Shocking documentary uncovers the subversion of Americas democracy.

I defy you to watch this 48 minute documentary and not be outraged about the depth of corruption and deceit within the highest ranks of our government.

Note: The first one minute forty seven seconds of this program is in broadcast in Dutch, The remainder is in English.
WATCH VIDEO

President Bush feels betrayed by several of his most senior aides and advisors and has severely restricted access to the Oval Office, INSIGHT magazine claims in a new report.

The president’s reclusiveness in the face of relentless public scrutiny of the U.S.-led war in Iraq and White House leaks regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame has become so extreme that Mr. Bush has also reduced contact with his father, former President George H.W. Bush, administration sources said on the condition of anonymity.

“The atmosphere in the Oval Office has become unbearable,” a source said. “Even the family is split.”

INSIGHT: Sources close to the White House say that Mr. Bush has become isolated and feels betrayed by key officials in the wake of plunging domestic support, the continued insurgency in Iraq and the CIA-leak investigation that has resulted in the indictment and resignation of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The sources said Mr. Bush maintains daily contact with only four people: first lady Laura Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Undersecretary of State Karen Hughes. The sources also say that Mr. Bush has stopped talking with his father, except on family occasions.
drudgereport.com

While immigrants from former colonies helped rebuild post-World War II France, many of their children and grandchildren are setting fire to its buildings and cars in what appears to be a blind explosion of rage – against the schools that failed them, the cars they can’t afford to own, the government offices they say treat them like foreigners.

The legacy of France’s African colonies weighs heavily over the riots that first exploded in this decaying, largely immigrant suburb of Paris two weeks ago.

Hamdi, a secular Muslim of Algerian parentage, said youths from immigrant families feel betrayed by a nation that plundered their homelands, used their forefathers’ muscle for post-World War II reconstruction – then turned its back once the labour market dried up in the late 1970s.

French unemployment is just under 10 percent. Among young people in the housing projects it’s as high as 40 percent.

Hamdi flashed his identity card. “I have it, m’sieur, I’m French,” he said. “Why can’t I work in a government ministry? … They think we’re dirt.”
indymedia.org

WASHINGTON — Whoever advised U.S. President George Bush to escape the storm of criticism over Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, and the Libby CIA case by flying to Argentina for a free trade summit should be sent to Guantanamo.

Bush’s venture was an embarrassing diplomatic failure and the most humiliating fiasco faced by a U.S. president in Latin America since Richard Nixon got mobbed in 1958. He was left looking confused, while his nemesis, Venezuela’s boisterous merengue-marxist leader, Hugo Chavez, mocked him.

Now Bush returns here besieged by factional warfare. The long-simmering conflict between America’s national security establishment and neo-conservative extremists has burst into the public realm with the criminal indictment of VP Dick Cheney’s powerful chief of staff, Lewis Libby, on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame CIA case.

The Libby investigation could produce embarrassing evidence of the White House neocons deceiving the U.S. into war.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell’s chief of staff for 16 years, publicly charged that a “cabal” of neocons “hijacked” U.S. foreign policy and drove the nation into a trumped-up war — what this column has said since 2001. The “cabal,” claimed Wilkerson, included Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, and former Pentagon desk warriors Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle.

Gen. William Odom, former chief of the ultra-secret National Security Agency, called Bush’s Iraq adventure “the biggest disaster in the history of the U.S.” Republican elder statesman Gen. Brent Scowcroft accused Bush of being “wrapped around the little finger” of Israel’s PM Ariel Sharon.

In London, leaked cabinet documents shockingly revealed that before the war, Bush told PM Tony Blair he “wanted to go beyond Iraq” by occupying Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Meanwhile, the FBI, intensifying its war against the neocons, is investigating two senior officials of the Israel lobby and a necon Pentagon analyst for passing security secrets to Israel. The CIA is deeply split between professional officers furious that national intelligence was corrupted to sell the Iraq war, and a minority eager to tell the White House whatever it desires.

Bush and Cheney now face a Republican and Pentagon revolt over their disgraceful defence of torture.

“We do not torture,” Bush insisted from Panama,. Of course not, Mr. President. You call it “forceful interrogation.” Meaning: Being kidnapped, drugged, stripped, thrown into a refrigerated, lightless underground cell, starved, deprived of sleep and sensory contact, covered with urine and excrement, severely beaten, anally raped, subjected to mock executions, given hideously painful electrical shocks, and strapped onto a special board and immersed in water until confessing or drowning.

This is what suspects have reportedly endured in America’s secret, outsourced prisons around the world.

Republican Sen. John McCain, an American war hero, is leading efforts in Congress to ban torture and compel observance of the Geneva Conventions.

CONVENTIONS WERE SACRED

When I was a U.S. GI, we were taught the Conventions were sacred. They protected all at war, as the CIA’s renowned former chief in Afghanistan, Milt Bearden, so brilliantly observed in a recent article.

