Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites as a “last resort” to block Teheran’s efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Central Command and Strategic Command planners are identifying targets, assessing weapon-loads and working on logistics for an operation, the Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

They are reporting to the office of Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, as America updates plans for action if the diplomatic offensive fails to thwart the Islamic republic’s nuclear bomb ambitions. Teheran claims that it is developing only a civilian energy programme.
telegraph.co.uk

Boston Globe: Iran is prepared to retaliate, experts warn
WASHINGTON — Iran is prepared to launch attacks using long-range missiles, secret commando units, and terrorist allies planted around the globe in retaliation for any strike on the country’s nuclear facilities, according to new US intelligence assessments and military specialists.

US and Israeli officials have not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to thwart its nuclear ambitions. Among the options are airstrikes on suspected nuclear installations or covert action to sabotage the Iranian program.

But military and intelligence analysts warn that Iran — which a recent US intelligence report described as ”more confident and assertive” than it has been since the early days of the 1979 Islamic revolution — could unleash reprisals across the region, and perhaps even inside the United States, if the hard-line regime came under attack.

Iran ‘danger for world’: Gore
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AFP) – Former US vice president and defeated presidential hopeful Al Gore lashed out at Iran’s clerical regime, denouncing it as a threat “for the future of the world.”

“Iran is ruled by corrupt politicians and clerics,” the Democrat said in an address to the Jeddah Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia.

He said the “corrupt leadership” combined with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israeli outbursts should raise alarm bells all over the world, including the Arab world and the Gulf region.

Ahmadinejad: Israel ‘will be removed’
Tehran (dpa) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Saturday that the Palestinians and “other nations” will eventually remove Israel from the region.

Addressing a mass demonstration in Tehran – one of many organized throughout Iran to commemorate the 27th anniversary of the Islamic revolution – he once again questioned the Holocaust “fairy tale”.

“We ask the West to remove what they created sixty years ago and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them,” Ahmadinejad said in a ceremony marking the 27th anniversary of the Islamic revolution.

“Do the removal of Israel before it is too late and save yourself from the fury of regional nations,” the ultra-conservative president said. He once again called the Holocaust a “fairy tale” and said Europeans have become hostages of “Zionists” in Israel.

This guy is just too good an evil enemy to be true.

Sanction the IAEA Board, not Iran
You probably heard that – as a result of extreme pressure brought by the Bush-Cheney administration – a “special” meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors was convened last week to discuss what to do about the “gravest” threat to develop to “our” national security since the end of the Cold War.

The “threat”?

The announced resumption of certain IAEA Safeguarded programs, voluntarily and temporarily suspended by Iran more than two years ago.

What did the Board decide to do?

Well, you may have heard misleading reports that the Board – unable to satisfy itself that Bush-Cheney allegations that Iran had a nuclear weapons program that IAEA inspectors had been unable to find any trace of, despite almost three years of intrusive inspections were without merit – did “refer” the matter to the Security Council.

The Associated Press even reported – falsely – that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had “ordered” the end of voluntary cooperation with the IAEA “in response to the U.N. agency decision to refer Iran to the Security Council over fears the country is trying to develop a nuclear bomb.”

But there was no referral.

Far from turning over the alleged “Iranian nuclear crisis” to the Security Council, the IAEA Board specifically “remains seized with the matter.”

The AP did correctly report that “Iran will resume uranium enrichment and will no longer allow snap IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities – voluntary measures it had allowed in recent years in a gesture to build trust.”

But, the AP didn’t tell you that Iran’s Parliament had passed a law last year that required – in the event the IAEA Board reported Iran to the Security Council – the cessation of all voluntary cooperation with the IAEA above and beyond that required by Iran’s Safeguards Agreement. And, a resumption of all Iranian Safeguarded nuclear programs that had been voluntarily suspended.

…It is too simplistic and easy to categorize this as a clash of civilizations, a very Western perspective that explains political tensions primarily through the lens of cultural and values differences. Most Muslims (and non-Muslim Middle Easterners such as several million Christian Arabs) probably see the current tensions as a political battle, not a cultural one. This is not primarily an argument about freedom of press in Europe, much as our dashing European friends would like to believe it is. It is about Arab-Islamic societies’ desire to enjoy freedom from Western and Israeli subjugation, diplomatic double standards and predatory neo-colonial policies.
rockymountainnews.com

The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.

Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.
informationclearinghouse.info

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Four years after the United States led the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a new Taliban movement has taken control in a swath of neighboring Pakistan.

