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Taliban's bombs came from US, not Iran

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Doctored intelligence reports continue to come out of CIA and other sources that appear to continue to support the agenda of the Bush Administration. Given this article, it would appear that this intelligence is disinformation designed to further the neo-con agenda. Fortunately, we have the Federation of American Scientists who are more interested in the truth.

Could this intelligence really be promoted by Obama Administration sources? I suppose it could, but it strikes me as much more likely that this flimsy evidence is from rogue intelligence sources given how easily it can be refuted.

In support of the official United States assertion that Iran is arming its sworn enemy, the Taliban, the head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Dennis Blair, has cited a statement by a Taliban commander last year attributing military success against North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces to Iranian military assistance.

But the Taliban commander's claim is contradicted by evidence from the US Defense Department, Canadian forces in Afghanistan and the Taliban themselves that the increased damage to NATO tanks by Taliban forces has come from anti-tank mines provided by the United States to the jihadi movement against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

The Taliban claim was cited by the ODNI in written responses to

questions for the record from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence following testimony by Blair before the committee on February 12, 2009. The responses were released to the Federation of American Scientists under the Freedom of Information Act on July 30.

ODNI wrote that Iran was "covertly supplying arms to Afghan insurgents while publicly posing as supportive of the Afghan government". As evidence of such covert Iranian arms supply, the ODNI said, "Taliban commanders have publicly credited Iranian support for their successful operations against coalition forces."

That statement was taken almost word-for-word from the subtitle of an article published on the website of London's DailyTelegraph and Sunday Telegraph on September 14 last year. "A Taliban commander has credited Iranian-supplied weapons with successful operations against coalition forces in Afghanistan," read the sub-heading of the article "Taliban claim weapons supplied by Iran".

The single Taliban commander quoted became plural in the ODNI version.

via Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs.

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The Return of the Welfare Queen and Open Class Warfare

Michael Steele invoked class warfare in his fear mongering attempt to turn seniors against the working poor who can't afford health care by claiming the seniors will lose Medicare benefits if health care goes to the uninsured. This guy is as dishonest as anyone in the Republican Party.

Image by ajagendorf25 via Flickr

The healthcare reform debate took a rather remarkable turn last week when the Washington Post published an Op-Ed piece by Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele telling retirees that his party would fight any effort to modify the benefits they derived from the government-run Medicare program in order to offer similar benefits to others. The Op-Ed was immediately supplemented by an item on the RNC Web page trumpeting a "Seniors' Health Care Bill of Rights," similarly pledging the GOP to a to-the-death defense of Medicare benefits and procedures, allegedly under dire threat from universal health coverage.Steele's gambit mainly got attention because it was laughably in conflict with nearly a half century of Republican attacks on Medicare, and because he adopted every ludicrous made-up claim about the impact of this or that health reform bill on Medicare. In a disastrous NPR interview later in the week, the GOP chieftain had a predictably difficult time explaining why the GOP wanted to "protect" Medicare because it was so bad a program that it couldn't withstand any "raids."

[..]This should be familiar to any political observer over the age of 30 as a new version of the old "welfare wedge": the emotionally powerful conservative argument that Democrats want to use Big Government to take away the good things of life from people who have earned them and give them to people who haven't.

[..]What's most interesting, and dangerous, about the new "welfare wedge" is that it's not about poor people who don't work for a living. After all, most very poor families often already have health insurance (depending on where they live) via Medicaid, and those who don't work these days generally don't have the option of working. The target of "welfare" shouters seems to be the working poor, or middle-class minority families who are struggling to stay in the middle class.

via The return of the welfare queen | Salon.

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Anti-Immigrant Minutemen Join White-Supremacist Militias on the Radical Right

Anti-immigrant groups like the “Minutemen” vigilantes are not only proliferating, but are rapidly beginning to resemble the white-supremacist and anti-government militias that have populated the netherworld of the Radical Right since the early 1990s. Adding insult to injury, the farcical conspiracy theories that circulate among both extreme nativist groups and right-wing militias are now being mainstreamed by commentators on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. Although the various strains of far-right extremism have by no means coalesced into a single movement, the ideological lines that once distinguished them have begun to blur.

As a result, it is not uncommon to find Minutemen deriving ideological succor from Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, and Glenn Beck as they stockpile weapons to defend against what they believe to be a secret plot by the Mexican government to “re-conquer” the southwestern United States—and another secret plot by the U.S. government to impose socialism under the leadership of a president who they believe to be an “illegal alien” from Kenya rather than a native-born U.S. citizen from Hawaii.

That is the portrait that emerges from a report released yesterday by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) entitled The Second Wave: Return of the Militias. The new SPLC report comes on the heels of a June report by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, Confronting the New Faces of Hate, which details the recent rise in hate crimes directed against immigrants, Latinos, and racial minorities in the United States, as well as the role of mainstream media commentators in fanning the flames of anti-immigrant and anti-Latino hatred. The SPLC report also provides details which supplement the findings of an April report by the Department of Homeland Security on the growing threat posed by right-wing extremists who are driven by white-supremacist and anti-immigrant ideology.

The image presented by these reports of heavily armed white supremacists being cheered on by a CNN commentator is terrifying enough, but even more terrifying in many respects is the fact that some Members of Congress are cheering them on as well. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) plays to delusional yet typical far-right conspiracy theories in warning that the Obama administration is engaged in a “final leap to socialism” and plans to put young people in “re-education camps.” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) attempts to appease the so-called “birther movement” by saying that it “has a point” in claiming that President Obama is not actually a native-born citizen of the United States.

Other politicians would do well not to follow the example set by Bachmann and Inhofe of pandering to the radical right-wing fringe and validating its ideology of hate. As a new report from the Immigration Policy Center details, the ranks of Latino, African American, and Asian voters grew by nearly 5 million between the 2004 and 2008 elections. Moreover, the rapid rise of Latino and Asian voters in particular occurred in electorally important states such as Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, New Mexico, and North Carolina. These newly mobilized voters are unlikely to be impressed by candidates whose campaign rhetoric is more attuned to the membership of white-supremacist militia groups than to the demographic realities of the modern United States.

via Immigration Impact » Blog Archive » Anti-Immigrant Minutemen Join White-Supremacist Militias on the Radical Right.

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