In an article published this week in the New York Times on Israel's use of cluster bombs on a civilian population in their illegal war last summer on Lebanon (carried out under the guise of attacking Hezbollah) -- although the Times did not quite phrase it that way -- we read the following justifiction given by Sean McCormack of the US State Department:
"It is important to remember the kind of war Hezbollah waged," he said. "They used innocent civilians as a way to shield their fighters." Read More...
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And, in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces should think about this new, virtual warfare.
The document says that information is "critical to military success". Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational importance.
Joe Quinn Signs of the Times Mon, 29 Jan 2007 17:29 EST
While the Israeli government has turned the Gaza strip and West Bank regions of Palestine into virtual prison camps, there is one section of the Palestinian community that appears to enjoy unhindered freedom of movement and a blind eye form the Israeli camps guards: "suicide bombers".
Iran: do you believe the lies and disinformation sown by the US and Israeli governments? Do you believe that Iran is a closed, fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship? A country full of potential terrorists eager to attack American citizens? If you believe this, will you be more likely to turn a blind eye to the predicted US and Israeli attack on the citizens of that country?
But what if Iran and the Iranian people are not as they have been portrayed? What if there is no threat from Iran? What if Iran is just a Middle Eastern country with 86 million people - people just like you and me?
What then?
Would you stand up for your fellow human beings against the predations of a small cabal of psychopaths in power and say "NO MORE!"
Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro was euthanized Monday after complications from his gruesome breakdown at last year's Preakness, ending an eight-month ordeal that prompted an outpouring of support across the country.
"We just reached a point where it was going to be difficult for him to go on without pain," co-owner Roy Jackson said. "It was the right decision, it was the right thing to do. We said all along if there was a situation where it would become more difficult for him then it would be time."
A series of ailments, including laminitis in the left rear hoof and a recent abscess in the right rear hoof, proved too much for the gallant colt.
Barbaro battled in his ICU stall for eight months. The 4-year-old colt underwent several procedures and was fitted with fiberglass casts. He spent time in a sling to ease pressure on his legs, had pins inserted and was fitted at the end with an external brace. These were all extraordinary measures for a horse with such injuries.
Roy and Gretchen Jackson were with Barbaro on Monday morning, with the owners making the decision in consultation with chief surgeon Dr. Dean Richardson.
"I would say thank you for everything, and all your thoughts and prayers over the last eight months or so," Jackson said to Barbaro's fans.
On May 20, Barbaro was rushed to the New Bolton Center, about 30 miles from Philadelphia in Kennett Square, hours after shattering his right hind leg just a few strides into the Preakness Stakes. The bay colt underwent a five-hour operation that fused two joints, recovering from an injury most horses never survive. But Barbaro never regained his natural gait.
He suffered a significant setback over the weekend, and surgery was required to insert two steel pins in a bone - one of three shattered in the Preakness but now healthy - to eliminate all weight bearing on the ailing right rear foot.
The procedure Saturday was a risky one, because it transferred more weight to the leg while the foot rests on the ground bearing no weight.
The leg was on the mend until the abscess began causing discomfort last week. Until then, the major concern was Barbaro's left rear leg, which developed laminitis in July, and 80 percent of the hoof was removed.
Richardson said Monday morning that Barbaro did not have a good night.
Brilliant on the race track, Barbaro always will be remembered for his brave fight for survival.
The story of the beloved 4-year-old bay colt's fight for life captured the fancy of millions.
When Barbaro broke down, his right hind leg flared out awkwardly as jockey Edgar Prado jumped off and tried to steady the ailing horse. Race fans at Pimlico wept. Within 24 hours the entire nation seemed to be caught up in a "Barbaro watch," waiting for any news.
Well-wishers young and old showed up at the New Bolton Center with cards, flowers, gifts, goodies and even religious medals for the champ, and thousands of e-mails poured into the hospital's Web site just for him.
"I just can't explain why everyone is so caught up in this horse," Roy Jackson, who owned the colt with his wife, Gretchen, has said time and again. "Everything is so negative now in the world, people love animals and I think they just happen to latch onto him."
Devoted fans even wrote Christmas carols for him, sent a wreath made of baby organic carrots and gave him a Christmas stocking.
The biggest gift has been the $1.2 million raised since early June for the Barbaro Fund. The money is put toward needed equipment such as an operating room table, and a raft and sling for the same pool recovery Barbaro used after his surgeries.
The Jacksons spent tens of thousands of dollars hoping the best horse they ever owned would recover and be able to live a comfortable life on the farm - whether he was able to breed or not.
The couple, who own about 70 racehorses, broodmares and yearlings, and operate the 190-acre Lael Farm, have been in the horse business for 30 years, and never had a horse like Barbaro.
As the days passed, it seemed Barbaro would get his happy ending. As late as December, with the broken bones in his right hind leg nearly healed and his laminitis under control, Barbaro was looking good and relishing daily walks outside his intensive care unit.
But after months of upbeat progress reports, including talk that he might be headed home soon, news came Jan. 10 of a serious setback because of the laminitis. Richardson had to remove damaged tissue from Barbaro's left hind hoof, and the colt was placed back in a protective sling.
On Jan. 13, another section of his left rear hoof was removed. After Barbaro developed a deep abscess in his right hind foot, surgery was performed Saturday to insert two steel pins in a bone.
This after Richardson warned last December that Barbaro's right hind leg was getting stronger and that the left hind foot was a "more formidable long-term challenge."
Even before the injury that ended his career, Barbaro had earned his fame for simply being a magnificent racehorse.
