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Barking Mad
Mike Whitney
There’s nothing more disturbing than knowing that an alcohol-addled megalomaniac has his sweaty fingers on the Big Red Switch and that with one little tug he could ignite the world like a Roman candle. It’s not a comforting thought, but it’s the truth. As the situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate and the feckless congress concedes more power to the president; Bush’s grasp of reality seems to grow increasing threadbare. How much more pressure his fragile psyche can take? Regrettably,! there are signs that Bush is losing ground to an invasive form of delirium praecox; the steady erosion of his already circumscribed mental faculties…
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Woodward’s 60 Minutes bloodbath
MIKE WHITNEY
Veteran journalist Bob Woodward can always be counted on to tell the truth… after all the other options have been exhausted. His new book doesn’t veer too far from the pattern he’s followed his entire career; one minute he’s the “kingmaker” dishing up hearty-helpings of literary tripe like “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack” and the next minute he’s ramming a scimitar into the lower lumbar region of his prey. That’s Bob, the consummate insider and part-time assassin who! se real job is not to maintain an “informed public” or preserve the free flow of information, but to use the privately-owned media in a way that serves the exclusive interests of the ruling elite. Most of what Woodward said on 60 Minutes was accurate and interesting. Bush has deceived the American people about the slow-rolling catastrophe in Iraq. He’s obfuscated the truth about the 800 to 900 attacks on American troops per week and, yes, Rumsfeld is the greatest bungler in the history of the Republic. But why has Woodward decided to spill the beans now?…
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Israel’s arsenal:
“ The cease-fire will not benefit Israel “ Says the Pentagon
Xavière Jardez (AFI – Flash n°64)
French and foreign mainstream medias have maliciously underlined the Iran or Syrian origin of Hezbollah’s armament during the month-long aggression in Lebanon though Hezbollah’s weapons do not in any way compare with Israel’s arsenal as Hezbollah unfortunately do not have any air defence. In the meantime, they have observed a thick silence over the US sourcing of Israel’s weaponry. Resistan! ce leaders are far less attached to Iran than the Israelis are to the United States where a powerful pro-Israeli lobby casts all political dice or the organised Jewish community abroad to Israel…
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Bloody Day in Iraq Leaves 182 Dead
Margaret Griffis, Antiwar.com
…At least 118 were killed in Baghdad alone, including one intelligence officer and Faris Khalil, a colonel in the Interior Ministry. At least thirteen more bodies were found throughout Baghdad on Monday, adding to the fifty that were found overnight Sunday. They were shot to death and bore signs of torture. It is believed that “sectarian death squads” killed them. Mortar attacks reportedly killed 1, injured 3 in northern Baghdad, while another mo! rtar killed 1 and injured 8 in the Ur district. 8 fatal shooting victims were delivered to a hospital in the Yarmouk district. Roadside bombs killed 3, injured 8 in the Saadoun district; wounded 3 more in the Yarmouk district and 2 in Eastern Baghdad. Another bomb targeting police killed 2, injured 2, in the Waziriya district, but whether the casualties were police or civilians is unconfirmed. A noontime bomb blast at a market in Al Nasr reportedly killed 4 and injured 13…
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America the Tyranny
Manuel Valenzuela, thepeoplesvoice.org
Behold and bear witness to what has become of America, in this era of uncertainty and bewilderment, in this time of fear and intimidation, that since towers were brought down and demolished has methodically fallen into the viper pit of neocon decadence, becoming, as it stands today, an authoritarian’s heaven and a corporatist’s promised land, its people ignorant, as always, to the barrage of waves systemically eroding centuries of rights, freedoms and lib! erties. From sea to shining sea, despotism is what today those who pay attention see…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Monday, 2 October 2006
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice
In a dispatch posted at 5:10pm Makkah time Monday afternoon, Mafkarat al-Islam reported that US occupation forces carried out a campaign of raids and searches in al-Fallujah on Monday morning (…) The correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam reported that in the course of the sweep, the Americans arrested 81 local residents, including elderly persons, and people li! sted as 60 percent disabled. The correspondent reported that the Americans took their captives to their base located east of al-Fallujah. It has been reported, the correspondent noted, that the Americans tend to put the prisoners in the American base known as “the Farm” al-Mazra’ah to be used as human shields, as the Resistance would be reluctant to bombard the American base, knowing that there are large numbers of local residents being held prisoner there…
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Fatal Vision: The Deeper Evil Behind the Detainee Bill
Chris Floyd
