WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President George W. Bush has defied Congress again by placing a slew of controversial political allies in key national security and foreign policy posts, circumventing the requisite approval process in the Senate.

Bush resorted to the same recess appointment procedure he used in August to install John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations, despite Capitol Hill’s strong opposition to the nominee.

On Wednesday, the bureaucratic maneuver was used to fill key vacancies in the Defense, State and Homeland Security Departments with officials whose approval by the Senate was in doubt.

The White House said Bush had appointed Gordon England, a former Navy secretary, to the post of deputy secretary of defense left vacant by Paul Wolfowitz, a leading architect of the Iraq war, who resigned the second-highest Pentagon job last year to become president of the World Bank.

A former General Dynamics executive, England was designated acting deputy defense secretary in May, but his Senate confirmation hearing hit a roadblock when at least two Republican senators, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Trent Lott of Mississippi, put it on hold over his decisions concerning the local shipbuilding industry.

The recess appointment, which presidents can made when Congress is in recess, will allow England and others to remain in their jobs until January 2007, when the current congressional session ends.

However, England’s appointed was expected to generate less controversy than that of Dorrance Smith, who was named assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, or the Pentagon’s chief spokesman.

In November, Smith penned an article for The Wall Street Journal blasting all major US television networks and the government of Qatar for cooperating with Al-Jazeera in showing gruesome battlefield footage obtained by the Arab television channel in Iraq.

He decried what he called “the ongoing relationship between terrorists, Al-Jazeera and the networks” and asked if the US government should maintain normal relations with Qatar as long as its government continued to subsidize Al-Jazeera.

The outburst prompted Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, to ask whether Smith, a former media adviser to ex-US administrator in Iraq Paul Bremer, “should be representing the United States government … with that kind of attitude and approach.”
yahoo news.com

The list goes on, each one worse than the one before…

AS ARIEL SHARON’S career comes to an end, the whitewashing is already underway. Literally overnight he was being hailed as “a man of courage and peace” who had generated “hopes for a far-reaching accord” with an electoral campaign promising “to end conflict with the Palestinians.”

But even if end-of-career assessments often stretch the truth, and even if far too many people fall for the old saw about the gruff old warrior miraculously turning into a man of peace, the reality is that miracles don’t happen, and only rarely have words and realities been separated by such a yawning abyss.

From the beginning to the end of his career, Sharon was a man of ruthless and often gratuitous violence. The waypoints of his career are all drenched in blood, from the massacre he directed at the village of Qibya in 1953, in which his men destroyed whole houses with their occupants — men, women and children — still inside, to the ruinous invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in which his army laid siege to Beirut, cut off water, electricity and food supplies and subjected the city’s hapless residents to weeks of indiscriminate bombardment by land, sea and air.

As a purely gratuitous bonus, Sharon and his army later facilitated the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and in all about 20,000 people — almost all innocent civilians — were killed during his Lebanon adventure.

Sharon’s approach to peacemaking in recent years wasn’t very different from his approach to war. Extrajudicial assassinations, mass home demolitions, the construction of hideous barriers and walls, population transfers and illegal annexations — these were his stock in trade as “a man of courage and peace.”
latimes.com

A ‘Butcher’ Capable of Making Peace
CAIRO — They have called him “the Butcher” and seldom mention his name without listing the places where he has been blamed for bloodshed: Sabra, Shatila, Jenin. During long decades of Middle East strife, few men have been more thoroughly reviled in the Arab world than Ariel Sharon.

But after years of battles and vitriol, and memories of the deaths in those Palestinian refugee camps, many Arabs grappled this week with a nuanced reaction to the failing health of a warrior who helped change the borders of Arab countries.

As the realization hit the region that the Israeli prime minister might no longer lead the Jewish state, a mood of regret and uncertainty crept into the tone of Arab analysts and editorials. As Sharon clung to life, the leaders of Egypt and Jordan, Arab countries that signed peace treaties with Israel, sent word of their concern.