Foaled and raised at Sanborn Chase at Springmint Farm near Nicholasville, Ky., Barbaro always stood out in the crowd. "He was an enormous foal," recalled breeder Bill Sanborn. "He was a tall and leggy horse, and when he grew it was like in two-inch spurts."
When the Jacksons sent Barbaro to trainer Michael Matz over a year ago, exercise rider Peter Brette climbed aboard and said "I thought he was a 3-year-old."
A son of Dynaformer, out of the dam Le Ville Rouge, Barbaro started his career on the turf, but Matz knew he would have to try his versatile colt on the dirt. He reasoned that if he had a talented 3-year-old in America, he'd have to find out early if his horse was good enough for the Triple Crown races.
Barbaro was good enough, all right. He won his first three races on turf with authority, including the Laurel Futurity by eight lengths and the Tropical Park Derby by 3 3/4 lengths.
That's when Matz drew up an unconventional plan for a dirt campaign that spaced out Barbaro's race to keep him fit for the entire Triple Crown, a grueling ordeal of three races in five weeks at varying distances over different tracks.
Barbaro won the Holy Bull Stakes at Gulfstream Park on Feb. 4, but his dirt debut was inconclusive since it came over a sloppy track. After an eight-week break, an unusually long time between races, Barbaro came back and won the Florida Derby by a half-length over Sharp Humor despite an outside No. 10 post.
The deal was sealed - on to the Derby, but not without criticism that Barbaro couldn't win coming off a five-week layoff. After all, it had been 50 years since Needles won the Derby off a similar break. But Matz was unfazed, and stuck to his plan, saying all the time he was doing what was best for the horse.
Not only did Barbaro win the Derby, he demolished what was supposed to be one of the toughest fields in years. The 6 1/2-length winning margin was the largest since 1946, when Assault won by eight lengths and went on to sweep the Triple Crown.
The 55-year-old Matz, meanwhile, was living a charmed life. Before turning to thoroughbreds eight years ago, he was an international show jumping star, and a three-time Olympian and silver medal winner who carried the U.S. flag at the closing ceremony at the 1996 Atlanta Games. He also survived a plane crash in Iowa in 1989 and became a hero by saving three children from the burning wreckage. The crash killed 112 of the 296 people on board United Flight 232.
In Barbaro, Matz truly believed he was training a Triple Crown winner. He often said Barbaro was good enough to be ranked among the greats and join Seattle Slew as the only unbeaten Triple Crown champions.
But two weeks later after the Derby Barbaro took a horrible misstep and one of the most extraordinary attempts to save a thoroughbred was under way. The injury was considered to be so disastrous that many thought the horse would be euthanized while still at Pimlico Race Track.
Instead, Barbaro was transported that night to the New Bolton Center's George D. Widener Hospital for Large Animals and was operated on the next day by Richardson.
The injuries were as serious as everyone feared: Barbaro sustained a broken cannon bone above the ankle, a broken sesamoid bone behind the ankle and a broken long pastern bone below the ankle. The fetlock joint - the ankle - was dislocated. Richardson said the pastern bone was shattered in "20-plus pieces."
Barbaro, who earned $2,302,200 with his six wins in seven starts, endured the complicated five-hour surgery in which Richardson inserted a titanium plate and 27 screws into the broken bones. After calmly awakening from anesthesia, he "practically jogged back to his stall" looking for something to eat.
At the time, Richardson stressed Barbaro still had many hurdles to clear, and called chances for a full recovery a "coin toss."
Afterward, though, things went relatively smoothly. Each day brought more optimism: Barbaro was eyeing the mares, nickering, gobbling up his feed and trying to walk out of his stall. There was great hope Barbaro somehow would overcome the odds and live a life of leisure on the farm.
But by mid-July, Richardson's greatest fear became reality - laminitis struck Barbaro's left hind leg and 80 percent of the hoof was removed. Richardson recalled recently what it was like when he met with the Jacksons, and Matz, and his wife, D.D., to deliver the news.
"It was terrible," Richardson said. "I wouldn't have blamed anyone at that point for saying they just couldn't face the prospects of going on."
But Barbaro responded well to treatment, and his recovery was progressing until a final, fatal turn.
AP Racing Writer Richard Rosenblatt contributed to this report.
“Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc. . . . The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high"
01/27/07 "ICHBlog" -- - The American public and the US Congress are getting their backs up about the Bush Regime’s determination to escalate the war in Iraq. A Massive protest demonstration is occurring in Washington DC today, and Congress is expressing its disagreement with Bush’s decision to intensify the war in Iraq.
This is all to the good. However, it misses the real issue--the Bush Regime’s looming attack on Iran.
Rather than winding down one war, Bush is starting another. The entire world knows this and is discussing Bush’s planned attack on Iran in many forums. It is only Americans who haven’t caught on. A few senators have said that Bush must not attack Iran without the approval of Congress, and postings on the Internet demonstrate world wide awareness that Iran is in the Bush Regime’s cross hairs. But Congress and the Media--and the demonstration in Washington--are focused on Iraq.
What can be done to bring American awareness up to the standard of the rest of the world?
In Davos, Switzerland, the meeting of the World Economic Forum, a conference where economic globalism issues are discussed, opened January 24 with a discussion of Bush’s planned attack on Iran. The Secretary General of the League of Arab States and bankers and businessmen from such US allies as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates all warned of the coming attack and its catastrophic consequences for the MIddle East and the world.
Writing for Global Research (January 24), General Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy on Geopolitical Affairs and former Joint Chief of Staff of the Russian Armies, forecast an American nuclear attack on Iran by the end of April. General Ivashov presented the neoconservative reasoning that is the basis for the attack and concluded that the world’s protests cannot stop the US attack on Iran.
