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran recently began installing the first of 3,000 gas centrifuges in a heavily fortified, underground chamber at its Natanz plant and that it planned to "bring them gradually into operation by May 2007."


A facility that large, if it functions properly, could produce enough highly enriched uranium in a year to build a nuclear warhead. A senior U.N. diplomat here cautioned that the Iranian schedule was "fairly optimistic" and said that the highly sensitive linked centrifuges, called cascades, may not be operational before the fall.


[..]During an IAEA team's visit to the underground site Feb. 17, Iranian officials informed the group that they had installed two cascades of 164 centrifuges each and that another two cascades were in the "final stages of installation." The Iranians said they would begin introducing uranium hexafluoride gas into the system to start enrichment by the end of the month.


Officials at IAEA headquarters in Vienna said that Iranian scientists had mastered centrifuge technology in recent months. One agency official described as "wishful thinking" reports that the centrifuges tested at Natanz were prone to breakage. He said the Iranians had run engineering tests "to the breaking point" to measure the weakness in the system. "They know how to enrich," he added. "They know how to spin centrifuges."

Fortunately, there are alternative news sources in the Internet to balence the imbalence in mainstream press.
WIRED Blogs

First, Iran has only enriched uranium up to 4.2% U-235, just about the level required to fuel a proliferation-resistant light-water reactor. This is still far below the threshold required to make nuclear weapons (20% U-235 is the minimum required to make a weapon, but most use about 90%). Unfortunately, just because Iran hasn’t enriched further doesn’t mean they can’t; the report says nothing about possible technical problems.


Second, the IAEA’s inventory of nuclear material at the Natanz pilot plant is “consistent with” the inventory supplied by the Iranians themselves. This gives some assurance that nuclear material is not being diverted to secret facilities. However, the main (underground) enrichment facility is not mentioned.


Third, while Iran has “declined to agree at this stage” to the use of remote monitoring, in the interim it has allowed “frequent inspector access” to the main underground enrichment plant at Natanz – the IAEA has eyes there, occasionally at least. This agreement will satisfy the IAEA only until the number of centrifuges reaches 500.


Fourth, there seem to be only about 500 fully installed centrifuges at Natanz – if all of them were running at full speed it would take about six years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb. However, Iran claims it has roughly 350 more “in final stages of installation;” this seems to be happening sooner than many experts expected.


Fifth, the IAEA has found no indications that spent fuel is being reprocessed for plutonium, at any of Iran’s declared nuclear facilities. However, construction continues at Iran’s planned heavy-water reactor, which could produce fuel for nuclear weapons. These are some pretty dim glimmers of hope, but they do indicate that some time remains before Iran will even have enough material to build a nuclear weapon. Given some hints that sanctions and financial pressure might be starting to work, who knows -- there might even be enough time to reach some sort of agreement.

There is good evidence that Bush is attempting to trigger an "accidental conflict," as a pretext to justify "limited strikes". The Raw Story has published a "Build Up To Iran Timeline" that documents all the moves on the chessboard.
Meanwhile, as I've been warning since January of 2005, US Special Forces have been operating within Iran since at least 2004. Unlike US news sources, the world has better information about what is going on in Iran.
India Times: Economic Times

Bomb blasts struck Iranian government buildings in the capital of an oil-rich border province, followed within hours by two other bombs in central Tehran, killing nine people, days before presidential elections.


Iran’s security service blamed the bombings on Sunday — the deadliest in Iran in more than a decade — on supporters of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. State-run TV quoted hospital officials as saying at least eight people were killed and 86 injured in four explosions in Ahvaz, the capital of the southwestern Khuzestan province bordering Iraq.


Hours later, two small bombs exploded in central Tehran, killing one person and wounding four. Police said one suspect was taken into custody. A spokesman for the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security decision-making body, blamed groups affiliated to Saddam’s former Baathist regime in Iraq. State TV quoted spokesman Ali Agha Mohammadi as saying the perpetrators of the Ahvaz bombings had infiltrated into Iran from Basra in southern Iraq.

There have long been reports that the US has enlisted Sadaam's Iranian terrorist organization, Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) to carry out US policy. The Raw Story reports on the not so secret Cheney/Rumsfeld order outsourcing special ops and intelligence to MEK.

According to all three intelligence sources, military and intelligence officials alike were alarmed that instead of securing a known terrorist organization, which has been responsible for acts of terror against Iranian targets and individuals all over the world – including US civilian and military casualties – Rumsfeld under instructions from Cheney, began using the group on special ops missions into Iran to pave the way for a potential Iran strike.


