The Best Candidates Never Seem To Win

Honesty usually doesn't work too well in nationwide politics. Honesty leaves a raw imprint on people. They react strongly, either in support, or against. Edwards walked that line, and lost. A class warrior with a $400 haircut and a $6 million home feels like a misfit. Certainly, Edwards earned his money, and his personal life long mission is honorable and will continue. I still believe he would have made the best President in the running. But it wasn't to be. TIME begins the process of understanding why.

"John Edwards didn't really move to the left as much as he began to use the language of class war," said Michael Munger, a political science professor at Duke University. "And that was a tactic designed to appeal to the angry left in Iowa, and the to laid-off factory workers of South Carolina."


The strategy at first seemed shrewd: build on Edwards' surprisingly good showing in Iowa in 2004 and make his native South Carolina his firewall while garnering union support. It was designed to take on the establishment candidate that everyone knew was going to run: former First Lady Hillary Clinton.


What no one, not Clinton or Edwards, was prepared for was the insurgency candidacy of Senator Barack Obama. Suddenly Edwards was running against a version of himself in 2004: the young, fresh, optimistic face, the Washington outsider with a thin resume but lots of charm, ruffling some feathers as he jumped the line. Except this version was an African American celebrity candidate with a cult-like following. Big and small donors flocked to Obama, the freshman senator from Illinois, as did the endorsements, and suddenly Edwards seemed like a third wheel.


[..]Edwards leaves the race having made a big impact on the two remaining candidates. His populist rhetoric forced his rivals to compete for union support, and he was the first out of the gate with detailed plans for universal healthcare and education, putting pressure on the field to match him. The former trial lawyer arguably won a majority of the debates, time and again challenging his opponents to refuse money from lobbyists and speed up their plans for withdrawing combat troops from Iraq.

"State Department Official" Involved in Leaking Nuclear Secrets to Pakistan?

Times Online

An investigation into the illicit sale of American nuclear secrets was compromised by a senior official in the State Department, a former FBI employee has claimed. The official is said to have tipped off a foreign contact about a bogus CIA company used to investigate the sale of nuclear secrets.


The firm, Brewster Jennings & Associates, was a front for Valerie Plame, the former CIA agent. Her public outing two years later in 2003 by White House officials became a cause celebre. The claims that a State Department official blew the investigation into a nuclear smuggling ring have been made by Sibel Edmonds, 38, a former Turkish language translator in the FBI Washington field office.


Edmonds had been employed to translate hundreds of hours of intercepted recordings made during a six-year FBI inquiry into the nuclear smuggling ring. She has previously told The Sunday Times she heard evidence that foreign intelligence agents had enlisted US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.


Her latest claims relate to a number of intercepted recordings believed to have been made between the summer and autumn of 2001. At that time, foreign agents were actively attempting to acquire the West’s nuclear secrets and technology.


Among the buyers were Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Paki-stan’s intelligence agency, which was working with Abdul Qadeer Khan, the “father of the Islamic bomb”, who in turn was selling nuclear technology to rogue states such as Libya.


Plame, then 38, was the glamorous wife of a former US ambassador, Joe Wilson. Despite recently giving birth to twins, she travelled widely for her work, often claiming to be an oil consultant. In fact she was a career CIA agent who was part of a small team investigating the same procurement network that the State Department official is alleged to have aided.


Brewster Jennings was one of a number of covert enterprises set up to infiltrate the nuclear ring. It is is believed to have been based in Boston and consisted of little more than a name, a telephone number and a post office box address.


[..]The FBI was monitoring Turkish diplomatic and political figures based in Washington who were allegedly working with the Israelis and using “moles” in military and academic institutions to acquire nuclear secrets.


The creation of this nuclear ring had been assisted, Edmonds says, by the senior official in the State Department who she heard in one conversation arranging to pick up a $15,000 bribe.


One group of Turkish agents who had come to America on the pretext of researching alternative energy sources was introduced to Brewster Jennings through the Washington-based American Turkish Council (ATC), a lobby group that aids commercial ties between the countries. Edmonds says the Turks believed Brewster Jennings to be energy consultants and were planning to hire them.


But she said: “He [the State Department official] found out about the arrangement . . . and he contacted one of the foreign targets and said . . . you need to stay away from Brewster Jennings because they are a cover for the government.


“The target . . . immediately followed up by calling several people to warn them about Brewster Jennings.


“At least one of them was at the ATC. This person also called an ISI person to warn them.” If the ISI was made aware of the CIA front company, then this would almost certainly have damaged the investigation into the activities of Khan. Plame’s cover would also have been compromised, although Edmonds never heard her name mentioned on the intercepts. Shortly afterwards, Plame was moved to a different operation.


[..]The State Department official said on Friday: “It is impossible to find a strong enough way to deny these allegations which are both false and malicious.”


[..]The FBI denied the existence of a specific case file about any outing of Brewster Jennings by the State Department official, in a response to a freedom of information request. However, last week The Sunday Times obtained a document, signed by an FBI official, showing that the file did exist in 2002.


Plame declined to comment, saying that she was unable to discuss her covert work at the CIA.

Journalist's Daughter Falsely Accused of Contacting Al Qaeda

Wonder why FISA disarming is bad? Why would Obama and Clinton return to Washington to vote against renewal?
CQ

U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002.


[..]One of his intelligence sources had revealed to him that he had “read a summary of a telephone conversation that I had from my home with a source in Egypt.”


McConnell said the eavesdropping must have been triggered by getting a call “from some telephone number that’s associated with some known outfit.” The journalist, however, had originated the call.


What happened next bears repeating, not just because it has gone largely unreported, but because it’s the kind of encounter many more Americans can expect if they end up as a target of our distressingly sloppy — some would say incompetent — counterterrorism agencies, if Congress extends a law (PL 110-55) enacted last August, that expanded the government’s electronic surveillance authority.


The law, which expires on Feb. 4, in effect turned U.S.-based Internet servers into a mail drop for U.S. intelligence.


In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the rise of Al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an article on Al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.


“They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force,” he recounted. “They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England” who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were jihadis, former members of Zawahiri’s terror organization in Egypt, and they wanted to know what we were talking about.”


What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.


“Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright,” they said. But Wright’s daughter was off at college at the time. He now worries that “she’s now on the link chart as an Al Qaeda connection.”