Taliban militants control much of Waziristan, a rocky, mountainous area twice the size of Long Island along the Pakistani border. Despite a heavy presence of Pakistani troops, Waziristan has become the largest and most protected sanctuary for Islamic militant guerrillas in the Afghan-Pakistani theater of the “global war on terror.”

U.S. military officers and Afghan officials in three neighboring provinces of Afghanistan say the infiltration of guerrillas from Waziristan has continued unabated and is the primary engine of the continued Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Waziristan “is very important to the Taliban” as a base of operations in the Afghan-Pakistani theater, said Mike Scheuer, a former top analyst at the CIA.

And it is likely to stay that way for years, analysts say. “The strength of the militants in Waziristan has built up over a generation,” said Behroz Khan, the regional bureau chief for a Pakistani daily, The News. At best, “it will take a generation to pacify and integrate this region” into the Pakistani state, he said.
newsday.com

The province where the Taliban were never defeated
he Taliban never really fell in Helmand province. While the outside world was celebrating the end of the Taliban regime after the fall of Kandahar in 2001, the Taliban were still in control of most of Helmand. It was in Helmand that the Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, took refuge after the fall of Kandahar, and from which he is believed to have staged a dramatic escape on the back of a motorcycle in early 2002. There were even claims from the Taliban in 2003 that the world’s most wanted man, Osama Bin Laden, had spent some time on the border between Helmand and the neighbouring province of Nimroz, under the noses of US forces.

When a British security contractor was forced out of his car at gunpoint, taken into the hills and beheaded in the nearby province of Farah last year, there were reports that the Taliban insurgents responsible were from Helmand.

Over the past year, Helmand has emerged as one of the main centres of the Taliban insurgency. Although it is only now attracting the attention of the outside world, the Taliban insurgency has been raging in Helmand ever since the original victory of US-led forces in Afghanistan in 2001. As early as 2002, the insurgents tried to assassinate the Afghan intelligence chief in the province. In March 2003, two US special forces soldiers were ambushed and killed by the Taliban in the province.

But over the past year the insurgency has rapidly grown in intensity, with the import of tactics from Iraq. There has been a spate of suicide bombings, beheadings, and attacks on soft targets, where previously the Taliban preferred to attack US and Afghan forces head on.

Into the valley of death: UK troops head into Afghan war zone
uicide bombings and firefights, Western troops under attack, sectarian clashes between Shia and Sunni, foreigners taken hostage. Days of escalating violence have left dozens of people dead and more than a hundred injured. This is not Iraq but Afghanistan, a conflict which has now overtaken on the grim league table of body counts – 89 killings in the last eight days in Afghanistan compared with 54 in Iraq during the same period.

It is into this maelstrom that the Royal Marines – the first batch of 5,700 British troops being sent to Afghanistan – will begin deploying this week in a mission lasting at least three years at a cost of £1bn.

With no exit strategy from Iraq in sight, British forces are entering another deadly conflict. Tony Blair’s insistence that there should be no sizeable withdrawal from Iraq until the security situation appreciably improves means that contingency plans for a large-scale reduction in numbers have had to be shelved. But last week John Reid, the Secretary of State for Defence, appeared to pave the way for a “significant” withdrawal from Iraq even if the country continued to face serious problems.

WASHINGTON Feb 12, 2006 (AP)— Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was “alert and doing fine” after Cheney sprayed Whittington with shotgun pellets on Saturday at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Armstrong said Cheney turned to shoot a bird and accidentally hit Whittington. She said Whittington was taken to Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital by ambulance.

Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president was with Whittington, a lawyer from Austin, Texas, and his wife at the hospital on Sunday afternoon.
abcnews.go.com

With oil exporters Venezuela and Mexico leading, Latin America and the Caribbean posted a 100.8 billion US dollars trade surplus with the United States in 2005, up 32.2% percent from the previous year, reported Friday the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for 17.5% of all goods and services imported by the United States, up slightly from its 17% share of 2004. But the region accounted for a significantly lower percentage of U.S. exports, 13.2%, compared to 21% in 2005.

Venezuela’s trade surplus with the United States rose to 27.6 billion last year, compared with 20.2 billion in 2004. Mexico jumped to a 50.1 billion surplus in 2005 from 45 billion the previous year. Brazil’s trade surplus in 2005 was up almost 2 billion to 9.1 billion, and Argentina posted 472 million US dollars surplus compared with 357 million in 2004.

The United States 2005 overall trade deficit was 725.8 billion in 2005, almost 18% more than in 2004. While exports have climbed, they have struggled to keep up as record oil prices, strong consumer demand and cheap foreign goods boosted imports.
falkland-malvinas.com

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (Reuters) – A U.S. free trade pact with Central America, already delayed by a legal wrangle, has run into further trouble at presidential elections in Costa Rica where voters punished the main pro-trade candidate.

