Congratulations Americans- not only are the hardliner Iranian clerics running the show in Iran- they are also running the show in Iraq. This shift of power should have been obvious to the world when My-Loyalty-to-the-Highest-Bidder-Chalabi sold his allegiance to Iran last year. American and British sons and daughters and husbands and wives are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years.

What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?

Iraq has been the land of dreams for everyone except Iraqis- the Persian dream of a Shia controlled Islamic state modeled upon Iran and inclusive of the holy shrines in Najaf, the pan-Arab nationalist dream of a united Arab region with Iraq acting as its protective eastern border, the American dream of controlling the region by installing permanent bases and a Puppet government in one of its wealthiest countries, the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdish state financed by the oil wealth in Kirkuk…

The Puppets the Americans empowered are advocates of every dream except the Iraqi one: The dream of Iraqi Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen… the dream of a united, stable, prosperous Iraq which has, over the last two years, gone up in the smoke of car bombs, military raids and a foreign occupation.
informationclearinghouse.info

The Israeli occupation army has re-imposed draconian restrictions on Palestinian civilians across the West Bank. The new measures, prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention, amount to virtually caging millions of Palestinians inside their respective towns, villages and refugee camps and follow an earlier ban on Palestinian traffic on intercity roads in the West Bank. If permitted to continue, the strangulation of Palestinian population centres, which coincides with the Eid Al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan, is likely to lead to a resumption of violence on a very large scale.

This week, Palestinian resistance factions, mainly under pressure from Egypt, re-committed themselves to the fragile calm on condition of Israeli reciprocity. Israel responded by carrying out more assassinations and air strikes against suspected resistance activists and civilian infrastructure such as roads and buildings that the Israeli army claimed were being used by “terrorists”. The frailty and mendacity of Israeli justifications suggest that the real goal is simply to wreak maximum damage and collective punishment on Palestinians “for the sake of it”, in the words of one Palestinian Authority official.
weekly.ahram.org.eg

…There is nothing less risky than praising a dead icon. There is nothing more risky than standing with a living one who, to use John Kerry’s words for Rosa Parks, “speaks truth to power”.

…Imagine if two planeloads of the US Congress, containing the same worthies who descended on Detroit with such alacrity, had gone to Texas this summer and camped out in the ditch outside Bush’s Ranch…

But Cindy Sheehan is alive and troublesome. Rosa Parks is dead and safe. Therein lies the difference.
informationclearinghouse.info

…”National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans.

Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot.
informationclearinghouse.info

As if the indictment of Lewis “Scooter” Libby wasn’t enough to give the White House some heavy concerns, a report from the Government Accounting Office takes a big bite out of the Bush clique’s pretense of legitimacy.

This powerful and probing report takes a hard look at the election of 2004 and supports the contention that the election was stolen. The report has received almost no coverage in the national media.

…1. Some electronic voting machines “did not encrypt cast ballots or system audit logs, and it was possible to alter both without being detected.” In short, the machines; provided a way to manipulate the outcome of the election. In Ohio, more than 800,000 votes were cast on electronic voting machines, some registered seven times Bush’s official margin of victory.

2: the report further stated that: “it was possible to alter the files that define how a ballot looks and works, so that the votes for one candidate could be recorded for a different candidate.” Very many sworn statements and affidavits claim that did happen in Ohio in 2004.

Next, the report says, “Vendors installed uncertified versions of voting system software at the local level.” The GAO found that falsifying election results without leaving evidence of doing so by using altered memory cards could easily be done.

The GAO additionally found that access to the voting network was very easy to compromise because not all electronic voting systems had supervisory functions protected by password. That meant access to one machine gave access to the whole network. That critical finding showed that rigging the election did not take a “widespread conspiracy” but simply the cooperation of a small number of operators with the power to tap into the networked machines. They could thus alter the vote totals at will. It therefore was no big task for a single programmer to flip vote numbers to give Bush the 118,775 votes.
rockrivertimes.com

GAO report

BRUSSELS, Belgium — Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger warned against an early withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces from Iraq, saying such a move would bolster insurgents and terrorists worldwide, causing instability across the Middle East.

