The House on Friday overwhelmingly rejected calls for an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq, a vote engineered by the Republicans that was intended to fail. Democrats derided the vote as a political stunt.

“Our troops have become the enemy. We need to change direction in Iraq,” said Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, a Democratic hawk whose call a day earlier for pulling out troops sparked a nasty, personal debate over the war.

The House voted 403-3 to reject a nonbinding resolution calling for an immediate troop withdrawal.

“We want to make sure that we support our troops that are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. We will not retreat,” Speaker Dennis Hastert, R- Ill., said as the GOP leadership pushed the issue to a vote over the protest of Democrats.

It was the second time in less than a week that President Bush’s Iraq policy stirred heated debate in Congress. On Tuesday, the Senate defeated a Democratic push for Bush to lay out a timetable for withdrawal.

Murtha, a 73-year-old Marine veteran decorated for combat service in Vietnam, issued his call for a troop withdrawal at a news conference on Thursday. In little more than 24 hours, Hastert and Republicans decided to put the question to the House.

Democrats said it was a political stunt and quickly decided to vote against it in an attempt to drain it of significance.

“A disgrace,” declared House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The rankest of politics and the absence of any sense of shame,” added Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat.
breitbart.com

This should mean to millions of us that there are only three Congress people who deserve to be there. ‘Immediate withdrawal’…as in Vietnam, it next to impossible for so many to resist the Narrative of America, that we were born to rule due to our democratic virtue, that our ‘responsibilities to the world’ are ordained by God. To admit that this war is evil, that it begets more and more evil every day, that it must be stopped…now…challenges the narrative to its core.

WASHINGTON — The Republican-controlled Congress helped itself to a $3,100 pay raise on Friday, then postponed work on bills to curb spending on social programs and cut taxes in favor of a two-week vacation.

In the final hours of a tumultuous week in the Capitol, Democrats erupted in fury when House GOP leaders maneuvered toward a politically-charged vote _ and swift rejection _ of one war critic’s call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. “You guys are pathetic, pathetic,” Massachusetts Rep. Martin Meehan yelled across a noisy hall at Republicans.
washingtonpost.com

Bush under fire as Iraq opens bitter feud
The venomous exchanges yesterday were provoked by the demand of John Murtha, the vastly experienced Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman and decorated Vietnam veteran, for an immediate withdrawal of the 160,000 US soldiers in Iraq, ending what he termed “a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion”. His call, coming from one of the most hawkish Democrats in the House and an expert on military matters, created a sensation here. In a blistering response, Denis Hastert, the Republican speaker of the House, accused Mr Murtha of giving comfort to the enemy.

“They would prefer that America surrender to the terrorists,” he charged, saying they had delivered “the highest insult” to American troops on duty abroad. That comment came after a stinging attack by Vice-President Dick Cheney on war critics, whose behaviour Mr Cheney labelled “dishonest and reprehensible”. For Mr Murtha – a former marine and a long-time supporter of high Pentagon spending and a strong military – that was too much. He lashed back at “people with five deferments” – a reference to Mr Cheney, who never served in Vietnam after having his draft deferred five times, but led the US to war in 2003.

“I like guys who got five deferments and never been there, and send people to war and then don’t like to hear what needs to be done,” the Pennsylvania Congressman said.

Later Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, likened Mr Murtha to Moore, author and arch Bush critic who directed the ferociously critical filmFahrenheit 9/11. A comparison between the stolid, grizzled 73-year-old war veteran and the pacifist and polemicist film-maker strains credulity. But the fact it was made shows how ferocious the debate has become.

Pentagon investigators have referred allegations of abuse in how the Halliburton Company was awarded a contract for work in Iraq to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation, a Democratic senator who has been holding unofficial hearings on contract abuses in Iraq said yesterday in Washington.

The allegations mainly involve the Army’s secret, noncompetitive awarding in 2003 of a multibillion dollar contract for oil field repairs in Iraq to Halliburton, a Texas-based company. The objections were raised publicly last year by Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, then the chief contracts monitor at the Army Corps of Engineers, the government agency that handled the contract and several others in Iraq.

In a letter received and released yesterday by Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, the assistant Pentagon inspector general, John R. Crane, said that the criminal investigation service of the Defense Department had examined Ms. Greenhouse’s allegations “and has shared its findings with the Department of Justice.” Senator Dorgan is the chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, a Congressional group that has repeatedly used unofficial hearings to question the administration’s record of awarding contracts in Iraq.

The Justice Department, the letter said, “is in the process of considering whether to pursue the matter.”