But those little Torquemadas of the modern Inquisition, Bush and Cheney, who both dodged regular military service in wartime, claim the Geneva Conventions are bunk.

Bush is actually threatening to veto McCain’s bill. Cheney keeps defending torture. Americans will one day look back on this period with the same revulsion and shame as they do on Joe McCarthy’s era.
tornontosun.canoe.com

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez accused Mexican leader Vicente Fox of being a “puppy” of President Bush and said: “Don’t mess with me, sir.” Fox shot back on Monday that “we have dignity in this country” and demanded an apology. Now the two nations are withdrawing their ambassadors.

The severing of diplomatic relations came after a week of verbal sparring that highlighted Latin America’s differences over free trade and relations with the United States. The conservative Fox tends to side with Washington on many issues, while Chavez, a socialist and populist, has been one of the hemisphere’s strongest critics of Bush.

Venezuela’s president has repeatedly accused Fox of being a “puppy” of American interests and of disrespecting him after the pair took opposing positions during this month’s Summit of the Americas.

On Sunday, Chavez used his weekly radio and TV show to warn Fox: “Don’t mess with me, sir, because you’ll get stung.”

Fox retorted in an interview with CNN: “Other countries might accept (Chavez’s) wording and the way he attacks everybody and he attacks institutions. We are not willing to do that in Mexico.”
breitbart.com

…In the latest stage of what he calls the “new socialism of the 21st century,” Chavez has called on state officials to take over private land deemed “idle” or lacking property titles dating back to 1848. Soldiers have enforced some of the takeovers, at times denying owners and workers access to the land.

In recent months, the government has extended its campaign to corporate-owned land. One state government expropriated an idle tomato processing plant from U.S.-based H.J. Heinz Co. and another seized a silo installation from Empresas Polar, Venezuela’s largest food company.

The state government paid Heinz $256,000 (U.S.) for its seized plant, distinguishing Venezuela’s reform from Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s massive land redistribution effort, which has not reimbursed thousands of white landowners for their seized farms.

While critics say both the Venezuelan and Zimbabwean governments are giving land to peasants with little agricultural experience, Venezuela offers farming loans while Zimbabwean farmers severely lack resources to develop their land.

With agriculture a small player in Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy, it is unlikely that a fall in food production would cause the kind of food shortages and other crises it has in Zimbabwe, notes Orlando Ochoa, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas.
Mugabe’s reform also seized farms on the basis of race, targeting land owned by white farmers, while Caracas focuses on productivity and property titles, Ochoa says.

Critics argue that the Venezuelan expropriations are concentrating more power in the government by giving peasants farming licences for — rather than ownership of — the land they farm.

But Carlos Escarra, a constitutional lawyer and professor at the Central University of Venezuela, rejects this common criticism, saying peasants actually become property owners who lack only the right to sell their land.

Chavez says that having co-operatives like Antiaga’s farming on expropriated land will lessen Venezuela’s dependence on imports by satisfying domestic deficits in food.

And the government has launched a campaign to plant more than 200,000 hectares of new sugar cane and cassava to produce sugar-based ethanol gasoline.

Yet Yaracuy farm owner Vladimir Rodriguez says it is ironic that the same government has not prevented co-operatives and extortionists from destroying more than $15 million worth of sugar cane on 33 farms in his state alone, according to his statistics.

A state-run agrarian fund known as Fondafa also grants loans for farming machinery to co-operatives that have taken over private property without state permission and uprooted sugar cane crops.
In one case of extortion, local delinquents — who farm owners say posed as landless peasants — murdered sugar cane farm owner Antonio Vieira after he refused to pay them to not destroy his crop.

Yaracuy state secretary-general Col. Angel Yarza, who called on the government to take over 48 ranches, denied in an interview that he had seen large quantities of destroyed sugar cane. He assured that the state does not encourage land invasions, but will not intervene to protect privately owned farms.

Antiaga says Yarza and other state officials are helping his group’s long fight to take land away from owners like Lecuna, who for him represent a system of traditional land ownership that prevent the rural poor from acquiring farms or landing sustainable jobs.

“We’re human beings, too, and we have to eat,” he says.
But for farm owners, seizing private property and issuing loans to poor farmers is no solution to poverty and unemployment.

“(The co-operatives) just want credits that they won’t pay back,” says Lecuna. “They’re not going to produce.”
torontostar.com

This article presents a dishonest comparison between Zimbabwe and Venezuela. Of course, at this point, being condemned by the US and the UK is pretty much of a compliment…

Spanish police have traced up to 42 suspected CIA operatives believed to have taken part in secret flights carrying detained or kidnapped Islamist terror suspects to interrogation centres and jails in Afghanistan, Egypt and elsewhere.

