Hillary: Pakistan troops might have killed Bhutto

Something very interesting is happening in the Presidential Election Race. Contrary to tradition, Clinton has come out with a policy directly in conflict with the Bush Administration. Never have former presidents been more active in condemning a seated President in history than with Dubya. Now even the Presidential Candidates are critical of current foreign policy positions.
If I were to guess, I think Hillary is trying to influence current events. If Musharraf knows that his support from the US ends with Bush, perhaps he will do the right thing and step down now when it's politically expedient and the pressure is supremely intense to do so. Biden has called for Musharraf to step down, perhaps Hillary is trying to make it happen.
Newsday.com

Hillary Rodham Clinton waded into Pakistan's volatile internal political situation Saturday, raising the possibility the country's military might have assassinated Benazir Bhutto because the killing took place in the garrison city of Rawalpindi.


Clinton's remarks came as Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf's government seemed to reject a call for an independent international investigation of the murder that Clinton and John Edwards proposed on Friday.


During a question-and-answer session at an elementary school here, Clinton offered a detailed prescription for the troubled country, suggesting that the U.S divert aid away from its military to social welfare programs.


And for the second time in as many days, she cast doubt on Musharraf's contention that the suicide bombing that led to the death of the country's most popular opposition leader was masterminded by al-Qaida.


"There are those saying that al-Qaida did it. Others are saying it looked like it was an inside job -- remember Rawalpindi is a garrison city," she said.

Meanwhile the evidence of a cover-up seems omnipresent, so much so one has to wonder if it reflects a power struggle within the military government of Pakistan, one part killing off Bhutto and trying to cover it up, another trying to pin the blame on Musharraf by leaking contradictory evidence about her death.
Why would the military say she wasn't shot, unless they are trying deliberately to make it appear Musharraf is responsible?

Spector: Assad Wants Peace

Arlan Spector, one of the few Republicans who have shown some leadership in the past 8 years says Syria is ready for peace. He says it's largely accepted that the Golan Heights would have to be returned to Syria. Contrary to popular knowledge, to Syria, the Golan Heights is one of a few bountiful sources of water in for this arid nation.
The Daily Star

Two visiting US Congressmen announced after talks with Syrian leaders on Sunday that they had secured a pledge that jailed dissidents would be freed and said they saw scope for progress in the peace process with Israel. Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, a member of President George W. Bush's Republican Party, and Congressman Patrick Kennedy, a Democratic representative from Rhode Island, met with President Bashar Assad and Foreign Minister Walid Moallem.


[..]Specter also sounded an upbeat note about the prospects for movement on the peace process between Syria and Israel, which has been frozen since 2000, saying it was now generally accepted that Israel would have to return the Golan Heights which it seized in 1967.

Can Obama Change His Stripes?

It seems that Obama is feeling the pressure from Edwards, so he's changing his tune to populist themes about the working class. Tell me, why would he have to change his message if he really was a populist? Just how much can he be supportive of the working class?
Los Angeles Times

Working-class voters have been migrating to the former North Carolina senator in recent weeks, prompting a shift in strategy.


Obama knocks CEOs who "dump" employee pensions while "pocketing bonuses." He laments Maytag workers who "labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas." He recalls humble beginnings and says his experience is "rooted in the lives of the people."


That kind of hard-driving populism has formed the core of John Edwards' campaign for president. But those words have come this week from Barack Obama -- one of Edwards' chief rivals for the Democratic nomination -- who has recalibrated his campaign to appeal to working-class voters before Thursday's caucuses.

Huckabee the Wacko Right WingNut

Informed Comment

Mike Huckabee is a smooth-talking, fanatical country preacher who has learned to make himself likeable on camera but who spews all kinds of hateful nonsense when among like-minded devotees.


The dark side of Huckabee, the anti-science and anti-gay side of Huckabee, and the anti-Palestinian genocidal side of Huckabee, are all more more dangerous than the incompetent fool side of Huckabee, but the latter is pretty dangerous, too.


The incompetent fool side was on full display in his remarks, apparently provoked by the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, about the alleged threat of illegal Pakistani immigration into the United States. He actually thundered about 660 persons, claiming that the Pakistanis came right after Latinos in the ranks of illegals. He also seemed to think that building a wall around Mexico would keep out Pakistanis (the illegals among whom likely mostly just overstayed their visas and landed at LaGuardia).


[..]Huckabee's first response to Benazir's assassination was to ask whether "martial law" would be "lifted." Martial law had not been declared, rather a constitutionally permissible "state of emergency" had been declared by Musharraf. He lifted it some time before Huckabee's remark.