In the end, after all their historical grievances against his wartime tactics, many Arabs saw Sharon as the only leader stubborn and strong enough to push Israel into accepting a Palestinian state. Arabs worried that the loss of Sharon would throw Israel into tumult and freeze already stagnant peace talks.

“It’s not that they bought that Sharon suddenly turned into a man of peace, but they saw him as capable of making peace. There is a very big difference,” said Iman Hamdi, a professor of political science at the American University of Cairo. “They may still think he’s a butcher, they may still hate him, but he’s the only one with the guts to withdraw from Gaza.”
Well they haved NOT withdrawn from Gaza, and this Reagan-type fallacy of saying that only a war-monger has the balls to make peace is sickening.

The Truth You Don’t Hear
What is the current situation on the ground in Palestine? The Israeli narrative that continues to dominate the international media presents an image that is absolutely at odds with reality. The Gaza redeployment was spun as the beginning of a peace process; a great retreat by General Ariel Sharon, who was portrayed as a man of peace. Yet the fact remains that Palestine is 27,000 square kilometres, of which the West Bank constitutes only 5,860 square kilometres, and the Gaza Strip, just 360 sq km. This is equal to only 1.3 per cent of the total land of historic Palestine. So even if Sharon really had withdrawn from Gaza, this would amount to just 5.8 per cent of the occupied territories.

But the Israelis did not get out of Gaza. A big fuss was created about the great sacrifice Israel was making and how painful it was for settlers to leave. If you steal a piece of land and keep it for 20 years, of course it becomes painful to leave it but it is still something stolen that should be returned to its owners. Prior to the disengagement, a total of 152 settlements existed in the occupied territories: 101 in the West Bank, 30 in East Jerusalem, and 21 in the Gaza Strip. These figures do not include the settlements that Sharon and the Israeli army have created in the West Bank without officially recognising them. With the disengagement, and the evacuation of settlements in Gaza and four small settlements in the Jenin area of the West Bank, 127 settlements have been left in place.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 6 – American officials are talking with local Iraqi insurgent leaders to exploit a rift that has opened between homegrown insurgents and radical groups like Al Qaeda, and to draw the local leaders into the political process, according to a Western diplomat, an Iraqi political leader and an Iraqi insurgent leader.

Clashes between Iraqi groups and Al Qaeda have broken out in several cities across the Sunni Triangle, including Taji, Yusefiya, Qaim and Ramadi, and they appear to have intensified in recent months, according to interviews with insurgents and with American and Iraqi officials.

In an interview on Friday, a Western diplomat who supports the talks said that the Americans had opened face-to-face discussions with insurgents in the field, and that they were communicating with senior insurgent leaders through intermediaries.

The diplomat said the goal was to take advantage of rifts in the insurgency, particularly between local groups, whose main goal is to expel American forces, and the more radical groups, like Al Qaeda, which have alienated many Iraqis by the mass killing of Iraqi civilians.
nytimes.com

O what a tangled web…those elusive insurgents are right there to be found when you want to talk to them…you’re promoting death squads among them…the ‘Al Qaeda’ alienation campaign might be your project too…

Iraq war could cost US over $2 trillion, says Nobel prize-winning economist
The real cost to the US of the Iraq war is likely to be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion (Ł1.1 trillion), up to 10 times more than previously thought, according to a report written by a Nobel prize-winning economist and a Harvard budget expert.

The study, which expanded on traditional estimates by including such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as the impact on the American economy, concluded that the US government is continuing to underestimate the cost of the war.

…Any attempt to find out whether the US is, or is not, constructing permanent military bases meets with frustration. The few who have attempted to get a direct answer to this question are met with evasion and purposeful confusion over what is or is not “permanent”. But this is the ultimate test of true Bush administration intentions in Iraq. If we are, in fact, constructing permanent bases, “leaving” simply means a reduction of forces and the permanent stationing of US brigades in Iraq. If this “compromise” solution appeals to you, you might wish to refresh your memory about the disastrous French experience in Indochina or even certain phases of the British occupation of Iraq.

