Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak today called upon the United States to reduce its forces in Iraq, saying Washington had ”made mistakes” and its continued presence in that country would complicate the problem with fallout in the entire West Asia.

”After a brilliant military victory, America has made mistakes in Iraq…American presence will become a part of the problem after the Iraqi polls and an American failure in Iraq will have an adverse effect in the extended West Asia,” he said in his address at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit here.

The remaining US forces could be concentrated on Iraq’s border with Jordan so that the country’s ”Sunni triangle” did not have a visible US military presence. He said the attack on Iraq was not based on a stable enough premise, that there were WMD’s in Iraq.

Linking the war against terror to nuclear proliferation, he said that nuclear power in the hands of mature powers promotes stability.
webindia123.com

And here is a shining example of what defines a ‘mature power’…
Not guilty. The Israeli captain who put 17 bullets into a Palestinian schoolgirl
11/16/05 “The Guardian” — — An Israeli army officer who fired the entire magazine of his automatic rifle into a 13-year-old Palestinian girl and then said he would have done the same even if she had been three years old was acquitted on all charges by a military court yesterday.

The soldier, who has only been identified as “Captain R”, was charged with relatively minor offences for the killing of Iman al-Hams who was shot 17 times as she ventured near an Israeli army post near Rafah refugee camp in Gaza a year ago.

The manner of Iman’s killing, and the revelation of a tape recording in which the captain is warned that she was just a child who was “scared to death”, made the shooting one of the most controversial since the Palestinian intifada erupted five years ago even though hundreds of other children have also died.

This story has the potential of becoming a “Katrina” moment: a revelatory episode that exposes long-suppressed truths about the reality of Bush’s “leadership” and its agonizing consequences. Just as the hurricane finally brought Bush’s incompetence, cronyism and callousness to mainstream attention, the torture chamber revelations could lead to a broader awareness of the murderous chaos that Bush’s “liberation” has unleashed upon Iraq, with sectarian and ethnic death squads roaming the land, murdering and oppressing the people — often with tacit U.S. backing or U.S. training. As one American officer said of Baghdad — the centerpiece of Bushist “democracy” in Iraq: “It’s getting more like Mogadishu every day.”
chris-floyd.com

11/16/05 “Counterpunch” — — In this his time of troubles, Bush seems to be moving deliberately and rapidly toward new wars of aggression in an unforgivable gamble to overcome his troubles. His speech on Veterans’ Day, November 11, 2005 at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania leads to this conclusion more clearly than any of his previous speeches and activities. The new wars would be the start of a world war initiated by Bush and radical Christianity against what he calls radical Islam, but in truth the wars would be waged against all Islam.

To repeat, despite Bush’s arguments to the contrary, the “clash of civilizations” would consist of wars started by us. The killing of innocent people in these wars is likely to be massive, and the wars could at any time turn nuclear. If the people and the politicians of America allow these wars to take place, the stain on the morality of Americans will last for generations.
informationclearinghouse.info

WASHINGTON — The CIA concluded recently that Fidel Castro suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has warned US policymakers to be ready for trouble if the 79-year-old ruler’s health erodes over the next few years.

If true, the CIA’s assessment of the nonfatal but debilitating condition would mean that the Cuban leader may be entering a period in which doctors say the symptoms grow more evident, medicines are less effective, and mental functions start to deteriorate.

Although Castro’s brother Raul, head of the armed forces, has been anointed as his successor, analysts fear the possibility of a tumultuous period in which an incapacitated Castro might refuse to give up power but might no longer project his personality to Cuba’s 11 million people.

”For Fidel to start shaking in a real and substantial way — in public — sends quite a powerful message to people around the world,” said Frank O. Mora, a professor of national security strategy at The National War College.
boston.com

O yeah? And what might that powerful message be? Muhammed Ali has Parkinson’s. People don’t seem to love and honor him any less.

Normally loyal Republican senators have stepped up their pressure on the White House over Iraq, demanding the Bush administration set out its plans to end the war, and insisting that within 12 months Iraq’s own forces take the lead in the battle against insurgents.

Ostensibly, the plan seeks to head off a rival Democratic demand for a fixed timetable for a US withdrawal – something George Bush has always rejected on the grounds it would amount to “cut and run”, and thus a victory for America’s enemies.

