The United States has until now not done enough to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, a senior Defense Ministry official has told The Jerusalem Post while expressing hope that Wednesday’s referral of the Iranian issue to the United Nations Security Council would prove to be effective.

“America needs to get its act together,” the official said. “Until now the US administration has just been talking tough but the time has come for the Americans to begin to take tough action.”

The only real way to stop Teheran’s race to obtain the bomb apart from military action was through tough economic sanctions that caused the Iranian people to suffer. “Once the people understand that their government is bringing upon them a disaster will they realize that the [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad’s regime needs to be replaced,” the official said.
jpost.com

Yeah we see how that worked in Iraq. This is crap anyway.

WASHINGTON — Acting to crack down on terrorist financing, the Treasury Department on Thursday ordered all commercial banks in the United States to end their relationships with two Syrian banks.

The order covers the state-owned Commercial Bank of Syria and its subsidiary, the Syrian Lebanese Commercial Bank.

The department said that all U.S. banks must close any accounts they have with the two banks.

“Today’s action is aimed at protecting our financial system against abuse by this arm of a state-sponsor of terrorism,” said Stuart Levy, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

“The Commercial Bank of Syria has been used by terrorists to move their money and it continues to afford direct opportunities for the Syrian government to facilitate international terrorist activity and money laundering,” Levy said.
chron.com

On the March 8 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Bill O’Reilly stated: “You know, in a sane world, every country would unite against Iran and blow it off the face of the earth. That would be the sane thing to do.” O’Reilly made the remark during a discussion of Iran’s recent threat to cause “harm and pain” to the U.S. if it pursues sanctions against Iran in the U.N. Security Council because of Iran’s developing nuclear program.

As Media Matters for America has documented, O’Reilly recently declared that “it’s just a matter of time … before we have to bomb” Iran.

From the March 8 edition of Westwood One’s The Radio Factor with Bill O’Reilly:

O’REILLY: And let’s do the No-Spin News. In Vienna, Iran has threatened the U.S.A. with, quote, “harm and pain” for its role in trying to get the United Nations to discipline Iran over the nuke issue. OK. It’s the usual saber-rattling. You know, we’ll hurt you, we’ll do this, that, and the other thing. Now, what Iran is doing is they perceive that America is weakened because of the conflict in Iraq and the division at home, OK? So they’re saying, “Hey, we’ll just push the envelope as far as we can push it and see what happens. So we think that Bush is a damaged president, his approval ratings are low, Iraq is chaos — we’re helping that out, by the way.” Iran is helping Iraq to be in chaos by allowing the terrorists to go through that country and arming them and teaching them how to make bombs and all of that.
mediamatters.org

MADRID, Spain – A two-year probe into the Madrid train bombings concludes the Islamic terrorists who carried out the blasts were homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, two senior intelligence officials said.

Spain still remains home to a web of radical Algerian, Moroccan and Syrian groups bent on carrying out attacks — and aiding the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq — a Spanish intelligence chief and a Western official intimately involved in counterterrorism measures in Spain told The Associated Press.

The intelligence chief said there were no phone calls between the Madrid bombers and al-Qaida and no money transfers. The Western official said the plotters had links to other Islamic radicals in Western Europe, but the plan was hatched and organized in Spain. “This was not an al-Qaida operation,” he said. “It was homegrown.”
msnbc.msn.com

The Vatican has disconcerted Italian politicians – and some of the Roman Catholic church’s most senior prelates – by endorsing a proposal by radical Muslims for a weekly “Islamic hour” in schools with a strong Muslim presence.

“If in a school there are 100 Muslim children, I don’t see why their religion shouldn’t be taught,” said Cardinal Renato Martino, a minister in the Vatican’s government, the Roman Curia.

The speaker of the Italian senate, Marcello Pera, who has launched a movement for the defence of Europe’s Christian values, said the suggestion was “the diametric opposite of any kind of attempt at integration”. In a note posted on the internet, he said it “tended, on the contrary, to reinforce the idea of an autonomous Muslim community inside the Italian state”.
guardian.co.uk

…Many have been alarmed by the increase of the Muslim population in Europe, which seems inimical to western values. They are naturally defensive and apprehensive; the cartoons can be seen as an expression of this anxiety and as a blow for freedom. But they also revealed the darker side of the culture they purported to defend, and have a grim precedent. Historically, Europe has found it extremely difficult to tolerate minorities; one member of the AoC group recalled that before the Shoah, in preparation for what was to come, Nazi propagandists encouraged the publication of anti-semitic cartoons in the German press.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an indispensable member of our AoC group, spoke from personal experience of the abiding pain felt by people who see their traditions consistently scorned and ridiculed by an imperialist power. When people hurt in this way, he said, it only takes a little thing to push them over the edge. When Islam was a major world power and Muslims were confident, they could take insults about their religion in their stride. But today, fearful of the hostility in Europe and bombarded with images from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, many experienced the gratuitous vilification of their prophet by the Danish cartoonists as the last straw.

Hatred of the west is a relatively recent prejudice in the Islamic world. A hundred years ago, every single leading Muslim intellectual, with the exception of the proto-fundamentalist Al-Afghani, saw western modernity as deeply congenial and, even though they hated European colonialism, many wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. Relations soured not because of an inherent “clash of civilisations”, but because of western foreign policy, which continues to fuel the crisis.