Now that we have a seamless web of databases, it wouldn’t be surprising if Caroline Wright finds herself blocked from getting on an airplane, entering the country or renewing her passport.

Lebanese Army on Alert in Beirut

Monsters and Critics

The Lebanese army was on high alert in the capital Beirut on Monday a day after power cuts protests turned into clashes between opposition followers and the Lebanese army, leaving nine people dead and raising fears of an upcoming civil strife.


Troops were out in force, setting up checkpoints along roads leading from the mainly Shiite neighbourhoods of southern Beirut, a hotbed of the Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, to Christian areas of the capital.


The scene reminded many Lebanese of the beginning of the 1975-1990 civil war as the first line of demarcation at the time was in the same area.


'This is the same scene we saw in 1975 when the civil war broke out in the streets of Beirut, this is a dangerous reminder,' commented one Christian resident of Ain Roumneh, the area that witnessed heavy violence on Sunday.


'The country is now opened on all options...the situation is taking a downturn,' said analyst Nabil Haythem.


Nine people were killed in Sunday's violence, including activists from the Syrian-backed opposition parties Amal and Hezbollah, hospital sources said about 49 people were also injured.

A President Like My Father/Brother; Kennedy Clan Endorses Obama

Senator Edward M. Kennedy will endorse Senator Barack Obama for President during a rally on Monday in Washington. After securing an endorsement from Senator John Kerry and a commanding win in the contentious South Carolina primary on Saturday, Obama gathers momentum in his campaign for the nomination.

The Massachusetts senator had vowed to stay out of the presidential nominating fight, but as the contest expanded into a state-by-state fight — and given the tone of the race in the last week — associates said he was moved to announce his support for Mr. Obama.

On top of that, Caroline Kennedy writes a highly emotional and personal Op-Ed today also endorsing Obama. If this keeps up, the Obama campaign could become a runaway freight train.
New York Times

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.


I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Violence Erupts on Gaza Border with Egypt

Al Jazeera English

Violence has erupted at the Rafah border after Cairo announced it would close the crossing between Gaza and Egypt.


Al Jazeera correspondent David Chater said the Egyptian government had ordered guards to close the Rafah border by 13:00 GMT on Friday. Stones were hurled at Egyptian guards by Palestinians after they raised batons and shields and formed a human wall close to one of three crossings.


Witnesses said guards then beat some Palestinians with clubs and fired several shots in the air. Egyptian forces began placing barbed wire near the collapsed steel wall earlier in the day and began stopping Palestinians from entering Egypt.


[..]He said: "The government took heavy criticism from the West over the border opening. The United States congress has already suspended $100 million of aid to Egypt due to the border breach."

Us Ready To Send Troops To Pakistan

Consistently, US news outlets ignore the "bad" news from the world.
Al Jazeera English

Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, has said the United States is prepared to send troops to Pakistan to fight alongside the country's forces against Islamic fighters.


"We remain ready, willing and able to assist the Pakistanis and to partner with them, to provide additional training, to conduct joint operations, should they desire to do so," Gates said on Thursday.


He also made it clear that his country was open to providing more direct assistance.


Asked if he envisaged US combat troops and Pakistani forces operating together, Gates said: "If the Pakistanis wanted to do that, I think we would."


Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said Gates's suggestion would anger most Pakistanis.


He said : "The Pakistani people believe that it is only their armed forces that are able to handle the continued violence in the tribal region. Musharraf himself said that if foreign intervention is applied, it would be construed as an act of war. But ultimately, the government believes that an end to the conflict is via a political solution - not a military one - and it should not be dictated from overseas."

Good News for Afghanistan is Bad News for Pakistan

csmonitor.com

The Taliban are unlikely to launch a spring offensive in Afghanistan this year because all their energies will be focused in Pakistan, United States military officials said. But as that battle heats up, US officials added that they do not have enough intelligence on the ground in Pakistan.


Taliban and Al Qaeda militants have killed more than 600 people in Pakistan in recent months, making 2007 the deadliest year for militancy in Pakistan. Although Pakistan's military has 100,000 troops stationed along the border of Afghanistan, violent extremism has spread inland to large cities like Lahore, where a suicide bomber killed 25 policemen in early January. Pakistan's government and the CIA have also blamed Taliban militants, working with Al Qaeda, for the assassination in late December of Benazir Bhutto.


The deteriorating security makes Pakistan more of a viable target for the Taliban, US officials told the Associated Press.


Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and other militants are staying behind in Pakistan to fight the government there, contributing to a drop in cross-border infiltrations into eastern Afghanistan, a top US commander said Wednesday.

Gaza: Warsaw Ghetto Redux?

Comment to "The PR War in Gaza" | Newsweek.com

The Nazi's created the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, now the Holocaust survivors have created this humanitarian nightmare in the The Gaza Strip. Aryan supremacy and Jewish supremacy .are more similar than different. The USA should disassociate, disengage and divest from the apartheid Jewish colonial enterprise.

Many in Gaza Without Clean Water, Surrounded by Raw Sewage

AKI - Adnkronos international

International humanitarian groups are predicting a worsening crisis in the Gaza Strip despite a pledge by an Israeli minister late Monday to resume sending fuel supplies to the territory.


Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak promised to allow medical supplies as well as diesel fuel to be shipped to the Gaza Strip for essential power supplies from Tuesday.


But organisations including the United Nations relief agency warned of a worsening crisis while the area remained without power, heat or light.


Amid predictions that more than a million people would soon be without safe drinking water, there were reports of raw sewage spilling into the streets because there was no electricity to fuel the local pump station.


The Gaza power plant shut down its two working turbines on Sunday, leaving much of Gaza in darkness, after Israel closed border crossings on Friday.


Hospitals dependent on vital diesel supplies were also predicting that they would run out of fuel within hours and then be forced to make crucial life or death decisions for their patients.


John Ging, director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza said the civilian population was living in "abject misery" and had been stripped of their human dignity.


"People here in Gaza have been living in abject misery and hardship now for a long time," Ging told the Arab TV network, Al-Jazeera. "On top of that they are living in darkness.


"You have to see how miserable the situation is. The civilian population is under occupation. It is collective punishment - they are victims."