Huckabee is a narrow-minded, bigotted and ignorant person, and I am quite sure that the American people have had enough of that sort of thing in the White House for a while. On the other hand, I certainly hope that he emerges as the Republican standard-bearer, because I think any Democratic candidate could make mincemeat of him once his bizarre views become public.

Heroin, Afghanistan, and the CIA

Ever since Ronald Reagan funded Osama Bin Ladin in his fight against the Soviets using heroin profits funneled through the CIA, the CIA and the US has been heavily into funding it's covert operations through the drug trade. Confirmation that the problem continues comes from a report last fall of a CIA Gulfstream II crash loaded with cocaine. The CIA stirred up Islamic fundamentalism to undermine the Soviet Union. Now drug money continues to flow into combating those we armed and radicalized who have now turned against us.
Meanwhile, the addicted in America populate homeless shelters and jails.
AlterNet

Perhaps the reason why the CIA’s well-documented role in the global drug trade is never really acknowledged is because it never really ended.


Other Western countries like Great Britain are quite honest about their history of drug trading, but we still engage in self-censorship, even amongst the Left, when it comes to acknowledging that similar activities have been carried out by the CIA in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and Latin America during the Iran-Contra Affair. Perhaps the reason why the CIA’s well-documented role in the global drug trade is never really acknowledged is because it never really ended.


Remember this story? The video to your right is an update into the specifics:

A Gulfstream II jet that crash landed in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in late September bearing a load of nearly four tons of cocaine. This particular Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay — home to the infamous “terrorist” prison camp — according to a number of press reports.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered that the CIA was responsible for distributing cocaine into poor Los Angeles neighborhoods. Shortly after Webb exposed the CIA, he was killed (the official story is that he committed suicide by shooting himself twice in the head).


War is profitable, and the so-called “War on Drugs” is no different. Government agencies make money in every part of the process: from sale, to seizure, to incarceration. America has 25% of the world’s incarcerated population, and a higher percentage of its black population in prison than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.

Sometimes there is a price to pay for telling the truth.
PrisonPlanet.com

Credible sources who were close to Gary Webb have stated that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen on multiple occasions breaking into and leaving his house before his apparent 'suicide' on Friday morning.


Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. He was found dead on Friday morning in what the police said was an apparent suicide.


[..]Original Associated Press reports stated that Webb had died of gunshot wounds (plural) to the face. This was later changed to 'single gunshot wound' when people began to question how or why a man would shoot himself in the face twice. This represents a concentrated effort to cover up the nature of Webb's death. There have also been reports that the coroner on the scene had originally reported 'multiple gunshot wounds' but later changed his story.


Newspapers also reported the fact that Webb's body was found by removal men without questioning why a man who was about to commit suicide would plan a house move.


The Miami Herald and LA Times continue to attack Webb even after his death in their obituariues published yesterday. Both claimed that his work was discredited despite the fact that Webb was vindicated by congressional investigations.


Former DEA agent Cele Castillo concurs that Webb was murdered and that in such a 'revenge hit' situation it was common in his experience that the murderers would have likely talked to Webb at length about how and why they were about to kill him.

If the Taliban really controlled drug profits, wouldn't they be flying modern aircraft against us?
JWHarrison

Afghanistan’s heroin share dwindled to 6 percent for much of the 1990’s. After the fundamentalist Taliban government was overthrown in 2001, opium production escalated. The production of Afghan opium used to produce heroin reached its highest level ever this year, accounting for 90% of the world’s supply of illicit opium.


With Afghanistan accounting for nearly the entire product in a multibillion dollar trade, it’s obvious that the benefactors are not the Afghans growing the poppies. Afghanistan still remains one of the poorest countries in the world. Though official US sources will claim that Afghan warlords and the Taliban are collecting this revenue, the surge in opium cultivation actually coincides with the US-led military operation which toppled that regime. In 2001, Taliban prohibition had caused the beginning of a worldwide heroin shortage for powerful interests. This fact is compounded when consider that the CIA was previously engaged in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan in the 1980’s as it supported the Mujahideen against the Soviets.


The connection between the CIA and the drug trade is well documented. The agency was accused by various US soldiers in Vietnam of smuggling opium into the United States to fund covert operations defending American corporate interests. It was also reported by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Webb that the CIA was responsible for distributing cocaine into poor Los Angeles neighborhoods. Shortly after Webb exposed the CIA, he committed “suicide” by shooting himself in the head… twice.


During the Iran-Contra Affair, it was also concluded that members of the US State Department were involved in cocaine trafficking from Latin America. In fact, the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the CIA during the Iran-Contra Affair was Robert Gates. Yes, the same Gates who is now Secretary of Defense and heads military matters worldwide, including Afghanistan of course. With drug trafficking constituting the third biggest global commodity after oil and arms trades, do we truly believe that the Taliban is the benefactor, or the powerful business and financial interests sustained by US foreign policy?