“They are doing whatever they want, no oversight at all,” one intelligence source said.


Indeed, Saddam Hussein himself had used the MEK for acts of terror against non-Sunni Muslims and had assigned domestic security detail to the MEK as a way of policing dissent among his own people. It was under the guidance of MEK ‘policing’ that Iraqi citizens who were not Sunni were routinely tortured, attacked and arrested.
Although the specifics of what the MEK is being used for remain unclear, a UN official close to the Security Council explained that the newly renamed MEK soldiers are being run instead of military advance teams, committing acts of violence in hopes of staging an insurgency of the Iranian Sunni population.


“We are already at war,” the UN official told RAW STORY.


Asked how long the MEK agents have been active in the region under the guidance of the US military civilian leadership, the UN official explained that the clandestine war had been going on for roughly a year and included unmanned drones run jointly by several agencies.

One of my favorite alternate news sources AlterNet points out the obvious logical and moral hypocracy in US sponsored terrorism in Iran.

I believed that the attacks by MEK had been halted in March of last year. If this attack is shown to be tied to MEK terrorists or any other "group" we are funding, arming, and training in the region, then the US will be implicated - even if we had nothing to do with the bombing directly.


Let's use Al Qaeda and the US as an example to illustrate how the MEK-US relationship might look to Iranians:


Imagine that this morning you woke up to find that 18 US national guardsmen were assassinated on US soil via a car bomb on their way to a work facility. Now imagine that it was determined that Al Qaeda was behind the attack and that Syrian government officials were behind the funding, training, and harboring of this Al Qaeda cell. How would you react? Would you not see this as a declaration of war against our country? How then would this look to Iranian citizens if it turns out MEK or any other organization being run by Israel and the US is behind this attack?
We can only hope that the US backed groups had nothing to do with this bombing, but I fear given what we already know, the case against us is looking very strong.

Zbigniew Brzezinski spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1st using unusually blunt predictions.

If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Finally, the nations leaders have the real cards laid on the table. But will they resist the Israeli pressure to act? Iran does not present a threat to the US. It may threaten Israel, depending on who you listen to, the risk is 5 to 10 years away. In more than 10 years, it may threaten Europe. It seems we have plenty of time to deal with this situation without going to war.

Al-Hakim's Son Arrested By Mistake?

Arrest of Shiite leader's son proves thorny - Los Angeles Times
Soldiers arrested Ammar al-Hakim and at least three of his bodyguards around noon as they crossed into Iraq from Iran about 80 miles southeast of Baghdad, the capital. His father, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, heads the largest Shiite voting bloc in the Iraqi parliament. The elder al-Hakim met with President Bush in December in Washington, D.C., and pledged to help end bloodshed in Iraq.
In a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times, Ammar al-Hakim said troops arrested him because his passport was nearing expiration and they thought his identification picture did not match his appearance. He complained of being treated roughly at the hands of U.S. soldiers, including being blindfolded as he was transported to a military base and having his underwear searched once he arrived there.
"We supported the new Baghdad (security) plan and we hoped that it would succeed, but at the same time people's dignity should respected," al-Hakim said. He said the government would seek answers from the U.S. about how the incident was handled.
Al-Hakim was released after about seven hours, and U.S. officials rapidly began damage control efforts. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad appeared on Iraqi government television, saying that the U.S. was "sorry about the arrest" and meant no disrespect.
Al-Hakim's father leads the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, the largest Shiite party in parliament. The elder al-Hakim was a onetime opponent of Saddam Hussein and spent much of the 1980s in exile in Iran as a commander of the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps has been criticized for close ties with Iran and has been accused of operating death squads targeting Sunnis, but it is also viewed as among the more moderate Shiite forces in Iraq.
Ammar al-Hakim heads the Shahid al-Mihrab Foundation, a charity affiliated with SCIRI that provides food and money to the foundation's supporters.

Playing Into bin Ladin's Hands

Iraq 101
The rate of fatal terrorist attacks around the world by jihadist groups, and the number of people killed in those attacks, increased dramatically after the invasion of Iraq. Globally there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks (28.3 attacks per year before and 199.8 after) and a 237 percent rise in the fatality rate (from 501 to 1,689 deaths per year). A large part of this rise occurred in Iraq, the scene of almost half the global total of jihadist terrorist attacks. But even excluding Iraq and Afghanistan—the other current jihadist hot spot—there has been a 35 percent rise in the number of attacks, with a 12 percent rise in fatalities.