He also warned that European Union nations and Washington needed to find another way to get Iran to stop the development of its nuclear program, which the EU and US fear is being used to make nuclear weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

Kissinger, in a speech Friday to top NATO officers and officials, said Iran’s nuclear program and terrorism continued to pose a tough challenge for trans-Atlantic ties, and warned also that Iran could use nuclear weapons as a way to protect itself while continuing to promote terrorist groups.
newsday.com

Yeah well what else would we expect from Mr. Stench of Brimstone.

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’
nytimes.com

The Niger connection

A political scandal in Italy, involving allegations that Italian secret agents followed a shady intelligence operator around London as he headed for a meeting with MI6, has called into question one of Britain’s last justifications for the invasion of Iraq.

Silvio Berlusconi’s government has admitted that agents of Sismi, the Italian military intelligence service, tracked the movements in London of Rocco Martino, an ex-informer, in the autumn of 2001. It did not say whether the British authorities were informed, but admitted that Mr Martino was also followed by Sismi in the US, without the knowledge of the FBI.

According to Italian press reports, however, Mr Martino had a meeting with the Secret Intelligence Service in London. A year later, the 66-year-old, who made a living peddling information to intelligence services and journalists, was the source of forged documents purporting to show that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium for nuclear weapons from the west African state of Niger.

The documents were used by the US to make its case for war. President George Bush cited the uranium claim in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But as soon as the US passed the documents to the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, it denounced them as obvious fakes.

Oil’s Victory in Alaska, with a Dem Assist
by Jeffrey St. Clair

For the past quarter century, there’s been an annual ritual on Capital Hill. Each spring, with the regularity of migrating warblers, the oil lobby bursts into the halls of congress with a scheme to open to drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, perched on the northern rim of Alaska on the ice-bound Beaufort Sea. This seasonal onslaught prompts the big eco groups to frenzied action, unleashing a blizzard of emergency fundraising appeals adorned with shots of caribou and polar bears, pleading with their members to send money immediately in order to “save the refuge”. Year after year, the face off has ended in a stalemate, with the politicians pocketing cash from both sides.

Now this dance is over. After emerging from their closed door session on the fabricated intelligence used to sell the Iraq war (supposedly evidence of spinal-column regeneration by Democrats), the Senate proceed to once again doom the nation’s most treasured wildlife refuge. With a 51-48 pro-drilling vote yesterday on a deviously-crafted line item in the U.S. Senate’s budget bill, the oil industry has seized its most prized trophy: access to reservoirs of crude beneath the 1.5 million-acre wildlife refuge on the Arctic plain.
counterpunch.org

Nimmo: Liberals and Conservatives: Two Sides of the Same Authoritarian Coin

As it turns out, Michael Moore owns Halliburton stock. Joseph Farah’s website expects us to be surprised and angered by such hypocrisy. However, this “revelation,” one of many featured in a book by Peter Schweizer, is not surprising, nor are other insights into the disingenuous behavior of Nancy Pelosi, Noam Chomsky, Barbra Streisand, Ralph Nader, and other so-called liberals and Democrats.

Anybody with two brain cells to rub together who is capable of reading a newspaper realizes Mikey is a hypocrite—or more accurately, a conflicted liberal.

…Democrats and liberals seem incapable of understanding it does not matter if a Democrat or Republican is in office—there will be invasions, mass murder, corporate thievery, neolib foreign and economic policy, encroachments on the Constitution and liberty, and an ever-growing police state and police state outrages (the Democrat Clinton, after all, oversaw the incineration of babies at Waco). Moreover, as history demonstrates, more Democrats have started wars than Republicans. Of course, since many Republicans are now neocons (and many founding neocons are former Trotskyites), this has become a moot point.

