…The attackers – as many as six teenagers or men in their early 20’s who rode in a van or sport utility vehicle – sped away before police officers arrived.

No weapons were recovered at the scene. Mr. Moore was taken to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center with bruises of the head, chest, arms and hip caused by blunt trauma, and a severe ankle laceration. He was released late last night.

The assault – six weeks after a group of white men attacked three black men in Howard Beach, Queens, severely beating one with a baseball bat – sent tremors of shock through Flatlands, a quiet neighborhood of shops and one- and two-family homes near Brooklyn’s south shore, where Jews, Italians, African-Americans and Caribbean immigrants share a generally peaceful, integrated life.
Full: nytimes.com

CRAWFORD, Tex., Aug. 7 – President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now.

Ms. Sheehan’s son, Casey, was killed last year in Iraq, after which she became an antiwar activist. She says she and her family met with the president two months later at Fort Lewis in Washington State.

But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush’s 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.

Ms. Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her, even if it means spending all of August under a broiling sun by the dusty road. Early on Sunday afternoon, 25 hours after she was turned back as she approached Mr. Bush’s ranch, Prairie Chapel, Ms. Sheehan stood red-faced from the heat at the makeshift campsite that she says will be her home until the president relents or leaves to go back to Washington. A reporter from The Associated Press had just finished interviewing her. CBS was taping a segment on her. She had already appeared on CNN, and was scheduled to appear live on ABC on Monday morning. Reporters from across the country were calling her cellphone.

“It’s just snowballed,” Ms. Sheehan said beside a small stand of trees and a patch of shade that contained a sleeping bag, some candles, a jar of nuts and a few other supplies. “We have opened up a debate in the country.”
Full: nytimes.com

Israel’s finance minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, resigned from the government yesterday, claiming its plan to withdraw from settlements in the occupied territories would allow the creation of a base for “Islamic terrorism”.

In what is widely seen as a prelude to a challenge to the leadership of the prime minister, Ariel Sharon, Mr Netanyahu submitted his letter of resignation as the cabinet met to rubber stamp the first phase of the evacuation of settlements in Gaza.

“I am not prepared to be a partner to a move which ignores reality, and proceeds blindly toward turning the Gaza Strip into a base for Islamic terrorism which will threaten the state,” he wrote.
Full: guardian.co.uk

COLORADO SPRINGS — The U.S. military has devised its first-ever war plans for guarding against and responding to terrorist attacks in the United States, envisioning 15 potential crisis scenarios and anticipating several simultaneous strikes around the country, according to officers who drafted the plans.

The classified plans, developed here at Northern Command headquarters, outline a variety of possible roles for quick-reaction forces estimated at as many as 3,000 ground troops per attack, a number that could easily grow depending on the extent of the damage and the abilities of civilian response teams.

…CONPLAN 2002 has passed a review by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and is due to go soon to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and top aides for further study and approval, the officers said. CONPLAN 0500 is still undergoing final drafting here. (CONPLAN stands for “concept plan” and tends to be an abbreviated version of an OPLAN, or “operations plan,” which specifies forces and timelines for movement into a combat zone.)

The plans, like much else about Northcom, mark a new venture by a U.S. military establishment still trying to find its comfort level with the idea of a greater homeland defense role after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Exxon Mobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, announced a huge 32 percent boost in second-quarter profits, the third-largest increase in company history. The Big Oil bonanza came at a time when Americans are paying record-high prices at the gas pumps.

Washington’s official reaction to that maddening news has been softer than silence. But before you search the skies for black helicopters, conspiracy theorists, do not rule out the possibility that sheer incompetence is also afoot. Blame here must be divided among the See-No-Evil Policymakers of this oil-friendly administration, the Snooze-and-Lose Democratic Minority-d’Perpetuity and Myopic Watchdogs who often function as Washington’s de facto agenda-setters.

The news from Exxon Mobil established that the pattern was industry-wide. Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s third-largest oil company, reported second-quarter profits up 34 percent. BP’s (British Petroleum) were up 29 percent. ConocoPhillips, America’s third-largest, reported profits that skyrocketed by 51 percent.

But this front-page-worthy news wound up buried by the news media. The Washington Post buried it four sections back, on page D2, under the headline: “Profit Soars at Exxon Mobil.” The report from Bloomberg News didn’t really link the fiscal ecstasy of Exxon, et al., with the fiscal misery of ordinary Americans who fill up at the pump. Over at the New York Times, editors not only buried the story at the bottom of page C6, but slapped on a headline (“Two Oil Companies Report Higher Earnings”) so soporific it probably lulled even the hyper-caffeinated strategist James Carville to sleep.