The Edwards Surge: Right Message at the Right Time

Here is why I think Edwards is the greatest hope for America.
The Nation

Indeed, undecided voters assembled in focus groups that watched the debate for the major television networks rated Edwards off the charts. That's going to help the 2004 Democratic nominee for vice president as the Iowa caucuses approach. Despite the intense focus on the campaigns of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, most polls suggest that Edwards is very much in the running in Iowa. And rightly so.


To a far greater extent than Obama or Clinton, Edwards has struck at the heart of issues that should matter most in the race to replace not just George W. Bush, but the Bush agenda of corporate giveaways, job-crushing free trade deals, war profiteering in Iraq, and subprime mortgage profiteering in Indiana, Idaho, Illinois and, yes, Iowa.


Edwards summed up his increasingly aggressive and powerful anti-corporate themes with a declaration: "What makes America America is at stake: jobs, the middle class, health care, preserving the environment in the world for future generations.


"But all those things are at risk. And why are they at risk? Because of corporate power and corporate greed in Washington, D.C. And we have to take them on. You can't make a deal with them. You can't hope that they're going to go away. You have to actually be willing to fight. And I want every caucus-goer to know I've been fighting these people and winning my entire life. And if we do this together, rise up together, we can actually make absolutely certain, starting here in Iowa, that we make this country better than we left it."

ZNet

My most interesting exchange with the Clintonites in Columbus Junction wasn’t about foreign policy. It was about so-called “economic war.” After discussing Hillary's Iraq policy with Kulongoski, I said the following to Oregon's chief executive: "just for your information, Governor, we voters see a lot of ads and get a lot of mail from Edwards. He speaks all over this state, and with him it's always about working people and how they get mistreated and so forth. He gets a lot of union worker support because of that. I wondered if you knew that when you dropped that ‘I’ve been waiting for a candidate who cares about workers’ line. You really ought to know."


Kulongoski didn’t miss a beat. He just smiled and said, "Edwards? Oh, but we're not talking about war."


"War"" I said.


"Economic war," he said.


"You mean 'class war," I said.


"Yeah. Look I’ve been at this too long. It’s about getting things done.”


I was getting ready to ask him what he thought of the notion that the American “get-things-done” business “community” had been waging savage “class warfare” of the unmentionable kind – from the top down – on American working people for all of my adult life. “Class war” has been going on for the last thirty-five years at least in the U.S. It appears to work quite well, for the privileged few.


But Kulogonski had to go. The former labor lawyer (was he pro- or anti-union?) and Vilsack had other locations to hit with their conservative, corporate (neo-)liberal message wrapped in the pseudo-progressive flag of identity politics. Yes, by all means, let’s run around telling people that electing Hillary will mean that the only remaining barriers to racial, economic, and gender equality are internal to the people on the bottom ends of the nation's steep social hierarchies.


The most interesting comment I’d gotten hadn’t been from Bill Clinton and about the imperialist war on Iraq. It came from the governor of Oregon and had to with class inequality inside the imperial “homeland.”


The Clintonites’ point and Bill’s too, was clear as day. It was this: “Let’s all be adult and realistic here. The way you get things done is by working with and through corporations and professional elites. You don’t get it by fighting concentrated power."

Obama Running to the Right of Other Dems

Krugman continues his verbal jabs with Obama's campaign on his health care plan.
Paul Krugman's Blog

Have you seen or heard about the radio ad that Obama is running in Iowa about health care? It has a man and a woman talking, with the man leading off saying that health care mandates “force those who cannot afford health care insurance to buy it, punishing those who don’t fall in line.”


This is what I’ve been complaining about. I was willing to cut Obama slack on the lack of mandates in his plan, even though the economics says they’re necessary; I figured that in practice, if elected, he’d end up doing the right thing.*


I started ramping up the criticism when he started attacking his opponents from the right, making the lack of mandates a principle rather than a compromise — because that was poisoning the well, making it much harder for any future Democratic president to implement a plan that will work.


And whaddya know, now he’s running an ad that bears a striking resemblance to the infamous “Harry and Louise” ads, run by the insurance industry, that helped block health care reform in 1993.


Call it the audacity of cynicism.


Let me repeat the argument: “The point of a mandate isn’t to dictate how people should live their lives — it’s to prevent some people from gaming the system. Under the Obama plan, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance, then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. This would lead to higher premiums for everyone else. It would reward the irresponsible, while punishing those who did the right thing and bought insurance while they were healthy.”

Oy, Kos - Paul Krugman's Blog

The Edwards and Clinton proposals actually include a public option — that is, people can buy into a Medicare-type plan administered by the government. They are not forced to go to private insurance companies. In fact, the public option was what originally made people like myself and Ezra Klein enthusiastic about the Edwards plan.


