The renowned reggae queen and wife of Bob Marley, Rita Marley is indeed a true philanthropist and patriot to Ghana.
She has initiated several projects in her local community in Ghana and other parts of the country.
Owing to her enormous contribution to the development of Konkonnuru village in the Akwapem Mountains, Rita Marley has been made a queenmother with the stool name Nana Afua Adobea.
ghanaweb.com
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters) – Richard Perle, a key architect of the U.S.-led war against Iraq, said on Saturday the West should not make the mistake of waiting too long to use military force if Iran comes close to getting an atomic weapon.
“If you want to try to wait until the very last minute, you’d better be very confident of your intelligence because if you’re not, you won’t know when the last minute is,” Perle told Reuters on the sidelines of an annual security conference in Munich.
“And so, ironically, one of the lessons of the inadequate intelligence of Iraq is you’d better be careful how long you choose to wait.”
Perle said Israel had chosen not to wait until it was too late to destroy the key facility Saddam Hussein’s secret nuclear weapons program in Osirak, Iraq in 1981. The Israelis decided to bomb the Osirak reactor before it was loaded up with nuclear fuel to prevent widespread radioactive contamination.
“I can’t tell you when we may face a similar choice with Iran. But it’s either take action now or lose the option of taking action,” he said.
reuters.com
First Negroponte, and now Perle. All the imperial dogs are barking. By his reasoning, accurate intelligence is irrelevant and worthless.
…It is known that the American General Staff has a conceptual plan for the defense of Israel, called Conplan 4305, which is updated every year. Some sources imply that plans for a strike on Iran by the Pentagon’s own forces also exist.
A prominent Russian specialist on Iran who asked not to be identified says that an American military operation against Iran at this point is very problematic. First, the Americans are bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it will clearly be some time, at best, before those countries evolve to the level anticipated by the United States. Second, the colossal burden of war spending may interfere as well, making an American invasion of Iran all the more difficult.
On the other hand, the expert doesn’t rule out the possibility of invasion. He says that Israel is a particularly energetic promoter of the aggression. It is worried by Tehran’s determination to see its national nuclear program to the logical conclusion and regards it as a dire threat to itself. Moreover, Tel-Aviv is within range of Iranian ballistic missiles.
The expert believe that the United States may go ahead and strike at Iran under pressure from Israel. A senior officer from Israeli military intelligence said in late 2005 that Israel was prepared to initiate elimination of Iranian nuclear facilities and added that it should be done this spring. The expert we approached for comments, however, doesn’t think that Israel can pull it off all alone even though the Americans have supplied it with a great deal of high-precision weapons designed for penetration and destruction of well-protected underground facilities.
globalresarch.ca
…”Let the dogs of the empire bark, that’s their job,” he said. “Ours is to battle to achieve the true liberation of our people.”
Chavez said the US government was weakening already, and echoed Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong’s idea that capitalist countries were a “paper tiger” to be challenged.
“They are right to be worried, because they know what’s happening here,” Chavez said in a speech lasting nearly three hours after accepting his prize.
“They will forever try to preserve the US empire by all means, while we will do everything possible to shred it.”
aljazeera.net
Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid. After four years reporting from Jerusalem and more than a decade from Johannesburg before that, the Guardian’s award-winning Middle East correspondent Chris McGreal is exceptionally well placed to assess this explosive comparison. Here we publish the first part of his two-day special report.
guardian.co.uk
Magazine shuts down after controversy
An economics magazine will be shut down after running an anti-Semitic article.
The promise to shut down Global Agenda was made in a Feb. 3 letter from the head of the World Economic Forum, Professor Klaus Schwab, to the head of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris.
Schwab said the article, which called for an international boycott of Israel, was “inflammatory and venomous.” It will be replaced in the reprinted Global Agenda with an editorial by Schwab about the values of the forum. He added that it will be the last issue of the magazine.
This is the group that throws the Davos fete every year…
…’I wish I hadn’t come back home from Iran after the Taliban left. I had a better life there, I had occasional work at least, so I am going back.’ Zahair Mohammad stands in the line trying, with hundreds of others, to get an Iranian visa. ‘I was thinking positively for a long time about rebuilding a life here in Kabul, where I was born, but I was wrong, very wrong. It’s time to go. I need to work abroad, like most, as a cheap labourer and send money home. What we’re hearing on the radio about a new Afghanistan is nothing but a dream.’ He gestures at the kilometre-long queue. ‘I was a refugee before and now I’m choosing to become one again. I’m not alone.’
