Congressman Ron Paul has accused the Bush administration of attempting to set in motion a militarized police state in America by enacting gun confiscation martial law provisions in the event of an avian flu pandemic. Paul also slammed as delusional and dangerous plans to invade Iran, Syria, North Korea and China.

Ron Paul represents the 14th Congressional district of Texas. He also serves on the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee, and the International Relations committee.

Paul appeared on the Alex Jones show yesterday and raised some interesting points about the possibility of imminent indictments of top Bush administration figures.

“I think there’s a lot more excitement coming and it’s not going to be good for the Republicans,” stated Paul.

“The things that I hear have to do with Karl Rove and Abramoff and that’s much much worse than anybody would believe and it involves DeLay as well.”

“And that type of an indictment will be much more serious than the indictment of shifting campaign funds around…..there’s some political infighting which could make that really interesting.”

On the subject of the police state, Paul stated,

“If we don’t change our ways we will go the way of Rome and I see that as rather sad…..the worst things happen when you get the so-called Republican conservatives in charge from Nixon on down, big government flourishes under Republicans.”

“It’s really hard to believe it’s happening right in front of us. Whether it’s the torture or the process of denying habeas corpus to an American citizen.”

“I think the arrogance of power that they have where they themselves are like Communists….in the sense that they decide what is right. The Communist Party said that they decided what was right or wrong, it wasn’t a higher source.”

Paul responded to President Bush’s announcement last week that he would order the use of military assets to police America in the event of an avian flu outbreak.

“To me it’s so strange that the President can make these proposals and it’s even plausible. When he talks about martial law dealing with some epidemic that might come later on and having forced quarantines, doing away with Posse Comitatus in order to deal with natural disasters, and hardly anybody says anything. People must be scared to death.”
prisonplanet.com

The Israeli army has signalled its intention to keep using Palestinian civilians as human shields in operations aimed at assassinating, arresting or kidnapping Palestinian political and resistance activists.

The Israeli High Court issued a ruling earlier this week barring the army from using Palestinian civilians as human shields, a practice used heavily in the West Bank, particularly since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifada or uprising in 2000.

On Tuesday, Israeli military sources said the army would press the High Court to reconsider the ruling on the ground that it would complicate “army activities” in the West Bank.
aljazeera.net

Beyond Chutzpah
A review of Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, University of California Press 2005

It is not everyday that a professor hires a prestigious law firm to threaten the University of California Press, yet for months Alan Dershowitz, Harvard’s Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, tried to stop UC Press from publishing Norman Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah. When the Press’ director Lynne Withey replied that she believed in academic freedom and would therefore go ahead with the book, Dershowitz sent letters to the university’s board of trustees and even to California’s governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, asking them to intervene on his behalf. Following both the trustees’ and governor’s decision not to get involved, one would have thought that the struggle had ended, but now that the book is on the shelves it seems that a new campaign is underway; this time an attempt to cancel the author’s reading engagements for example at Harvard Bookstore and Barnes and Noble in Chicago. So what is the controversy about?

A purported al-Qaida web posting has charged the United States with fabricating a letter from the group’s second in command allegedly to its leader in Iraq asking for money and laying out the group’s plans for the Middle East.

“We in al-Qaida declare that there is no truth to these claims, and they are baseless, except in the imagination of the politicians of the Black (White) House,” according to the statement on a web site known as a clearing house for al-Qaida material.

The statement was signed by Abu Maysara, who claims to be spokesman for al-Qaida in Iraq. It could not be authenticated.

“We call on Muslims not to pay attention to this cheap propaganda and to remember that the media will always be the infidels’ sole weapon until the end of the battle,” the statement said.

US claim

US officials said the letter to al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, first disclosed by the Pentagon on Friday and released in full on Tuesday, was acquired during American operations in Iraq and dated 9 July.
aljazeera.net

Purported Letter to al-Zarqawi from al-Zawahri

CARACAS, Venezuela, Oct. 12 (Reuters) – President Hugo Chávez on Wednesday ordered a Christian missionary group working with indigenous peoples to leave the country after accusing its members of “imperialist infiltration” and spying.