San Jose Mercury News

Masked gunmen destroyed about two-thirds of the metal wall separating the Gaza Strip from Egypt in the town of Rafah early today and tens of thousands of Palestinians poured across the border to buy supplies made scarce by an Israeli blockade of the impoverished territory.


The gunmen began breaching the border wall dividing Rafah before dawn, according to witnesses and Hamas officials, who told the Associated Press that they had closed all but two of the gaps in the wall. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said people were allowed free movement through the open gaps.


Thousands of Gazans began crossing into Egypt and returning with milk, cigarettes and plastic bottles of fuel, the Hamas officials and witnesses said.

Voices Are Raised in Democratic Debate

Any hope for a Hillary-Obama ticket seem remote today as the stup became personal last night. Both candidates implied the other was a liar, a hidden closet capitalist and other unrepeatable comments. They seem to be determined to take each other out at the knees.
Edwards is said to have won the debate by staying out of the fray and admonishing the candidates to get back to the issues of the disenfranchised. But without any wins his campaign struggles to avoid "beautiful loser" status by being the hardest working candidate. Meanwhile, his populist message, "issues of poverty and justice are going to be talked about in a way, and with a passion, that hasn't been seen in mainstream politics for decades."
Thank you John Edwards.

On MLK Day: Obama Addresses Homophobia, Anti-Semitism and Xenophobia Among Black Americans

Here Obama speaks with conviction and a level of honesty uncommon among politicians. Perhaps this guy is what he says he is: a uniter. Perhaps we shall see.
The New York Observer

Unfortunately, all too often when we talk about unity in this country, we’ve come to believe that it can be purchased on the cheap. We’ve come to believe that racial reconciliation can come easily – that it’s just a matter of a few ignorant people trapped in the prejudices of the past, and that if the demagogues and those who exploit our racial divisions will simply go away, then all our problems would be solved.


All too often, we seek to ignore the profound institutional barriers that stand in the way of ensuring opportunity for all children, or decent jobs for all people, or health care for those who are sick. We long for unity, but are unwilling to pay the price.


But of course, true unity cannot be so easily won. It starts with a change in attitudes – a broadening of our minds, and a broadening of our hearts.


It’s not easy to stand in somebody else’s shoes. It’s not easy to see past our differences. We’ve all encountered this in our own lives. But what makes it even more difficult is that we have a politics in this country that seeks to drive us apart – that puts up walls between us.


We are told that those who differ from us on a few things are different from us on all things; that our problems are the fault of those who don’t think like us or look like us or come from where we do. The welfare queen is taking our tax money. The immigrant is taking our jobs. The believer condemns the non-believer as immoral, and the non-believer chides the believer as intolerant.
For most of this country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man. And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.


And yet, if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that none of our hands are entirely clean. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community.
We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them. The scourge of anti-Semitism has, at times, revealed itself in our community. For too long, some of us have seen immigrants as competitors for jobs instead of companions in the fight for opportunity.


Every day, our politics fuels and exploits this kind of division across all races and regions; across gender and party. It is played out on television. It is sensationalized by the media. And last week, it even crept into the campaign for President, with charges and counter-charges that served to obscure the issues instead of illuminating the critical choices we face as a nation.
So let us say that on this day of all days, each of us carries with us the task of changing our hearts and minds. The division, the stereotypes, the scape-goating, the ease with which we blame our plight on others – all of this distracts us from the common challenges we face – war and poverty; injustice and inequality. We can no longer afford to build ourselves up by tearing someone else down. We can no longer afford to traffic in lies or fear or hate. It is the poison that we must purge from our politics; the wall that we must tear down before the hour grows too late.
Because if Dr. King could love his jailor; if he could call on the faithful who once sat where you do to forgive those who set dogs and fire hoses upon them, then surely we can look past what divides us in our time, and bind up our wounds, and erase the empathy deficit that exists in our hearts.


But if changing our hearts and minds is the first critical step, we cannot stop there. It is not enough to bemoan the plight of poor children in this country and remain unwilling to push our elected officials to provide the resources to fix our schools. It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms. It is not enough for us to abhor the costs of a misguided war, and yet allow ourselves to be driven by a politics of fear that sees the threat of attack as way to scare up votes instead of a call to come together around a common effort.

FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft

Hey, Murdock can't be all bad. His newspaper in London, often used as a disinformation leaker for US intelligence, has a real story today.
Today, I got more information on Sibel Edmund than in any US news source.
I'm guessing that what Sibel tripped over was the Bush Administration, via the Turkish ambassador and the No 3 man in the State Department, leaking nuclear secrets to Turkey to counter Iran's nuclear ambitions. It seems that Bush is in the business of nuclear proliferation to India, and now to Turkey??
Worse yet, Turkish intelligence has a cozy relationship with Pakistani intelligence. Now doesn't that sound reassuring??
Hat tip to The Brad Blog.
Times Online

THE FBI has been accused of covering up a key case file detailing evidence against corrupt government officials and their dealings with a network stealing nuclear secrets.


The assertion follows allegations made in The Sunday Times two weeks ago by Sibel Edmonds, an FBI whistleblower, who worked on the agency’s investigation of the network.


Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.


She says the FBI was investigating a Turkish and Israeli-run network that paid high-ranking American officials to steal nuclear weapons secrets. These were then sold on the international black market to countries such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.


One of the documents relating to the case was marked 203A-WF-210023. Last week, however, the FBI responded to a freedom of information request for a file of exactly the same number by claiming that it did not exist. But The Sunday Times has obtained a document signed by an FBI official showing the existence of the file.


Edmonds believes the crucial file is being deliberately covered up by the FBI because its contents are explosive. She accuses the agency of an “outright lie”.


"œI can tell you that that file and the operations it refers to did exist from 1996 to February 2002. The file refers to the counterintelligence programme that the Department of Justice has declared to be a state secret to protect sensitive diplomatic relations,"€ she said.


The freedom of information request had not been initiated by Edmonds. It was made quite separately by an American human rights group called the Liberty Coalition, acting on a tip-off it received from an anonymous correspondent.


The letter says: "€œYou may wish to request pertinent audio tapes and documents under FOIA from the Department of Justice, FBI-HQ and the FBI Washington field office."€


It then makes a series of allegations about the contents of the file “ many of which corroborate the information that Edmonds later made public.