There will be shock and indignation, General Ivashov concludes, but the US will get away with it. He writes:
“Within weeks from now, we will see the informational warfare machine start working. The public opinion is already under pressure. There will be a growing anti-Iranian militaristic hysteria, new information leaks, disinformation, etc. . . . The probability of a US aggression against Iran is extremely high. It does remain unclear, though, whether the US Congress is going to authorize the war. It may take a provocation to eliminate this obstacle (an attack on Israel or the US targets including military bases). The scale of the provocation may be comparable to the 9-11 attack in NY. Then the Congress will certainly say “Yes” to the US President.”
The Bush Regime has made it clear that it is convinced that Bush already has the authority to attack Iran. The Regime argues that the authority is part of Bush’s commander-in-chief powers. Congress has authorized the war in Iraq, and Bush’s recent public statements have shifted the responsibility for the Iraqi insurgency from al-Qaeda to Iran. Iran, Bush has declared, is killing US troops in Iraq. Thus, Iran is covered under the authorization for the war in Iraq.
Both Bush and Cheney have made it clear in public statements that they will ignore any congressional opposition to their war plans. For example, CBS News reported (Jan. 25) that Cheney said that a congressional resolution against escalating the war in Iraq “won’t stop us.” According to the Associated Press and Yahoo News, Bush dismissed congressional disapproval with his statement, “I’m the decision-maker.”
Everything is in place for an attack on Iran. Two aircraft carrier attack forces are deployed to the Persian Gulf, US attack aircraft have been moved to Turkey and other countries on Iran’s borders, Patriot anti-missile defense systems are being moved to the Middle East to protect oil facilities and US bases from retaliation from Iranian missiles, and growing reams of disinformation alleging Iran’s responsibility for the insurgency in Iraq are being fed to the gullible US Media.
General Ivashof and everyone in the Middle East and at the Davos globalization conference in Europe understands the Bush Regime’s agenda.
Why cannot Americans understand?
Why hasn’t Congress told Bush and Cheney that they will both be instantly impeached if they initiate a wider war?
Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably
01/28/07 "ICHBlog" -- -- "IF ARAFAT were alive…" one hears this phrase increasingly often in conversations with Palestinians, and also with Israelis and foreigners.
"If Arafat were alive, what's happening now in Gaza wouldn't be happening…" - "If Arafat were alive, we would have somebody to talk with…" - "If Arafat were alive, Islamic fundamentalism would not have won among the Palestinians and would have lost some force in the neighboring countries!"
In the meantime, the unanswered questions come up again: How did Yasser Arafat die? Was he murdered? If so, who murdered him?
On the way back from Arafat's funeral in 2004, I ran into Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Knesset. I asked him if he believed that Arafat was murdered. Zahalka, a doctor of pharmacology, answered "Yes!" without hesitation. That was my feeling, too. But a hunch is not proof. It is only a product of intuition, common sense and experience.
Recently we got a kind of confirmation. Just before he died, Uri Dan, who had been Ariel Sharon's loyal mouthpiece for almost 50 years, published a book in France. It includes a report of a conversation Sharon told him about, with President (George W.) Bush. Sharon asked for permission to kill Arafat and Bush gave it to him, with the proviso that it must be done undetectably. When Dan asked Sharon whether it had been carried out, Sharon answered: "It's better not to talk about that." Dan took this as confirmation.
Israel shamir www.israelshamir.net Sun, 28 Jan 2007 12:01 EST
Publication of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is a great event for America and for all of us. It's not that Carter had said something we did not know about Palestine. Before Carter came, we knew that the Zionists established a racist apartheid regime in the Holy Land where Jews have rights, and goyim have duties. Before Carter came we knew a native Palestinian has no right to vote, move, work freely in his land, that he is locked up behind the twenty-foot wall. Before Carter came we knew that the US support allowed the atrocities to occur and the apartheid regime to entrench. But we did not know that there are prominent Americans who would dare the wrath of organised Jewry and spell it out loud.
Boasts of a nuclear programme are just propaganda, say insiders, but the PR could be enough to provoke Israel into war
Iran's efforts to produce highly enriched uranium, the material used to make nuclear bombs, are in chaos and the country is still years from mastering the required technology.
Iran's uranium enrichment programme has been plagued by constant technical problems, lack of access to outside technology and knowhow, and a failure to master the complex production-engineering processes involved. The country denies developing weapons, saying its pursuit of uranium enrichment is for energy purposes.
Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace - in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the US - a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production. read more...
MOODY AIR FORCE BASE, Georgia (AP) -- The military's new weapon is a ray gun that shoots a beam that makes people feel as if they will catch fire.
The technology is supposed to be harmless -- a non-lethal way to get enemies to drop their weapons.
Military officials say it could save the lives of civilians and service members in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The weapon is not expected to go into production until at least 2010, but all branches of the military have expressed interest in it, officials said. (Watch a demo of the ray gun)
During the first media demonstration of the weapon Wednesday, airmen fired beams from a large dish antenna mounted atop a Humvee at people pretending to be rioters and acting out other scenarios U.S. troops might encounter.
The crew fired beams from more than 500 yards (455 meters) away, nearly 17 times the range of existing non-lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets.
While the sudden, 130-degree Fahrenheit (54.44 Celsius) heat was not painful, it was intense enough to make participants think their clothes were about to ignite.
"This is one of the key technologies for the future," said Marine Col. Kirk Hymes, director of the non-lethal weapons program that helped develop the weapon. "Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in."