A Spanish police report seen by the New York Times provides the names of the mainly American crew and passengers of a dozen suspect flights that landed in Palma de Mallorca in 2003 and 2004. The flights were allegedly part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme, in which, say human rights groups, suspected extreme Islamists are taken to be interrogated in countries where US human rights rules on torture do not apply.
guardian.co.uk

…”They took us to a cage — an animal cage that had lions in it within the Republican Palace,” he said. “And they threatened us that if we did not confess, they would put us inside the cage with the lions in it. It scared me a lot when they got me close to the cage, and they threatened me. And they opened the door and they threatened that if I did not confess, that they were going to throw me inside the cage. And as the lion was coming closer, they would pull me back out and shut the door, and tell me, ‘We will give you one more chance to confess.’ And I would say, ‘Confess to what?'”

Inside the Republican Palace — the site of Saddam’s former office — Sabbar says troops taunted him with a mock execution.

“I found the other prisoners who had come before me there in the line beside me mocking, in a way as to make it a mock execution,” he said. “They all stood up, those of us who could stand up. They directed their weapons towards us. And they shot, shot towards our heads and chests. And when the shots sounded, some of us lost consciousness. Some started to cry. Some lost control of their bladders. And they were laughing the whole time.”

After a night in jail at the Republican Palace, Khalid says he was taken to the prison at the Baghdad airport where the torture continued.

“They put us in individual cells,” he said. “And before entering those cells, they formed two teams of American soldiers — one to the right, one to the left — about 10 to 15 each American soldiers. And they were holding wooden sticks. It was like a hallway, like a passage. And they made us go that hallway while shouting at us as we were walking through and hitting us with the wooden sticks. They were beating us severely.”

Khalid says U.S. soldiers deprived him of food, water, and sleep. He claims he began to suffer from stomach ulcers, but was denied medical care.

All the while, Khalid says, soldiers routinely asked for information about Saddam’s whereabouts: “I said to him, ‘How would I know where Saddam is?’ And I thought that he was kidding me. And that’s why I laughed. And he beat me again.”

Khalid refuses to talk about one other allegation. In his legal complaint, he holds U.S. soldiers responsible for “Sexually assaulting and humiliating [him] … by grabbing his buttocks and simulating anal rape by pressing a water bottle against the seat of his pants; putting a hand inside [his] … pants and grabbing his buttocks during a severe beating … (and) brandishing a long wooden pole and threatening to sodomize him on the spot and every night of his detention.”
abcnews.go.com

Former Sen. John Edwards’ decision Sunday to so publicly repudiate his past vote authorizing the war in Iraq could help shape a Democratic race for president that’s just beginning.

The reason?

If 2004 is any guide, liberals and interest groups opposed to the Iraq war will exert a powerful influence on the 2008 battle for the Democratic nomination — especially in the crucial year or so leading up to the first caucuses and primaries.

In 2004, they catapulted Howard Dean, then an obscure ex-governor of Vermont, to the front of the Democratic pack — at least for awhile — because of his anti-war positions.

Dean’s more famous rivals, including Edwards and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., spent months on the defensive because they were among 29 Senate Democrats who voted to authorize President Bush to invade Iraq.

During a 2003 appearance at the California Democratic convention, Edwards was booed when he mentioned his support for disarming Saddam Hussein. And after the U.S. bombing of Baghdad began, antiwar demonstrators picketed Edwards’ Charlotte office and a campaign fundraiser in Raleigh.

To rescue their campaigns in the months leading up to the 2004 Iowa caucuses, Edwards and Kerry voted against Bush’s request for $87 billion for military and reconstruction efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Dean — now national chairman of the Democratic Party — called Edwards’ column in the Washington Post saying his 2002 vote was a mistake “very courageous. It’s always hard to admit you were wrong.”

Over on ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos — a one-time spokesman for President Bill Clinton — said Edwards’ remarks would put pressure on Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who is seen as the Democrat to beat in 2008 for the presidential nomination.

Clinton has criticized Bush’s handling of the war, but she hasn’t wavered on her vote. Asked her position recently on National Public Radio, she said: “I can’t talk about this on the fly; it’s too important.”

She may have to start talking soon.
commondreams.org

It’s a lot easier to admit you were wrong after the fact. These people are irrelevant.

OSLO – Warmer, wetter weather brought on by global warming could increase outbreaks of the plague, which has killed millions down the ages and wiped out one third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, academics said.

Migratory birds spreading avian flu from Asia today could also carry the plague bacteria westward from their source in Central Asia, Nils Stenseth, head of a three-day conference on the plague and how it spreads, told Reuters on Monday.

“Wetter, warmer weather conditions mean there are likely to be more of the bacteria around than normal and the chance of it spreading to humans is higher,” he said.

The European Union-funded group has just finished analyzing Soviet-era data from Kazakhstan which show a link between warmer weather and outbreaks of the plague.
commondreams.org