Edmonds had told this newspaper that members of the Turkish political and diplomatic community in the US had been actively acquiring nuclear secrets. They often acted as a conduit, she said, for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they attracted less suspicion.


She claimed corrupt government officials helped the network, and venues such as the American-Turkish Council (ATC) in Washington were used as drop-off points.


The anonymous letter names a high-level government official who was allegedly secretly recorded speaking to an official at the Turkish embassy between August and December 2001.


It claims the government official warned a Turkish member of the network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause célèbre in the US.


The letter also makes reference to wiretaps of Turkish “targets” talking to ISI intelligence agents at the Pakistani embassy in Washington and recordings of “operatives” at the ATC.


Edmonds is the subject of a number of state secret gags preventing her from talking further about the investigation she witnessed.


"œI cannot discuss the details considering the gag orders,â€" she said, €œ"but I reported all these activities to the US Congress, the inspector general of the justice department and the 9/11 commission. I told them all about what was contained in this case file number, which the FBI is now denying exists.


"This gag was invoked not to protect sensitive diplomatic relations but criminal activities involving US officials who were endangering US national security.

Who's to Blame For the Recession?

New York Times - PAUL KRUGMAN

In other words, the United States was not, in fact, uniquely well-suited to make use of the world’s surplus funds. It was, instead, a place where large sums could be and were invested very badly. Directly or indirectly, capital flowing into America from global investors ended up financing a housing-and-credit bubble that has now burst, with painful consequences.


As I said, these consequences probably won’t be as bad as the devastating recessions that racked third-world victims of the same syndrome. The saving grace of America’s situation is that our foreign debts are in our own currency. This means that we won’t have the kind of financial death spiral Argentina experienced, in which a falling peso caused the country’s debts, which were in dollars, to balloon in value relative to domestic assets.


But even without those currency effects, the next year or two could be quite unpleasant.


What should have been done differently? Some critics say that the Fed helped inflate the housing bubble with low interest rates. But those rates were low for a good reason: although the last recession officially ended in November 2001, it was another two years before the U.S. economy began delivering convincing job growth, and the Fed was rightly concerned about the possibility of Japanese-style prolonged economic stagnation.


The real sin, both of the Fed and of the Bush administration, was the failure to exercise adult supervision over markets running wild.


It wasn’t just Alan Greenspan’s unwillingness to admit that there was anything more than a bit of “froth” in housing markets, or his refusal to do anything about subprime abuses. The fact is that as America’s financial system has grown ever more complex, it has also outgrown the framework of banking regulations that used to protect us — yet instead of an attempt to update that framework, all we got were paeans to the wonders of free markets.


Right now, Mr. Bernanke is in crisis-management mode, trying to deal with the mess his predecessor left behind. I don’t have any problems with his testimony yesterday, although I suspect that it’s already too late to prevent a recession.


But let’s hope that when the dust settles a bit, Mr. Bernanke takes the lead in talking about what needs to be done to fix a financial system gone very, very wrong.

Remaking the Middle East: The New Cold War

The Neocon dream is for the US to dominate the word. Dubya has damaged beyond repair attempts to influence Central Asia and the Middle East by persuasion and supporting human dignity. Zbigniew Brzezinski advocated such an approach. In his book The Grand Chessboard he explains the foreign policy imperative of first Great Britain, and now the United States to dominate the work through control of Eurasia.

Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago, Eurasia has been the center of world power.- (p. xiii)


... But in the meantime, it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. The formulation of a comprehensive and integrated Eurasian geostrategy is therefore the purpose of this book. (p. xiv)


In that context, how America 'manages' Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa's subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world's known energy resources." (p.31)

Bush has been so inept, he's blown any other option other than winning militarily. Winning is no longer an option in Iraq, so he's ready to take on Iran.
CRG Newsletter

It is no secret that the main purpose of the U.S. presidential tour of the Middle East was to raise opposition against Iran and anyone resisting the “New Middle East.” Almost immediately, Syria claimed that the presidential Middle Eastern tour of George W. Bush Jr. was mostly made to try and further isolate Syria and orchestrate a future war scenario against Iran. [11]


[..]U.S. and British foreign policies are more about the objectives of the Anglo-American establishment than the distinctiveness of the individuals that hold the office of American president and British prime minister. This reality has been confirmed in the course of the election campaign by the potential successors of George W. Bush Jr., Democrats and Republicans alike.


Aside from a few individuals who represent the true aspirations of the American people, the majority of presidential contenders in the U.S. are talking about a virtual continuation of the military policies of the Bush Jr. Administration.


John McCain has talked about attacking Lebanon and Syria. [14]


Hilary Clinton wants a permanent occupation of Iraq or a “post-occupation phase” as U.S. officials decadently call it and she has threatened Iran.


Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, has made it clear he intends to mirror the Bush Jr. Administration and that he does not intent to recognize a Palestinian state and that he would use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear Iran.


The era of wars will not be over with the departure of George W. Bush Jr. and Vice-President Cheney from the White House.


The problem is deeper and more complicated than the persona of one man and his cabinet. George W. Bush Jr. is only a figurehead in the mechanisms of a larger machine; he represents the establishment but he alone or his cabinet do not steer the helm of U.S. foreign policy.

Too Many Questions in the New Hampshire Vote

The BRAD BLOG

Voting Rights attorney John Bonifaz, legal director of VoterAction.org, was on the scene today, and just told me that he has great concerns about the transparency of both the initial election and the hand-count auditing process that got under way in earnest today. "I'm very concerned that this is not a fully transparent process that is happening there," he told me.


The sensitive memory cards containing the programming and tabulation from the Diebold optical-scanners are apparently "missing in action" for the moment. Those cards, as viewers of HBO's Hacking Democracy know by now, may be used to hack an election, such that only a proper hand-count of the paper ballots afterwards will reveal the hack. (See the video of that hack for yourself right here. The same exact machine being hacked in that film was used across the state to count 80% of the ballots in NH in last week's primary.)