It was a dark hour indeed on Thursday when the United States Senate voted to end the constitutional republic and transform the country into a “Leader-State,” giving the president and his agents the power to capture, torture and imprison forever anyone – American citizens included – whom they arbitrarily decide is an “enemy combatant.” This also includes those who merely give “terrorism” some kind of “support,” defined so vaguely that many experts ! say it could encompass legal advice, innocent gifts to charities or even political opposition to US government policy within its draconian strictures. All of this is bad enough – a sickening and cowardly surrender of liberty not seen in a major Western democracy since the Enabling Act passed by the German Reichstag in March 1933. But it is by no means the full extent of our degradation…
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DAILY WAR NEWS FOR MONDAY, OCTOBER 02, 2006
Today in Iraq
The Iraqi parliament voted Monday to extend the country’s state of emergency for 30 more days. The state of emergency has been renewed every month since first being authorized in November 2004. It grants security forces greater powers and affects the entire country apart from the autonomous Kurdish region in the north. The measure allows for a nighttime curfew and gives the government extra powers to make arrests without warrants and carry out police and m! ilitary operations. The Iraqi police found 58 bodies during the past 24 hours in different parts of Baghdad, a police source said on Monday. “The number of the unidentified bodies found by our patrols rose to 58 until this morning in different Baghdad neighborhoods,”the source told Xinhua on condition of anonymity. Most of the bodies were blindfolded and showing signs of torture with bullet holes in different parts of their bodies, he added. Gunmen also kidnapped 14 workers from computer shops in front of Baghdad’s Technical University…
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The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: Sorting Fact from Fiction
Stephen Gowans
…Iran poses no threat, either to the US or Israel, other than the threat of potential self-defense. The claims that the country’s leadership mocks the Holocaust and seeks nuclear weapons to carry out a genocide against Jews is pure nonsense, concocted, like the mythical stories of Saddam Hussein’s hidden weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda, to justify another conquest of an economically nationalist oil-rich state…
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Iraqi police seen giving up control of the streets to Shiite militias
Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers
Efforts to halt sectarian violence in Iraq have been thwarted in part because Shiite Muslim militiamen and the politicians who support them routinely intimidate members of Iraq’s nascent police force into allowing the militias to control the streets, according to a top U.S. military official, Iraqi politicians and Iraqi police officials…
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The National Intelligence Estimate—a phony debate between two pro-war parties
Bill Van Auken, SEP candidate for US Senator from New York
With less than six weeks until the US midterm elections, the Democrats and the Bush administration have launched a debate that is as heated as it is false concerning the latest National Intelligence Estimate’s findings on the US war in Iraq and the so-called global war on terror. Reports on the estimate were initially leaked to the press last weekend, provoking the White House t! o declassify selected portions of the document on Tuesday. The conclusions reached in this report, which is supposed to synthesize the work of some 16 separate US spy agencies, are hardly remarkable and offer precious little justification for the tens of billions of dollars spent each year to keep the American intelligence apparatus going…
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Iran: The Unthinkable War
Part One: Pretending You Didn’t Know
Juan Santos, www.dissidentvoice.org
The Democrats are silent as the Bush regime prepares for war against Iran — silent in the face of a potential nuclear mass murder — even a global war. Silent in the face of an attack that could cause an utter meltdown of the global economy, a 1930s style Depression that would send millions, perhaps billions of people into starvation-level poverty, as the prices of oil and gasoline triple. The potentials for ho! rror for tens of millions of people in the region are almost unspeakable…
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The Lineage of Bush-Cheney Torture
Chris Floyd
…It is obvious too from the facts related by Margulies that what the CIA was interested in – and is still interested in – was not techniques for eliciting accurate information but methods for producing confessions that would conform to whatever horrific fantasy scenario that the regime deemed politically expedient. This of course has a direct application to our political reality today. The Bush Regime relies on the manufacture and manipulation of fear in order to r! etain power and push its unconstitutional – and unpopular – agenda of presidental dictatorship, military aggression, war profiteering, and oligarchic plunder. Horrific scenarios are devised to foment the required level of fear and bloodlust – the “imminent threat” of Saddam Hussein’s WMD and his “connections” to al Qaeda, etc. – and then “justified” by false confessions coerced by CIA captives. This pattern has been repeated over and over…
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Bahar urges Abbas to come home immediately to help stop violence in Gaza
Window Into Palestine
Acting PLC speaker and Hamas’ senior political leader Dr. Ahmed Bahar has deplored the shooting by PA presidential guards at the PLC headquarters in Gaza Strip and participating in the vandalism carried out by tens of the PA security elements. “We regret that the PA presidential guards, who are supposed to be the ones to maintain peace and order, were the ones that violated the law and fueled violence through intensivel! y firing at the PLC headquarters in Gaza,” Bahar said. For that reason, Bahar urged PA chief Mahmoud Abbas, through a telephone call, to cut short his tour abroad and come home immediately to stop the security mess in the Palestinian arena…
