Sing to the tune of: “Do you know the Muffin Man?”:
Do you know the Carlyle Group?
The Carlyle Group, The Carlyle Group?
Do you know the Carlyle Group,
that invests in military gain?”

Do you know that Tony Blair?
That Tony Blair, That Tony Blair?
Do you know that Tony Blair
has a job offer with same?…

Okay, that’s enough nursery rhyme singing. This isn’t a nursery subject, neither is Blair’s relationship with the Bush Family Financial Tree, their connections with the Saudis, and the equity investment company that nurses the Tree..
War is no child’s play. WAR is The Carlyle Group’s primary business. WAR and that which enhances it’s operations… They own companies that build weapons, telecommunication systems, and aviation support. In fact, even our current president, Dubyah, had a position in 1991 with one of their properties (1a). The Carlyle Group, now 18 years old, is one of the main ‘tree keepers’ of the Bush Family Financial Tree.

To Cindy Sheehan, and all who have lost from WAR, (which is just about everyone), if you want to know why you’ve lost, look into the development and practices of the Carlyle Group. If you are unfamilar with them, here’s a general starter…from the incredible news hound, Tom Feeley, and his Information Clearing House:

informationclearinghouse.info

There’s actually two articles listed in that link. The Red Herring article (1b) is particularly brow raising (and the links at the bottom of that article also tell of Carlyle’s involvements in Asia) Here’s a short list of a fraction of the men who have in the past and/or present been involved, either in the administration or as clients of Carlyle:

James Baker III (former US Secretary of State under Bush Senior, recently served on the 2004 election investigation commission with Jimmy Carter),
Frank Carlucci (former US Secretary of Defence and former Deputy director of the CIA, good friend with Donald Rumsfeld and his former wrestling partner at Princeton),
George Herbert Walker Bush (former US president, former director of the CIA),
The Bin Laden Family (the family of Osama, himself),
John Major(previous Prime Minister of Great Britian),
Fidel Ramos (ex-president of the Philippines),
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (of Saudi Arabia. In various positions of the TOP richest men in the world between 1999 and 2005, see (2),
George Soros (another billionarie),

and many more. While most equity firms have only 10 or 12 employees, Carlyle has 240 (see Red herring article), all over the world.

On 09/11/01, there was a Carlyle group meeting in progress in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, DC, including the Bin Laden Family, Carlucci and Baker. They watched the images of the twin towers falling on television news. A couple of days later, the Bin Ladens hopped on a jet, unobstructed and flew back to Saudi Arabia. Since the turn of the millenium, the Carlyle Group has added 6 billion dollars to it’s financial worth, in no small part due to the wars that followed 9/11, in Afganistan and Iraq.
choicechanges.com

Over the course of the past year, the Bush administration has begun to shift its focus in Latin America away from asymmetrical threats, such as terrorism, and toward the more traditional power politics of the region: containing the left-leaning governments bent on curtailing Washington’s influence in the region. Threats previously espoused by the administration — Hezbollah’s presence in the tri-border region and in Chile, Venezuela’s Margarita Island serving as a terrorist resort and Islamic groups working with the drug traffickers in the region — have all seemingly been knocked down in their threat level in public declarations. However, in Central America, Washington is getting serious about a problem it helped to create — and not simply because the region’s street gangs and vast criminal networks are making their presence known in the United States.

While media reports, often fueled by some in the Bush administration, have focused on the possibility of al-Qaeda tapping into the criminal networks controlled by the gangs, this threat seems overstated for the time being. However, the street gangs represent an opportunity Washington is likely to exploit in the region. Even as Washington adopts a traditional power politics stance in Latin America, it can be expected that it will use Central America’s gang problem to deepen its influence in the region through joint initiatives and training programs, in part designed to block Venezuela’s attempts to put a rift between the region and Washington.
pinr.com

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The population of Jewish settlements in the West Bank has grown this year by more than the 9,000 settlers evacuated under a plan to cede some occupied land, an Israeli government official said on Friday.

Thousands of Israelis have streamed into larger West Bank settlements since the start of the year, increasing the number of Jews living on occupied land to 246,000, said the Interior Ministry official, who declined to be identified.

The official said that even after factoring in Israel’s evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank this week, the overall number now living in the occupied West Bank has grown by about 10,000 Jews.