How do we move forward? Washington’s threatening posture towards Iran can only lead to an increase in hostility between Islam and the west, and we must expect more conflicts like the cartoon crisis. Instead of allowing extremists on both sides to set the agenda, we should learn to see these disputes in historical perspective, recalling that in the past aggressive cultural chauvinism proved to be dangerously counterproductive. The emotions engendered by these crises are a gift to those, in both the western and the Islamic worlds, who, for their own nefarious reasons, want the tension to escalate; we should not allow ourselves to play into their hands.
guardian.co.uk

Two months after the New York Times revealed that the Bush Administration ordered the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance of American citizens, only three corporations–AT&T, Sprint and MCI–have been identified by the media as cooperating. If the reports in the Times and other newspapers are true, these companies have allowed the NSA to intercept thousands of telephone calls, fax messages and e-mails without warrants from a special oversight court established by Congress under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Some companies, according to the same reports, have given the NSA a direct hookup to their huge databases of communications records. The NSA, using the same supercomputers that analyze foreign communications, sifts through this data for key words and phrases that could indicate communication to or from suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers and then tracks those individuals and their ever-widening circle of associates. “This is the US version of Echelon,” says Albert Gidari, a prominent telecommunications attorney in Seattle, referring to a massive eavesdropping program run by the NSA and its English-speaking counterparts that created a huge controversy in Europe in the late 1990s.

So far, a handful of Democratic lawmakers–Representative John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and Senators Edward Kennedy and Russell Feingold–have attempted to obtain information from companies involved in the domestic surveillance program. But they’ve largely been rebuffed. Further details about the highly classified program are likely to emerge as the Electronic Frontier Foundation pursues a lawsuit, filed January 31, against AT&T for violating privacy laws by giving the NSA direct access to its telephone records database and Internet transaction logs. On February 16 a federal judge gave the Bush Administration until March 8 to turn over a list of internal documents related to two other lawsuits, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, seeking an injunction to end the program.
alertnet.org

…In Texas, a group of veterans staged a protest march covering the distance to the nearest VA hospital: 250 miles.

“[It takes] four-and-a-half to five hours .. one way,” said Vietnam War vet Polo Uriesti.

Uriesti said his father, a veteran of World War II, suffers a greater hardship. But he said the headaches and flashbacks of post-traumatic stress still flare up without warning.

“I just … it chokes me up,” said Uriesti.

The VA acknowledged some veterans suffer those problems but said most do not.

“Last year, 97 percent of veterans who came to us for a primary care appointment got that appointment within 30 days, and 95 percent of those who came for an acute care appointment got it within 30 days,” said R. James Nicholson, secretary of Veterans Affairs.

Audit: VA Fudged Reports

But an inspector general’s audit found real problems with the way the VA has come up with those numbers. The audit found that some VA staff, feeling “pressured,” actually fudged the numbers, and error rates were as high as 61 percent.

In Atlanta, one veteran who the VA said got an appointment within a week actually waited nearly a year.
abcnews.go.com

The United States authorities are facing demands by doctors from around the world to abandon the barbaric method of force-feeding hunger strikers at Guantanamo Bay.

More than 250 medical experts are launching a protest today against the practice – which involves strapping inmates to “restraint chairs” and pushing tubes into the stomach through the nose. They say it breaches the right of prisoners to refuse treatment.

The United Nations has demanded the immediate closure of the US detention camp in Cuba after concluding that treatment such as force-feeding and prolonged solitary confinement could amount to torture.

Doctors from seven countries, including the best-selling author Oliver Sacks, call for disciplinary action against their US counterparts who force-feed detainees. About 80 prisoners are understood to be refusing food, including a UK resident, Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national who is married to a British woman and has four children.

Since August they have been routinely force-fed, an excruciatingly painful practice that causes bleeding and nausea. The doctors say: “Fundamental to doctors’ responsibilities in attending a hunger striker is the recognition that prisoners have a right to refuse treatment.
independent.co.uk

WASHINGTON (AP) – The FBI said Friday there is no specific, credible threat of a terror attack aimed at college basketball arenas or other sports stadiums, but acknowledged alerting law enforcement to a recent Internet posting discussing such attacks.

The FBI and Homeland Security Department distributed an intelligence bulletin Friday to state and local law enforcement nationwide describing the online threat against sporting venues, said Special Agent Richard Kolko, an FBI spokesman in Washington.

“We have absolutely no credible intelligence or threats pertaining to this issue,” Kolko said.

With conference tournaments taking place this weekend, and the NCAA tournament scheduled to begin Thursday, the bulletin was sent “out of an abundance of caution,” Kolko said.

“We have been in touch with Homeland Security and the FBI about this issue,” said NCAA spokesman Erik Christiansen.

“We do not believe there is an imminent threat,” he said. “We are in constant communication with the local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, including Homeland Security and the FBI. This is not new; we are in regular contact with all these law enforcement agencies at every level.”

The online message described a potential attack in some detail, calling it an efficient way to kill thousands of people using suicide bombers armed with explosives hidden beneath their winter clothing, said a federal law enforcement official who read the bulletin.
guardian.co.uk