Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani is the “best” candidate in the 2008 race for Israel, a panel of eight Israeli experts assembled by Haaretz has determined.

Giuliani is followed by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, Arizona Senator John McCain and New York Senator Hillary Clinton. Ranking bottom of the list is Illinois Senator Barack Obama.

As part of a new project, The Israel Factor: Ranking the presidential candidates” the panel will rank the candidates every month, up until the 2008 election, awarding them marks out of 10 on a series of questions that will determine which candidates are “best” for Israel.

The project is part of Rosner’s Domain, and is moderated by Haaretz Chief U.S. Correspondent, Shmuel Rosner. Professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, who is also the Haaretz pollster, is responsible for the statistical analysis of the rankings.

The panel also concluded that the chances of any of the candidates ordering future military action in Iran were not very high. Giuliani scored highest on this question, followed by Gingrich and McCain.

Clinton was the candidate the panel considered most likely to engage more vigorously in mediating a peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. She was followed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former presidential candidate John Kerry.
haaretz.com

The hero of 9-11…indeed.

Pakistan, criticized by some Afghan leaders over cross-border infiltration by the Taliban, vowed on Wednesday to help its neighbor fight terrorism as Afghanistan battles its worst violence in five years.

After lengthy talks with his Afghan counterpart, Hamid Karzai, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said he was committed to crushing the Taliban, their al Qaeda allies and “Talibanisation,” a reference to the spread of hardline Islam.

“The best way to fight this common enemy is to join hands, trust each other and form a common strategy,” he told reporters in Kabul, days before the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks that prompted the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan.

yahoo.com

Well since Pakistan created them I guess they can crush them, right?

The Senate on Wednesday rejected a move by Democrats to stop the Pentagon from using cluster bombs near civilian targets and to cut off sales unless purchasers abide by the same rules.

On a 70-30 vote, the Senate defeated an amendment to a Pentagon budget bill to block use of the deadly munitions near populated areas. The vote came after the State Department announced last month that it is investigating whether Israel misused American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas of Lebanon.

Unexploded cluster bombs — anti-personnel weapons that spray bomblets over a wide area — litter homes, gardens and highways in south Lebanon after Israel’s 34-day war with Hezbollah militants

yahoo.com

Mexican President Vicente Fox had to cancel his final state of the union speech before the country’s Congress September 1, after legislators protested a massive police/military mobilization against anti-government demonstrators by seizing the podium. This is the first time in modern Mexican history that a sitting president has been prevented from addressing the opening session of the legislature on September 1.

Fox provoked the conflict by ordering the deployment of thousands of troops to block a demonstration by supporters of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the presidential candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who was declared the loser in the July 2 vote by a narrow margin of 240,000 votes.

The PRD candidate has rejected preliminary rulings of the federal election tribunal in favor of Felipe Calderon, the candidate of Fox’s conservative National Action Party (PAN). The tribunal is expected to declare Calderon the victor officially on September 6, clearing the way for his inauguration as Fox’s successor December 1.

The military occupation, unprecedented in modern Mexican history, opens up a dangerous stage in Mexico’s political and social crisis. The PAN government, through this measure, delivered a message to Lopez Obrador to give up his demands for a recount and accept the decision to declare Calderón the president-elect. This security operation represents a serious warning to the Mexican working class of the government’s intentions to repress economic and social struggles.

axisoflogic.com

Why Mexico Matters

Mexico matters because the people and leaders knew election problems were coming and they did something about it. They protested in massive numbers, again and again. The Mexican people are offering the largest resistance to election fraud in modern history. Think of the demonstrations in the Ukraine, Belarus, the Georgia Republic, or any other post election protest. Over a period of 15 days, there were three Assemblies sponsored by Lopez-Obrador and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). These demonstrations attract over a million people (in a nation of 100 million). The corporate media tried to downplay the crowd size with Bloomberg News failing to mention a 1.1 million estimate it got on July 16 from police authorities. These are vibrant, involved people who work with their leaders, particularly Presidential candidate Lopez-Obrador, to develop plans and fend off attacks by the ruling party.

Mexico matters because the people and leaders refused to give up when the system failed to give them a real recount. The independent election institute tried to pass off a Calderon victory without investigating the numerous and substantial allegations of election fraud. For example, the institute tried to announce a victory by President Vincente Fox’s hand-picked candidate, Calderon, until an audience member pointed out ballots that they failed to count — at least 2.5 million of them. That type of “error” is rarely an error; rather, it shows bias and intent to deceive. The electoral tribunal resisted but was ultimately pressured into a recount of 9% of the vote. The tribunal then refused to order a total recount of the paper ballots even though it found that 130,000 were either missing or invalid — in only 9% of the precincts! The projected total for 100% of the precincts would be over 1.3 million ballots. Yet the full recount failed to materialize.