And yet, says Bonifaz who spent time today speaking with New Hampshire Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of State and Deputy Attorney General, nobody seems to have any idea where those cards are and what has become of them. He says he was told by Secretary of State William Gardner that his office doesn't get involved in tracking what happens to those memory cards. Some have reportedly been returned to LHS, and may have had their memory erased already. "When you have a private company counting 80% of the votes, and you later learn that the memory cards are unaccounted for, you have a serious question about the transparency and accountability in that process," Bonifaz said. He notes that federal law requires all materials from elections be preserved for 22 months after the election. So if those materials have already been lost, destroyed, or over-written, there are legal questions that must be addressed.


Bonifaz also noted that while representatives and observers for the Hillary Clinton and Dennis Kucinich campaigns were on site, nobody at all seemed to be there from either the Barack Obama or John Edwards camps.

Bush's Peace in Palestine: Israeli Rocket Attack

There is no coincident. Within hours of Bush's trip to the Middle East to push his "peace" process, Israel rockets and tanks attack Gaza. Bush's trip wasn't about peace, it was about preparations for another war, with Iran.
The Daily Star

Israeli troops killed 19 Palestinians on Tuesday, including three civilians and the son of a former Palestinian foreign minister, as fighting erupted across the Gaza Strip a day after the start of key Middle East peace talks. The deadliest single day of violence in more than a year saw the son of former Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar, a senior Hamas official, killed. Also, during the bombardment in Gaza, a civilian just inside Israel was shot dead in a rare sniper attack.
The fighting broke out a day after top Israeli and Palestinian negotiators began talks on core issues of the conflict, hot on the heels of US President George W. Bush's visit and prediction of a signed peace treaty within a year.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas branded the Gaza attack a "massacre," and said it flew in the face of peace efforts.

Ayatollah Huckabee Condemns US Constitution with new Fatwa

Informed Comment

Mike Huckabee says he wants to amend the US constitution to bring it into line with the divinely revealed law of the living God:

"I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution. But I believe it's a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living god. And that's what we need to do -- to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view."

Musharraf’s Last Stand

Newsweek.com

By clinging to power, the president is making Pakistan fight the wrong battle—against him, rather than the extremists destabilizing the nuclear-armed nation.


Pakistan worries everyone. Commentators talk of rising instability and national peril. Proliferation experts like Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warn that the country's nuclear weapons could fall into the wrong hands. Presidential contenders threaten to get tough with Islamabad. And to add urgency to these discussions come periodic terror attacks, including one last Thursday, outside the Lahore High Court, that killed 19 policemen and bystanders.


In the past year Pakistan has suffered its worst violence since the riots that followed its founding in 1947. And in the past six months it has careered from one political and constitutional crisis to another, none of which has been resolved, or is likely to be resolved by parliamentary elections scheduled for Feb. 18. . . . In fact, Pakistan is facing two crises—one political and the other security-related. . . .


There is a solution to Pakistan's political crisis, one that will allow Musharraf to leave on a high note. First, he must hold free and fair elections. . . . Musharraf should recognize that he has become far too controversial to be able to lead his nation and should instead recede from power.


That still leaves Pakistan's other, more dangerous, crisis—the new jihad. . . . The most troubling aspect of this wave of terror is that no one in Pakistan seems to understand why it's happening. . . . Theories abound. The Pakistani military was never fully committed to battling jihadists. Having spent decades training fighters for Kashmir and Afghanistan, the Army withdrew support but would not kill or arrest its former charges.


Washington itself bears a significant part of the blame. The Taliban were never really defeated after the fall of Kabul. They simply went into hiding and regrouped, and yet the American Army declared victory and left. . . . The American debate has been, as is often the case, largely removed from reality.


The real question we face in Pakistan is what to do about the upcoming elections to ensure that they are free and fair. We need to walk Musharraf back from a power struggle in which he is pitted against an independent judiciary and democratically elected politicians. And above all we must find a way to work with the Pakistani people and not a handful of generals. Otherwise the intense anti-Americanism in Pakistan—fast rising because of our support for Musharraf—will produce a new wave of jihadists, born in the mountains of the frontier, tested in battle against the Pakistani Army and thirsting to fight the ultimate enemy, thousands of miles away.

Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007

Clearly, we have to watch Democrats as well as Republican about retaining our Civil Liberties. The House, in a wave of paranoia, passed a law against promulgating any "extremist ideology" on the internet or other means. Homeland Security gets to decide what is extremist. Here is the voting breakdown. Click on the link to see where your Representative voted.
GovTrack: H.R. 1955)

Totals & Party Breakdown

	Total			Democrat	Republican	Independent
Ayes:	404	(94%)		219	185	0
Nays:	6	(1%)		3	3	0
No Vote:	22	(5%)		10	12	0
Required: 2/3 of 410 votes (274)

The ACLU Blog doesn't sound too shrill at this point since they have the Senate and the Conference process to intervene. Clearly my (MN) House delegation didn't understand what they were voting on.

Internet censorship also was spurred on under the false illusion of making us safer from terrorists. H.R. 1955, a bill creating a seemingly innocuous commission to study so-called "homegrown terrorism," contained several troubling provisions. Instead of focusing on what everyone agrees should be targeted — criminal conduct like engaging in terrorist actions or intentionally aiding and abetting such conduct — the bill over-broadly targeted freedom of speech and freedom of belief. The bill defined violent radicalization as "the adoption or promotion of an extremist belief system."


In the process, it ignored the incitement test in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which limits government censorship of speech except where there is imminent harm, it is likely to produce illegal action, and the speaker intends to cause that imminent illegality. Equally troubling, although the bill purported to disclaim racial profiling and censorship, its findings encouraged those activities.


The Internet was specifically identified as a source that needed to be restricted: "The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization… by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist related propaganda to U.S. citizens." H.R. 1955 only passed the House and was not taken up by the Senate. We will continue to work with members on both sides of the Hill to ensure that "homegrown terrorism" and other national security measures are not used as an unconstitutional proxy for Internet censorship.