The system uses millimeter waves, which can penetrate only 1/64th of an inch of skin, just enough to cause discomfort. By comparison, common kitchen microwaves penetrate several inches of skin.
The millimeter waves cannot go through walls, but they can penetrate most clothing, officials said. They refused to comment on whether the waves can go through glass.
Two airmen and 10 reporters volunteered to be zapped with the beams, which easily penetrated various layers of winter clothing.
The system was developed by the military, but the two devices being evaluated were built by defense contractor Raytheon.
Airman Blaine Pernell, 22, said he could have used the system during his four tours in Iraq, where he manned watchtowers around a base near Kirkuk. He said Iraqis often pulled up and faked car problems so they could scout U.S. forces.
"All we could do is watch them," he said. But if they had the ray gun, troops "could have dispersed them."
01/25/07 "ICHBlog" -- - Given the presence of four American submarines off the coast of Iran, Eduard Baltin, former commander of the Russian fleet, reasons that the U.S. is planning to attack Iran.
Bush and Cheney have less than two years to go in their current role and want to go down in the history books as the heroes of the Pax Americana, as the men who managed to conquer the Middle East and its oil, as the men who took full-spectrum dominance seriously, while in their own country booking successes through exorbitant profits for the military-industrial complex and the realization of radical legislation. The prelude was long and the path was full of obstacles, but the goal of a third great war - a war with Iran - is increasingly within sight. Dan Plesch in The Guardian sums it up in one sentence: 'All the signs are that Bush is planning for a neocon-inspired military assault on Iran'.
Deborah Lipstadt Washington Post Sat, 20 Jan 2007 17:54 EST
"It is hard to criticize an icon. Jimmy Carter's humanitarian work has saved countless lives. Yet his life has also been shaped by the Bible, where the Hebrew prophets taught us to speak truth to power. So I write."
Comment: And write she does, only there is very little that can be called 'truth' in this piece of sophistry. Can Debbie write one paragraph without manipulation, paramoralisms, and bad logic? Let's see.
Carter's book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes in defense.
Comment: As if a history of suffering excuses inflicting suffering on an innocent third-party. This is like excusing Hitler for the crimes against Germany in World War I. It only trivializes the murder of Israelis in the eyes of those who view Israelis as more human than Palestinians, e.g. Deborah Liptstadt. And even if Carter used a so-called anti-semitic stereotype (which he didn't), this does not change the fact that some Isrealis happen to fit the description.
One cannot ignore the Holocaust's impact on Jewish identity and the history of the Middle East conflict. When an Ahmadinejad or Hamas threatens to destroy Israel, Jews have historical precedent to believe them. Jimmy Carter either does not understand this or considers it irrelevant.
Comment: First, may I ask what the holocaust has to do with the genocide of the Palestinians? Does this excuse the atrocious treatment of a civilian population? Second, Ahmadinejad never threatened to destroy Israel. Third, Jimmy Carter does not consider it because it is propaganda.
His book, which dwells on the Palestinian refugee experience, makes two fleeting references to the Holocaust. The book contains a detailed chronology of major developments necessary for the reader to understand the current situation in the Middle East. Remarkably, there is nothing listed between 1939 and 1947. Nitpickers might say that the Holocaust did not happen in the region. However, this event sealed in the minds of almost all the world's people then the need for the Jewish people to have a Jewish state in their ancestral homeland. Carter never discusses the Jewish refugees who were prevented from entering Palestine before and after the war. One of Israel's first acts upon declaring statehood was to send ships to take those people "home."
Comment: The Jewish holocaust took place 60 years ago. The Palestinian holocaust is taking place now. Also, what about all the Jewish refugees Zionist "Israelis" refused to allow, for example, from Hungary, during WWII, to come to Palestine? Lipstadt would have us believe the Zionists actually cared about Jewish life. They did not. Read Herzl, Ben-Gurion, and Jabotinksy to see what these men really thought of their religious brethren.
A guiding principle of Israel is that never again will persecuted Jews be left with no place to go. Israel's ideal of Jewish refuge is enshrined in laws that grant immediate citizenship to any Jew who requests it. A Jew, for purposes of this law, is anyone who, had that person lived in Nazi Germany, would have been stripped of citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws.
Comment: But what if there is no external threat? What if the real threat is the Isreali leaders themselves?
Compare Carter's approach with that of Rashid Khalidi, head of Columbia University's Middle East Institute and a professor of Arab studies there. His recent book "The Iron Cage" contains more than a dozen references to the seminal place the Holocaust and anti-Semitism hold in the Israeli worldview. This from a Palestinian who does not cast himself as an evenhanded negotiator.
Comment: And this affects the truth of the situation how? It makes no difference what Israelis are made to think; it matters what is being done to the Palestinians, and who is doing it to them.
In contrast, by almost ignoring the Holocaust, Carter gives inadvertent comfort to those who deny its importance or even its historical reality, in part because it helps them deny Israel's right to exist. This from the president who signed the legislation creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Comment: Israel has no "right" to exist. But that doesn't stop it. To say it does is to say Israel has the right to steal Palestinian land and make the Palestinians agree that Israel has this right. This is so absurd, it's not even wrong. What matters is what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, NOT whomever is comforted by this sad fact. Palestine has a right to exist, a right that is consistently ignore by Israeli politicians and military.
Carter's minimization of the Holocaust is compounded by his recent behavior. On MSNBC in December, he described conditions for Palestinians as "one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation" in the world. When the interviewer asked "Worse than Rwanda?" Carter said that he did not want to discuss the "ancient history" of Rwanda.
Comment: The conditions in Rwanda have nothing to do with the conditions in Palestine. Notice that Lipstadt isn't even denying the conditions in Palestine, she's just using her sophistical twists to divert your attention.