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at lost of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side. Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes the parts it covets – half of the West Bank – and cleanses it of its native population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an arrangement cannot work in the Gaza enclave – Egypt unlike Jordan has succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel – although geographically the Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its midst.

palestinechronicle.com

Gaza’s Darkness, Israel’s Reoccupation
Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.

Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn’t even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about ‘the end of the occupation’ and ‘partitioning the land? now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied.

In large parts of Gaza nowadays, there is no electricity. Israel bombed the only power station in Gaza, and more than half the electricity supply will be cut off for at least another year. There’s hardly any water. Since there is no electricity, supplying homes with water is nearly impossible. Gaza is filthier and smellier than ever: Because of the embargo Israel and the world have imposed on the elected authority, no salaries are being paid and the street cleaners have been on strike for the past few weeks. Piles of garbage and obnoxious clouds of stink strangle the coastal strip, turning it into Calcutta.

…Indeed, not only is the FBI good at “penetrating conspiracies,” they are also good at creating and managing them, as they managed the Jersey City-based based cell that included the blind Egyptian cleric Shaikh Omar Abdul Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Eyad Ismail, convicted in relation to the 1993 WTC bombing conspiracy. Not only did the FBI manage the bombings through their informant, former Egyptian Army officer Emad Salem, they “sat on volumes of translations of Arabic telephone intercepts gathered before the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center from U.S and Sudan-based Muslim militants who once worked for U.S. intelligence in the mujaheddin war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan,” according to investigative journalist Wayne Madsen. “Ironically, the two men responsible for the failure to present the surveillance intelligence on the 1993 World Trade Center bombers to the juries and grand juries hearing the charges—the main federal prosecutors for New York City and New Jersey in the bombing case—were Patrick J. Fitzgerald and Michael Chertoff, respectively.”

Gadahn’s video message arrives on the heels of the arrest of a fresh crop of patsies in London, East Sussex, and Manchester. “Peter Clarke, head of Metropolitan Police antiterror efforts, said police and intelligence agents were trying to track thousands of people believed to be directly or indirectly involved in terrorism,” according to the Associated Press. “The threat from homegrown terrorism is increasing in Britain, he told the British Broadcasting Corp. in an interview.”

Walid Phares, writing for the Counterterrorism Blog, tells us “Azzam al Amrikee” Gadahn “is the clearest specimen of Jihadism’s second generation within the US, in as much as the 7/7 videos revealed the type of future Jihadists for Great Britain’s second generation,” never mind that Siddique Khan, the alleged ringleader of the 7/7 London bombings, was “working for British intelligence agency MI5 as an informant at the time of the attacks,” according to Charles Shoebridge, a 12-year veteran detective of the London Metropolitan Police. Moreover, although not reported in the corporate media, it was impossible for the alleged London bombers to be photographed at the Luton station and also King’s Cross, as this conflicts with the actual train timetable.

kurtnimmo.com

…Accompanied by four Haitians, the foreigners entered Simon Pele, a Cité Soleil neighborhood where U.N. troops had reportedly attacked people in recent weeks. The plan was for the group to interview residents to ascertain what actually had happened at that time. “We saw a church and a health clinic and a school that had been completely blasted away and couldn’t operate any more,” Welsh said.

They had just begun to interview people, when they saw four UN armored personnel carriers approaching. “Two went down one street and two came down the street we were on,” Welsh said in an interview in Berkeley on Saturday.  Market stalls were operating in front of the houses and there were many people on the street, including children, Welsh said.

Accompanying the APCs, manned by Brazilian soldiers, was a UN bulldozer and a UN dump truck filled with sand. The sand was dumped and the bulldozer scooped it up, placing it to form a barrier in a roadway “apparently to block an escape route from the neighborhood,” said Terrell in a phone interview from Haiti on Sunday.

From previous experience, people understood that this was the first step in a U.N. “operation” that would culminate in an attack on the neighborhood, Welsh said, adding that the bulldozer and dump truck seemed to scare the people more than the familiar sight of the occupying troops atop the APCs.

Then the troops started firing. “They were shooting down the street and into houses,” said Welsh, describing the shots as repeated and apparently random. Both Welsh and Terrell said they heard two pops coming from the direction of the houses, which they said could have been return fire from a small caliber weapon.

