no bush vindication

[mahak]

Haribol. It is quite apalling that the world is so happy at the utter misery of even a demon such as saddam. I dont trust it, and yall heard it here first. Too convenient in the wake of disclosure of hale burton and the climbing death toll, the riots in the gas lines, etc.

 

Even stupid democrat non-contenders are congratulating bush the butcher, but he deserves no congratulations at all. He is a liar, he has caused the death of 100,000 iraqis, 500 American military personnel, etc, just so he can humiliate a former ally? Yes, former ally. Saddam did what he has done at the request of the US. He was mideast buffer against our enemy, the fanatic, militant, fundamentalist. Thoise he murdered, the shiites and the kurds, were our enemies. Saddam is juniors version of his dad's Noriega, the drug deal gone south.

 

There is no vindication for W. There is no way that those dead cover the illegal entry into an unnecessary war. Al qaida is still strong and getting stronger every day. America is not safer now that the guy's out of his hole. Bin laden is just as happy at his capture as the rabid rightists in this country.

 

And, the scoop here is that this guy is not hussein. This is a ploy, not very original, a counterintelligence ploy to manipulate the minds of all the fools who are cheering, thinking how great amerikkka is that we can slaughter an unequipped army decimated by a great destruction, a crippling embargo for 12 years, etc. No, Im not at all feeling proud, and Im probably the highest military security cleared writer on this forum. I am devastated by the waste of america good will and young soldiers lives.

 

Now, it is time to arrest the other fascist dictator who has no reluctance to use weapons of mass destruction, even on his own people. Time for bush the butcher to crawl out of his hole to face the justice awaiting us all.

 

Hare Krsna, ys, mahaksadasa

[ancient_paztriot]

This is the title of a new book out by Larry Everest (only $12 paperback)

 

This unique volume compiles in one place a history of US intervention against Iraq and the devastating consequences for the people and the region. It shows the ways in which war today is a continuation of that history, but also a radical leap to more direct military control in Iraq and around the world. The “Bush Doctrine” is both built on our imperial history and yet new and far more dangerous.

 

 

In Oil, Power and Empire, Everest rips away the shroud of Bush pretext. He

 

 

1. Exposes the true U.S. agenda: war on Iraq is part of plan for U.S. global domination, monopolizing world energy sources, and restructuring the Middle East.

 

 

 

2. Dissects Bush Administration arguments -- “weapons of mass destruction,” the al-Qaeda connection, violations of UN resolutions -- as pretexts for pre-planned agenda.

 

 

 

3. Shows that for 80-some years, U.S. actions in Iraq and the Middle East, often Machiavellian in the extreme, have been guided by considerations of oil, power and empire, have brought horrendous results for the peoples of the region (including helping Saddam Hussein to power), and led not to justice and stability, but a deepening spiral of U.S. military intervention.

 

 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

1. PLOTTING WAR AS THE TOWERS BURNED

How the Bush Administration decided to go to war on Iraq within 2 months of Sept. 11, despite the lack of an Iraqi connection.

 

2. IMPERIALISM AND THE CREATION OF IRAQ.

A history of imperialism shows how the conflicts and tensions of today arose and why a U.S. colony would be no better.

 

3. 1945-1979: BUILDING A MIDDLE EAST PILLAR OF EMPIRE

After World War II the US moved in initiating a spiral of greater military involvement and intervention in the region, which is now going to take another leap.

 

4. THE 1980s: DOUBLE-DEALING DEATH IN THE GULF

Encouraging the IRan-Iraq war, arming Iraq, assisting in chemical warfare; everything Bush charges Hussein with, the US was complicit in.

 

5. NEW WORLD ORDER, TAKE 1: DESERT STORM & KILLER SANCTIONS

The Persian gulf war was the first conflict after the collapse of the Soviet Union and intended to send a global message more about that than any concern about Kuwait.

 

6. IRAQ and THE BUSH DOCTRINE

September 11 gave the U.S. an opportunity to achieve a long-held agenda and it forcefully and deliberately and step-by-step nothing less than an imperialist master plan for world domination.

 

7. CREATING PRETEXTS: THE POST-9/11 CAMPAIGN FOR WAR.

As they were preparing pretexts, they had already decided to attack and were already positioning materials.