To give Carter the benefit of the doubt, let's say that he meant an ongoing crisis. Is the Palestinians' situation equivalent to Darfur, which our own government has branded genocide?
Comment: Darfur is not Palestine. The issue is Palestine.
Carter has repeatedly fallen back -- possibly unconsciously -- on traditional anti-Semitic canards. In the Los Angeles Times last month, he declared it"politically suicide" for a politician to advocate a "balanced position" on the crisis. On Al-Jazeera TV, he dismissed the critique of his book by declaring that "most of the condemnations of my book came from Jewish-American organizations."
Comment: The use of the cliche, canard, does not make facts any less true, contrary to public opinion. Sorry, Deb.
Jeffrey Goldberg, who lambasted the book in The Post last month, writes for the New Yorker. Ethan Bronner, who in the New York Times called the book "a distortion," is the Times' deputy foreign editor. Slate's Michael Kinsley declared it "moronic." Dennis Ross, who was chief negotiator on the conflict in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, described the book as a rewriting and misrepresentation of history. Alan Dershowitz teaches at Harvard and Ken Stein at Emory. Both have criticized the book. Because of the book's inaccuracies and imbalance and Carter's subsequent behavior, 14 members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors have resigned -- many in anguish because they so respect Carter's other work. All are Jews. Does that invalidate their criticism -- and mine -- or render us representatives of Jewish organizations?
Comment: No, the fact that they're WRONG invalidates them. There's a difference between saying something is a lie, and actually demonstrating it is a lie.
On CNN, Carter bemoaned the "tremendous intimidation in our country that has silenced" the media. Carter has appeared on C-SPAN, "Larry King Live" and "Meet the Press," among many shows. When a caller to C-SPAN accused Carter of anti-Semitism, the host cut him off. Who's being silenced?
Comment: "There is no Israeli lobby. I am now going to count to 10, then I will snap my fingers and you will wake up..."
Perhaps unused to being criticized, Carter reflexively fell back on this kind of innuendo about Jewish control of the media and government. Even if unconscious, such stereotyping from a man of his stature is noteworthy. When David Duke spouts it, I yawn. When Jimmy Carter does, I shudder.
Comment: Is Lipstadt stupid, or just lying? And notice that Lipstadt is making good use of her Hasbara manual. She's already made use of propaganda techniques "name-calling" and "bandwagon"; now she's useing the good ol' transfer, whereby David Duke's horrendous reputation is transferred to loveable Jimmy Carter. How low can you go, Deb?
Others can enumerate the many factual errors in this book. A man who has done much good and who wants to bring peace has not only failed to move the process forward but has given refuge to scoundrels.
Comment: Ha! "Others can enumerate the factual errors." Why is that? Perhaps because the only factual errors are the ones where Carter goes easy on the truly Apartheid nature of Israel both in Palestine AND in Israel!
The writer teaches at Emory University. Her latest book is "History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving."
Comment: Comments are interspersed throughout the article.
The steadily rising Iraq war price tag will reach about $8.4 billion a month this year, Pentagon spokesmen said
Heavy replacement costs for lost, destroyed and aging equipment are mounting.
The Pentagon has been estimating last year's costs for the increasingly unpopular war at about $8 billion a month, having increased from a monthly 'burn rate' of around $4.4 billion during the first year of fighting in fiscal 2003.
Islands appear off Greenland as polar ice melts away By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF The New York Times
LIVERPOOL LAND, Greenland — Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.
When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.
"It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn’t it?" Dennis Schmitt said.
Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, Calif., had just landed on a newly revealed island 645 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: He had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.
Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orleans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island’s distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.
Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as one-fifth of a hectare; every hour or so, several more tonnes of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — "lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland’s ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.
"We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now."With 44,400 kilometres of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by almost seven metres.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
"That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Boggild said. "If you lose that much volume you’d definitely see new islands appear."
He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometres away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometres."
The abrupt acceleration of melting in Greenland has taken climate scientists by surprise. Tidewater glaciers, which discharge ice into the oceans as they break up in the process called calving, have doubled and tripled in speed all over Greenland. Ice shelves are breaking up, and summertime "glacial earthquakes" have been detected within the ice sheet.
"The general thinking until very recently was that ice sheets don’t react very quickly to climate," said Martin Truffer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. "But that thinking is changing right now, because we’re seeing things that people have thought are impossible."
A study in the Journal of Climate last June observed that Greenland had become the single largest contributor to global sea-level rise.
Until recently, the consensus of climate scientists was that the impact of melting polar ice sheets would be negligible over the next 100 years. Ice sheets were thought to be extremely slow in reacting to atmospheric warming. The 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered to be an authoritative scientific statement on the potential impacts of global warming, based its conclusions about sea-level rise on a computer model that predicted a slow onset of melting in Greenland.
"When you look at the ice sheet, the models didn’t work. Which puts us on shaky ground," said Richard Alley, a geosciences professor at Pennsylvania State University.
There is no consensus on how much Greenland’s ice will melt in the near future, Alley said, and no computer model that can accurately predict the future of the ice sheet. Yet given the acceleration of tidewater-glacier melting, a sea-level rise of a foot or two in the coming decades is entirely possible, he said. That bodes ill for island nations and those who live near the coast.
"Even a foot rise is a pretty horrible scenario," said Stephen P. Leatherman, director of the Laboratory for Coastal Research at Florida International University in Miami.