What is more bizarre is that all of this news happened while Congress was enacting an energy bill that contains barrels of boondoggles – but which a wide range of experts agrees will do next to nothing to solve America’s energy crisis. Not short term. Not long term.
Full:cincypost.com

by Peter Wilby
08/05/06 “The Guardian” — — Shortly after September 11 2001, I was widely denounced for implying, in a New Statesman editorial, that by electing George Bush – who was known to be indifferent to anything but the interests of US capital – Americans had helped to bring the New York and Washington attacks on themselves. Now Omar Bakri Mohammed and other Muslim clerics blame Britons for the London bombings because they re-elected Tony Blair. Do I, as one who voted for Blair and travel regularly on the tube, agree with them?

Let me first explain what I was trying to say (perhaps clumsily) four years ago. When America goes to war – in Vietnam or the Middle East, for example – it kills many people who have had no chance to influence their rulers. Americans, however, claim their government is “of the people, by the people, for the people”. America, on its own estimation, is a superpower which wishes to spread liberal capitalism.

The large majority of Americans (including migrants) have bought into this project and benefit from it – through cheap oil, for example, or through profits of US-based multinationals, which are often derived from expropriation of other countries’ resources. Any president who fails to protect these benefits risks himself or his party losing office. So if they are serious about democracy, Americans should accept a share of responsibility for what is done in their name. And so should we, whose country is America’s closest ally and accomplice.

None of this is to deny that indiscriminate murder is wrong or to support either the gang that attacked America in 2001 or the ones that attacked London last month. It is merely to observe that we should all take responsibility for our actions or inactions. This is what we now demand of Muslims. Is there something wrong with their religion? Have they given their young people the right values? Many Muslims are asking exactly these questions. For example, Bushra Nasir, head of a comprehensive and one of the Muslim delegation that met Tony Blair after the bombings, says that “now is the time for us Muslims to put our house in order” and “to look at what is going wrong with Muslim families and education”. The least we can do is ask a few questions of ourselves.

…A section of the Islamic world believes the west is waging war on it, that this war has intensified with the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and that it could intensify further with an invasion of Iran. It’s no use saying the 2001 attack preceded those invasions. As far as many Muslims are concerned, it went on for most of the 20th century. Arabs were expelled from Israel in the 1940s; Israel occupied the West Bank from 1967; the first Gulf war took place in 1991 and, to Bin Laden’s rage, led to US troops polluting sacred Saudi soil. The US has propped up corrupt, secular, pro-western tyrannies throughout the Islamic world – and then blamed and even bombed Muslims for their failure to embrace democracy.

…How do you prosecute a war against the US and Britain? Muslims fight us on their own soil, but why should they not carry the fight to our homelands as we carry it to theirs?
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

If people are unable to entertain the idea that with 7-7 and 9-11 we are looking at state terrorism, the least they can do is understand arguments like this one…

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman
08/05/05 “Baltimore Sun” — — A STORY THAT the U.S. government hoped would never see the light of day finally has been published, 60 years after it was spiked by military censors. The discovery of reporter George Weller’s firsthand account of conditions in post-nuclear Nagasaki sheds light on one of the great journalistic betrayals of the last century: the cover-up of the effects of the atomic bombing on Japan.

On Aug. 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; three days later, Nagasaki was hit. Gen. Douglas MacArthur promptly declared southern Japan off-limits, barring the news media. More than 200,000 people died in the atomic bombings of the cities, but no Western journalist witnessed the aftermath and told the story. Instead, the world’s media obediently crowded onto the battleship USS Missouri off the coast of Japan to cover the Japanese surrender.

A month after the bombings, two reporters defied General MacArthur and struck out on their own. Mr. Weller, of the Chicago Daily News, took row boats and trains to reach devastated Nagasaki. Independent journalist Wilfred Burchett rode a train for 30 hours and walked into the charred remains of Hiroshima.

Both men encountered nightmare worlds. Mr. Burchett sat down on a chunk of rubble with his Baby Hermes typewriter. His dispatch began: “In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only describe as the atomic plague.”

He continued, tapping out the words that still haunt to this day: “Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller has passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they will act as a warning to the world.”

Mr. Burchett’s article, headlined “The Atomic Plague,” was published Sept. 5, 1945, in the London Daily Express. The story caused a worldwide sensation and was a public relations fiasco for the U.S. military. The official U.S. narrative of the atomic bombings downplayed civilian casualties and categorically dismissed as “Japanese propaganda” reports of the deadly lingering effects of radiation.