 

8. AN UNJUST WAR OF EMPIRE. [[bLURBS} “An excellent book with analytical discussions of all the relevant matters of foreign policy which all to often in the current era are left undiscussed or are framed in slogans and propaganda. Should be made 'required reading—especially for policy makers in Washington.”

--Dwight Simpson, Prof. International Relations at San Francisco State University.

[ancient_paztriot]

Robbing us Blind

The Return of the Bush Gang and the Mugging of America by Steve Brouwer ($12)

 

Steve Brouwer is on of the nation's best front-line reporters from the ongoing class war. You won't find any academic evasions in this book. The operative terms are "robbery" and "piracy," and the message is, "Wake up America, and reclaim your country before it is too late!"

-Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

 

 

In this blazing attack on the fiscal policies of both Bush presidents, Steve Brouwer lays bare the robbery behind the rhetoric in Robbing Us Blind: The Return of the Bush Gang and the Mugging of America.

 

From the tax cuts for the rich to the deadly health care policies for the pharmaceutical companies, Brouwer details the damage-not just from George W. but from his father as well. Packed with statistics yet woven into a gripping story, Brouwer tackles the central question head on:

 

Can We Really Call Them Robbers?

 

Showing exactly how the Bush Gang is a throwback to the "Gilded Age," Brouwer delineates the devastating evidence: The share of the national income that goes to the bottom 90% of the American people shrank from 67% of the total in the late 1970s to about 52% twenty years later. Almost all of the missing income was redistributed to the very richest Americans, the top 1%. Their take of the loot-already a robust 9.3% in 1979-had more than doubled to 20.8% by 2000. And that's before George Jr.'s tax cuts...

 

Yet Brouwer takes on a further question: Why blame this on "The Bush Gang?"

 

From 1981, when George Sr. became Reagan's vice president, through 2004, the Bush family has effectively been at the helm of our country most of the time-16 out of the last 24 years. If George Jr. gets re-elected, asks Brouwer, how much of our national income will be left in the hands of the people by 2008?

[ancient_paztriot]

Weapons of Mass Deception

The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq by Sheldon Rampton John Stauber($9)

 

It was a day for the history books. On April 9th, 2003, millions of Americans sat glued to their television sets as U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens joined together to topple the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. Like the fall of the Berlin wall, the fall of Saddam’s statue appeared to be one of those iconic moments that proved - spontaneously and undeniably - that democracy would always triumph over totalitarianism, that freedom was the great equalizer. "If you don’t have goose bumps now," said Fox News anchor David Asman as the extraordinary footage rolled, "you will never have them in your life."

 

"Jubilant Iraqis Swarm the Streets of Capital," read the New York Times headline.

 

Or did they?

 

In their eye-opening new exposé, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, Rampton and Stauber take no prisoners as they reveal - headline by headline, news show by news show, press conference by press conference - the deliberate, aggressive, and highly successful public relations campaign that sold the Iraqi war to the American public. April 9th seemed to confirm what Washington and pro-war pundits had been saying for months: that the Iraqi people would eventually come to see America as their liberator, not their enemy. Yet the American media chose to focus on headlines such as "Iraqis Celebrate in Baghdad" (Washington Post) rather than on a Reuters long-shot photo of Firdos Square showing it to be nearly empty, or the Muslim cleric who was assassinated by an angry crowd in Najaf for being too friendly to the Americans, or the 20,000 Iraqis in Nasiriyah rallying to oppose the U.S. military presence.

 

We’ve always known what good PR and advertising could do for a new line of sneakers, cosmetics, or weight-loss products. In Weapons of Mass Deception, Rampton and Stauber show us a brave new shocking world where savvy marketers, "information warriors," and "perception managers" can sell an entire war to consumers. Indeed, Washington successfully brought together the world’s top ad agencies and media empires to create "Operation: Iraqi Freedom" - a product no decent, patriotic citizen could possibly object to. With meticulous research and documentation, Rampton and Stauber deconstruct this and other "true lies" behind the war:

 

* Top Bush officials advocated the invasion of Iraq even before he took office, but waited until September 2002 to inform the public, through what the White House termed a "product launch." * White House officials used repetition and misinformation - the "big lie" tactic - to create the false impression that Iraq was behind the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, especially in the case of the alleged meeting in Prague five months earlier between 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials. * The "big lie" tactic was also employed in the first Iraq war when a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah told the horrific - but fabricated - story of Iraqi soldiers wrenching hundreds of premature Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die. Her testimony was printed in a press kit prepared by Citizens for a Free Kuwait, a PR front group created by Hill and Knowlton, then the world’s largest PR firm. * In order to achieve "third party authenticity" in the Muslim world, a group called the Council of American Muslims for Understanding launched its own web site, called OpenDialogue.com. However, its chairman admitted that the idea began with the State Department, and that the group was funded by the U.S. government. * Forged documents were used to "prove" that Iraq possessed huge stockpiles of banned weapons. * A secretive PR firm working for the Pentagon helped create the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which became one of the driving forces behind the decision to go to war.