Across Latin America a similarly explosive multiplier effect is under way, with indigenous movements redrawing the continent’s political map, demanding not just “rights” but a reinvention of the state along deeply democratic lines. In Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous groups have shown they have the power to topple governments. In Argentina, when mass protests ousted five presidents in 2001 and 2002, the words of Mexico’s Zapatistas were shouted on the streets of Buenos Aires.

Facing mass protests in Argentina yesterday during the Summit of the Americas, George W. Bush saw first hand that the spirit of that revolt is alive and well. And although President Bush didn’t take Hugo Chavez up on his offer to hold an open debate on the merits of “free trade,” the truth is that the debate has already happened on the continent’s streets and at its ballot boxes and Bush has lost. Consider this: the last time the 34 heads of these states got together it was April 2001 in Quebec City; it was Bush’s first Summit after his election and he announced with great confidence that the Free Trade Area of the Americas would be law by 2005. Now, four years later, many of the faces of his colleagues have changed and Bush can’t even get the FTAA on the meeting’s agenda, let alone get it signed.
zmag.org

Bush rebuked by the hand of God

…As domestic polls informed him that he was increasingly mistrusted by his fellow Americans, Mr Bush was clearly mortified to be called “human trash” by Latin America’s equivalent of Michael Jordan – the Argentinian football legend Diego Maradona.

…Anyone who has spent time in Latin America recently knows Mr Bush is the least popular US president among Latin Americans in history. Five Latin American countries have voted in left-of-centre governments since he took office. From the indigenous people through to the middle classes and even among the elite, Latin Americans increasingly seek not the American dream, but the Latin American dream. They are disillusioned with what Maradona yesterday called “the American Empire”.

Rioters shatter Bush’s hopes of forging free trade coup

…Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said yesterday FTAA discussions should wait until at least after crucial World Trade Organisation talks in December on stripping global trade barriers and boosting the world’s economy. Venezuela’s firebrand president Hugo Chavez was more strident. On Friday night he told a crowd of more than 20,000 protesters that the policy was a branch of American imperialism. ‘Only united can we defeat imperialism and bring our people a better life,’ he said, adding: ‘Here, in Mar del Plata, FTAA will be buried!’

…The scenes of violence and protest, which have become common at most meetings of world leaders, prompted Bush to ruefully acknowledge his unpopularity in much of the world outside his own borders. ‘It’s not easy to host all these countries, particularly not easy to host, perhaps, me,’ Bush told his Argentine hosts ‘But thank you for doing it.’

A $50 BILLION hole is about to be blown in our national safety net for the poor, including:

• $9.5 billion in Medicaid – CUT. It’s a direct hit to those needing health care – including children
• $5 Billion in Child Support Enforcement – GONE. Without it, deadbeat parents are off the hook again, plunging hundreds of thousands of children back into poverty.
• $844 Million in food stamps – ELIMINATED. Do we even need to explain the implications here?

The list goes on. It is about to happen at the U.S. Capitol, where Congress has proposed perhaps the cruelest, most immoral budget ever to reach the floor. Its rationale: to help pay for Katrina recovery. Yes, Katrina recovery will be expensive, but do we really believe punishing the poorest among us is the best answer? If this budget if passed, Katrina victims will the the FIRST to feel its sting. It makes no sense.

Adding insult to injury, the proposed budget also contain massive tax BREAKS for big corporations and the ultra-wealthy few.

This budget must not stand. On Thursday morning, FaithfulAmerica joined a gathering of national religious leaders at the U.S. Capitol to call on Congress to reject the proposed budget cuts in the federal budget. The reason: the proposed cuts literally take from the POOR and give to the RICH. Cruel and immoral as it sounds, this is exactly what is going down in Washington. You can help stop it. Read how below.
faithfulamerica.org

Good to remember that not every Christian in the US is a fundamentalist nut.