Kucinich Calls for a Recount in New Hampshire

The BRAD BLOG

Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the most outspoken advocate in the Presidential field and in Congress for election integrity, paper-ballot elections, and campaign finance reform, has sent a letter to the New Hampshire Secretary of State asking for a recount of Tuesday’s election because of “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”

This man is not just crying wolf or grabbing headlines. There is very good reasons to want to check the accuracy of the count.
Obama-Clinton: remarkable opscan v. handcount results

Analysts at the Election Defense Alliance (EDA) have confirmed that based on the official results on the New Hampshire Secretary of state web site, there is a remarkable relationship between Obama and Clinton votes, when you look at votes tabulated by op-scan v. votes tabulated by hand:

Clinton Optical scan 91,717 52.95%
Obama Optical scan 81,495 47.05%
Clinton Hand-counted 20,889 47.05%
Obama Hand-counted 23,509 52.95%

The percentages appear to be swapped. That seems highly unusual, to say the least.


EDA and others are proceeding with intra and inter-county results and demographic analysis to better understand what this extremely unusual "coincidence" may indicate. The work to understand what really happened in New Hampshire is far from complete.


In the meantime, what are we to make of all this? On the one hand, everyone has heard of the unanimous verdict of both private and public opinion polls leading up to the New Hampshire primary, showing Obama with about a 10% lead. And a report on Brad Blog today quotes Chris Matthews on "Hardball" who saw a comparable lead for Obama - about 8% - in the media's "unadjusted" New Hampshire exit poll.


On the other hand, it is a fact that the specific models of Diebold op-scan and central tabulators currently in use to count votes in New Hampshire have been proven, by multiple public demonstrations, to be wide-open to insider manipulation through a variety of mechanisms. Some exploits involve computer programs, and others, simple proximity to the central tabulator or precinct scanner.


So there is an undeniable possibility that the optical scan vote in New Hampshire could have been manipulated by insiders at the outsourced companies that run the election there, or by anyone with hand-on access to the voting and tabulating machines.

Business Interests Fear an Edwards Presidency

The Guardian

Ask corporate lobbyists which presidential contender is most feared by their clients and the answer is almost always the same -- Democrat John Edwards. The former North Carolina senator's chosen profession alone raises the hackles of business people. Before entering politics, he made a fortune as a trial lawyer. In litigious America, trial lawyers bring lawsuits against companies on behalf of aggrieved individuals and sometimes win multimillion-dollar settlements. Edwards won several.


But beyond his profession, Edwards' tone and language on the campaign trail have increased business antipathy toward him. His stump speeches are peppered with attacks on "corporate greed" and warnings of "the destruction of the middle class." He accuses lobbyists of "corrupting the government" and says Americans lack universal health care because of "drug companies, insurance companies and their lobbyists."


Despite not winning the two state nominating contests completed so far, with 48 to go, Edwards insists he is in the race to stay. An Edwards campaign spokesman said on Thursday that inside-the-Beltway operatives who fight to defend the powerful and the privileged should be afraid. "The lobbyists and special interests who abuse the system in Washington have good reason to fear John Edwards. "Once he is president, the interests of middle class families will never again take a back seat to corporate greed in Washington," said campaign spokesman Eric Schultz.


Open attacks on the business elite are seldom heard from mainstream White House candidates in America, despite skyrocketing CEO pay, rising income inequality, and a torrent of scandals in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street. But this year Edwards is not alone. Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, sometimes also rails against corporate power and influence, tapping a populist current that lies just below the surface of U.S. politics. One business lobbyist, who asked not to be named, said Edwards "has gone to this angry populist, anti-business rhetoric that borders on class warfare ... He focuses dislike of special interests, which is out there, on business." Another lobbyist said an Edwards presidency would be "a disaster" for his well-heeled industrialist clients.

151,000 Iraqis killed since U.S.-led invasion-WHO

Reuters

About 151,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of their country, according to World Health Organisation (WHO) research published on Wednesday.


The new study, which said violent deaths could have ranged from 104,000 to 223,000 between March 2003 and June 2006, is the most comprehensive since the war started.

But Juan Cole says it's 250,000

A new World Health Organization study estimates the excess numbers of civilians killed in violence in Iraq from April 2003 through June 2006 at between 101,000 and 224,000. They settled on 151,000 or so as the most likely number. This number is an estimate of how many people died of violence beyond what you would have expected from the 2001-2002 baseline. Violent deaths increased 17 times over once the Bush administration invaded the country. As I read the AP article, the study actually found more like 302,000 excess deaths, but only attributed 151,000 to violence. It seems to me possible that some of the other 151,000 excess deaths could also be chalked up to the US invasion and the reaction to it, even if they are not violent. There have been disease outbreaks, shortages of medicine, poor medical care, displacement of populations to tent cities with poor sanitation, and difficulties in traveling to distant hospitals. Bears looking into.

The Lancet study found 600,000 excess deaths from violence. I'm not qualified to make a methodological judgment as to the virtues of the two studies. I don't think the validity of the Lancet estimate should just be dismissed by journalists or bloggers, for the same reason. If someone is a specialist in the public health field and a whiz at statistics, then I'd be interested in a judgment from that person. But I would point out that the last time Bush admitted his war had killed civilians, he quoted the figure of 30,000, and we can definitely dismiss such tiny numbers as woefully inaccurate. Bush has to face up to what he has done.

Passive gathering of death statistics from newspapers, which always misses a lot of unreported deaths, such as at the Iraq Body Count site, came up with 47,668 civilian deaths in the same period. IBC is now up to about 84,000 civilian deaths. If the 3 to 1 discrepancy between reported and unreported deaths visible in the WHO study held steady, that would take us to a further 100,000 or so deaths in the past 18 months, and to roughly 250,000 excess deaths through violence since the war began.

There is also the question of how many Iraqis have sustained significant or crippling injuries from the same violence that has left so many dead. For US troops, the ratio is nearly 4,000 killed to nearly 10,000 severely wounded, or 2.5 times. If the same rate held true for Iraqi civilians in the war, and if it is true that 250,000 have by now been killed, it would equal 625,000 severely wounded.

One of the arguments warmongers gave for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that his regime was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 civilians between 1968 and 2003. That estimate now appears exaggerated, since the number of bodies in mass graves has not borne it out. But what is tragic is that in 4 1/2 short years, a foreign military occupation has unleashed killing on a scale achieved by the murderous Saddam Hussein regime only over decades. Bush did not kill all those people directly, of course, but he did indirectly cause them to be killed, since these are excess deaths beyond what you would have expected if there had been no invasion and occupation.