 

Weapons of Mass Deception is the first book to expose the aggressive public relations campaign used to sell the American public on the war with Iraq. It is a must-read for those who want to know how and why they bought this war.

 

------

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

*ACKNOWLEDGMENTS*

 

*INTRODUCTION: Liberation Day*

 

*CHAPTER 1: Branding America*

 

*CHAPTER 2: War Is Sell*

 

*CHAPTER 3: True Lies*

 

*CHAPTER 4: Doublespeak*

 

*CHAPTER 5: The Uses of Fear*

 

*CHAPTER 6: The Air War*

 

*CHAPTER 7: As Others See Us*

[ancient_paztriot]

For descriminating minds, these books and more are here:

 

www.commoncouragepress.com

[ancient_paztriot]

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The current federal budget deficit isn't the result of the war with Iraq and the recession, as maintained by President George W. Bush, U.S. Comptroller General David M. Walker said Tuesday.

 

 

Walker said the deficit is a result of a structural imbalance between federal revenues and federal liabilities and a harbinger of deeper troubles to come. Walker is head of the General Accounting Office and is the federal government's highest-ranking auditor.

 

"We have a serious problem," said Walker, speaking at an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants meeting in Washington.

 

Bush has said the fiscal 2003 deficit of $374 billion and the nearly $500 billion deficit projected for 2004 are the direct result of the recession and the nation's war with Iraq.

 

Walker said Tuesday, "We haven't been in recession since November 2001." And, the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan plus extra federal funding for homeland security account for just 25% of the federal budget deficit.

 

"Just look at the facts," Walker said.

 

Speaking to a reporter after his speech, Walker also warned against those optimistically predicting that a booming economy will solve the nation's fiscal crisis.

 

"The hole is too deep to grow your way out of this problem," he said.

 

The current federal debt, coupled with the future value of the nation's projected liabilities to veterans, retirees and other entitlement programs add to "tens of trillions of dollars," Walker said.

 

If the value of the nation's federal liabilities for the next 75 years was calculated, it would amount to $150,000 for "every man, woman and child," Walker said. "And there's no paying this off with your credit card."

 

Walker is known for being outspoken and, while appointed by then-President Bill Clinton, has taken positions unpopular with both Democrats and Republicans at various times.

 

"My job is to speak truth to power," Walker said.

 

While Wall Street analysts generally agree with Walker's assessment, and while some investors appear concerned, interest rates so far haven't been affected.

[ancient_paztriot]

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The whole Saddam saga dribbles out in bits and pieces. It now appears that Bush claimed Saddam possessed not only weapons of mass destruction but the means to lob them into U.S. cities. In a conference call with reporters on Monday, Florida's Democratic senator Bill Nelson said 75 senators got this bit of information as part of a classified briefing before last October's vote to authorize the attack on Iraq. According to a report in Florida Today, senators learned in the secret briefing that Iraq had biological and chemical weapons—including anthrax—that could be dumped on east coast cities from unmanned drones. "They have not found anything that resembles a UAV [unmanned Aerial Vehicle] that has that capability," Nelson told the reporters. Nelson voted for the war.

 

Meanwhile, the inevitable stories suggesting the Saddam capture was a fake are beginning to circulate. One comes from debka.com, posted December 17. Many consider Debka an Israeli intelligence site. Whether that's the case or not, it often turns up inside information about the Middle East and Central Asia that turns out to be true.

 

"Saddam Hussein was not in hiding; he was a prisoner," headlined Debka. The story goes on to say that Hussein was seized on November 16, and held in the hole in Adwar for at least three weeks, while his captors attempted to get the $25 million that the U.S. promised to anyone who found the fallen ruler dead or alive.