On low-lying and gently sloping land like coastal river deltas, a sea-level rise of just a third of a metre would send water hundreds of metres inland. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide make their homes in such deltas; virtually all of coastal Bangladesh lies in the delta of the Ganges River. Over the long term, much larger sea-level rises would render the world’s coastlines unrecognizable, creating a whole new series of islands.
"Here in Miami," Leatherman said, "we’re going to have an ocean on both sides of us."
Such ominous implications are not lost on Schmitt, who says he hopes that the island he discovered in Greenland in September will become an international symbol of the effects of climate change. Schmitt, who speaks Inuit, has provisionally named it Uunartoq Qeqertoq: the warming island.
Global warming has profoundly altered the nature of polar exploration, said Schmitt, who in 40 years has logged more than 100 Arctic expeditions. Routes once pioneered on a dogsled are routinely paddled in a kayak now; many features, like the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf in Greenland’s northwest, have disappeared for good.
"There is a dark side to this," he said about the new island. "We felt the exhilaration of discovery. We were exploring something new. But of course, there was also something scary about what we did there. We were looking in the face of these changes, and all of us were thinking of the dire consequences." LINK
Juan Cole Informed Comment Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:47 EST
Lawrence Wilkerson, an aide to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state says that Iran in 2003 offered to help stabilize Iraq and to cut off aid to Hizbullah in Lebanon and to Hamas. Wilkerson says that the State Department was interested in pursuing the offer, which presumably came from reformist president Mohammad Khatami. He says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of "talking to evil." As if Mohammad Khatami is evil and Richard Bruce Cheney is not. (Cheney's lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and connection to 9/11 have gotten hundreds of thousands of people killed).
A day after "Kyrill" battered Europe with hurricane-force winds, the continent is struggling to get back to normal. With oil spills, ships threatening to sink, computer viruses and damage estimates in the billions, that may take awhile. more...
Frogs have started mating, wild hamsters can't sleep, and the mild climate intimates spring. How dangerous is Europe's warm winter for animals and plants? A look at the miracle of biological clocks. By Rafaela von Bredow more...
Flying over snow-capped peaks and into a thick fog, the helicopter set down on a barren strip of rocks between two glaciers. A dozen bags of supplies, a rifle and a can of cooking gas were tossed out onto the cold ground. Then, with engines whining, the helicopter lifted off, snow and fog swirling in the rotor wash.
When it had disappeared over the horizon, no sound remained but the howling of the Arctic wind.
"It feels a little like the days of the old explorers, doesn't it?" Dennis Schmitt said.
Schmitt, a 60-year-old explorer from Berkeley, California, had just landed on a newly revealed island 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle in eastern Greenland. It was a moment of triumph: he had discovered the island on an ocean voyage in September 2005. Now, a year later, he and a small expedition team had returned to spend a week climbing peaks, crossing treacherous glaciers and documenting animal and plant life.
Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.
Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island's distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.
Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.
All over Greenland and the Arctic, rising temperatures are not simply melting ice; they are changing the very geography of coastlines. Nunataks — "lonely mountains" in Inuit — that were encased in the margins of Greenland's ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape.
"We are already in a new era of geography," said the Arctic explorer Will Steger. "This phenomenon — of an island all of a sudden appearing out of nowhere and the ice melting around it — is a real common phenomenon now."
In August, Steger discovered his own new island off the coast of the Norwegian island of Svalbard, high in the polar basin. Glaciers that had surrounded it when his ship passed through only two years earlier were gone this year, leaving only a small island alone in the open ocean.
"We saw it ourselves up there, just how fast the ice is going," he said.
With 27,555 miles of coastline and thousands of fjords, inlets, bays and straits, Greenland has always been hard to map. Now its geography is becoming obsolete almost as soon as new maps are created.
Hans Jepsen is a cartographer at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, which produces topographical maps for mining and oil companies. (Greenland is a largely self-governing region of Denmark.) Last summer, he spotted several new islands in an area where a massive ice shelf had broken up. Jepsen was unaware of Schmitt's discovery, and an old aerial photograph in his files showed the peninsula intact.
"Clearly, the new island was detached from the mainland when the connecting glacier-bridge retreated southward," Jepsen said, adding that future maps would take note of the change.
The sudden appearance of the islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists say. Greenland is covered by 630,000 cubic miles of ice, enough water to raise global sea levels by 23 feet.
Carl Egede Boggild, a professor of snow-and-ice physics at the University Center of Svalbard, said Greenland could be losing more than 80 cubic miles of ice per year.
"That corresponds to three times the volume of all the glaciers in the Alps," Boggild said. "If you lose that much volume you'd definitely see new islands appear."
He discovered an island himself a year ago while flying over northwestern Greenland. "Suddenly I saw an island with glacial ice on it," he said. "I looked at the map and it should have been a nunatak, but the present ice margin was about 10 kilometers away. So I can say that within the last five years the ice margin had retreated at least 10 kilometers."
Joe Quinn Signs Of The Times Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:57 EST
Today's Boston Globe ran an editorial by the editorial page director, H.D.S. Greenway. It was a typical apparently "left of center" piece on a possible attack on Iran, with Greenway urging everyone to "step back and take a deep breath". Towards the end of the piece however, Greenway makes a comment where he momentarily strikes at the heart of the matter only to then gloss it over with a line taken directly from the Zionist book of truisms.
"Failure by American non-Jews to recognize that Zionist Israel has nothing to do with America’s best interests and really nothing to do with the form of Judaism practiced by their next door American neighbor; and failure by American Jews to look deeply enough into their own tradition to recognize that Israeli imperialism and violence is contrary to everything their religion has stood for for 2000 years, will lead to the Third Irony:
Themselves the victims of a holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, some psychopaths disguising themselves as Jews are, in the course of only two generations and in the name of the Jews, perpetrating a holocaust upon the Palestinian people."