The Obama plan includes a public option for everyone as well — but thereby hangs a tale. You see, when it was first announced, it didn’t: the public option was there only for selected groups — others would have to go with private insurance companies. It was only after several days of hectoring from progressive health care wonks that the Obama people said, in effect, “OK, we’ll make it available to everyone.” I was told that they really hadn’t thought about that — which is amazing, considering how important the public option is. (the Edwards campaign has been clear in stating that it might eventually lead to a single-payer system.)


This was one of the episodes that led health wonks I talk to to conclude that Obama may just not be that committed to universal care.


This gets once again at what I keep trying to tell people: on health care, Obama is consistently running to the right of his rivals.


And it’s deeply disappointing to have influential bloggers buying into the bizarre notion that trying to make a health care plan truly universal is somehow a gift to the insurance companies.

2,500 tons of Afghan drugs enter Iran yearly

Maybe this has always been part of the US policy for Iran. Perhaps this is one of the many ways the US has decided to attack Iran.
The Daily Star

Some 2,500 tons of narcotics enter Iran from neighboring Afghanistan annually, more than a quarter of which are consumed in the Islamic Republic, an anti-drugs official said on Sunday. "Afghanistan produces 8,200 tons of narcotics, 2,500 of which enter Iran," the Fars news agency quoted Mohammad Reza Jahani, deputy head of Iran's anti-narcotics organization, as saying. "Of this amount, 700 tons are consumed in the country, 500 tons are seized by the police and the rest, which is about 1,300 tons, is transited through the country," he said. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has said that Afghanistan's opium production increased from 6,100 tons in 2006 to 8,200 tons in 2007, accounting for 93 percent of global production. Iran lies on a major narcotics route from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Turkey and Europe, and Tehran says it needs more funds to combat trafficking across its porous eastern borders. It has hanged smugglers, dug trenches and built walls across the border and lost hundreds of police and military forces in its battle against traffickers. With cheap heroin available at $3.5 dollars per gram, according to the United Nations, the country also faces a serious drug abuse problem with an official two million drug addicts - 250,000 of whom are intravenous heroin users. Nearly half of the prisoners in the country's jails have been incarcerated for drug-related crimes.

CIA withheld Al Qaeda tapes from 9/11 panel-paper

Can you imagine why the CIA would withhold tapes from the 9/11 Commission? Probably because they are incriminating. And I'd bet they were withholding the tapes under orders or at least knowledge of the White House.
Reuters

The Sept. 11 commission's chairmen, Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, said their reading of the review, a copy of which the newspaper obtained, convinced them the CIA made a conscious decision to impede the panel's inquiry, the Times said.


A memo prepared by Philip Zelikow, the panel's former executive director, concluded that "further investigation is needed" to determine whether the CIA's withholding of the interrogation tapes from the commission violated U.S. law, the paper reported.


CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield on Saturday said the CIA gave the commission "a wealth of information" and did not destroy the tapes while the commission was active.


"The 9/11 commission certainly had access to, and drew from, detailed information that had been provided by terrorist detainees," Mansfield said in an e-mail. "That's how they reconstructed the plot in their comprehensive report."


"Because it was thought the commission could ask about tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active. As Director Hayden pointed out in his December 6th statement, the tapes were destroyed only when it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries," Mansfield said.


The CIA said it destroyed the tapes lawfully to protect the agents involved in the interrogations, but the news prompted an outcry from rights activists and Democrats in Congress, as well as investigations by the Bush administration and Congress.

Tourist Chained and Held Incommunicado, No Food, or Sleep for 24 Hours

Here is an incredible story about a tourist who came to New York to spent money. Welcome to America!
Signs of the Times News

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.


Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.


We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties.

Where did America learn this from? Guess:
Signs of the Times News

The security personnel of El Al Airlines descended upon me at Newark International Airport like a flock of vultures. There were five of them, in uniform, blockading the check-in counter. They looked old enough to have finished their obligatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces but not old enough to have finished college, which put them beneath me in age. I was prepared for their initial question, "What are you?", which I've been asked my entire life. Really, there is no satisfactory word for what I am.


"Mulatto" is now considered taboo since at its root is the four-legged beast that results from the union of a horse and a donkey (though I am told mules are smarter than both of those breeds). "Mixed" is a more proper adjective for a cocktail. "Interracial" is too vague, and "bi-racial" is similarly unspecific. Though it chafed me, I knew the canned answer that would satisfy: "I look the way I do because my mother is white and my father is black." This time the usual reply wasn't good enough. This time the interrogation was tribal.