 

That's not the only rumor experts have had to contend with. One story making the rounds in Baghdad and Great Britain's Iraqi community concerns a photograph of two American GIs standing beside a date palm tree. The photo was supposedly taken on the day of Saddam's capture. But according to the story, any Iraqi would know that this picture was a fake, because date palms are usually harvested in the summer. In any case, unharvested dates fall off the tree before December, and even if they don't, they are brown and dry, not yellow, as they are in the photo.

 

Then there were questions about how the Americans could pull off such a fast DNA test to verify that they had the real Saddam.

 

Normally, it can take up to a month to get a DNA study done, although if you pay more money, the process can be completed in five days. On Sunday, Dr. Robert Shaler, director of the department of forensic biology in the office of the city's chief medical examiner, told Wired that he's "not surprised" by reports that Saddam had been identified through DNA in less than 24 hours. "If you have a single sample and you stop everything else you're doing, you can get it done," he said. That would occur, for example, if police have arrested a suspect and can hold him only temporarily unless DNA matches him to a serious crime.

 

A senior administration official at the White House acted unsurprised when he said, "I don't even know if that speculation dignifies comment."

 

But some are still asking questions. Why, for instance, did Hussein look so bedraggled and confused shortly after his capture? On one Arab website, a former Republican Guard officer in the village of Al-Dor, near where Saddam was captured, claimed that some believe the hole had been hit with nerve gas. Dead birds and other apparently drugged animals were found around the hideout shortly after Hussein's capture.

 

An official at the Pentagon said the military doesn't have chemical weapons and hasn't for decades, and stated that facts stand as they were presented in news briefings.

 

Told of the stories chalking up Saddam's capture as a Bush campaign ploy, an official of the Republican National Committee burst into laughter.

[ancient_paztriot]

WASHINGTON—Every day the U.S. looks more like a police state.

 

An internal Justice Department probe, based on surveillance videos made by the government inside federal detention facilities, shows that the U.S. harassed, beat, and kept in solitary confinement without access to family or lawyers men it picked up off the streets of New York after 9-11. More likely than not, these men were seized on grounds that some cop or FBI agent thought they looked like Osama followers. Or that a business partner or neighbor decided he could get the man's money or property by charging him first with theft and then telling the cops, "Oh, by the way, I think the guy is Al Qaeda," a claim that one magistrate after another accepted as the reason to set bails so high no one but a millionaire could pay to get out.

 

And this doesn't even scratch the surface of what's been going on. Lawyers were not told the numbers of courtrooms to where their clients were being shuttled because the room locations were secret. Members of Congress, government, the press, and the judiciary knew from the very get-go that any FBI agent, acting on his or her own, could make an affidavit asserting that any individual was a suspected terrorist.

 

Every day, Ashcroft and Bush work the country toward something like martial law, though the administration has suffered setbacks, like last week's rulings by two federal appellate courts in Padilla v. Rumsfeld and Gherebi v. Bush. Both of those decisions, for now at least, hamper the government's ability to simply lock up suspects indefinitely.

 

But the government has other targets and other ways of dealing with them. The most recent crackdown seems to be on the foreign press—the source of much of the substantial critique of its policies.

 

U.S. immigration authorities are detaining foreign correspondents on grounds they have not obtained special visas permitting them to operate here, reports the Associated Press. True, there is a law stipulating a special visa for journalists, but few have ever heard of it and it is seldom enforced. No more. No one ever told the visiting journalists it had suddenly been revived. As a result, immigration officials aren't allowing reporters from abroad to come in under ordinary 90-day tourist visa waivers.

 

Peter Krobath, chief editor for the Austrian movie magazine Skip, was seized and held overnight in a cold room with 45 others who landed without visas. Is he an Osama follower? A disguised fedayeen from Saddam's clan? No. He is guilty of flying to the U.S. to interview Ben Affleck.

 

Thomas Sjoerup, a photographer for the Danish paper Ekstra Bladet, had to give the American authorities fingerprints, a mug shot, and a DNA sample, and he was promptly sent back home anyway.

 

Six French journalists were marched across a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport in handcuffs, having had their belts and shoelaces removed. The International Press Institute, based in Vienna, along with the International Federation of Journalists, headquartered in Brussels, is protesting this treatment.

 

The U.S. response? An embassy official in Vienna insisted that the government was only acting in accordance with the letter of the law.