Lewis “Scooter” Libby has been called Dick Cheney’s Dick Cheney: a constant presence behind the scenes enforcing loyalty providing the means to meet his boss’s ends.
Mr Libby (who earned his nickname as a hyperactive infant) played a central role in compiling the White House’s allegations of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, travelling with the vice-president to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, several times in 2002 to chivy sceptical agency analysts.

Before Colin Powell made his fateful presentation of the WMD case to the UN in February 2003, it was Mr Libby who tried to persuade the former secretary of state to include controversial reports that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, had met an Iraqi agent in Prague. Mr Powell rejected the claims but Mr Libby did not give up, telephoning him late into the night on the eve of the presentation, calling for the inclusion of other allegations.

Mr Libby also contacted the Pentagon before a substantial contract to repair Iraq’s oil fields was awarded to Halliburton, Mr Cheney’s old firm. And he talked to Time magazine’s Matt Cooper and the New York Times’s Judy Miller in July 2003 about the identity of a CIA undercover agent, Valerie Plame who was the wife of a prominent administration critic.

He joined the Bush administration along the same path followed by many influential officials. After taking a political science class at Yale given by Paul Wolfowitz, the current head of the World Bank, he became part of a network of neo-conservatives known as “the Vulcans”. Mr Wolfowitz later persuaded him to drop his private law practice and join the Reagan administration.

He moved from the state department to the Pentagon under the first President Bush, where a policy paper he wrote calling for the US to build up its military strength to the point where it could not be challenged, caught the eye of the then defence secretary, Mr Cheney.
guardian.co.uk

A white farmer convicted of murdering a black former employee and throwing him to a pride of lions was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday at the end of a case that hit a raw nerve across South Africa, highlighting simmering racial tensions 11 years after the end of apartheid.
Crowds of angry black people inside and outside the courtroom in the small rural town of Phalaborwa cheered when Judge George Maluleke sentenced Mark Scott-Crossley to life imprisonment. Simon Mathebula, an employee of Scott-Crossleya who was also convicted of the murder, received 15 years, with three years suspended, as the judge ruled that he was merely an accomplice.

The two men were convicted of killing Nelson Chisale in January 2004. Mr Chisale had been sacked by Scott-Crossley a month before but returned to the farm to retrieve some pots and pans. He was seized by Mathebula, who tied him to a tree and, with Scott-Crossley, beat him until he lost consciousness, the court was told.

Scott-Crossley then used his pickup truck to carry Mr Chisale several miles away to a farm where rare white lions were being bred. With the help of Mathebula and two other employees, Scott-Crossley threw Mr Chisale into an enclosure which held five lions.

All that was found of Mr Chisale were a few bones and some shredded clothes. His remains were identified by a single finger from which police could take a print. Although the autopsy stated that Mr Chisale had died from being “mauled by lions”, it was not clear whether he was dead before being thrown into the pen or not.
guardian.co.uk

Large parts of the Amazon rainforest are at their driest in living memory, a direct consequence, scientists say, of the severe hurricane season off the US Gulf coast.

Rainfall has been significantly below average this year along the Rio Solimoes and the Rio Madeira, two of the major Brazilian tributaries that flow into the Amazon, causing water levels to drop to record lows. Rivers and lakes are drying up, revealing huge sandbanks and making navigation difficult for boats. Since many towns are only accessible by river, medicine, food and fuel are running out in some communities.
guardian.co.uk

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 – Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush’s education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.

In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated “covert propaganda” in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
nytimes.com

Study: Sun’s Changes to Blame for Part of Global Warming

Increased output from the Sun might be to blame for 10 to 30 percent of global warming that has been measured in the past 20 years, according to a new report.

Increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases still play a role, the scientists say.

But climate models of global warming should be corrected to better account for changes in solar activity, according to Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West of Duke University.
livescience.com

The Anglo-American goal of “federalism” for Iraq is part of an imperial strategy of provoking divisions in a country where traditionally the communities have overlapped, even inter-married. The Osama-like promotion of al-Zarqawi is integral to this. Like the Scarlet Pimpernel, he is everywhere but nowhere. When the Americans crushed the city of Fallujah last year, the justification for their atrocious behaviour was “getting those guys loyal to al-Zarqawi”. But the city’s civil and religious authorities denied he was ever there or had anything to do with the resistance.