Under circumstances where Congress was performing its constitutional oversight responsibilities, and where the press was less intimidated by power, it would be a straightforward exercise to determine whether a final neoconservative trick is afoot. Congressional committees would have senior civilian and uniformed Pentagon and State department officials answer direct questions about US plans. “Mr or Madame secretary, are we, or are we not, constructing permanent military bases in Iraq and, if so, for what purpose?”
news.yahoo.com/huff post

(AP) BAGHDAD – The largest oil refinery in Iraq is closed again.

An Iraqi official says the refinery located about 155 miles north of Baghdad had to be closed after insurgents ambushed a tanker truck carrying gas from the facility Wednesday.

The official also tells Dow Jones Newswires that pumping to the refinery has stopped because its reserves are full.

The ambush saw four tankers destroyed, another 15 damaged and three Iraqi army vehicles blown up.

The refinery that pumps about 140,000 barrels a day had to be closed last month after insurgents threatened to kill drivers transporting oil and blow up their trucks.

Despite large oil reserves, Iraq frequently suffers from gas shortages because its refining capacity is so low.
uruknet.info

Kurdistan: Meet the New Bosses
The neocons in Washington love to talk about how they’re promoting freedom and democracy in Iraq. They often cite as their example the country’s Kurdish population, staunch allies of Washington, who have been protected by the American military since no-fly zones were imposed after the 1991 Gulf War.

But just how much freedom is there in northern Iraq?

Consider the case of Dr. Kamal Sayid Qadir, a well-known Kurdish writer, lawyer, and university lecturer who holds Austrian citizenship. He was picked up by the Kurdish security service in Arbil on Oct. 26 and sentenced to 30 years behind bars.

Qadir’s arrest is clearly an affront to freedom, and his case has been taken up by key human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the international writers group PEN, as well as the Iraqi Journalists Guild. Dozens of prominent Kurdish journalists and intellectuals around the world have also signed a petition calling for his immediate release.

Qadir was arrested because he was a fierce critic of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) – the two armed Kurdish factions who have ruled northern Iraq under U.S. auspices.

Earlier this year, for example, he wrote that Kurdish leaders have failed to “transform Iraqi Kurdistan into a model democracy for Iraq, or even the Middle East, because, instead, the Kurdish parties transformed Iraqi Kurdistan into a fortress for oppression, theft of public funds, and serious abuses of human rights like murder, torture, amputation of ears and noses, and rape.”

Mourning Turns to Anger in Iraqi Shi’ite City

REVIVED INSURGENCY OR DESPERATE ACTS?
The insurgency has taken off again after what seemed to be a lull in activity.

U.S. officials have been insisting that there would be a rise in violence after the elections, but the ferocity of the attacks cannot be attributed to that reason alone.

Until yesterday most of the attacks were concentrated against the Iraqi police. But these last two days it seems the targets are more wide spread: a market place, a funeral, a convoy of gas tankers, the walkway between two shrines, as well as an Iraqi police recruiting center.

A visiting Iraqi journalist commented that the situation is going to get worse. He thinks the insurgents now feel empowered because they believe the American troops will start to pull out.

His fear and the fear of many Iraqis is that lawlessness is they something will have to live with for long time.

But today American officials emphasized that these are desperate acts by an insurgency in its dying throes to derail the march to democracy.

President Bush summoned most of the living former secretaries of state and defense to the White House yesterday for what participants described as a cordial but pointed discussion about the future of Iraq.

The bipartisan advice-seeking was virtually unprecedented for this White House, which has drawn criticism even from Republicans for being insular in its deliberations and dismissive of dissenters.