So when Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller’s 25,000-word story on the horror that he encountered in Nagasaki was submitted to military censors, General MacArthur ordered the story killed, and the manuscript was never returned. As Mr. Weller later summarized his experience with General MacArthur’s censors, “They won.”
Full: informationclearinghouse.info

The fact is that the United States and its military partners have staged four nuclear wars, “slipping nukes under the wire” by using dirty bombs and dirty weapons in countries the US needs to control. Depleted uranium aerosols will permanently contaminate vast regions and slowly destroy the genetic future of populations living in those regions, where there are resources which the US must control, in order to establish and maintain American primacy.

Described as the Trojan Horse of nuclear war, depleted uranium is the weapon that keeps killing. The half-life of Uranium-238 is 4.5 billion years, the age of the earth. And, as Uranium-238 decays into daughter radioactive products, in four steps before turning into lead, it continues to release more radiation at each step. There is no way to turn it off, and there is no way to clean it up. It meets the US Government’s own definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

After forming microscopic and submicroscopic insoluble Uranium oxide particles on the battlefield, they remain suspended in air and travel around the earth as a radioactive component of atmospheric dust, contaminating the environment, indiscriminately killing, maiming and causing disease in all living things where rain, snow and moisture remove it from the atmosphere. Global radioactive contamination from atmospheric testing was the equivalent of 40,000 Hiroshima bombs, and still contaminates the atmosphere and lower orbital space today. The amount of low level radioactive pollution from depleted uranium released since 1991, is many times more (deposited internally in the body), than was released from atmospheric testing fallout.

A 2003 independent report for the European Parliament by the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR), reports that based on Chernobyl studies, low level radiation risk is 100 to 1000 times greater than the International Committee for Radiation Protection models estimate which are based on the flawed Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Studies conducted by the US Government. Referring to the extreme killing effects of radiation on biological systems, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, one of the 46 international radiation expert authors of the ECRR report, describes it as:

“The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide.”

1943 MANHATTAN PROJECT BLUEPRINT FOR DEPLETED URANIUM

In a declassified memo to General Leslie R. Groves, dated October 30, 1943, three of the top physicists in the Manhattan Project, Dr James B Conant, A H Compton, and H C Urey, made their recommendation, as members of the Subcommittee of the S-1 Executive Committee, on the ‘Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon’:

“As a gas warfare instrument the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicles, or aerial bombs. In this form it would be inhaled by personnel. The amount necessary to cause death to a person inhaling the material is extremely small … There are no known methods of treatment for such a casualty … it will permeate a standard gas mask filter in quantities large enough to be extremely damaging.”

As a Terrain Contaminant:

“To be used in this manner, the radioactive materials would be spread on the ground either from the air or from the ground if in enemy controlled territory. In order to deny terrain to either side except at the expense of exposing personnel to harmful radiations … Areas so contaminated by radioactive material would be dangerous until the slow natural decay of the material took place … for average terrain no decontaminating methods are known. No effective protective clothing for personnel seems possible of development. … Reservoirs or wells would be contaminated or food poisoned with an effect similar to that resulting from inhalation of dust or smoke.”

Internal Exposure:

“… Particles smaller than 1µ [micron] are more likely to be deposited in the alveoli where they will either remain indefinitely or be absorbed into the lymphatics or blood. … could get into the gastro-intestinal tract from polluted water, or food, or air. … may be absorbed from the lungs or G-I tract into the blood and so distributed throughout the body.”
Full: globalresearch.ca

Under the cloak of secrecy imparted by use of military code names, the American administration has been taking a big – and dangerous – step that will lead to the transformation of the nuclear bomb into a legitimate weapon for waging war.

Ever since the terror attack of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has gradually done away with all the nuclear brakes that characterized American policy during the Cold War. No longer are nuclear bombs considered “the weapon of last resort.” No longer is the nuclear bomb the ultimate means of deterrence against nuclear powers, which the United States would never be the first to employ.

In the era of a single, ruthless superpower, whose leadership intends to shape the world according to its own forceful world view, nuclear weapons have become a attractive instrument for waging wars, even against enemies that do not possess nuclear arms.

Remember the code name “CONPLAN 8022.” Last week, the Washington Post reported that this unintelligible nickname masks a military program whose implementation could drag the world into nuclear war.