“He is simply an invention.” said the Imam of Baghdad’s al-Kazimeya mosque. “Al-Zarqawi was killed in the beginning of the war in the Kurdish north. His family even held a ceremony after his death.” Whether or not this is true, al-Zaqawi’s “foreign invasion” serves as Bush’s and Blair’s last veil for their “war on terror” and botched attempt to control the world’s second biggest source of oil.

On 23 September, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, an establishment body, published a report that accused the US of “feeding the myth” of foreign fighters in Iraqi who account for less than 10 per cent of a resistance estimated at 30,000. Of the eight comprehensive studies into the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the “coalition”, four put the figure at more than 100,000. Until the British army is withdrawn from where it has no right to be, and those responsible for this monumental act of terrorism are indicted by the International Criminal Court, Britain is shamed.
informationclearinghouse.info

A Bush Cabinet officer predicted this week that New Orleans likely will never again be a majority black city, and several black officials are outraged.
Alphonso R. Jackson, secretary of housing and urban development, during a visit with hurricane victims in Houston, said New Orleans would not reach its pre-Katrina population of “500,000 people for a long time,” and “it’s not going to be as black as it was for a long time, if ever again.”
Rep. Danny K. Davis, Illinois Democrat and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, quickly took issue.
“Anybody who can make that kind of projection with some degree of certainty or accuracy must have a crystal ball that I can’t see or maybe they are more prophetic than any of us can imagine,” he said.
Other members of the caucus said the comments by Mr. Jackson, who is black, could be misconstrued as a goal, particularly considering his position of responsibility in the administration.
washtimes.com

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 – After Hurricane Katrina left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency signed contracts for more than $2 billion in temporary housing, including more than 120,000 trailers and mobile homes. But the agency has placed just 109 Louisiana families in those homes.

A month after the disaster, the federal government’s temporary housing effort is stumbling.

The inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security said Wednesday that FEMA was freezing many orders for trailers, although the agency disputes that. Members of Congress, complaining that a $236 million deal to lease three ships to house evacuees was far too expensive, are calling for an investigation. And under an alternative FEMA program to give victims cash to find their own housing, 332,000 households have been approved in just a week.
nytimes.com

Come on, this is not incompetence, it’s deliberate. Keep people in a desperate situation with NOTHING waiting long enough, and they’ll settle for $2000. Sick.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence is still struggling to understand the nature of Iraq’s insurgency more than two years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte said on Thursday.

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Negroponte, a former ambassador to Iraq who became director of national intelligence five months ago, said not enough had been done to come to grips with the insurgents who by some estimates have killed more than 5,000 Iraqi civilians and security forces.

Some 1,780 U.S. troops have also died in Iraq since U.S. President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations.

“It’s a very, very difficult issue,” Negroponte told an audience of intelligence officials in Washington.

“There’s no analytical issue that is more important, no intelligence issue more important, than understanding the nature of the insurgency in all of its aspects.

“There’s a desirability, a thirst really, to get as much fidelity about what is happening within the insurgency, and I think also a feeling that much more could still be done in terms of finding out now what the nature of that insurgency is,” he said.
news.yahoo.com

A ‘desirability, a thirst’ for ‘fidelity.’ Too funny. ‘Geez, we just don’t understand this’… It would be slightly more believable if they weren’t orchestrating it.

So all the left-liberals who thought that the nomination of Bolton to the UN would mean the death of that organization — that it would unleash the U.S. to dominate the world — should consider Bolton’s latest move: opposing a bill to withhold funds to the UN.

Hmmm. When will left-liberals learn that the United Nations is a fig leaf and puppet for U.S. imperialism, and that, while conservative politicians sometimes attack the UN’s superficial check on U.S. militarism, most of them are perfectly fine using the organization as an instrument of, and excuse for, U.S. global hegemony?

The UN is a threat not just to American sovereignty, but world peace, and has been since it was conceived by the U.S. working with the Soviet Union. When the UN tells the U.S. it can’t bomb, it does so anyway. When it sanctions U.S. aggression, the empire proceeds with the façade of international diplomacy. What a sham the whole thing is. Bolton is right at home with the UN.
antiwar.com