Ms. Greenhouse, a 20-year veteran of military procurement work, says her objections before the contract was signed were ignored. After internal clashes with officials at the agency and threats of demotion, she went public with her charges in the fall of 2004.

This year, she was demoted in August from the elite Senior Executive Service, on charges of poor performance, and given a lower-ranking job as a project manager. She has filed appeals, but for now “she has no projects to manage and she just sits in the corner,” her attorney, Michael Kohn, said yesterday in a telephone interview from Washington. The inspector general’s office at the Defense Department had already begun its own investigation of her charges regarding the contracting. Exactly which issues are of most interest to investigators in the Justice Department is unclear. Mr. Crane wrote that he could not provide more details “as this is an ongoing criminal investigation.”
nytimes.com

America’s powerful medicines regulator has ruled there is no evidence of a link between the bird flu drug Tamiflu and the deaths of 12 children in Japan.
A Food and Drug Administration panel found no “causal link” between the deaths over the past 13 months and the drug, which is widely distributed.

Swiss manufacturer Roche welcomed the ruling, saying: “The positive role of Tamiflu remains unchanged.”

Tamiflu, it added, would be relabelled to warn of possible skin side-effects.

Countries have placed huge orders for Tamiflu to ward off a feared pandemic that scientists fear could result from the H5N1 strain of bird flu.

‘Adverse skin events’

The FDA had looked at 75 cases of mental and skin disorders – 69 of them in Japan – which raised concern about the use of Tamiflu in children.

Of the 12 deaths, four were described as sudden, one attributed to a fall during a psychiatric disturbance, and several others to heart and lung failure.

There were also 32 cases of psychiatric disturbance, including hallucinations.

The FDA panel concluded that there was no “causal link between paediatric deaths and neuropsychiatric adverse events and Tamiflu”.

“We welcome the outcome of the FDA advisory committee and look forward to working with the FDA and other health authorities to extend our knowledge of the use of Tamiflu and its safety profile,” said William Burns, head of Roche’s pharmaceuticals division.
bbc.co.uk

The death squads are on the march across the planet.

…The commandos are part of the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says will gradually replace American troops in this war. But the commandos are being blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring.

One such group, the Volcano Brigade, is operating as a death squad — under the influence or control of Iraq’s most potent Shiite factional militia, the Iranian-backed Badr Organization, said several Iraqi government officials and western Baghdad residents.

In the past six months, Badr has heavily infiltrated the Interior Ministry under which the commandos operate, the sources said. Badr also was accused of running the secret Interior Ministry prison raided Sunday by U.S. troops.

About 2 a.m. on Aug. 23, men in Volcano Brigade uniforms and trucks rolled into the streets of Dolay, a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood of western Baghdad, residents say. “I got a call from my cousins” around the corner, said Ahmed Abu Yusuf, 33, an unemployed Sunni. “They told me to stay hidden because the Volcano were in the streets, arresting Sunnis.”

For three hours, the raiders burst into Sunni homes, handcuffed dozens of men and loaded them into vans. They ended the assault and drove out of the neighborhood just before the dawn call to prayer, which would bring men into the streets, walking to the local mosques, Abu Yusuf said.

Two days later and 90 miles away, residents of the desert town of Badrah, near the Iranian border, found the bodies of 36 of the men in a gully, their hands still bound and their skulls shattered by bullets. Two were the cousins who had phoned him the warning, Abu Yusuf said.
seattletimes.nwsource.com

No secret at all. Negroponte’s ‘Salvador Option,’ and I suppose we’ll have to wait 20 years for the consciousness to dawn on Americans that they run death squads.

A federal jury in Memphis yesterday found a former military colonel from El Salvador responsible for crimes against humanity during that country’s civil war in the 1980’s and ordered him to pay $6 million in damages.

The nine-member jury found that the colonel, Nicolás Carranza, had “command responsibility” for the torture of a Salvadoran who was forced to confess falsely to killing an American military adviser, Lt. Cmdr. Albert Schaufelberger, in 1983.

Colonel Carranza was the vice minister of defense, El Salvador’s second-highest military commander, from 1979 to 1981, and in 1983 he was head of the Treasury Police, the most notoriously violent of the country’s security forces.

Mr. Carranza, who moved to Memphis in 1985 and is now an American citizen, testified that he was a paid informant for the Central Intelligence Agency for two decades, including the years that were the focus of the trial. His tie to the agency was corroborated at the trial by the American ambassador to El Salvador at the time, Robert White.