I am often struck by how clueless the American public is to the vast destruction we have wrought on Iraq and its people, directly or indirectly. It strikes me as a bitter joke that 4 million are displaced, often facing hunger and disease, and the rightwing periodicals and presidential candidates are talking about how the "surge" has "turned things around." For whom? How many orphans have we created? How many widows? How many people who weep and cry every night while trying to fall asleep on straw mats? I estimate on the basis of a UN study of refugees in Syria that as many as 600,000 or 700,000 Baghdadis were ethnically cleansed from the capital under the nose of the American troops implementing the surge. There is an old Chinese proverb, "Children throw stones at frogs in jest, but the frogs die in earnest."

A Health Care System to Die For

Remember the right wingnut warnings about "socialized medicine" when Hillary was pushing for health care reform in the first Clinton Administration?

Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog
Giuliani:

You have got to see the trap. Otherwise we are in for a disaster. We are in for Canadian health care, French health care, British health care.

The numbers don't lie.

Hillary Eeks Out A Win From the Obama Freight Train

Hillary is appropriately relieved after a week that was all Obama. Recognizing she has to change her tactics, she has reached towards the center and progressive wing of the Democratic Party by adopting Edward's populist themes. I think she will find that to be the only way to slow or stop the Obama freight train.
Or perhaps there was something like the "Bradley Effect" going on in New Hampshire. White voters may not admit publicly to pollsters and caucus goers that they are prejudiced, but act on it behind the election curtain.
AlterNet

In her victory speech last night, Hillary Clinton probably nailed the underlying reason for her remarkable comeback in New Hampshire. In the last three days, Clinton had changed her pattern, spending far more time taking questions and comments and less time delivering the same old stump speech. "I listened to you," she told the voters of New Hampshire, "and in the process, I found my own voice."

"Too many have been invisible for too long; you're not invisible to me. . . . There will be no more invisible Americans. . . . Now let's give the country the kind of comeback that New Hampshire has just given me."

On MSNBC last night, Katrina vanden Heuvel made the point that these candidates are learning from each other. Obama's speech borrowed populist themes from Edwards, she noted, adding that Clinton probably turned her campaign around when she said she rediscovered the progressive causes and reasons why she was running.


When Clinton castigated the oil companies, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the predatory loan companies, she was echoing Edward's speeches. "For seven years they've had a President who stood up for them. Now it's time you had someone stand up for you."

Justice Department has "No Comment" on Halliburton/KBR Rape Case

Jamie Leigh Jones has had no justice since alleging rape by her Halliburton-KBR co-workers. She says Army doctors turned the results of her "rape kit" to Halliburton-KBR security officials in Baghdad. Not surprisingly, the evidence disappeared. There have been many alleged rapes in a Halliburton-KBR atmosphere of "rampant sexual harassment", but only Jones has had the courage to go public to force an investigation.
AlterNet

Last month, after ABC News reported that former Halliburton/KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones had been gang-raped by her co-workers while working in Baghdad, multiple lawmakers -- including Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX), Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) -- pressed the Bush administration to reveal the state of the case and to explain how an earlier investigation "had not resulted in any prosecution."


The Bush administration has been anything but cooperative. Both the State and Justice departments refused to give Poe "answers on the status" of the investigation. The DoJ "refused to send a representative" to a Congressional hearing last month, and the State, Defense and Justice departments all missed Nelson's deadline for answering questions.


[..]Though Kicklighter is refusing to investigate Jones' allegations, he did say he would explore 'whether and why' a U.S. Army doctor handed to KBR security officials the results" of Jones' "rape kit," which then disappeared. Nelson's office told ABC that the senator is "not satisfied" with Kicklighter's letter.


Nelson is right to be disappointed, especially since Jones' assault may not be "an isolated case."


Former Halliburton/KBR employees have described an atmosphere of "rampant sexual harassment." Poe has also confirmed that his office has heard from multiple other women who were victims of sexual assault while working for KBR in Iraq.

Bhutto’s Assassination: Who Gains?

Despite all the news that says that both the US and Musharraf are hurt by the Bhutto assassination, there is good reason to believe that she was killed by someone in the military government. Now whether the cover-up was exposed by an opponent of Musharraf, one wonders how anyone could have made such a mess guaranteed to lose credibility.
From GlobalResearch.ca, here is a non-mainstream view of what happened.

Informed intelligence sources say there was a cynical deal cut behind the scenes between Washington and Musharraf. Musharraf is known to be Cheney’s preferred partner and Cheney we are told is the sole person running US-Pakistan policy today.


Were Musharraf to agree to stationing of US Special Forces inside Pakistan, “Plan B”, the democratic farce with Bhutto could be put aside, in favor of the continued Musharraf sole rule. Washington would “turn a blind eye.”


On Dec. 28, one day after the Bhutto assassination, the Washington Post reported that in early 2008, “US Special Forces are expected to vastly expand their presence in Pakistan as part of an effort to train and support indigenous counter-insurgency forces and clandestine counterterrorism units,” under the US Central Command and US Special Operations Command, a major shift in US Pakistani ties. Until now Musharraf and his military have refused such direct US control, aside from the agreement after September 11, extracted from Musharraf under extreme pressure of possible US bombing, to give the US military direct control of the Pakistan nuclear weapons.


The elimination of Bhutto leaves an opposition vacuum. The country lacks a credible political leader who can command national support, which leaves the military enhanced as an institution, with its willingness to defend Musharraf on the streets. This gives the Pentagon and Washington a chance to consolidate a military opposition to future Chinese economic hegemony—the real geopolitical goal of Washington.

New Footage of Bhutto Assassination Proves Musharraf Is Lying.

Bob Cesca

Musharraf Needs to Resign

The credibility and stability of Pakistan is at grave risk. If Pakistan destabilizes any further, bin Ladin will set up shop openly. Pakistan/India relations will sour and nuclear war will again become thinkable.
International Crisis Group

Gravely damaged by eight years of military rule, Pakistan’s fragile political system received a major blow on 27 December 2007, when former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Her murder, days before the parliamentary elections scheduled for 8 January 2008 and now postponed to 18 February, put an end to a U.S. effort to broker a power-sharing deal with President Pervez Musharraf which the centre-left Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader had already recognised was unrealistic. Her popularity and the belief Musharraf and his allies were responsible, directly or indirectly, have led to violent countrywide protests.