The soldiers ignored the foreigners, who filmed and photographed the incident, hoping that their presence would deter a full-scale assault by the UN soldiers on the people. “We tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t talk to us,” said Welsh, who, for some of the time, was as close as five feet from where the soldiers were shooting. At one point, “I saw five or six Brazilians run out of the APCs and into the neighborhood,” Terrell said.

zmag.org

Mexico City. The Congress of the country is ringed by two-meter tall grilled metal barriers soldered together apparently to thwart a suicide car bomb attack. Behind this metal wall, 3000 vizored, kevlar-wearing robocops — the Federal Preventative Police (PFP, a police force drawn from the army) — and members of the elite Estado Mayor or Presidential military command, form a second line of defense. Armed with tear gas launchers, water cannons, and reportedly light tanks, this Praetorian Guard has been assigned to protect law and order and the institutions of the republic against left-wing mobs that threaten to storm the Legislative Palace — or so the President informs his fellow citizens in repeated messages transmitted on national television.

No, the President’s name is not Pinochet and this military tableau is not being mounted in the usual banana republic or some African satrap. This is Mexico, a paragon of democracy (dixit George Bush), Washington’s third trading partner, and the eighth leading petroleum producer on the planet, seven weeks after the fraud-marred July 2 presidential election of which, at this writing, no winner has been officially declared. One of the elite military units assigned to seal off congress is indeed titled the July 2 brigade.
MEXICO ON A KNIFEBLADE headlines the British Guardian, but the typically short-term-memory-loss U.S. print media seems to have forgotten about the imbroglio just south of its borders. Nonetheless, the phone rings and it’s New York telling me they just got a call from their man on the border and Homeland Security is beefing up its forces around Laredo in anticipation of upheaval further south. The phone rings again and it’s California telling me they just heard on Air America that U.S. Navy patrols were being dispatched to safeguard Mexican oil platforms in the Gulf. The left-wing daily here, La Jornada, runs a citizen-snapped photo of army convoys arriving carrying soldiers disguised as farmers and young toughs. Rumors race through the seven mile-long encampment installed by supporters of leftist presidential challenger Andres Manuel! Lopez Obrador (AMLO) three weeks ago who have tied up big city traffic and enraged the motorist class here, that PFP robocops will attack before dawn. The campers stay up all night huddled around bum fires prepared to defend their tent cities.

zmag.org

…The agenda is clearly to maintain a state of alert and panic until such a time that reverting back to ‘normal’ and ‘reasoned’ security measures is forgotten – the new normal becomes the insane and displaying any traits of disobedience to authority figures is taken as a sign of terrorism. Lie detector tests, voice stress analysis technology, advanced screening which produces naked images of passengers along with brain scanner and perspiration tension analysis systems are all being implemented as the notion of innocent until proven guilty is jettisoned without recourse.

The airports are merely a beta test for the exact same measures to be rolled out in major cities, where regular checkpoint officials inspect internal passports and consumers are body scanned to enter a supermarket or any kind of public event as spy drones swoop overhead to catalogue movement and alert authorities to any suspicious body language (remember Poindexter’s gait analysis?).

The key to achieving all this on the part of the Neo-Fascists is to carry out more staged terror attacks on soft targets like sports stadiums, schools and large shopping malls. In terms of police state propaganda, these attacks would be more effective than a 9/11 style event because the implications would reach down into the roots of everyday life.

After more soft target terror attacks on buses and trains, citizens will be forced to biometric scan and show ID just to enter the transport station. Resistors who refuse to take a national ID card and eventually an implanted ID chip will be punished by their exclusion from a trusted travelers program that denotes how well a citizen has behaved and compares that score to the criteria of how and when they can travel. Nationwide toll roads snaking across the US and Britain that use RFID signals at toll booths and instant kill switches in private vehicles will see this nightmare extend its tentacles into the personal vehicle of every citizen.

prisonplanet.com

…”They are not going to be able to turn our country and region into a Kosovo. Now our people are aware of everything and will not play into imperialist tricks. We will absolutely not permit them to attack Iran or Syria. We are going to fight for our freedom to the last drop of our blood. Let no one doubt this. They are claiming that Iran has nuclear weapons at its disposal. On the contrary, most of the nuclear weapons are in the hands of Israel and the US. Furthermore, nuclear weapons are nothing but excuses put forward in order to create collaborating regimes in the region.

Q. There are claims that Hezbollah is being directed by Tehran. What are your views on this issue?

Hasan Nasrallah: This is a great lie. We are an independent Lebanese organization. We do not take orders from anyone. But this does not mean that we are not going to form alliances. We are on the side of Iran and Syria. They are our brothers. We are going to oppose any attack directed at Tehran and Damascus to the last drop of our blood just as we do in Lebanon. We uphold global resistance against global imperial terrorism.

Q. Is there any other additional point you want to make?

Hasan Nasrallah: Peace cannot be unilateral. So long as there is imperialism in the world, a permanent peace is impossible. This war will not come to an end as long as there are occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

axisoflogic.com