…Mr. Carranza, who retired in 2001 after working as a security guard in a Memphis museum, said he believed that the only “stain” on his military career was his collaboration with the C.I.A.
nytimes.com

The recent shift to the left among Latin American governments has been a cause for concern in the Bush administration. The White House has tried in vain to put this shift in check. Presidential elections in Bolivia on December 18th are likely to further challenge U.S. hegemony. Evo Morales, an indigenous, socialist congressman, is expected to win the election. How far will the U.S. go to prevent a leftist victory in Bolivia? Some Bolivians fear the worst.

In the past year, U.S. military operations in neighboring Paraguay have complicated the already tumultuous political climate in the region. White House officials claim the operations are based on humanitarian aid efforts. However, political analysts in Bolivia and Paraguay say the activity is aimed at securing the region’s gas and water reserves and intervening in Bolivia if Morales wins.

Five hundred U.S. troops arrived in Paraguay on July 1st with planes, weapons and ammunition. Reports from a journalist with the Argentine newspaper, /Clarin/, prove that an airbase exists in Mariscal Estigarribia, Paraguay, which is 200 kilometers from the border with Bolivia and may be utilized by the U.S. military. (1)

Earlier this year, Paraguayan lawmakers granted U.S. troops total immunity and have given the Pentagon access to the Estigarribia base, which was built by U.S. technicians in the 1980s and is larger than Paraguay’s international airport in Asunción, the country’s capital. (2)

In addition to the military activity, the FBI also has plans for Paraguay. On October 26, FBI Director Robert Mueller arrived in the country to “check on preparations for the installation of a permanent FBI office in Asuncion…to cooperate with security organizations to fight international crime, drug traffic and kidnapping.” (3)
zmag.org

The United States has military contingency plans aimed against Venezuela, contrary to the UN Charter and the document guiding relations between members of the Organizations of American States (OAS).

A recent article in the Washington Post – which has not been refuted by the Pentagon – affirms that the Defense Department has prepared a plan to create a potential conflict with the South American nation, considered a threat to US strategic security by the White House.
rense.com

Venezuela’s Chavez calls Bush ‘killer’, ‘madman’

Déjà vu All Over Again? . . .

On November 13, 2005, the Times published a report by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger headlined, “Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran’s Nuclear Aims”. The report contains allegations of secret Iranian plans to obtain a nuclear warhead based on information contained in a stolen laptop computer. The allegations are made by anonymous US “officials”, in the mode of former Times reporter Judith Miller, whose fabulously wrong pre-Iraq invasion September 2002 report on Iraq’s quest for aluminum tubes for use in a clandestine nuclear weapons program set the stage for Bush administration heavies Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice to start talking about tubes + Saddam Hussein x 9-11 = mushroom clouds over America.

Like Miller before them, in their story Broad-Sanger rely heavily on anonymous “American officials”, “American intelligence officials”, “officials” in the Bush administration, etc. to roll out the “strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead.”

What is the evidence found in the laptop? “More than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments” that show “a long effort to design a nuclear warhead.” Where did the laptop come from? “American officials have said little. . . about the origins of the laptop, other than that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a source in Iran who they said had received it from a second person, now believed to be dead.” Is the evidence (or intelligence) convincing? “[W]hile the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.” What is Iran’s response? Not in the Broad-Sanger article but in a Reuters article, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said: “The baseless claim made us laugh. We do not use laptops to keep our classified documents.”
commondreams.org

UN agency says Iran got nuclear designs; warhead plan suspected

PARIS — Shaken by the Iraq war and the rise of anti-American sentiment around the world, Americans are turning inward, a Pew survey of US opinion leaders and the general public suggests.

The survey, conducted this autumn and released yesterday, found a revival of isolationist feelings among the public similar to the sentiment that followed the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s.

At the same time, the survey showed, Americans are feeling less unilateralist than in the past, in what appeared to indicate a desire for a more modest foreign policy.

Forty-two percent of Americans think the United States should ”mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own,” according to the survey, which was conducted by the Pew Research Center in association with the Council on Foreign Relations.

That is an increase of 40 percent since a poll taken in December 2002, before the US-led invasion of Iraq; at that time only 30 percent of Americans said the country should mind its own business internationally.
boston.com

American ‘inwardness’, i.e. narcissism, is nothing new. The self-seeking behavior of Americans made global corporate imperialist takeover possible. When it serves us, we are ‘the world’s only superpower.’ When American aggression is not being nicely received, we can just retreat into our various amusements and distractions. As privileged folks, we have an amazingly low tolerance for unpleasantness of any kind. Americans have never bothered much to concern themselves about how people live in the rest of the world. The appalling naivete of American response to 9-11 is a case in point. It’s all about us. Never forget that.