On Dec. 21, 2005, Congress passed a defense appropriations bill, which according to the press releases of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees, and many news articles subsequently written, funded “defense spending” for the United States for the current fiscal year, 2006. The impression made by the press releases and the news articles was that the $453 billion advertised in the bill, H.R. 2863, constitutes America’s defense budget for 2006.[1]

That would be quite incorrect. In fact, the total amount to be spent for the Department of Defense in 2006 is $13 billion to $63 billion more, the latter figure assuming full funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you also count, non-DOD “national defense” costs, add another $21 billion, and, if you count defense related security costs, such as homeland security, the congressional press release numbers are more than $200 billion wrong.
counterpunch.org

Is the United States about to launch a second preemptive war, against a nation that has not attacked us, to deprive it of weapons of mass destruction that it does not have?

With U.S. troops tied down in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Pakistanis inflamed over a U.S. airstrike that wiped out 13 villagers, including women and children, it would seem another war in the Islamic world is the last thing America needs.

Yet, the “military option” against Iran is the talk of the town.

“There is only one thing worse than … exercising the military option,” says Sen. John McCain. “That is a nuclear-armed Iran. The military option is the last option, but cannot be taken off the table.”

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” McCain said Iran’s nuclear program presents “the most grave situation we have faced since the end of the Cold War, absent the whole war on terror.”

Meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bush employed the same grim terms he used before invading Iraq. If Iran goes forward with nuclear enrichment, said Bush, it could “pose a grave threat to the security of the world.”

McCain and Bush both emphasized the threat to Israel. And all the usual suspects are beating the drums for war. Israel warns that March is the deadline after which she may strike. One reads of F-16s headed for the Gulf. The Weekly Standard is feathered and painted for the warpath. The Iranian Chalabis are playing their assigned roles, warning that Tehran is much closer to nukes than we all realize.

But just how imminent in this “grave threat”?

Thus far, Tehran has taken only two baby steps. It has renewed converting “yellowcake” into uranium hexafluoride, the gaseous substance used to create enriched uranium. And Iran has broken the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) seals at its nuclear facility at Natanz, where uranium hexafluoride is to be processed into enriched uranium. But on Saturday, the foreign ministry said it was still suspending “fuel production.”

However, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has declared, “There are no restrictions for nuclear research activities under the NPT,” the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Iran has signed.

Here, Iran’s president is supported by his countrymen and stands on the solid ground of international law. Yet Secretary of State Condi Rice said last week, “There is simply no peaceful rationale for the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment.”

Is Condi right?

Unlike Israel, Pakistan and India, which clandestinely built nuclear weapons, Iran has signed the NPT. And Tehran may wish to exercise its rights under the treaty to master the nuclear fuel cycle to build power plants for electricity, rather than use up the oil and gas deposits she exports to earn all of her hard currency. Nuclear power makes sense for Iran

True, in gaining such expertise, Iran may wish to be able, in a matter of months, to go nuclear. For the United States and Israel, which have repeatedly threatened her, are both in the neighborhood and have nuclear arsenals. Acquiring an atom bomb to deter a U.S. or Israeli attack may not appear a “peaceful rationale” to Rice, but the Iranians may have a different perspective.
informationclearinghouse.info

Noam Chomsky said Iran would be “crazy” not to develop nuclear weapons.
Speaking Tuesday to an audience of over 1,000 at University College, Dublin — Ireland’s largest university — Chomsky said, “No sane person wants Iran to have nuclear weapons,” but added that the Islamic republic had to respond to alleged threats from Israel and the United States, both nuclear powers.

Hillary Clinton calls for U.N. sanctions against Iran
PRINCETON, N.J. (AP) — U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton called for United Nations sanctions against Iran as it resumes its nuclear program and faulted the Bush administration for “downplaying” the threat.

In an address Wednesday evening at Princeton University, Clinton, D-N.Y., said it was a mistake for the United States to have Britain, France and Germany head up nuclear talks with Iran over the past 2 1/2 years. Last week, Iran resumed nuclear research in a move Tehran claims is for energy, not weapons.

“I believe that we lost critical time in dealing with Iran because the White House chose to downplay the threats and chose to outsource the negotiations,” Clinton said.

Rice: No Point in More Iran Negotiations
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – France, with the support of the United States, rejected Iran’s request for more negotiations on the Islamic republic’s nuclear program, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice saying Wednesday “there’s not much to talk about” after Iran resumed atomic activities.

As European countries pushed ahead with efforts to have Iran brought before the U.N. Security Council for its nuclear activities, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused them of trying to deprive Iran of peaceful technology.

“We are asking they step down from their ivory towers and act with a little logic,” Ahmadinejad said. “Who are you to deprive us from fulfilling our goals?

“You think you are the lord of the world and everybody should follow you. But that idea is a wrong idea.”

We’ve got Pat Buchanan and Noam Chomsky agreeing,Hillary Clinton demonstrating the death of a two-party system, the fix is in, and whether by Israel or by the U.S., Iran is going to be attacked. So what are we going to do about it? Is this ‘democracy’ so gutted that there is nothing we can do? Are we in such a morally degraded state that we lack the will to do anything that would interfere with the day-to-day of our lives? What is worth sacrifice? How about the overwhelming probability of global nuclear holocaust?

Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, the United States continues to spend billions of dollars annually to maintain and upgrade its nuclear forces. It is deploying a larger and more accurate preemptive nuclear strike capability in the Asia-Pacific region, and shifting its doctrine toward targeting U.S. strategic nuclear forces against “weapons of mass destruction” complexes and command centers.

As of January 2006, the U.S. stockpile contains almost 10,000 nuclear warheads. This includes 5,735 active or operational warheads: 5,235 strategic and 500 nonstrategic warheads. Approximately 4,225 additional warheads are held in the reserve or inactive stockpiles, some of which will be dismantled. Under plans announced by the Energy Department in June 2004 (and possibly revised in spring 2005), some 4,365 warheads are scheduled to be retired for dismantlement by 2012 (see Nuclear Notebook, September/October 2004). This would leave approximately 5,945 warheads in the operational and reserve stockpiles in 2012, including the 1,700-2,200 “operationally deployed” strategic warheads specified in the 2002 Moscow Treaty or Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

…Carter may come across today as a sort of benign and liberal old sage, but these statements are in flat contradiction to his practice as the 39th president from 1977-1981. When asked if the U.S. should rebuild Vietnam, a country it destroyed at a cost of three million Vietnamese lives and 58,000 U.S., his glib response was, “Well, the destruction was mutual.”

The Shah Pahlevi regime, which had come to power in Iran in a CIA-sponsored coup in 1953, was renowned for the murderous brutality of its secret police. Carter visited the Shah in 1979 and praised him for his “progressive administration” at a time when the Shah’s military was gunning down thousands of unarmed demonstrators.

In response to the Shah’s fall in the 1979 revolution, Carter, in his 1980 State of the Union address, set forth his Carter Doctrine: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
countrpunch.org

And don’t forget Guatemala and El Salvador.

An Oregon law that allows doctor-assisted suicide, the only one of its kind in the United States, was upheld by the Supreme Court in an embarrassing defeat for the Bush administration, which has spent five years trying to overturn it.

The High Court justices voted 6-3 in Oregon’s favour, saying the state had every right to pass such a law without federal interference. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the majority opinion, said the former attorney general John Ashcroft’s attempt to claim a higher authority and revoke the prescription-writing licences of participating doctors was “both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design”.

Oregon voters have twice approved the assisted suicide law, which requires two doctors to confirm terminally ill patients wanting to take advantage of it are capable of making the decision on their own. Since 1997, when the Death With Dignity Act was first passed, more than 200 people have used it to end their lives.
independent.co.uk

Michelle Bachelet has pledged to make half her cabinet women and give all Chileans a voice following her election as the Catholic nation’s first female president.

But the socialist paediatrician took a more moderate line than other leftist leaders in Latin America, saying she would seek to maintain Chile’s economic success and that she supported a US-backed free area as long as it took into account the region’s diversity.
guardian.co.uk

Saida Abdukarim was eight months pregnant and innocently tending her vegetables when she was set-upon, raped and beaten mercilessly.
Begging for the life of her child, she was told by her attackers: “You are black so we can rape you.” As they raped her and beat her with the butts of their guns she crouched over, absorbing the blows in an attempt to protect her unborn baby.

So far, her strategy appears to have worked: her baby is still alive. She, by contrast, fared much worse. She was battered so badly that she was unable to walk. All this just because she left her village for food.
guardian.co.uk

…The United States do not have friends, they say. They only have interests to defend. This is the lesson that anyone who wants to understand international relations needs to take on board in their analyses.

Since its independence, the DRC has always been a major stake in any global economic discourse. Multinational companies continue, through their governments, to influence the internal politics of the DRC.

In 1960, the free world‘s rhetoric against the expansion of international communism masked economic wars being waged by both the capitalist and communist blocs. With the end of the cold war, the mask fell away.

All the developed or industrialised countries are motivated by the defence of their economic interests. The report by a UN team of experts about the economic stakes, the main cause of the wars in the DRC, is very clear.

Mining contracts that the government in Kinshasa has just signed with a number of American companies perhaps explain this controversy about involving the UDPS in the political process. For some, it illustrates the adage: ‘Better the devil you know, than the devil you don’t,’ and just goes to show that the attitude of the Americans is no different from other countries with an interest in the Congo. ‘If I don’t do it, someone else will.’
globalresearch.ca

It is the sort of invitation any poverty-stricken student would find hard to resist. “Do you have a professor who just can’t stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? If you help … expose the professor, we’ll pay you for your work.”
For full notes, a tape recording and a copy of all teaching materials, students at the University of California Los Angeles are being offered $100 (£57) – the tape recorder is provided free of charge – by an alumni group.
guardian.co.uk

…”Right now, the rest of the world owns $3 trillion more of us than we own of them,” Buffett told business students and faculty Tuesday at the University of Nevada, Reno. “In my view, it will create political turmoil at some point. … Pretty soon, I think there will be a big adjustment,” he said without elaborating.
news.yahoo.com