Mr. Chávez briefly suspended foreign missionary permits in August after the American evangelist Pat Robertson called on Washington to assassinate the left-wing leader.

The group he is evicting is the Florida-based New Tribes Mission, which trains and coordinates missionaries to preach in remote areas, and has 160 assigned in Venezuela, according to its Web site.

No one answered the United States telephone number on the site.

“This is real imperialist penetration,” Mr. Chávez said of the group. “They are taking sensitive and strategic information.”
nytimes.com

Chavez for President!

President George W. Bush’s temper tantrums are on the rise with White House insiders reporting increasing tongue-lashing of staffers, obscenity-filled outbursts and a leader driven to the edge by what he sees as party disloyalty and a country that no longer trusts him.

Conservative backlash over his latest Supreme Court nominee may, in fact, have pushed the President over the edge.

“He’s out of control,” one White House aide says privately. “There’s no other way to put it. His anger spills over in meetings. He berates anyone who brings him bad news but there’s not a lot of good news we can bring the President right now. He calls other Republicans ‘motherfucking traitors’ and it is becoming more and more of a challenge to keep that anger from showing in public.”

A Bush White House that has always prided itself with an ability to shield the President’s weaknesses from the public faces a mounting list of embarrassing public incidents.

The most recent came when Bush fled Washington to avoid the largest anti-war rally since Vietnam, some reporters asked him if he was running away.
axisoflogic/capitolhillblue

The hired hands of Big Business, the thugs who make up the somewhat credible-looking façade of the government of the United States — and many other countries — are well on their way to changing the mechanisms by which the world is run.

Their buddies in Europe, in this Mafioso enactment of the big scheme, are the new socialists — Gerard Schröder of Germany and the New Labour apostle, Tony Blair of Britain. The so-called rightist governments of France, Italy and, until recently, Spain are not noticeably different from the ‘new socialists’. They seem to have reunited themselves in what is known as the ‘third’ way. Left and right seem to be concepts without any meaning and, at this stage of the game, the world seems to be charging forth to accommodate the cold-handed robots who have bought up our politicians. It’s a champagne and caviar party for only 1% of the 1% of the people of the earth — and the rest of us are paying for it.

The buying of the world is what this is all about, the privatization of all the utilities that we thought of as belonging to the realm of local and federal government. Naďvely, it seemed to us that everybody on the planet should have a right to:

clean water
a non-toxic environment
proper sewerage and electricity
access to basic education
freedom from religious persecution.

And in places where the standard of living is not up to this task, then for shame, make it up to the formerly exploited countries and pay them back for the disgraceful and humiliating ways they were treated during colonial and the slave trade eras.
axisoflogic.com

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the current incarnation of a nation that has been known to history by various names, although most of us will have known it as Belgian Congo or Zaďre. It is presently known in some circles as Congo-Kinshasa, to distinguish it from its neighbour, Republic of Congo, or Congo-Brazzaville. Much of DRC’s western border is comprised of the Congo River, which it shares with Republic of Congo in an undefined way; no specific agreements have been reached on the division of the river, its islands, or its resources.

This nation of approximately 55 million people straddles the equator in central Africa, an area called by author Joseph Conrad the “Heart of Darkness”. When you hear the phrase “darkest Africa”, this is it.

DRC is comprised of more than 200 ethnic groups and is surrounded by Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia, and Angola. It is virtually landlocked although there is a narrow band of a few dozen miles along the western Bight of Africa.

And the country has had a troubled history that leads squarely back to one man: King Leopold II of Belgium.
axisoflogic.com

Vice President Cheney in a recent speech to US military personnel has acknowledged that the war could go on for several decades. This statement, which reveals the Bush Administration’s commitment to global warfare, was barely mentioned by the mainstream media.

We are dealing with a “military roadmap”. Iraq and Afghanistan are at the outset of the Bush administration’s military adventure.

Cheney warned that the US will be involved in war for decades to come:

“Like other great duties in history, it will require decades of patient effort, and it will be resisted by those whose only hope for power is through the spread of violence.”

