WASHINGTON (AP) — It was billed as a conversation with U.S. troops, but the questions President Bush asked on a teleconference call Thursday were choreographed to match his goals for the war in Iraq and Saturday’s vote on a new Iraqi constitution.

“This is an important time,” Allison Barber, deputy assistant defense secretary, said, coaching the soldiers before Bush arrived. “The president is looking forward to having just a conversation with you.”

Barber said the president was interested in three topics: the overall security situation in Iraq, security preparations for the weekend vote and efforts to train Iraqi troops.

As she spoke in Washington, a live shot of 10 soldiers from the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division and one Iraqi soldier was beamed into the Eisenhower Executive Office Building from Tikrit – the birthplace of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

“I’m going to ask somebody to grab those two water bottles against the wall and move them out of the camera shot for me,” Barber said.

A brief rehearsal ensued.
“OK, so let’s just walk through this,” Barber said. “Captain Kennedy, you answer the first question and you hand the mike to whom?”

“Captain Smith,” Kennedy said.

McClellan says he sees nothing wrong with the fact that Pentagon officials coached the soldiers.

“Captain. Smith? You take the mike and you hand it to whom?” she asked.

“Captain Kennedy,” the soldier replied.
And so it went.
washingtontimes.com

The US has announced the creation of a new intelligence agency led by the CIA to co-ordinate all American overseas spying activities.

The National Clandestine Service (NCS) will oversee all human espionage operations – meaning spying by people rather than by technical means.

The move is the latest in the post-9/11 reforms of US intelligence agencies.

Analysts say the NCS restores some authority to the CIA after it lost overall control of US intelligence.

‘Expression of confidence’

The chief of the new service will supervise the CIA’s espionage operations and co-ordinate all overseas spying, including those of the FBI and the Pentagon.

The director of the new agency, whose identity will remain secret and is simply known as “Jose”, will report directly to the head of the CIA, Porter Goss.
bbc.co.uk

Jose???

The high hopes for Ukraine after Yushchenko took power are being dashed as rival elites squabble over spoils

Those who doubted how revolutionary Ukraine’s “orange revolution” would turn out to be have no reason for pleasure now. The massive disappointment felt by tens of thousands in Kiev, which recent visitors report, far outweighs any intellectual satisfaction there is in having predicted that Viktor Yushchenko’s assumption of power would not transform the country, politically or economically. Indeed, “realists” like myself were also wrong. We did not expect things to unravel so fast.
guardian.co.uk

They are the stadium giants of rock, one of the biggest draws in the business, who built a reputation on protest anthems and support for the global battle against poverty and Aids.
He is a powerful US Republican who, like every powerful US Republican with an election in the offing, needs to do a little fundraising. But Rick Santorum’s plans to drum up cash on the sidelines of U2 gigs have not impressed the band.

“U2 concerts are categorically not fundraisers for any politician – they are rock concerts for U2 fans,” said Jamie Drummond, executive director of DATA, an Africa advocacy group co-founded by U2 singer Bono.
With the band’s Vertigo tour of the US well under way, the spokesman stressed that political fundraisers – a normal part of large music and sports events in the US – were in no way linked to the band, its music or its message.

“Neither DATA nor Bono are involved in these [fundraisers], and they cannot be controlled,” he added.

Mr Santorum’s get-together reportedly involves a $1,000 (£570) event during this weekend’s Philadelphia show. Other events are planned for other shows on the tour, which runs until the end of December. And he is not alone. Hillary Clinton has also offered a small number of invitees the chance to join her in a suite in Washington at next week’s gig. A cool $2,500 will secure the contributor a chance to rub shoulders with the Democratic elite while watching Bono and the Edge grind out the old favourites.

A spokeswoman for Ms Clinton said: “We do a meet-and-greet with the senator, and then go in and listen to music.”
guardian.co.uk

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. Naïvely, 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