"What do you mean black? Where are you from?"
"New Jersey."
"Why are you going to Israel?"
"To visit a friend."
"What is your friend?"
"She's a Cancer."
"She has cancer?"
"No, no. I'm kidding. She's healthy."
"She's Jewish?"
"Yes."
"How do you know her?"
"We grew up together."
"Do you speak Hebrew?"


[..]"Ms. Raboteau. Do you want to get on that plane?"
I was beginning to wonder.
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Answer the question then! What are your origins?"
What else was I supposed to say?
"A sperm and an egg," I snapped.


That's when they grabbed my luggage, whisked me to the basement, stripped off my clothes and probed every orifice of my body for explosives. When they didn't find any, they focused on my tattoo, a Japanese character which means different, precious, unique. I was completely naked, and the room was cold. I tried to cover myself with my hands. I remember feeling incredibly thirsty. One of them flicked my left shoulder with a latex glove. "What does it mean?" he asked. This was the first time I'd ever been racially profiled, not that the experience would have been any less humiliating had it been my five hundredth. "It means Fuck you," I wanted to say, not because they'd stripped me of my dignity but because they'd shoved my face into my own rootlessness.


I have never felt more black in my life than I did when I was mistaken for an Arab.

Iraq Surge Displaced a Million to Syria

The news from Iraq is so controlled, we may never know the consequences of the American invasion. But even the surge seems to have hurt more civilians than anyone.
Informed Comment

The US troop escalation that began last February seems to be implicated in the displacement of over one million Iraqis to Syria between March and October of this year, adding to the nearly 450,000 that fled there in 2006. This is according to projections from a United Nations weighted survey of nearly 800 refugees. Some 78% of those interviewed in Syria said that they came from Baghdad.


Many of the refugees are from the white collar middle class, and are the people Iraq can least afford to lose. Most of them are only 3 months or less from exhausting all their saving and being thrown into complete destitution. Children are not being educated, and literacy is falling dramatically in the next generation. Many girls are forced into 'survival sex,' i.e. prostitution.


How the US 'surge' drove one million Iraqis to Syria last spring and summer is a great mystery, and casts severe doubt on its political success. A significant proportion of these one million Surge Victims appear to have been Baghdad Sunnis, since from January of 2007 through July 2007 the US military admits that Baghdad went from being 65% Shiite to being 75% Shiite. Since another 500,000 left between July and October, depending on what proportion of those were Sunnis, Baghdad could now be even more than 3/4s Shiite. The Sunnis are not going to take this lying down, and the 'surge' seems to me to have set the stage for 1) a violent return of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs to their usurped homes in Baghdad and 2) therefore a second Battle for Baghdad as soon as the US forces in Iraq are too weak to prevent it.

Was Rice's trip to Iraqi Kurdistan Deliberately Sabotaged?

Now, why would Rice go to Iraqi Kurdistan at the precise moment of a Turkish incursion? There is no way Rice would do that on purpose.
Yet, there is a leak saying the US provided real time intelligence to Turkey on the location of PKK terrorists, just as Rice was leaving Washington.
Sure looks like a set up. And guess who has been setting up the Secretary of State for the past 7 years? This has Cheney's smell all over it.
Informed Comment

it is absolutely impossible that Condi plans out a trip to Kirkuk and a meeting with Barzani with full knowledge that while she is there, Turkey will send 500 Turkish soldiers into northern Iraq to occupy the villages of Kaya Retch Binwak, Janarok and Gelly Resh. Or even that when she set out on her trip, she knew that Turkey was planning to bomb Iraqi Kurdistan on Sunday, killing 3, wounding 8, and displacing 300 Kurdish villagers.


[..]So in my view Turkey is trying to drive a wedge between the US and Barzani, and Turkish chief of staff Yasar Buyukanit deliberately embarrassed Secretary Rice and ruined her trip to celebrate Kurdish-Arab reconciliation (a reconciliation that is not actually good news for Ankara, which does not want to see the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government annex Kirkuk).


If the bombing raid was also not a SNAFU but was a deliberate attempt to thwart Rice's good feeling tour in Iraqi Kurdistan, then that would point to the Turkish military having received advance warning from someone in the US government about Rice's secret trip. That is, it would point to spying. That in turn would raise the question of whether there are relatively high USG officials who had knowledge of her secret itinerary, and who have an interest in bolstering the ties of the US with the Turkish military at the expense of Washington's de facto alliance with Barzani in Iraq.