Stability in Pakistan and its contribution to wider anti-terror efforts now require rapid transition to legitimate civilian government. This must involve the departure of Musharraf, whose continued efforts to retain power at all costs are incompatible with national reconciliation; an interim consensus caretaker government and a neutral Election Commission; and brief postponement of the elections to allow conditions to be created – including the restoration of judicial independence – in which they can be conducted freely and fairly.


Bhutto’s death has drawn the battle lines even more clearly between Musharraf’s military-backed regime and Pakistan’s moderate majority, which is now unlikely to settle for anything less than genuine parliamentary democracy. Many in Pakistan fear that the federation’s very survival could depend on the outcome of this struggle.

Rudy Surrogate: "I Don't Subscribe To The Principle That There Are Good Muslims And Bad Muslims&quot

Talking Points Memo

John Deady, the co-chair of New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy, is standing by the comments he made in the controversial interview with The Guardian we posted on below, in which he said that "the Muslims" need to be chased "back to their caves."


In an interview with me, Deady confirmed that when he made the comments, he was referring to all Muslims. "I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims," Deady told me by phone from his home in New Hampshire. "They're all Muslims."


[..]In the earlier interview with The Guardian, Deady said of Muslims: "We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."


When I asked Deady to elaborate on his suggestion that we need to "get rid" of Muslims, Deady said: "When I say get rid of them, I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide. What I was referring to is, stand up to them every time they stick up their heads and attack us. We can't afford to say, `We'll try diplomacy.' They don't respond to it. If you look into Islamic tradition, a treaty is only good for five years. We're not dealing with a rational mindset here. We're dealing with madmen."


When I asked Deady if this was also a reference to all Muslims, he said: "I am talking about Muslims in general."

Bhutto Was To Expose Musharraf's Plan to Rig Elections

One of the reasons Musharraf gets along so well with Bush is that he's part of the "Democratic" process Bush supports in Pakistan. Bush wanted to set him up to rig elections and monitor his political opponents just like Bush does in the US.
But Bhutto was going to spoil Musharraf's fun by exposing his voting corruption to the visiting US Congressman and Senator.
Pakistan government delays elections - CNN.com

Pakistan's parliamentary elections have been postponed until Februrary 18 because of the unrest following the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.


The elections were originally scheduled for January 8, but that would have been "impossible" because of the time needed to re-do burned ballot papers and repair ransacked election offices, Chief Election Commissioner Justice Qazi Muhammad Farooq said on Wednesday.


Provincial officials also wanted the elections delayed until after the Muslim holy month of Muharram, which will begin around January 9 and end about February 6.


Kanwar Dilshad, the commission's secretary general, had earlier said a decision would be made after consulting with all the political parties.


However, spokesmen for Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N party said neither had been formally consulted by early afternoon Wednesday in Pakistan.


Both opposition parties wanted the elections to go ahead as scheduled next week, hoping to capitalize on the sympathy following Bhutto's killing.


Sharif told reporters that he believed Musharraf -- who was scheduled to address the Pakistani nation on Wednesday evening -- intended to delay the vote because his party would not garner enough seats in parliament to rule.


The United States welcomed Pakistan's decision to announce a specific election date, fearing that the government might indefinitely delay the vote.


"It's important that there is a firm date for elections," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said shortly after Wednesday's announcement. "We hope that all the political parties will work together to ensure a free and fair election."


Meanwhile, sources close to the slain former Pakistani prime minister earlier told CNN that Bhutto had planned to hand over to visiting U.S. lawmakers on the day she died a report accusing Pakistan's intelligence services of a plot to rig parliamentary elections.


Bhutto was assassinated Thursday, hours before a scheduled meeting with U.S. politicans Patrick Kennedy and Arlen Specter.


A top Bhutto aide who helped write the report showed a copy to CNN.


"Where an opposing candidate is strong in an area, they [supporters of President Pervez Musharraf ] have planned to create a conflict at the polling station, even killing people if necessary, to stop polls at least three to four hours," the document says.


The report also accused the government of planning to tamper with ballots and voter lists, intimidate opposition candidates and misuse U.S.-made equipment to monitor communications of opponents.


"Ninety percent of the equipment that the USA gave the government of Pakistan to fight terrorism is being used to monitor and to keep a check on their political opponents," the report says.

Pakistan Military Complicit in Bhutto Assassination?

Juan Cole has a great analysis of events in Pakistan.
Informed Comment

It looks increasingly as though someone in the military government in Pakistan may have been somehow complicit in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.


[..]You could construct a speculative scenario in which the shooter used a standard army issue revolver (I'm not a hardware guy, but I think that would be a .38) because he saw a target of opportunity, but that Plan A had been to detonate a belt bomb. If he used a service revolver, that would raise the question of who gave it to him and why. What if the bullet were found, say at the crime scene? If Benazir were not struck by a bullet, then the army could always maintain that it was fired by a soldier on the scene in the midst of the chaos, and was aimed at the perpetrators. But if she was killed by the army bullet, then it could not be explained away. (In fact, the bullet has not been found, but someone may have been afraid it would be).


Motive? Well, the military's suspicions of her would have been rather heightened in mid-November when she reacted heatedly to then Gen. Musharraf's declaration of a state of emergency. '“It is time for him to go. He must quit as President,” Bhutto said.


[..]The government stonewalling on the issue of an autopsy and the coercion of government employees to toe a pre-determined line, smells to high heaven of complicity. It could be incompetence or stupidity, of course. And the Pakistani military is not all one thing. There is the Inter-Services Intelligence, some members of whom have long ties to Muslim militants. There is the officer corps, etc.


Three further notes: The Pakistan People's Party members and other opponents of Musharraf already were thinking like this before circumstantial evidence emerged that made it even more plausible. I fear their conviction will now be unshakeable, which does not bode well for social peace. It would be a feud.


Second, the physicians would not have had their lawyer speak out about their having been coerced by the military if they thought that Musharraf was likely to continue in office. That is, they have made a bet on a PPP prime minister and are more afraid of being punished by the new government than they are of being punished by the old one. Do they think the old one is about to be overthrown?


And, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, head of the Muslim League (N), called Monday for Musharraf to resign, saying of him, "He is a one-man calamity and the source of all the problems. The country is burning."


Oooops?