“When you factor in the removal of settlers and take into account about 10,000 newcomers, mainly ultra-Orthodox Jews, you arrive at a figure of about 246,000 settlers. This is correct as of June 2005,” the official said.
news.yahoo.com

As Labor Day draws near and children head back to school, much important attention is being focused on recruitment tactics (sanctioned by No Child Left Behind) in our country’s public secondary schools and colleges. However, this hounding and seduction is not just happening in our high schools. Rather, it reaches down to children as young as 8 years old. Here, though, it is packaged as leadership, character, and discipline development, or as top-secret motivational presentations by so-called medal of freedom recipients

On April 19, 2005 Tommy Franks visited Logan Street Elementary school in Los Angeles to do what was billed as a “motivational presentation” for the school’s students. The “non-profit, pro-military” organization that sponsored Franks’ secret (without family consent or knowledge) presentation to the school’s fifth graders was actually U.S. Trust, a private investment firm with $102 billion dollars in assets. Logan Street school is 89% Latino, and 93% of the students receive free or reduced lunch. This is exactly the population that is heavily targeted by NCLB-related recruitment efforts. I suppose that US Trust and Franks were there to encourage the students to be all they can be?

We don’t know what actually went on during Franks’ performance/presentation for the fifth grade students, because apparently the video of the event has been destroyed by the school district. However, one parent speculated: “Rumor is that he took pictures with our community youth to be used in a future run for office bid on the republican ticket.”

Or, perhaps, Franks was priming these ten year old students for the military programs that they may soon encounter in their middle schools: Middle School Cadet Corps, or Junior Officer Reserves Training Corps.

An article from In These Times describes how many of these programs have eleven year old students learning how to stand, march and salute in synchronization while carrying fake guns and doing push-ups for disobeying orders. Here’s a bit from the In These Times piece that puts this kind of militarization-in-the-name-of-education into perspective:

“Proponents of the programs tout leadership training and character development. But critics quote former Defense Secretary Gen. William Cohen, who described JROTC as ‘one of the best recruiting services that we could have.'”

In an effort to further deepen our understanding, here’s a bit of an interview with Nina Shokraii Rees, Assistant Deputy Secretary, Office of Innovation and Improvement, United States Department of Education:

Do you consider art and music “frills,” or would you say they are necessary to a good elementary education?

Nina Shokraii Rees: It depends. If a student is attending an affluent school that has the budget to invest in such things, then I see many benefits to adding art and music courses. What I object to is focusing the attention of poor school systems on these activities. Schools should be in the business of teaching students the basics. If they fail to teach students how to read and write, it makes no sense to ask them to offer music! In a perfect world, these are decisions that I wish parents could make and pay for.

So there you have it –affluent schools get art and music. Schools lower on the socio-economic ladder get military training (and top-secret visits from Tommy Franks). Countering the overt and more insidious recruitment tactics sanctioned by NCLB is certainly necessary. However, as both educators and humans, we must also be honest and upfront about ways in which our structures of schooling, and the system’s unmarked (default) language of control, also contribute to our militarized culture.
counterpunch.org

Kristina Grish has been described as a ‘Nazi’ and little better than a prostitute. Her crime: writing a light-hearted, non-Jewish women’s guide to understanding Jewish men.

On websites and letters pages in Israel and the United States, Jewish women have railed at Grish, an American Protestant, accusing her of making it harder for them to find a Jewish man and trying to destroy Judaism.

On the surface, Boy Vey! The Shiksa’s Guide to Dating Jewish Men, has little in common with Mein Kampf, but Grish has touched the insecurity of some Jews who feel that marrying outside their religion will lead to its gradual erosion.
guardian.co.uk

The controversial document, produced by the Congregation for Catholic Education and Seminaries, the body overseeing the church’s training of the priesthood, is being scrutinised by Benedict XVI.

It been suggested Rome would publish the instruction earlier this month, but it dropped the plan out of concern that such a move might tarnish his visit to his home city of Cologne last week.

The document expresses the church’s belief that gay men should no longer be allowed to enter seminaries to study for the priesthood. Currently, as all priests take a vow of celibacy, their sexual orientation has not been considered a pressing concern.

Vatican-watchers believe the Pope harbours doubts about whether the church should publish the document, which has already been the subject of three drafts.

‘Inevitably, such a directive will be met with opposition,’ said John Haldane, professor of moral philosophy at the University of St Andrews.

The instruction tries to dampen down the controversy by eschewing a moral line, arguing instead that the presence of homosexuals in seminaries is ‘unfair’ to both gay and heterosexual priests by subjecting the former to temptation.
guardian.co.uk

MEMBERS of Britain’s elite have been selected as priority cases to receive scarce pills and vaccinations at the taxpayers’ expense if the country is hit by a deadly bird flu outbreak.

Workers at the BBC and prominent politicians — such as cabinet ministers — would be offered protection from the virus.

Ken Livingstone, the London mayor, has already spent Ł1m to make sure his personal office and employees have their own emergency supplies of 100,000 antiviral tablets.

If there is an avian flu pandemic in the coming months there would be enough drugs to protect less than 2% of the British population for a week.

The Department of Health has drawn up a priority list of those who would be first to receive lifesaving drugs. Top of the list are health workers followed by those in key public sector jobs.