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Desperate measures from desperate men
Jerry Mazza, Online Journal Associate Editor
And I might add, for desperate times. I’m talking about the US Senate passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that discards key human rights protections. This is an act of a desperate president, seeking to rally support for his failed and brutal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, by further rallying the spineless and frightened Congress round the flag. The more Bush is cornered by failure, the more he goes on the attack and flails ! fearful legislators with the loss of their jobs if they’re not patriotic enough…
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The Palestinian people are not cheap
Khalid Amayreh
…Our people are not naïve or stupid or cheap. They know certainly that the chalice offered by America and Israel and the perfidious Arab regimes in return for recognizing Israel is a poisoned drink, they know that if they allowed themselves to be bullied into recognizing Israel, they would be forced to give up al-Quds al Sharif and al Masjidul Aqsa and the paramount right of return for Palestinian refugees. They know that America is a liar, a big liar, that sh! ould never be trusted or believed. They know that should we give up now, we will get neither freedom nor statehood, in addition to losing our national dignity. The huge rally in Jabalya is not an isolated event. According to an opinion poll conducted by Dr. Khalil Sheqaki recently, Hamas has more or less maintained its popularity among Palestinians despite the draconian sanctions. In fact, there are genuine indications that Hamas would win once again if elections were to be held now…
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Israel Continues to Steal Water and Soil from Lebanon
Kurt Nimmo
It is said Israel has not completed its withdrawal from Lebanon because “Hizbullah has returned to the Lebanese border” and “Hizbullah operatives have engaged in rock-throwing against Israeli soldiers and planted Hizbullah flags along the border,” apparently more than enough of an excuse for the IOF to stay put. “Israeli military sources had previously said the final phase of withdrawal took place on Sunday, when the last Israeli soldier withdrew,” ! reports CNN. However, “UNIFIL spokesman Alexander Ivanko told CNN Israeli troops still control the border village of Ghajar,” supposedly until “IDF, UNIFIL and the Lebanese army come to an agreement regarding the security arrangements in the area,” that is to say the Israelis will stay until the threat of Lebanese rock throwers abates…
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Palestinian Children Killed NOT Posing any Treath to Israeli Occupant
Bloodiest Year for Palestinian Children
PalestineFreeVoice
Defense for Children International/Palestine Section (DCI/PS) said that 2006 risks are being the bloodiest year for Palestinian children since the beginning of the Israeli Occupation in 1967. In a press release, on Monday, DCI/PS PS pointed out that it was invited to address the Committee during its forty third session to discuss the violation of Palestinian children’s right! s by Israel outside of Israel’s reporting schedule to the CRC. It added that DCI was allowed a special audience with the CRC in light of the urgent situation facing Palestinian children as a result of Israel’s on-going military campaign…
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Beatings, abductions, shootings: on patrol with the al-Mahdi army
Ned Parker and Haider Azzawi, The Times
ABU MAHA admits freely that he kills and kidnaps Sunni “terrorists”. At checkpoints Iraqi soldiers greet him by name and let him pass. For Abu Maha is a leader of Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army in western Baghdad, a deadly force with such power that no politician dares take it on. The thousands-strong militia and a political power base of 32 seats in Parliament have made Hojatoleslam al-Sadr’s m! ilitant Shia movement the strongest in Iraq. The group is blamed for many death squad killings, but has such grassroots appeal that even the Shia premier cancelled plans to clear Sadr City, its Baghdad stronghold. The group is blamed for many death squad killings, but has such grassroots appeal that even the Shia premier cancelled plans to clear Sadr City, its Baghdad stronghold…
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Surprise Surprise, It’s Another Al Qaeda Blockbuster Release
Steve Watson / Infowars
Karl Rove’s promised October surprise has arrived nice and early. Five weeks before the midterm election, a “previously undiscovered” video emerges that reminds the uninformed world that Al Qaeda carried out the 9/11 attacks and in order to combat them we must vote for security over liberty. The video, supposedly obtained by The Times of London through ‘a tested channel’, shows Osama Bin Laden addressing followers at Kandahar In ! 2000. It also features “9/11 mastermind” Ramzi Binalshibh and Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta reading his will, along with Ziad Jarrah, the alleged pilot of flight 93…
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War is Peace
Irene Rheinwald
“Imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations – not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.” George Orwell penned these words over five decades ago, yet the sentiments are sadly germane to today’s “war on terror”…
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