The session in the Roosevelt Room came complete with a photo opportunity and presidential statement after Bush spent an hour with such prominent foreign policy voices as Robert S. McNamara, a Democratic secretary of defense during the Vietnam era 40 years ago, and James A. Baker III, the secretary of state for Bush’s father during the Persian Gulf War of the early 1990s.
washingtonpost.com

The stench of the living dead in that room must have been terrific. Was Kissinger there?

Buried dead, Big Easy Profits

Joyce Green died on the roof of her Lower 9th Ward home as her New Orleans neighborhood flooded during Hurricane Katrina. Helplessly, her son watched her die as the water rushed dangerously below them. Just last week he was able to return to their collapsed house on Tennessee Street for the first time, and found her skeletal remains amidst the ruins. He was able to identify them because they were wrapped in the clothes she was wearing the day she died.

During Katrina, the Lower 9th Ward was deluged due to breaches in the Industrial Canal levee. Additionally, an enormous barge that was illegally left in the canal was launched into the neighborhood, destroying lives and property during its reckless trajectory. Four months later, many questions remain unanswered regarding the destruction in the Lower 9th Ward, including the question of possible criminal negligence. However, before those questions have been fully investigated, let alone answered, the City of New Orleans is rushing to bulldoze much of the neighborhood–without informing homeowners.

On the eve of the holiday season, Greg Meffert, the city’s chief technology officer, revealed that the city would immediately demolish about 2,500 “red-tagged” homes in the Lower 9th Ward. Before Meffert’s announcement, a red-tag merely meant that a home was unsafe to enter. The City of New Orleans website specifically states in bold italicized text that “a red sticker does not indicate whether or not a building will be demolished, only that the structure is currently unsafe to enter.”

Yet the City decided to bulldoze red-tagged homes without informing homeowners of the new meaning of the red tags or the demolition order. This is a clear violation of due process, guaranteed under federal and state constitutions, which protects property owners from the unlawful destruction of their property. It is also a clear, opportunistic attack on the Lower 9th Ward community, whose historically black roots run deep in the neighborhood. Boasting the highest level of black homeownership in the nation, the area is also where many black New Orleanians have traditionally been able to purchase their first homes.
counterpunch.org

by Michel Chossudovsky
The launching of an outright war using nuclear warheads against Iran is now in the final planning stages.

Coalition partners, which include the US, Israel and Turkey are in “an advanced stage of readiness”.

Various military exercises have been conducted, starting in early 2005. In turn, the Iranian Armed Forces have also conducted large scale military maneuvers in the Persian Gulf in December in anticipation of a US sponsored attack.

Since early 2005, there has been intense shuttle diplomacy between Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara and NATO headquarters in Brussels.

In recent developments, CIA Director Porter Goss on a mission to Ankara, requested Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “to provide political and logistic support for air strikes against Iranian nuclear and military targets.” Goss reportedly asked ” for special cooperation from Turkish intelligence to help prepare and monitor the operation.” (DDP, 30 December 2005).

In turn, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given the green light to the Israeli Armed Forces to launch the attacks by the end of March:

All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the deadline for launching a military assault on Iran…. The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on Iran’s nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action.

(James Petras, Israel’s War Deadline: Iran in the Crosshairs, Global Research, December 2005)

The US sponsored military plan has been endorsed by NATO, although it is unclear, at this stage, as to the nature of NATO’s involvement in the planned aerial attacks.
globalresearch.ca

Interview with Mordechai Vanunu: Israel preparing to use nuclear weapons against Iran
Each and every nuclear bomb is a Holocaust in itself. It can kill, devastate cities, destroy entire peoples.

Bad enough that the U.S. military is occupying Iraq.
Now the IMF is occupying the country.

In December, the International Monetary Fund, in exchange for giving a loan of $685 million to the Iraqi government, insisted that the Iraqis lift subsidies on the price of oil and open the economy to more private investment.

As the IMF said in a press release of December 23, the Iraqi government must be committed to “controlling the wage and pensions bill, reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products.”

The impact of the IMF extortion was swift and brutal.

