President George W Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq – and create a Palestinian State, a new BBC series reveals.

In Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, a major three-part series on BBC TWO (at 9.00pm on Monday 10, Monday 17 and Monday 24 October), Abu Mazen, Palestinian Prime Minister, and Nabil Shaath, his Foreign Minister, describe their first meeting with President Bush in June 2003.

Nabil Shaath says: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …” And I did. And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, “Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.” And by God I’m gonna do it.'”

Abu Mazen was at the same meeting and recounts how President Bush told him: “I have a moral and religious obligation. So I will get you a Palestinian state.”
bbc.co.uk

help us, Jeebus.

Catholic Church no longer swears by truth of the Bible

THE hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has published a teaching document instructing the faithful that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

WASHINGTON – President Bush, trying to reverse a slide in public support for the war in Iraq, said Thursday that Islamic radicals are seeking to “enslave whole nations and intimidate the world,” and called that a prime reason not to cut and run in Iraq.

“There’s always a temptation in the middle of a long struggle to seek the quiet life, to escape the duties and problems of the world and to hope the enemy grows weary of fanaticism and tired of murder,” he said, seeking to address calls from anti-war activists for a U.S. troop withdrawal.
news.yahoo.com

Not surprising that Bush doesn’t get the irony of his words, since they apply to him and his better than anybody.

COLUMBUS , Ohio – States that sentence the most criminals to death also tend to be the states that had the most lynchings in the past, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that the number of death sentences for all criminals – Black and white – were higher in states with a history of lynchings. But the link was even stronger when only Black death sentences were analyzed.

The results may be shocking to many people, but they aren’t surprising to sociologists who study the racial aspects of the death penalty, said David Jacobs, co-author of the study and professor of sociology at Ohio State University .

“Our results suggest that the death penalty has become a sort of legal replacement for the lynchings in the past,” Jacobs said. “This hasn’t been done overtly, and probably no one has consciously made such a decision. But the results show a clear connection.”

Another study finding reinforces this idea. Results showed that the number of death sentences in states with the most lynchings increased as the state’s population of African Americans grew larger, at least to a certain point. The researchers believe that is because, as their numbers increase, Blacks are seen by the white majority as a growing threat.
axisoflogic.com

Scientists have recreated the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the deadliest ever to emerge, to the alarm of many researchers who fear it presents a serious security risk.

Undisclosed quantities of the virus are being held in a high-security government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia, after a nine-year effort to rebuild the agent that swept the globe in record time and claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people.

The genetic sequence is also being made available to scientists online, a move which some fear adds a further risk of the virus being created in other labs.
guardian.co.uk

A researcher interviewed on NPR talked about the “eerie parallels” between the 1918 influenza and bird flu. I don’t know what the heck is going on, but not so eerie, I’m afraid…

An angry groundswell has risen against the appointment of George W. Bush’s personal attorney to the US Supreme Court.

One key question must be asked: as a Justice, would she soon be asked to rule on a conspiracy conviction against her present boss?

…Indeed, the labyrinthian complications of the Plame case multiply the odds overshadowing any simple case against any single individual from the White House.

But conspiracy would be a different story. It would seem patently obvious that outing Plame had to have been discussed in some form by the very top of the Bush junta.

That Bush himself knew Plame was a CIA agent has long since been established. That Libby, Rove and Cheney knew is also beyond doubt.

So how the knowledge of Plame’s status somehow leapt to the ears of columnist Robert Novak and the likes of Judith Miller may be more important than the outing itself.

If Bush, Cheney, Rove and Libby did discuss such a retaliation, and then found a way to make it happen, we are suddenly out of the playoffs and into the World Series.

In Watergate, the coverup became the crime of importance. In Iran-Contra, it was who knew what when. In the Plame case, it could well be who discussed what with whom when.
commondreams.org

Osama bin laden is expected to remain in hiding until he stages another attack on the United States, an ex-CIA expert who had tracked the terror mastermind for two decades warned in an interview.

“As soon as he hits us in the United States again we’ll see how important he is in the Islamic world,” Michael Scheuer, the former head of the “bin Laden unit” at the CIA, told AFP in an interview.