The Story Behind Zawahiri's Video

It would appear that Al Qaeda's Zawahiri is concerned about become irrelevant. He defends the Islamic State of Iraq, the Sunni insurgents largely quieted by other Sunni militias, and attacks Iran and other prominent Shiites. Here is Juan Cole's assessment of the video.
Informed Comment

The USG Open Source Center summarizes the main points in the new video released by al-Qaeda's number 2 man, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri identifies Iraq as the primary field for jihad or holy war and defends the Islamic State of Iraq (radical Sunni Muslims in Iraq) from charges of having been especially vindictive and destructive. Zawahiri also again slams the the Shiites. He sees Iran as hypocritical and actually tacitly cooperating with the US. He dismisses Muqtada al-Sadr as an Iranian cat's paw. He attacks Hasan Nasrallah of Lebanon's Hizbullah. This sectarian approach is typical of the Salafi Jihadis' failures in Iraq, where only a pan-Islamic movement against US occupation could have had a chance of succeeding. Nasrallah is still very popular in the Arab world because his Hizbullah stood up to Israel's attack on Lebanon in summer of 2006, and al-Zawahiri clearly sees Nasrallah as a rival to himself. But Nasrallah has an extensive social welfare program and deputies in the Lebanese parliament, and leads a real if small political movement in a compact territory. Zawahiri is a fugitive whose organization is shadowy and tenuous and on the run. These are the rantings of a loser. The one worrisome thing in the video Zawhiri's conviction that the US presence in Iraq is keeping al-Qaeda alive as a cause, which may well be correct. A whole new generation of jihadis with key terrorism skills is being created by their struggle against what they see as US occupation. That US interests are held harmless from this development in the long run seems unlikely. Zawahiri also calls on the Pakistani military to make a coup against Pervez Musharraf, apparently in hopes that officers of a radical Muslim bent will come to power. (This development is highly unlikely, since Musharraf has by now purged a lot of those elements from the officer corps.)

The Secret Behind the Tar Sands of Alberta

What if Alberta Canada becomes one big open pit mine? Thats the plan for a section of Alberta the size of the UK. BP will strip the vegetation from the surface, divert huge water resources and burn natural gas to bring each barrel of oil out of the ground.
AlterNet calls this "The Biggest Global Warming Crime in History".

Greenpeace pledged a direct action campaign against BP following its decision to reverse a long-standing policy and invest heavily in extracting so-called "oil sands" that lie beneath the Canadian province of Alberta and form the world's second-largest proven oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.


Producing crude oil from the tar sands -- a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay -- found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta -- an area the size of England and Wales combined -- generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling.


[..]The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers -- up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas.


[..]"It takes about 29kg of CO2 to produce a barrel of oil conventionally. That figure can be as much 125kg for tar sands oil. It also has the potential to kill off or damage the vast forest wilderness, greater than the size of England and Wales, which forms part of the world's biggest carbon sinks.


[..]BP said it will be using a technology that pumps steam heated by natural gas into vertical wells to liquefy the solidified oil sands and pump it to the surface in a way that is less damaging than open cast mining. But campaigners said this method requires 1,000 cubic feet of gas to produce one barrel of unrefined bitumen -- the same required to heat an average British home for 5.5 days.


[..]Licenses have been issued by the Albertan government to extract 350 million cubic metres of water from the Athabasca River every year. But the water used in the extraction process, say campaigners, is so contaminated that it cannot be returned to the eco-system and must instead be stored in vast "tailings ponds" that cover up to 20 square miles and there is evidence of increased rates of cancer and multiple sclerosis in down-river communities.


Experts say a pledge to restore all open cast tar sand mines to their previous pristine condition has proved sadly lacking. David Schindler, professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, said: "Right now the big pressure is to get that money out of the ground, not to reclaim the landscape. I wouldn't be surprised if you could see these pits from a satellite 1,000 years from now."

The Rich Keep Getting Richer

Why has so many in the middle class voted Republican over the years? They haven't been paying attention.
Paul Krugman

Here’s what the numbers say about percentage gains in after-tax income from 2003 to 2005:


Bottom quintile: 2%
Next quintile: 2.4%
Middle quintile: 3.9%
Fourth quintile: 3.7%
Top quintile: 16%


Top 10%: 20.9%
Top 5%: 27.7%
Top 1%: 43.5%


It was a boom, all right — but only for a few people.


One other thing that’s striking from the report, by the way, is that over the 26 years the estimates span, the only significant gains for the bottom two quintiles, and most of the gains for the middle quintile, took place during the Clinton years.

Edwards Is More Electable. Period.

Somebody finally said it. And it was Ian Welch at The Agonist

CNN's poll ... shows Edwards crushing Republicans.


Versus McCain: Clinton loses by 2%, Obama is in a dead heat, and Edwards wins by 8%.


Versus Giuliani: Clinton wins by 6%, Obama by 7%, Edwards wins by 9%.


Versus Romney: Clinton wins by 11%, Obama by 13%, and Edwards wins by 22%.