“Since the Dec. 15 parliamentary election, fuel prices have increased five-fold, mostly because the outgoing government of Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari has cut subsidies as part of a debt-forgiveness deal it signed with the International Monetary Fund,” the Los Angeles Times reported on December 28.

“The move has shocked Iraqis long accustomed to hefty subsidies of gasoline, kerosene, cooking gas, and other fuels.”

Iraqis are getting a nasty taste of the IMF’s medicine. “Over the summer, gas was selling for about five cents a gallon,” the LA Times noted. “Now it’s about 65 cents, and at the end of the price increases, gasoline will cost about the same in Iraq as it does in other countries in the Persian Gulf, about $1 per gallon. The prices of kerosene, diesel, and cooking gas have seen similar or steeper increases.” The price of public transportation has also gone up significantly.

Not surprisingly, these enormous price hikes have led to riots around the country, with police firing on 3,000 protesters in Nassiryeh, according to an account on Daily Kos. www.dailykos.com/story/2005/12/20/11119/029,
Iraq’s oil minister quit to protest the government’s capitulation to the IMF. According to Daily Kos, Oil Minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Uloum asked, “Is this how we repay the Iraq citizens who risked their lives to participate in the elections, by raising fuel prices in this way?”
progressive.org

Anger as Britain admits it was wrong to blame Iran for deaths in Iraq
MPs and soldiers’ families have demanded an explanation from the Government after a U-turn over claims that Iran was complicit in the killing of British soldiers in southern Iraq.

Britain has dropped the charge of Iranian involvement after senior officials had repeatedly accused the Tehran regime of supplying sophisticated explosive devices to insurgents. Government officials now acknowledge that there is no evidence, or even reliable intelligence, connecting the Iranian government to the infra-red triggered bombs which have killed 10 British soldiers in the past eight months.

whoops

The Iranian Left & the Iraq War
A glance at websites and newspapers of many Iranian “left” groups residing outside the country, gives one little impression that Iran’s neighboring country, Iraq, is in a state of war and occupation by the US Empire. There seems to be little concern among Iran’s traditional left about the United States’ intentions to take over and control Middle East’s oil resources. The neoconservative “Project for the New American Century (PNAC)” signifies little (if anything) to many of Iran’s left groups (1). Some, even, under the pretext of fighting fundamentalist Islamists(2), indirectly cheer the American incursion into Afghanistan and Iraq. In reality, however, Iraq is a mirror reflecting the many flaws and shortcomings of the left in the Middle East.

Some in the Iranian left might be evasive on the issue of their silence about the US imperialism’s crimes in the region, but the Iraqi left’s direct collaboration with the Bush administration is undeniable. As part of the Iraqi Governing Council, the Iraqi Communist Party (with the exception of the breakaway faction) and the Kurdish forces headed by Jalal Talebani and Masoud Barezani, collaborated with the US occupation forces, not just in the arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of Iraqi insurgents, but also in the process of building a neo-liberal state that will sell out the future of Iraqis (Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites alike) to the capitalist institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and such transnational corporations as Halliburton, Bechtel, etc. In their impotent (if not incompetent) quest against Saddam’s regime, they have ended up collaborating with a colonial power to topple a secular government, only to replace it with a fundamentalist, theocratic regime in a landscape leaning towards civil war. Do they really think they will have any following among the people of Iraq when the present puppet government is gone?

The same unfortunate parallels can be drawn with respect to the Iranian left. Instead of questioning their tactics and strategy as a result of which the Mullahs, not the left were able to take power after the fall of the Shah’s dictatorship, at a moment of ultimate debility, the Western-cultured leftists seem to be waiting for the overthrow of Iran’s Islamic Republic regime in the hands of the US imperialism without the slightest concern over (or understanding of) what will pursue in the aftermath.

Before disputing any of the above assertions, these intellectuals would have to explain their disregard, silence, or cheerleading for a number of issues, some of which are listed below:

A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.
washtimes.com