George W. Bush's last attempt to win the war in Iraq is meeting with strong resistance. His own party is criticizing him with brutal openness, calling his new ideas for Iraq a disaster. Bush is almost completely isolated -- like Richard Nixon during his final days in office. By Marc Pitzke more...
George W. Bush's last attempt to win the war in Iraq is meeting with strong resistance. His own party is criticizing him with brutal openness, calling his new ideas for Iraq a disaster. Bush is almost completely isolated -- like Richard Nixon during his final days in office. By Marc Pitzke more...
01/12/07 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Bush’s “surge” speech is a hoax, but members of Congress and media commentators are discussing the surge as if it were real.
I invite the reader to examine the speech. The “surge” content consists of nonsensical propagandistic statements. The real content of the speech is toward the end where Bush mentions Iran and Syria.
Bush makes it clear that success in Iraq does not depend on the surge. Rather, “Succeeding in Iraq . . . begins with addressing Iran and Syria.”
Bush asserts that “these two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops.”
Bush’s assertions are propagandistic lies.
The Iraq insurgency is Sunni. Iran is Shi’ite. If Iran is supporting anyone in Iraq it is the Shi’ites, who have not been part of the insurgency. Indeed, the Sunni and Shi’ites are engaged in a civil war within Iraq.
Does any intelligent person really believe that Iranian Shi’ites are going to arm Iraqi Sunnis who are killing Iraqi Shi’ites allied with Iran? Does anyone really believe that Iranian Shi’ites are going to provide sanctuary for Iraqi Sunnis?
Bush can tell blatant propagandistic lies, because Congress and the American people don’t know enough facts to realize the absurdity of Bush’s assertions.
Mark From Ireland Gorillas Guides Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:41 EST
Maysan: Five People Die Amongst Them A Teenager and Two Children Die Scavenging For Copper
Five people were killed today by exploding ordinance from previous wars in two separate incidents.
In the first incident in West Amarah three brothers Hussein Sabri Matanch (Aged 18) and Rafael Qasim (Aged 12) and Jasim (Aged 9) were trying to dismantle a mortar shell to get at the copper inside it so that they could sell it to scrap dealers. Here’s how eyewitnesses to their deaths describe what happened:
Maysan: Five People Die Amongst Them A Teenager and Two Children Die Scavenging For Copper
Five people were killed today by exploding ordinance from previous wars in two separate incidents.
THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA; FOUR AMERICAN PETROLEUM GIANTS HAD AGREEMENTS WITH THE AFRICAN NATION BEFORE ITS CIVIL WAR BEGAN. THEY COULD REAP BIG REWARDS IF PEAC
THE OIL FACTOR IN SOMALIA; FOUR AMERICAN PETROLEUM GIANTS HAD AGREEMENTS WITH THE AFRICAN NATION BEFORE ITS CIVIL WAR BEGAN. THEY COULD REAP BIG REWARDS IF PEACE IS RESTORED.
Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside.
That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.
According to documents obtained by The Times, nearly two-thirds of Somalia was allocated to the American oil giants Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips in the final years before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown and the nation plunged into chaos in January, 1991. Industry sources said the companies holding the rights to the most promising concessions are hoping that the Bush Administration's decision to send U.S. troops to safeguard aid shipments to Somalia will also help protect their multimillion-dollar investments there.
Officially, the Administration and the State Department insist that the U.S. military mission in Somalia is strictly humanitarian. Oil industry spokesmen dismissed as "absurd" and "nonsense" allegations by aid experts, veteran East Africa analysts and several prominent Somalis that President Bush, a former Texas oilman, was moved to act in Somalia, at least in part, by the U.S. corporate oil stake.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. helicopter gunship conducted a strike against two suspected al Qaeda operatives in southern Somalia, but it was not known whether the mission was successful, CBS News reported on Monday.
The U.S. Air Force helicopter, operated by the Special Operations Command, flew from its base in Djibouti to the southern tip of Somalia, where the al Qaeda suspects were believed to have fled from the capital Mogadishu, the U.S. network reported.
A Pentagon spokesman said he had no information on the report.
The al Qaeda operatives, who were not named, included a suspect in the car bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the report said.
British health and safety inspectors are investigating an incident at a recently closed nuclear power station in Suffolk which led to the escape of 40,000 gallons of radioactive water, it has been revealed.
The incident happened at the Sizewell A station, one of the oldest in the world, which closed eight days ago.
Its reactors, which had been producing electricity for 40 years, are now being decommissioned.
A Sizewell spokesman said there had been a "breakage" in a pipe, which led to the water escape.
"The escape was stopped rapidly," said the spokesman.
The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate confirmed it was investigating the incident, adding that no water had left the site and there had been no contact with members of the public or workers.
A spokesman said the water contained traces of a radioactive substance.
Gary Smith, national officer of the GMB union, said: "The incident highlights decades of chronic under-investment in our nuclear industry.
"It also comes at a time when the Government is proposing to cut funding to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
"The Government gave a commitment that it would clean up the nuclear legacy, and proposals to cut NDA funding will ultimately impact on investment in training and maintenance, which can only further exacerbate problems that we have as a result of neglect.
"Any cuts in the NDA budgets will severely undermine public confidence in the future of the industry."