Costa Rica’s electoral board began a recount on Tuesday of the vote from the weekend, which ended with a near dead heat despite opinion polls showing free trade advocate Oscar Arias would win easily.

Arias, a former president who strongly backs the U.S.-Central American Free Agreement, or CAFTA, won just over 40 percent of votes on Sunday, on a par with main rival Otton Solis who wants to renegotiate the deal.

A winner should be announced in two weeks. If it turns out that no candidate garners minimum support of more than 40 percent, a new round of voting will be held on April 2.

“Even if Arias wins, it is still bad news for CAFTA because Costa Ricans said, ‘Hold on, this is something we have to look at,'” said Michael Lettieri of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs think tank in Washington.
reuters.com

Evo Morales is just an inspirational symbol for his people? Think again. Bolivia’s first Indian president has shown political acuity in his early days in office, skillfully maneuvering and sticking to his radical program for transforming the country while keeping adversaries at home and abroad at bay.

On Feb. 6, just 15 days after his inauguration, Morales called for the mobilization of the country’s peasant organizations to shield his government against efforts by “some transnational corporations” to destabilize the country to stop the “nationalization” of energy resources. The plot, he said, had been detected by the armed forces.

A day after swearing in, Morales shook up the Bolivian high command by choosing a low-ranking general to head the military, effectively forcing higher-ranking generals to resign. The move was a key move, as the Bolivian armed forces have a long history of intervening in Bolivian politics.

Morales also called on peasant and other popular organizations to rally behind his call for the election of a constituent assembly in early July, to draft a new constituent for Bolivia. “The oligarchs,” he said, “should not be given time to breathe” as the country tries to reshape its basic institutions.
counterpunch.org

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – While the world community scrutinizes Iran’s nuclear plans, Latin America’s biggest country is weeks away from taking a controversial step and firing up the region’s first major uranium enrichment plant.

That move will make Brazil the ninth country to produce large amounts of enriched uranium, which can be used to generate nuclear energy and, when highly enriched, to make nuclear weapons.

Brazilians, who have long nurtured hopes of becoming a world superpower, are reacting with pride to the new facility in Resende, about 70 miles from Rio de Janeiro.
realcities.com

…Via Fox, the Bush Regime streams steady doses of its “opiate to the masses” via a distribution network reaching 85 million cable subscribers. Fox and most other mainstream media entities are the syringes mainlining the mind-altering, psychosis-inducing propaganda munificently showered upon Americans by the Party. Social Darwinists comprising the Party, including major corporate shareholders and executives, Israeli interests, the military industrial complex, plutocrats, the power players of the Religious Right, and intellectual elites hold the Great Beast (us “commoners”) at bay with a powerfully addictive state of being called the American Dream.

It is indeed a Brave New World. As many Americans somnambulate through their existence, they are virtually oblivious and indifferent to the profound human misery which must occur in order for a tiny fraction of humanity to experience the American Dream. When (or if) their Soma fix finally wears off, I suspect they will be ready to chew off their own arms to escape the disease-ridden whores with whom they have unwittingly climbed into bed. Mirroring Hitler’s Germany, this nation of “decent, God-fearing” people is pledging allegiance to a murderous regime. Are the comfort of conformity and the safety of loyalty to the Empire worth the price of one’s soul?

America’s ruling class has created a scintillating facade to hide its dystopia, assuring the Great Beast that we all have the right and the means to attain the looks of a Victoria’s Secret model, the money of a Donald Trump, and the athletic ability of a Michael Vick. Infomercials, work from home schemes, plastic surgery, hypnosis, and myriad other avenues to instant success and immediate gratification abound amongst the virtually infinite number of hollow pursuits littering the spiritually barren landscape of the United States. Those who fall short of the “American ideal” simply need to continue upping their dose American Soma. If that fails and they fall victim to the ravages of unbridled addiction, spiritual emptiness, poverty, despair, self-hatred, or anorexia, they can simply end their misery with a drug overdose or a shotgun blast to the face. America’s predator class, the pushers of the opiate of the masses, is not concerned with the suffering they inflict. In their zeal to appease the triumvirate they worship (power, money, and narcissistic desires), the “chosen ones” of our society do not hesitate to sacrifice the rights, dignity, sanity and even lives of hundreds of millions of innocent human beings. After all, if they come from amongst the rabble of the Great Beast, how can they be truly human and why would their anguish or death matter?
axisoflogic.com