Despite his low profile, bin Laden remains powerful, Scheuer said, shrugging off reports that the Al-Qaeda chief was isolated and his communication network shattered due to a relentless hunt for him.

“We mistake quiet for defeat or irrelevance. And all quiet is disquiet,” said Scheuer, a fierce critic of the Bush administration and its “War on Terror” policy since he left the CIA in November last year.
breitbart.com

Maybe he took a brief leave of absence to plan the damn thing.With ‘fierce critics’ like this, who needs allies?

Britain and Iran clashed openly last night after a senior British official directly accused Tehran of supplying Iraqi insurgents with sophisticated roadside bombs that have killed eight British soldiers and two security guards since May.

The bombs, triggered when an infra-red beam is touched, have created havoc among British forces in southern Iraq. They release a projectile capable of penetrating armoured vehicles, against which the British army has virtually no defence.

The British official said that Iranian interference in Iraq could be related to British pressure on Iran over its suspected nuclear weapons ambitions. “It would be entirely natural that they would want to send a message ‘Don’t mess with us’,” he said. An Iranian government spokesman rejected the British accusations and said it was opposed to the insurgency in Iraq.
guardian.co.uk

10/05/05 “TomPaine.com” — — A flurry of Arab diplomacy over the last few days is unfolding in a rear-guard effort to prevent the crisis in Iraq from exploding into what Saudi Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal warned last month could be a regional civil war involving not only Iraq, but all of its neighbors.

The main, and well-deserved, target of Saud’s ire was the increasingly authoritarian and brutal rule of the main Iraqi Shiite parties, especially the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose Badr Brigade militia are terrorizing Iraq’s secular, urban Shiite population and carrying out death-squad attacks against Sunnis. The attacks against the Sunnis are aimed not only at the Iraqi armed resistance but at secular, nationalist Sunni leaders and activists.

Last week, I reported on the fear of Shiite militias and death squads as reported by Aiham Al Sammarae, an Iraqi oppositionist and former minister under the interim government in 2004 who is trying to broker a deal with the Iraqi resistance. Since then, other reports have surfaced concerning the extensive violence carried out by paramilitary forces tied to SCIRI and to Al Dawa, SCIRI’s partner in the Shiite religious bloc in Iraq. By now it is clear that if Tony Soprano lived in Iraq, he’d be a member of the Shiite militia. Consider the following report from CBS News:

CBS News correspondent Lara Logan reports there is a secret, ruthless cleansing of the country’s towns and cities. Bodies—blindfolded, bound and executed—just appear, like the rotting corpses of 36 Sunni men that turned up in a dry riverbed south of Baghdad.

CBS News traced 16 of those men to a single street in a Baghdad suburb, where family members showed CBS News how the killers forced their way into their homes in the middle of the night and dragged away their sons and fathers.

“My uncles were tortured, they even poured acid on them,” a young boy told CBS News.

Clutching photographs of the murdered men, the women and children left behind came together to grieve.

One woman said as her husband was marched away she sent her son after him with his slippers, but his abductor sent the child back with a chilling message: No need for slippers—he will come back dead.

They were targeted for one reason alone: all were Sunnis.

Or this, from the Chicago Tribune :

In the dead of night, bands of armed men in Iraqi commando uniforms stormed Baghdad’s Hurriyah neighborhood in late August, breaking down doors with sledgehammers and grenades.

If the family inside was Shiite, the gunmen moved on to another house, witnesses said. If the family was Sunni, the gunmen tore through the building, demolishing furniture and manhandling those inside. More than 70 young Sunni Arab men were whisked away.

Countless atrocities, too, have been perpetrated by Sunni gangs and by terrorists associated with Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. But the killings by the Shiite militias are far more chilling because they have an entirely different quality: They are carried out by gunmen tied to the U.S.-supported regime in Baghdad. They don’t draw criticism from U.S. officials, and most American media reports continue to portray the Shiites as victims and the Sunnis as aggressors.