Five years after the Taliban were deposed by a US-led military alliance, Afghanistan remains entrenched in poverty. Intense frustration with the government, particularly among refugees who returned amid promises of change, is growing. The Observer has learnt that such is the demand among ordinary Afghans to leave that this weekend the Interior Ministry has run out of the basic materials to make passports.
guardian.co.uk
Afghanistan fighting spreads to Pakistan
MILITANTS attacked Afghan government offices and a police convoy, continuing a series of assaults that has left at least 41 people dead in the region over two days, government officials said.
About 250 Afghan forces fought more than 200 rebels in the area’s fiercest fighting in months. At least 19 people were killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan on Saturday.
Afghan officials said US forces joined the battle Friday and yesterday but a US military spokesman said he could only confirm involvement in the first day of fighting.
The violence spread across the border as a roadside bomb exploded near an army vehicle yesterday in Pakistan in a north-western tribal region near Afghanistan, killing three security personnel, an official said.
02/03/06 “PRNewswire” — — Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson makes the startling claim that much of Powell’s landmark speech to the United Nations laying out the Bush Administration’s case for the Iraq war was false.
“I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council,” says Wilkerson, who helped prepare the address.
“I recall vividly the Secretary of State walking into my office,” Wilkerson tells NOW. “He said: ‘I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground in Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and don’t find a single weapon of mass destruction?'” In fact, no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.
informationclearinghouse.info
Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News has another scoop that probably portends the most important strategic military development of our generation.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has given the Navy go ahead to develop a conventionally armed Trident missile. Two dozen existing nuclear-armed submarine-launched missiles will be converted to carry conventional warheads. The missiles will then be assigned “global strike” missions to allow quicker preemptive attacks.
For the first time since intercontinental ballistic missiles were “captured” in arms control treaties 40 years ago as unique and potentially destabilizing weapons, the United States will muddy the waters by modifying an existing nuclear weapon for use in day-to-day warfare.
The conversion of Trident missiles abandons the strict segregation of nuclear from conventional weapons.
Were the United States ever to use its new conventional Tridents, the firing would also flirt with accidental nuclear war. Ballistic missiles aimed at targets in North Korea, for example, might falsely signal to China or Russia that the United States was attacking them.
washingtonpost.com
Ability to Wage ‘Long War’ Is Key To Pentagon Plan
The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a “long war,” yesterday laid out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed, often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism and other nontraditional threats.
Major initiatives include a 15 percent boost in the number of elite U.S. troops known as Special Operations Forces, a near-doubling of the capacity of unmanned aerial drones to gather intelligence, a $1.5 billion investment to counter a biological attack, and the creation of special teams to find, track and defuse nuclear bombs and other catastrophic weapons.
China is singled out as having “the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States,” and the strategy in response calls for accelerating the fielding of a new Air Force long-range strike force, as well as for building undersea warfare capabilities.
by Charles Sullivan
…We are witnessing an all pervasive mediocrity in government that has come as a result of a spectacular failure of citizenship. We are a people that value ease and convenience over self education, sacrifice and truth. We do not demand evidence in support of our views. We believe what we are told; and we do what we are told by authority. We do not like to make trouble. Asking questions requires self examining critical thinking, a skill that is rapidly disappearing from our culture of fluff and ease. We want the kind of life where the decisions are made for us—a life that does not place demands upon us. We want to be entertained, not informed by burdensome truths that may assault our conscience and cause psychological injury. That is dangerous knowledge because it would dispel the myths about what America really is. It would force us to think differently about who we are as a people. We would see us as the rest of the world sees us.
informationclearinghouse.info
I understand the horror and anger. I share it. But I don’t think ‘hitting the streets day after day’ is going to do it. I think we have to acknowledge that ‘the people’ never have run this country, counter to all the rhetoric. National strikes are not in our repertoire, nor is massive tax revolt. I wonder what citizenship has ever really meant here. I’m afraid the American people are in for a huge shock, and those of us who won’t be shocked are along for the ride anyway.
South Africa’s upwardly mobile professionals are flaunting their new wealth. But while they thrive in a resurgent country, impoverished millions are still struggling to survive in the townships.
guardian.co.uk