Versus Huckabee: Clinton wins by 10%, Obama wins by 15%, and Edwards annihilates Huckabee by 25%.


Basically, current polling shows the popularity of the candidates in direct inverse relationship to how well they poll against Republicans in a general. Edwards polls better than Obama who polls better than Clinton.


[..]Voting your beliefs (the poor and middle class are getting screwed) and choosing the most electable candidate aren't in opposition to each other this time.


So what I'm asking Democratic primary voters is to take a good hard look at Edwards again. Stop accepting the media's narrative of Edwards as "the number 3 guy". Look at the numbers, look at his positions and realize that this time you can have it all -- you can have a progressive candidate and you can have a nominee who will absolutely wipe the floor with the Republicans.


Vote your heart, but by all means also vote electability. And don't let political correctness blind you to political realities. Because the country simply cannot afford another 4 years with a Republican president.

Huckabee: A Wife Should Graciously Submit

Daily Kos

Huckabee's opinion on gay marriage is out there, but we should also be publicizing Huckabee's opinions on heterosexual marriage. Specifically, what he believes about a women's role in a marriage.


In August of 1998, Huckabee was one of 131 signatories to a full page USA Today Ad which declared: "I affirm the statement on the family issued by the 1998 Southern Baptist Convention." What was in the family statement from the SBC? "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ."


The ad wasn't just a blanket, "we support the SBC statement," but rather highlighted details. The ad Huckabee signed specifically said of the SBC family statement: "You are right because you called wives to graciously submit to their husband's sacrificial leadership."


Add "graciously submit" to his "Take back the nation for Christ" statement, and if the media does its job, he's well on his way to being toast.

Dubya's Somalia Devolves

Dubya's foreign policy has been a disaster. Somali is a good example. A Muslim fundamentalist regime was the only likely successful government to stabilize Somalia. Because there were a few Al Qaeda sympathizers in their ranks, then they had to be all bad. The truth is there are no good guys left in Somalia. The only group with any hope of leading must engender the kind of loyalty that comes automatically for many Islamists.
Constructive engagement has been a tried and true diplomatic way to influence a government toward mutually favorable policies. It's time to make constructive engagement as the center piece of American foreign policy. Dubya, we can't just kill everyone we disagree with, duh!
The Daily Star

Repeated regional and internecine violence, which has now spanned 16 years and been worsened by nearly a year of bloody insurgency, has left Mogadishu in ruins, with most basic services completely wiped out.


The remaining residents in Mogadishu, many were driven out by the heavy fighting last month, eek out a living, making do with nearly nothing. Despite efforts by the government to make the city more livable, by painting buildings - those that have survived years of shelling - and clearing and cleaning certain areas, garbage heaps make up much of city's features, and water and electricity remain a luxury.


[..]The fighting has killed hundreds of people this year and sparked a dire humanitarian crisis described by the United Nations as Africa's worst. Nearly 200,000 people fled the war-wracked capital during the latest clashed in November, and at least 600,000 others have been displaced from Mogadishu since February. The latest clashes on Sunday claimed the life of a civilian and wounded three others.

The outcome was predictable from the begining. Ethiopia's invasion was doom from the start. Dubya's financing of it just filtered into the wrong pockets as usual.
PINR

In PINR's judgment, the power struggle within the T.F.G. has ended with its devolution into factionalism and a government divided between Yusuf -- an irreparably failed boss -- and Hussein -- an appeaser without a power base; both are weak and appear to have no possibility of providing national leadership. Yusuf is no longer the protagonist and Hussein is incapable of replacing him; the last piece of Somalia's devolution is in place.


As the T.F.G. collapsed, the patterns of devolution described by PINR in its reports throughout 2007 persisted and deepened. The insurgency against the Ethiopian occupiers and allied T.F.G. forces continues despite an Ethiopian attempt to mount a brutal crackdown and has spread beyond Mogadishu to other regions. The political opposition to the T.F.G. remains intransigent in its demand that Ethiopian forces withdraw from Somalia before it will negotiate on power-sharing. Tensions remain high between Somaliland and Puntland over their conflicting territorial claims. Some regions in Somalia have competing governments, extortionate roadblocks have proliferated, inter-clan conflicts over water and pasture persist, piracy and crime have risen, and there is a humanitarian crisis brought about by the Ethiopian crackdown, which created hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons. Independent media are being suppressed. The donor powers continue to call for broad-based power-sharing in the T.F.G. and for more contributions to the weak African Union peacekeeping force in Mogadishu, to no avail and with no relevance to the actual situation. PINR sees no need to document the above conditions in detail, since they simply prolong a familiar pattern.