Although senior government ministers would be among the high-priority cases, the department said this weekend that it had not decided whether to include opposition politicians.

timesonline.co.uk

CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 26 (Reuters) – Venezuela’s government temporarily suspended permits for foreign missionaries on Friday, four days after the American evangelist Pat Robertson called for the assassination of President Hugo Chávez.

The chief of the Justice Ministry’s religious affairs unit, Carlos González, said Friday that authorization of permits for missionaries would be curbed while the government tightened regulations on preachers inside Venezuela.

The permits “are suspended for a short time, it could be three or four weeks, while we organize a system to see what additional data we need for people coming into the country to preach,” Mr. González said.

“We were already working on this, but these declarations have made us speed things up,” he said.

Mr. Robertson, the founder of the Christian Coalition, said Monday on his television program, “The 700 Club,” that if Mr. Chávez “thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it.”

He added: “It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war. And I don’t think any oil shipments will stop.”

He retracted his comments on Wednesday, saying he spoke in frustration over Mr. Chávez’s constant accusations that the Bush administration was trying to overthrow or kill him. American officials have repeatedly dismissed those charges as wild rhetoric.

On Friday, Mr. Chávez said that President Bush would be to blame if anything happened to him after the comments by Mr. Robertson.

“He was expressing the wishes of the U.S. elite,” Mr. Chávez said at a public event. “If anything happens to me, then the man responsible will be George W. Bush. He will be the assassin.”

He said, “This is pure terrorism.”

Relations between the two countries have soured since Mr. Chávez survived a brief coup in 2002 that he says was backed by the United States. American and Venezuelan officials have since frequently traded accusations.

In a sign of deteriorating ties, Mr. Chávez recently suspended cooperation with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing its agents of spying.

The United States then revoked the visas of three top Venezuelan military officers it said had been suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.
Full: nytimes.com

Robertson performed his function, which was to ignite a whole new wave of vitriol against Chavez.

I heard a thing on the BBC about the thousands of evangelical churches mushrooming in Kinshasa and the corresponding murder and abandonment of tens of thousands of Congolese children accused of ‘witchcraft’ and the ‘exorcism’ rituals that often kill them, after months of isolation and torture. The devil is loose in Congo and elsewhere for sure.

Oil Fat Cats vs. Hugo Chavez–NY Daily News
…Even more scandalous for Big Oil, Chavez is using Venezuela’s windfall not to fatten his own country’s oligarchy but to benefit the Venezuelan poor and help neighboring countries…

In recent weeks, two “revelations” of pre-9/11 US military-intelligence relationships with Al-Qaeda “terrorists” and Osama bin Laden—have are being used as cannon fodder in an intensifying power struggle between rival political factions vying to seize the “war on terrorism” agenda for their own, and deepen the cover-up of 9/11.

The furor over new stories involving alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and US-bin Laden go-between Tarik Hamdi, pits spinmasters against other spinmasters, Kean 9/11 Commission supporters versus hawkish Bush-linked 9/11 Commission attackers, neocons versus neoliberals, and intelligence and law enforcement agencies at each other’s throats again, over “intelligence failures”.

While the spin has dwelled exclusively around “anti-terrorism” and various red herrings, and the supposed frustration over the tracking and arrest of Al-Qaeda members, the true evidence trail continues to be purposely ignored. This trail leads directly to high-level US government officials and US intelligence agencies themselves (and US intelligence branches such as Pakistan’s ISI), for their nurturing, guiding and placement of “Islamic terrorist” intelligence assets (including Atta, Hamdi, bin Laden and Al-Qaeda), and US complicity for 9/11.
Full: globalresearch.ca

Turkish Intelligence: Al-Qaeda a U.S. Covert Operation

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 26 – With Iraq’s new constitution still in limbo, thousands of Sunni Arabs rallied in central and northern Iraq on Friday to protest the proposed draft.

Followers of Moktada al-Sadr demonstrated peacefully in Baghdad Friday, a day after members of his militia clashed with rival Shiites.

In Kirkuk, in the north, more than 2,000 Sunnis marched in the streets after Friday Prayer, chanting “No to federalism,” “Iraq is the home of all” and “Baathists are loyal Iraqis.” In Baquba, a largely Sunni city northeast of Baghdad, several thousand people marched, some carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein, whose Baath Party kept the Sunni minority in power for years.

Sunni political leaders have refused to agree to the draft constitution in large part because a Shiite proposal would create a vast autonomous region in Iraq’s oil-rich south. The Sunnis say that proposal – which would parallel the federal zone governed by the Kurds in northern Iraq – could cripple the Iraqi state and allow neighboring Iran to dominate the Shiite south.
Full: nytimes.com

We went in there to wreck that country and by-jeezus we’re gonna do it.