In other respects, the Republican text is very similar to that of their opponents, which was defeated in a vote last night, denoting a new readiness by the Senate as a whole to challenge the handling of the war. It was a “potential turning point” in congressional attitudes to Iraq, Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat, said.

For Republicans, moreover, the plan is the clearest sign yet of party unease at an ever more unpopular war, which has dragged down Mr Bush’s approval ratings to record lows, and threatens the party’s grip on Congress at next year’s mid-term elections.

Under the scheme, the administration would have to deliver quarterly reports on the progress of the war, and the prospects for “completing the mission in Iraq” and pulling out US troops. The difference, essentially, is that Democrats want “estimated dates” for such a withdrawal, subject to the fulfilment of various conditions on the ground. For Republicans, this formulation would be a timetable by another name.
independent.co.uk

The former mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, 52, was the only candidate not to face any challenge within his party, the liberal Democratic Revolutionary Party. His rivals folded earlier this year after Mr. López Obrador successfully beat back attempts by the two other parties to torpedo his candidacy with a charge that he had ignored a court order.

His main pledge has been to expand public works projects and to provide free health care and cash subsidies to the elderly, as he did in the capital. He has painted his opponents as captives of the same network of big business leaders and machine politicians who held power here for most of the 20th century. Rejecting an expensive media campaign, he has promised a grass-roots movement to galvanize voters from the lower and middle classes, from which polls say his supporters come.

Indeed, he has been touring the country by car, giving speeches in every town along the route, like the old whistle-stop campaigns in the United States.

“I think what’s needed is a true purification of public life, a sharp renovation, and this has to take place from below toward the top,” he said in a recent interview on Televisa. “That’s why I do these meetings, these encounters with the people.”
nytimes.com

Is this the Election that will finally break the camel’s back?

With so much going on, few have noticed the extraordinary outcome of last Tuesday’s election in Ohio where the crooked state that brung you — by hook and by crook — a second term for George W. Bush may have turned in results so staggeringly impossible, that perhaps even the Mainstream Corporate Media (if only in Ohio?!) will have no choice but to look into it.

As usual, the Free Press’ heroic Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are on the case. Their article on what happened on ballot issues 1 through 5 last week is A MUST READ for anybody who still gives the slightest damn about whatever democracy might be left in America.
huffingtonpost.com

AMMAN – A blast at the Radisson hotel in the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday was caused by a bomb placed in a false ceiling, police sources at the scene told Reuters.
msnbc.msn.com

that’s the whole text of this story

Perhaps the most exciting Senate candidate in the nation is the independent, Socialist Congressman from Vermont, Bernie Sanders.

Sanders is the real thing. A champion of his low-income, rural constituents–the dairy farmers and working poor of Vermont–and a star among Burlington progressives, Sanders has a compellingly straightforward way of talking about politics. And he has been tackling the problems that affect working families in a no-nonsense way. He was the first member of Congress to take a busload of constituents across the border to buy drugs in Canada, and he has had frequent, confrontational debates with Alan Greenspan when the former chairman of the Federal Reserve appeared before Congress.

When I interviewed Sanders recently for The Progressive, he warned that the Republicans’ mounting troubles do not spell easy victory for the Democrats, who need to become more of a real opposition. As for the left, he urged liberals and progressives of all stripes to get out and talk to people who don’t already agree with us. “We are right on the issues,” he said, but the social and cultural divide is ours to bridge.

Of the Republican campaign against him, which was then just shaping up, Sanders said: “If you look at what they did to Max Cleland and what they did to John Kerry, we have a pretty good idea of what they can do. It’s the politics of personal destruction. They are incapable of debating issues, because their positions on all of the issues are horrendous. Their style has always been to try to personally destroy whom they run against. So we expect a great deal of negativity.”
commondreams.org

By Steven E. Jones, Department of Physics and Astronomy. Brigham Young University. Provo, UT 84604

ABSTRACT

In writing this paper, I call for a serious investigation of the hypothesis that WTC 7 and the Twin Towers were brought down, not just by damage and fires, but through the use of pre-positioned explosives. I consider the official FEMA, NIST, and 9-11 Commission reports that fires plus damage alone caused complete collapses of all three buildings. And I present evidence for the explosive-demolition hypothesis, which is suggested by the available data, testable and falsifiable, and yet has not been analyzed in any of the reports funded by the US government.
WATCH VIDEO