Wayne Madsen Wayne Madsen Report Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:24 EST
According to U.S. maritime industry sources, tanker captains are reporting an increase in onboard alarms from hazard sensors designed to detect hydrocarbon gas leaks and, specifically, methane leaks. However, the leaks are not emanating from cargo holds or pump rooms but from continental shelves venting increasing amounts of trapped methane into the atmosphere. With rising ocean temperatures, methane is increasingly escaping from deep ocean floors. Methane is also 21 more times capable of trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
In fact, one of the major sources for increased methane venting is the Hudson Submarine Canyon, which extends into the Atlantic 400 miles from the New York-New Jersey harbor. Another location experiencing increased venting is the Santa Barbara Channel on the California coast.
Meanwhile, a strong natural gas odor was reported this morning in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Weehawken, and Newark. Last August, a similar unexplained gas odor sent people to the hospital in Staten Island and Queens. Although methane is odorless, natural methane venting is often accompanied by the venting of acrid hydrogen sulfide, a byproduct of bacterial decomposition.
The US Coast Guard sent a message to ships and tugs in the bay and ocean south of New York requesting any reports of the odor being detected at sea. There were also an unconfirmed report of a similar strong odor being detected this morning on the Delaware coast near Lewes. This morning, the prevailing winds in New York and New Jersey were southerly at 5 to 10 miles per hour.
In other global warming news, the warm temperatures on the U.S. East Coast are resulting in early blooming of the cherry trees and azaleas in Washington, DC and New York City, apple and peach trees in Maryland, and roses, forsythias, and crocuses in Connecticut. A number of people along the East Coast are suffering from allergies usually experienced in April. Monk parakeets from South America have invaded the Chicago area.
George W. Bush continues to insist that global warming is "silly science" based on "fuzzy math." Corporate news media masters are pressuring plastic-faced and neatly-coiffured TV weathermen to treat the current abnormal warm weather as an unexpected "gift" for their viewers. The latte-sipping and SUV-driving yuppies in Washington, DC are certainly taking the current weather abnormality in stride -- they almost appear ecstatic about the weather, obviously unaware that the future of our planet is hanging on a thread.
Kurt Nimmo Wednesday January 03rd 2007, 10:13 pm Another Day in the Empire
Is John "Keating Five" McCain sincerely clueless? Or is he simply a politician playing a cynical numbers game with Iraq and thus eventually condemning to certain death more troops that should be here at home, protecting our borders?
McCain told General John Abizaid he didn't understand why the United States cannot "control" al-Anbar province and was flummoxed the general would suggest the "mission" is to train Iraqis to fight the "insurgency," actually a popular resistance against both occupation by foreign troops and their hand-picked Iraqi proxy.
McCain expressed frustration that said "insurgents" have taken back al-Anbar, thus demonstrating you can't teach an old dog new tricks, or at least teach him a bit of history and the inevitability of defeat for those who invade and attempt to occupy, as the French lost Vietnam at Diem Bien Phu and the British lost Afghanistan at the Gandamak pass. In Iraq, the Brits were unable to contain continual uprisings against occupation, even though they used mustard gas, a weapon favored Winston Churchill for the likes of "uncivilized" tribes. John McCain, the Manchurian candidate for president in 2008, does not even seem vaguely aware of such historical realities:
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said yesterday that he believes top officials in the Bush administration have privately concluded they have lost Iraq and are simply trying to postpone disaster so the next president will "be the guy landing helicopters inside the Green Zone, taking people off the roof," in a chaotic withdrawal reminiscent of Vietnam.
01/05/06 "Information Clearing House" -- -- Lies have consequences . All those who helped President George W. Bush launch a war of aggression—termed by Nuremberg “the supreme international crime”—have blood on their hands and must be held accountable. This includes corrupt intelligence officials. Otherwise, look for them to perform the same service in facilitating war on Iran.
“They should have been shot,” said former State Department intelligence director, Carl Ford, referring to ex-CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin, for their “fundamentally dishonest” cooking of intelligence to please the White House. Ford was alluding to “intelligence&rdquo ; on the menacing but non-existent mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq.
Ford was angry that Tenet and McLaughlin persisted in portraying the labs as real several months after they had been duly warned that they existed only in the imagination of intelligence analysts who, in their own eagerness to please, had glommed onto second-hand tales told by a con-man appropriately dubbed “Curveball.” In fact, Tenet and McLaughlin had been warned about Curveball long before they let then-Secretary of State Colin Powell shame himself, and the rest of us, by peddling Curveball’s wares at the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003.
After the war began, those same analysts, still “leaning forward,” misrepresented a tractor-trailer found in Iraq outfitted with industrial equipment as one of the mobile bio-labs. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, then working for NBC News, obliged by pointing out the equipment “where the biological process took place... Literally, there is nothing else for which it could be used.”
George Tenet knows a good man when he sees him. A few weeks later he hired Kay to lead the Pentagon-created Iraq Survey Group in the famous search to find other (equally non-existent, it turned out) “weapons of mass destruction.” (Eventually Kay, a scientist given to empirical evidence more than faith-based intelligence, became the skunk at the picnic when, in January 2004, he insisted on telling senators the truth: “We were almost all wrong—and I certainly include myself here.” But that came later.)
President Bush may not be very good at dealing with reality, but he is still gifted at letting American troops be killed, and then turning their deaths to his own political advantage.
If in your presence an individual tried to sacrifice an American serviceman or woman, would you intervene?
Would you at least protest?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them?
What if he had already sacrificed 3,003 of them -- and was then to announce his intention to sacrifice hundreds, maybe thousands, more?
This is where we stand [with] President Bush's "new Iraq strategy," and his impending speech to the nation, which, according to a quoted senior American official, will be about troop increases and "sacrifice."
The president has delayed, dawdled and deferred for the month since the release of the Iraq Study Group.
He has seemingly heard out everybody, and listened to none of them.