Still, it is the ferocity of the Shiite fanaticism governing Iraq today, and the ruling circle’s ever-closer ties to Iran, that prompted Prince Saud to warn of a regional civil war sparked by the Shiites. He brought that message to Washington last week, talking to senators and to the Washington press corps. He then flew back to the Middle East to attend a meeting of Arab foreign ministers, including Iraq’s Foreign Minister Hossein Zebari. We’ll come to the Arab League meeting shortly, but first some background:
informationclearinghouse.info

Wolfowitz and Negroponte: “The Salvador Option.”

A Wolfowitz in sheep’s clothing
10/04/05 “New York Times” — — WASHINGTON – Paul Wolfowitz is having fun.

“It’s fun to have the chance to be a retail politician again,” he told Andrew Balls of The Financial Times on a recent trip to India. It was an economic odyssey designed to warm up his image by tipping off the press to record his shirt-sleeve visit to a slum and his street-dancing with children in Andhra Pradesh.

When the reporter noted that Wolfowitz’s role as No.2 at the Pentagon must seem distant, he agreed, saying, “Yes, it does seem like a long time ago.”

A lot has changed for this architect of the Iraq war since he left the scene of the accident. Following the lead of that other wooly-headed war theoretician, Robert McNamara, Wolfie scuttled to the World Bank, where he changed the subject from bollixing up Iraq to fixing up Africa.

Unlike the Powell maxim “If you break it, you own it,” the Wolfowitz philosophy is “If you break it, walk away from it.”

Where on earth are those who egged on the Iraq civil war?

Puppets, Policies and Priorities
…The most flagrant example of this tactic in the modern world is the Presidency of the United States of America, where one expendable, and not totally obedient, President has been replaced by another who has been programmed to do exactly as his operators wish. We saw this when disaster struck the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and the current puppet was seen to be seeking help in reading from a class of small children, or, when the hurricane Katrina struck the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans was flooded, the string-pullers overlooked the need to tell him about it for several days. In both cases, he was left for vital (though short) periods without instructions, since the puppet-masters had not realised that this time-lag would be noticed by so many.

I am not suggesting that these shadowy and extremely sinister figures should come out of hiding to speak for themselves, but it makes it essential for every citizen to try to unmask these manipulators who exercise real power over the state and the lives of every single person within it.

What we do know, because of the policies which have been revealed to the world, is that these puppet-masters have no interest in, or loyalty towards, the country which they control. They clearly have other loyalties, and there are three groups which have come to light, and some of the rulers are loyal to all three, others to two of them and still others just to one. The common factor in these three loyalty groups is that they are all bound to harm the interests of the general population of the U.S.A.

Although they are often intertwined, it is worthwhile to examine each of these strands of crude treachery separately, and I will call them, for the sake of simplicity, rampant capitalism, Zionism and (supposedly Christian) obfuscation.

In August 2005, Israel configured its 38-year illegal military occupation of the Gaza Strip by unilaterally ‘disengaging’ from the territory and evacuating its illegal Jewish settlers. However, the Palestinian territory continues to be under Israel’s brutal occupation. Israel’s ‘disengagement’ plan is nothing but Israeli PR, over-sold by Western media to divert the public from the brutality of Israel’s Occupation of Palestinian land. Israeli military control of the world’s largest open-air prison will continue unhindered, with tacit support of Western powers.
axisoflogic.com

Botswana’s police commissioner said on Tuesday that officers had fired rubber bullets to disperse a group of about 35 Bushmen protesting their eviction from ancestral lands in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.

The Basarwa tribesmen had been trying to break through blockades and enter the reserve on Saturday, police commissioner Edwin Batshu said. Some demonstrators, including mothers with infants and young children, were briefly detained, but were not charged, he said.

The Kalahari Bushmen said their leader, Roy Sesana, was arrested and beaten by police. One protester was shot in the jaw and hospitalised, according to a tribal spokesperson who did not want to be named for fear of police retaliation.

The Batswara accused the government of evicting them to relocation camps in an effort to clear the land for De Beers mining giant to explore for diamonds and minerals.

An estimated 2 000 people have been relocated to camps. However, several families were still living in the reserve, cut off from food and water, the Bushmen said.
mg.co.za