Since the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in March 2005, the U.S. Administration has played an increasingly imperious role in Lebanon, exacerbating divisions in an already fiercely sectarian country.

Against a backdrop of bombings and assassinations which have filled the security vacuum left by Damascus, Lebanon is now sharply polarized into two camps: one resolutely opposed to the growing American presence in their country; the other united through its opposition to Syria.

Hizbullah, Lebanon’s largest political party, allied with the other main Shiite group Amal and a collection of Leftists/Arabists are rejecting the U.S. embrace. This group’s less than outraged response to allegations that Damascus was behind a string of attacks on anti-Syrian figures has created tremendous animosity toward Lebanon’s large Shiite community, who are now known to number between 40 and 50 per cent of the population.

America’s major Lebanese allies: the mostly Sunni entourage of the murdered former Prime Minister Hariri allied with Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, leftists funded by the Hariri camp and the remnants of Lebanon’s Christian far right are spearheading the anti Syrian camp.
counterpunch.org

…British and US policy towards Afghan opium after the 2001 invasion was totally cynical. As a covert reward to the warlords for supporting Karzai, the occupiers turned a blind eye to the 2002 replanting. Since the market for any unregulated global product tends to be near perfect, the prospect of rocketing profits brought an unprecedented acreage of Afghanistan into production. Twenty-eight of 32 provinces were instantly under cultivation. Refining factories were set up, keeping more profit in the country and creating jobs. Europe was soon swamped with cheap heroin. A Glasgow 11-year-old could buy it for £10 a packet. Afghanistan’s economy is now wholly reliant on opium as a result of the west’s ending of Taliban crop suppression and refusal to curb consumption. The policy was deliberate.

Britain is now pretending otherwise by sending the army to Helmand province, Afghanistan’s poppy-growing area. Its Herculean objective is to stamp out both the opium trade and Taliban infiltration. According to the defence secretary, John Reid, the war on terror is “absolutely interlinked to countering narcotics”. By eradicating poppies in Helmand, Britain hopes to drain the swamp on which terrorism floats.
guardian.co.uk

…This is an unpatriotic government. This is a government that deals openly in illegalities, whether it is attacking a country which has done us no harm, two countries — Iraq and Afghanistan — because we now believe, not in declaring war through Congress as the Constitution requires, but through the President. ‘Well, I think there are some terrorists over there, and I think we got to bomb them, huh? We’ll bomb them.’ Now, we’ve had idiots as presidents before. He’s not unique. But he’s certainly the most active idiot that we have ever had.

And now here we are planning new wars, ongoing wars in the Middle East. And so as he comes with his State of the Union, which he is going to justify eavesdropping without judicial warrants on anybody in the United States that he wants to listen in on. This is what we call dictatorship. Dictatorship. Dictatorship. And it is time that we objected. Don’t say wait ‘til the next election and do it through that. We can’t trust the elections, thanks to Diebold and S&S and all the electronic devices which are being flogged across the country to make sure that elections can be so rigged that the villains will stay in power.
democracynow.org

I think the myth of sovereignty of the people in the U.S. has been fully exposed. We can demonstrate all we want. Who cares?

1/31/06 “Washington Post” — — The National Security Agency is in the process of building a new warning hub and data warehouse in the Denver area, realigning much of its workforce from Ft. Meade, Maryland to Colorado.

The Denver Post reported last week that NSA was moving some of its operations to the Denver suburb of Aurora.

On the surface, the NSA move seems to be a management and cost cutting measure, part of a post-9/11 decentralization. “This strategy better aligns support to national decision makers and combatant commanders,” an NSA spokesman told the Denver paper.

In truth, NSA is aligning its growing domestic eavesdropping operations — what the administration calls “terrorist warning” in its current PR campaign — with military homeland defense organizations, as well as the CIA’s new domestic operations Colorado.

Translation: Hey Congress, Colorado is now the American epicenter for national domestic spying.

In May, Dana Priest reported here in The Washington Post that the CIA was planning to shift much of its domestic operations to Aurora, Colorado.

The move of the CIA’s National Resources Division was then described as being undertaken “for operational reasons.”

The Division is responsible for exploiting the knowledge of U.S. citizens and foreigners in the United States who might have unique information about foreign countries and terrorist activities. The functions extend from engaging Iraqi or Iranian Americans in covert operations to develop information and networks in their home countries to recruiting foreign students and visitors to be American spies.

Aurora is already a reconnaissance satellite downlink and analytic center focusing on domestic warning. The NSA and CIA join U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) in Colorado. NORTHCOM is post 9/11 the U.S. military command responsible for homeland defense.

The new NSA operation is located at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, at a facility commonly known as the Aerospace Data Facility.

According to Government Executive Magazine — thanks DP — “NSA is building a massive data storage facility in Colorado, which will be able to hold the electronic equivalent of the Library of Congress every two days.” This new NSA data warehouse is the hub of “data mining” and analysis development, allowing the eavesdropping agency to develop and make better use of the unbelievabytes of data it collects but does not exploit.
informationclearinghouse.info

Researchers have found the remains of African slaves in a 16th century Mexican graveyard, confirming historical accounts that the import of slaves began in the New World not long after Europeans conquered Mexico.

The graves were discovered near the ruins of a colonial church in Campeche, Mexico, a port on the Yucatán peninsula. The authors of the study, details of which were published yesterday, say the remains are the earliest physical evidence of African slaves in North America.
guardian.co.uk

…New York State is the most segregated state for Black and Latino children in America: seven out of eight Black and Latino kids here go to segregated schools. The majority of them go to schools where no more than two to four percent of the children are White. Only Illinois, Michigan, and California come close to this abysmal record. The level of segregation statewide is due largely to New York City, which is probably the country’s most segregated city.

When it comes to residential integration and school integration, New York has an undeserved reputation for progressive values. For the last 40 years it has been one of the most regressive cities in America, in many ways unaffected by the Brown decision. The courts never tried to integrate New York, and the major media, including the New York Times, consistently opposed any drastic measures that would significantly integrate the city’s system.
blackcommentator.com