What is referred to in military parlance as GWOT (The Global War on Terrorism) requires, according to Cheney, the deployment of US forces Worldwide in more than one hundred countries rather than in a select number of overseas military bases::

“American soldiers are currently serving in 120 countries, and the Army remains an active, visible sign of America’s commitments — defending our interests, standing by our friends, keeping patient vigil against possible dangers, and, above all, directly engaging the enemies of the United States.”

The US will be involved in the conduct of major theater wars as well as “military policing” and punitive actions.

These actions are based on the doctrine of preemptive warfare, where war is conducted as an act of self defense.

The US will also be involved in military actions against “failed states” and “unstable nations”, which do not constitute a perceived threat to the security of the US, as defined in the March 2005 National Security Strategy.

The NSS consists in US military presence around the World, the development of new weapons systems, the conduct of theater wars and global military policing.

The stated purpose of the US military agenda as conveyed in Cheney’s speech are to:

a) fight terrorism and protect the “civilized World”
“There is still difficult work ahead, because the terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against the civilized world. We are dealing with enemies that recognize no rule of warfare and accept no standard of morality, and they are determined to continue waging a campaign of terror against coalition forces, Iraqi security personnel, and other innocents.

By their methods of murder, the terrorists hope to overturn Iraq’s democratic government and return that country to the rule of tyrants, and then use Iraq as a staging area for ever greater attacks against America and other civilized nations.

If the terrorists were to succeed, they would return Iraq to the rule of tyrants, make it a source of instability in the Middle East, and use it as a staging area for ever greater attacks against America and other civilized nations.

b) promote democracy
If the terrorists were to succeed, they would return Iraq to the rule of tyrants, make it a source of instability in the Middle East, and use it as a staging area for ever greater attacks against America and other civilized nations.

c) spread free market reforms Worldwide
In the broader Middle East and beyond, America will continue to encourage free markets, democracy, and tolerance, because these are the ideas and the aspirations that overcome violence, and turn societies to the pursuits of peace.”
globalresearch.ca

10/12/05 “Daily Star” — — BEIRUT: In the latest official Syrian comment on the increasing pressure on Damascus, Premier Naji Otari said “all the gates of hell will open on the U.S. if it attempts to attack Syria.” Otari was replying to a report this week in Newsweek magazine revealing that Washington had debated launching military strikes inside Syria against camps used by insurgents operating in Iraq.

Citing unnamed government sources, the magazine reported that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had managed to block the proposal during a meeting of senior U.S. officials on October 1.

Speaking to reporters in Shanon, Ireland, on a four-nation tour, Rice said: “I am not going to comment on internal deliberations in the administration.”

Otari also accused Lebanese officials of being unable to make an independent decision, saying they were answerable to the French and U.S. ambassadors to Lebanon.
infoclearinghouse.info

Sinking under a host of socioeconomic problems and still in mourning after the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, the African-American community is in deep pain. It finds itself directionless, losing ground and lacking the world-class leadership it needs to right itself.

In other words: Black America is in desperate need of a hero. Friday afternoon, a hero returned.

In an emotional, see-saw speech, former U.S. Rep. Ron Dellums announced to a deliriously happy crowd of 500 that next year he will run for mayor of Oakland.

The announcement was a dramatic turnabout, because he mounted the podium apparently intending to say “no.”

A grassroots movement had sprung up to draft him, collecting 8,000 signatures using only volunteer labor. But Dellums, the hero of the anti-apartheid struggle and mentor to anti-war U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, has been working for the past few years as a well-paid Washington lobbyist. Though he looks like a fit man of 50, he is actually nearly 70 years old.

In other words, he is of retirement age and finally earning some money. No one could fairly begrudge him the chance to spend his twilight years unburdened by all the problems of urban America. Oakland has some of the highest crime and murder rates in America. Its public schools are crumbling and in receivership. The city council often appears dysfunctional and largely in the pocket of big developers. No one in his right mind would willingly take on the challenge of turning around this town.
commondreams.org