CONPLAN 8022 is a series of operational plans prepared by Startcom, the U.S. Army’s Strategic Command, which calls for preemptive nuclear strikes against Iran and North Korea. One of the plan’s major components is the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the underground facilities where North Korea and Iran are developing their nuclear weapons. The standard ordnance deployed by the Americans is not capable of destroying these facilities.

After the war in Afghanistan, it became clear that despite the widespread use of huge conventional bombs, “bunker-busters,” some of the bunkers dug by Al-Qaida remained untouched. This discovery soon led to a decision to develop nuclear weapons that would be able to penetrate and destroy the underground shelters in which the two member states of the “axis of evil” are developing weapons of mass destruction.

The explanation given by administration experts calls these “small” bombs, which would have a moderate effect on the environment. The effect of the bomb would not be discernible above ground, the radioactive fallout would be negligible, and the “collateral damage” caused to civilians would be minimal.

Accordingly, America’s deterrent credibility against the “rogue states” would grow, because it is clear that the U.S. would allow itself to make use of these “small bombs” – as they would destroy the weapon sites but not cause the death of many civilians.

The war in Iraq, whose purpose was the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s development facilities and stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, but which led to America’s miring in the Iraqi swamp, has increased the attraction of nuclear weapons. After all, it would have been much simpler and more logical to destroy Saddam’s facilities with a few “small bombs,” which would not have caused any real damage to the civilian population, than to become entangled in a ground war that has resulted in 150,000 American soldiers treading water in the Iraqi swamp.

The problem with this argument is that it is hopeless. To understand this, one may analyze the effect of a nuclear attack of the sort posited by American military strategists in CONPLAN 8022. Obviously, the U.S. would not use less than five to ten “small bombs” were it to attack Iran or North Korea, since, considering the number of relevant targets in the two countries, anything less would fail to achieve the goal of deterrence and prevention. According to the plan, each bomb would have a 10-kiloton yield – about two-thirds of that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Each detonation of a bomb a few meters underground would destroy most of the buildings on the surface to a range of two kilometers. After the explosion, there would be a need to quickly evacuate civilians from an area of 100 square kilometers, to avoid the deadly effects of the radioactive fallout; buildings, agricultural crops and livestock would be affected in an area of thousands of square kilometers, and depending on wind direction and velocity, there could be a need to evacuate more people from thousands of additional square kilometers.

None of this takes into account the political and psychological repercussions of using nuclear weapons for the first time in more than 60 years. The Bush administration regards all this as “limited collateral damage.”
Full: globalresearch.ca

Halliburton Secretly Doing Business with Key Member of Iran’s Nuclear Team

Uzbekistan’s unending tragedy – 15 years of unremitting repression of its Muslims (well, make that a century) – has reached a critical impasse. With the massacre of up to 1,000 innocents in Andijan, the mood in the country is set against Karimov: there is no graceful exit for this once wily balancer of clan greed, untempered by any basis in Islamic principles of social justice and public service.

But K and Uz are not alone. A recent analysis of Tunisia (see Le Monde 6/5) describes the poverty and anomy of life under its repressive, secular, pro-US dictator Ben Ali, with his playtime democracy, prohibition of all Islamic parties and general discouragement of Islam, and above all the fear to make even the mildest public criticisms. We can say ‘ditto’ more or less for Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia. Then there are such embarrassments as Dubai, which is building a high tech Disney-style archipelago replica of the world for the super-rich, or the Emirates, which imports Russian and Uzbek women as sex slaves. It is very hard to find a Muslim country which reflects the austere social justice of the Koran. But then, it is hard to find a Muslim country which is not a US-client state. Malaysia and Iran come to mind, and in their own very different ways, they offer some hope.

In his July 4th speech this year, President George Bush hailed the new era of democracy, the result of US battles “from Bunker Hill to Baghdad”. Leaving aside Bunker Hill and what’s left of the American Revolution, we can already see the democracy that the US is bringing to Baghdad and Kabul – the kind where the living envy the dead, of whom there are hundreds more with each passing day. No. The call should be: ‘From Bishkek to Baghdad, the Caliphate’s time has come.’ And ironically, though Karimov loudly proclaims himself its greatest enemy, he is unwittingly one of its greatest assets, constantly raising its spectre in justification of his persecution of Uzbek Muslims. Irony: never has the Muslim world been so enslaved to kufr (anti-Islamic) countries and leaders, and yet never has it been so demonized and despised by them. While western media construct fantasies to the contrary, this is the sad, tragic reality.
Full: axisoflogic.com