With Somalia devolved, the ball is in the court of the external actors, who no longer form a single team. Desperate to pull out, Addis Ababa lost an ally when it forced Gedi out and received in return a "neutral" anxious to please the donor powers. Look for Addis Ababa to be forced to lower its profile as a result of its weakened position. The donor powers are caught between persisting in supporting the T.F.G., which has lost every shred of its unity; devising a new strategy; or pulling back.


A new strategy, the outlines of which have been floated by some strategists in the U.S. military, would be to cantonize Somalia in order to isolate and encircle its most unstable regions; that would involve as its central feature diplomatic recognition of Somaliland and an abandonment of the T.F.G. and of any possibility of a Somali state. Were a cantonization strategy to be pursued, its success would depend on substantial reconstruction aid for the most stable areas, which, in PINR's judgment, would be unlikely to be forthcoming.


Cantonization is simply a return to pre-Courts Somalia, as are continued support for a collapsed T.F.G. and pulling back. There is no present actionable strategy that does not lead back to devolution.

Obama's Progressive Stripes Are Skin Deep

It would appear that Obama isn't the man he's appeared to be. He's now using Republican talking points to attack his rivals.
Paul Krugman makes his point that Obama's health plan has a big problem. Now Obama has hit back in a Swift Boat type attack. DailyKos has the scoop on the Obama attack dog back lash. It would appear Obama's progressive stripes are skin deep.
New York Times

From the beginning, advocates of universal health care were troubled by the incompleteness of Barack Obama’s plan, which unlike those of his Democratic rivals wouldn’t cover everyone. But they were willing to cut Mr. Obama slack on the issue, assuming that in the end he would do the right thing.


Now, however, Mr. Obama is claiming that his plan’s weakness is actually a strength. What’s more, he’s doing the same thing in the health care debate he did when claiming that Social Security faces a “crisis” — attacking his rivals by echoing right-wing talking points.


The central question is whether there should be a health insurance “mandate” — a requirement that everyone sign up for health insurance, even if they don’t think they need it. The Edwards and Clinton plans have mandates; the Obama plan has one for children, but not for adults.


Why have a mandate? The whole point of a universal health insurance system is that everyone pays in, even if they’re currently healthy, and in return everyone has insurance coverage if and when they need it.


And it’s not just a matter of principle. As a practical matter, letting people opt out if they don’t feel like buying insurance would make insurance substantially more expensive for everyone else.


Here’s why: under the Obama plan, as it now stands, healthy people could choose not to buy insurance — then sign up for it if they developed health problems later. Insurance companies couldn’t turn them away, because Mr. Obama’s plan, like those of his rivals, requires that insurers offer the same policy to everyone.


As a result, people who did the right thing and bought insurance when they were healthy would end up subsidizing those who didn’t sign up for insurance until or unless they needed medical care.


[..]But now Mr. Obama, who just two weeks ago was telling audiences that his plan was essentially identical to the Edwards and Clinton plans, is attacking his rivals and claiming that his plan is superior. It isn’t — and his attacks amount to cheap shots.


First, Mr. Obama claims that his plan does much more to control costs than his rivals’ plans. In fact, all three plans include impressive cost control measures.


Second, Mr. Obama claims that mandates won’t work, pointing out that many people don’t have car insurance despite state requirements that all drivers be insured. Um, is he saying that states shouldn’t require that drivers have insurance? If not, what’s his point? Look, law enforcement is sometimes imperfect. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have laws.


Third, and most troubling, Mr. Obama accuses his rivals of not explaining how they would enforce mandates, and suggests that the mandate would require some kind of nasty, punitive enforcement: “Their essential argument,” he says, “is the only way to get everybody covered is if the government forces you to buy health insurance. If you don’t buy it, then you’ll be penalized in some way.”


Well, John Edwards has just called Mr. Obama’s bluff, by proposing that individuals be required to show proof of insurance when filing income taxes or receiving health care. If they don’t have insurance, they won’t be penalized — they’ll be automatically enrolled in an insurance plan.


[..]I recently castigated Mr. Obama for adopting right-wing talking points about a Social Security “crisis.” Now he’s echoing right-wing talking points on health care.

Something is Wrong with Our Justice System

There is something wrong with our justice system. Michael Vick gets 23 months in prison Monday for his role in a dogfighting conspiracy, and Barry Bonds faces a 30 year in prison term if convicted for lying to a grand jury about steroid use.
The US has the highest rate of imprisonment of any country in the world, 40 percent greater than those of our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). One in 32 Americans are in jail or prison. Too many are young African Americans and way too many are imprisoned for petty drug offenses. Not only are we creating more victims, we're ensuring their future success as criminals in the best training grounds (prisons). We can no longer afford this sick system, by taxes, or moral responsibility.