Globalization in India: No Help for the Poorest

India's growth of little benefit to its poorest | FP Passport
Two recent reports highlight just how far India still has to go in its development. Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report claiming that India's 165 million dalits—so-called "outcastes" or "untouchables," placed on the lowest rung in India's caste system—are still the victims of brutal and pervasive discrimination. India's extensive system of political protections for dalits has not, by any stretch of the imagination, translated into improved social practices. Just one example from the report:
Dalits are forced to perform tasks deemed too "polluting" or degrading for non-Dalits to carry out. According to unofficial estimates, more than 1.3 million Dalits – mostly women – are employed as manual scavengers to clear human waste from dry pit latrines. In several cities, Dalits are lowered into manholes without protection to clear sewage blockages, resulting in more than 100 deaths each year from inhalation of toxic gases or from drowning in excrement.
Fast on the heels of this criticism has come another report, this one from UNICEF, which found that an astounding 46 percent of Indian children under the age of three are undernourished—far higher, even, than in sub-Saharan Africa. India has yet to prove that its blistering economic growth can be translated into widespread improvement in the lives of its poorest citizens.

The Drum Beat of War Against Iran Intensifies

Los Angeles Times

Israeli leaders rarely invoke the Holocaust in the face of enemies. The Jewish homeland founded after Adolf Hitler's genocide has, for the last generation, felt secure enough to fight its many battles with little or no help.


But the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran has rattled Israel's self-confidence. Its politicians and generals warn of a "second Holocaust" if, as in the 1930s, the world stands by while a heavily armed nation declares war against the Jews.


Spelling out that scenario, Israeli officials have begun an unusually open campaign to muster international political and economic pressures against Iran. They warn that time is growing short and hint that they will resort to force if those pressures fail to prevent Iran's development of an atomic weapon.


Israeli leaders fear that an Iranian bomb would undermine their nation's security even if Tehran never detonated it. That Israel has its own nuclear arsenal would not counteract the psychological and strategic blow, they believe.


Israel began secretly preparing in the early 1990s for a possible air raid on Iran's then-nascent nuclear facilities and has been making oblique public statements about such planning for three years.


What is new is Israel's abandonment of quiet diplomacy to rally others to its side. Until a few months ago, Israeli leaders worried that high-profile lobbying would backfire and provoke accusations that they were trying to drag the United States and its allies into a war.


Israel's new activism coincides with a recent drumbeat of U.S. threats against Iran, including President Bush's vow to "seek out and destroy" Iranian and Syrian networks he said were arming and training anti-American forces in Iraq, and his dispatch of a second aircraft carrier group to the Persian Gulf.


Several factors have contributed to Israel's more assertive campaign, Israeli officials and defense analysts said.


Israel's war against Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon last summer brought Tehran's hostility alarmingly close to home. At the same time, the war made relatively moderate Sunni-dominated Arab nations more wary of Shiite Iran, easing Israel's isolation and creating a de facto anti-Iran coalition.


Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. And while denying any plan to build an atomic weapon, Iran has continued to enrich uranium and acquire long-range missiles.

Los Angeles Times

Iran has accelerated its program to enrich uranium and defied a United Nations Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said here Thursday.


The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran recently began installing the first of 3,000 gas centrifuges in a heavily fortified, underground chamber at its Natanz plant and that it planned to "bring them gradually into operation by May 2007."


A facility that large, if it functions properly, could produce enough highly enriched uranium in a year to build a nuclear warhead. A senior U.N. diplomat here cautioned that the Iranian schedule was "fairly optimistic" and said that the highly sensitive linked centrifuges, called cascades, may not be operational before the fall.


[..]During an IAEA team's visit to the underground site Feb. 17, Iranian officials informed the group that they had installed two cascades of 164 centrifuges each and that another two cascades were in the "final stages of installation." The Iranians said they would begin introducing uranium hexafluoride gas into the system to start enrichment by the end of the month.


Officials at IAEA headquarters in Vienna said that Iranian scientists had mastered centrifuge technology in recent months. One agency official described as "wishful thinking" reports that the centrifuges tested at Natanz were prone to breakage. He said the Iranians had run engineering tests "to the breaking point" to measure the weakness in the system. "They know how to enrich," he added. "They know how to spin centrifuges."