Free Iraq

Planning our future -
Secretive Bilderbergers meet: Powerful group takes over Ottawa hotel for meeting; Power-brokers put Mideast, Iran and oil on their agenda.

The Bilderberg group is a half-century-old organization comprising about 130 of the world's wealthiest and most powerful people.

Bilderberg says the privacy of its meetings helps encourage freewheeling discussion.

The 2006 group includes David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Queen Beatrix of Holland, New York Gov. George Pataki, the heads of Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, the Royal Bank of Canada, a number of media moguls, and cabinet ministers from Spain and Greece.

The group also includes a pair of prominent figures involved in planning the U.S. invasion of Iraq — Richard Perle and Ahmad Chalabi.


And, in case you're thinking of seeking membership . . .
Pepe Escobar (Asia Times May 22, 2003), The masters of the universe: "The Bilderberg does not invite - or accept - Asians, Middle Easterners, Latin Americans or Africans."

(I really don't understand Ahmad Chalabi's 'pedigree'. Perhaps it's something like the old South Africa when Japanese people - because of economic ties - were (officially) 'Honorary Whites'. Anyway . . . Does this not tell us something about how the world is run? Think of this next time you exercise your democratic vote - in any country.)
 

Paul Joseph Watson, Bilderberg Mafia Comes Under Scrutiny Of Canadian Media: The Canadian media should be commended for doing their job - putting the lapdog American media to shame - and shining a spotlight on an organization that steers the course of geopolitics yet operates with no democratic oversight whatsoever.

"These guys love secrecy -- 125 of the most elite people on the planet meeting together and setting policy. ... It's diabolical -- world government, global taxation. On the agenda here, they're debating (an impending) attack on Iran."

The fact is that during last year's conference in Rottach-Egern, Bilderberg luminaries 'forecasted' the dramatic rise in oil prices. A year ago oil stood at $40 a barrel - now it's $70.

The BBC also uncovered Bilderberg documents dating back to the 1950's showing that the subsequent EU common market and the Euro was originally the brainchild of Bilderberg.
 

Paul Craig Roberts, War Criminal Nation; You'd Better Shut Up: Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing hard-pressed US taxpayers $300,000,000 per day! These wars are lost. Yet, imbecilic members of Congress are in the process of funding the war for another year. Multiply $300 million by 365 days and you get $109,500,000,000. ...

US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have killed far more civilians than they have resistance fighters. Bush administration spokespersons are crowing that they have killed Musab al-Zarqawi in an air strike. But al-Zarqawi was an al Qaeda leader, not a member of the Iraqi resistance. Al-Zarqawi's death will have no affect on the outcome in Iraq.

Far more important is the news that civil war in Baghdad alone claimed 1,400 deaths last month. Perhaps even more important is the news that the Taliban's resurgence has forced the Bush administration to launch more than 750 air strikes in Afghanistan in May. That is 25 air strikes per day! It is a foregone conclusion that most of the casualties are women and children.

The only reason Americans can look themselves in the mirror is that they are clueless and have little idea of what is being done in their name. ...

Slaughter of civilians? Just a few bad apples. We will fix that with seminars for the troops on military ethics and core values.

Bush supporters dismiss anyone who tells them the truth as a traitor. Bush supporters are as dependent on propaganda as substance abusers are on drugs and alcohol. Try weaning Bush supporters from the obvious lies that are the basis of this administration, and they will call you every name in the book.

They are proud to be Americans. Lies and war crimes are an American right.

And you had better shut up or those Haliburton-built concentration camps will be your new home.
 

Do you really think the U.S. plans to leave?
Iraq war bill deletes US military base prohibition: Congressional Republicans killed a provision in an Iraq war funding bill that would have put the United States on record against the permanent basing of U.S. military facilities in that country.
 

Kurt Nimmo, Neocon Prince of Darkness Sighted at Bilderberg Meeting: ... As [Richard] Perle is a prime shaker and mover behind the “clash of civilizations” agenda to “reshape” the Muslim Middle East (that is to say, shock and awe it, by way of bunker-buster and depleted uranium, into submission), it makes perfect sense for him to be on the Bilderberger roster, especially now that Iran is next up on the target list.
 

Gunmen kidnap senior Iraqi oil official in Baghdad
 

BILDERBERG
- wanna kno whos kummin?
- here: World Bank!
 

Zarqawi's house offers clues and hints
- leopard-print nightgown
- small carton of pineapple juice, straw intact
- leaflet identifying target radio station
- photo: FDR
- Newsweek magazine
- phrases about Jews & Christians
- large black plaque: "God is the light of the skies and the earth"

(Think of the clues that might have been, were it not for the small matter of 2 x 500 lb bombs.)
 

7 Palestinian civilians killed when IDF shell hits Gaza beach: A woman and two young children, aged six months and 18 months, as well as a young teenager were among the dead, medical officials said. ... The IDF apologized for the incident ... (emphasis added)
 

Suicide suspected in major’s death in Iraq
 

US refuses to rule out attacking Iran
 

Stan Winer, Tortured Fragments of History: In April 2004, the world was momentarily shocked by televised photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked, posed in contorted positions, and visibly suffering humiliating abuse while amused American soldiers stood by. ... An official inquiry disclosed that the US Army specifically allowed the CIA to house "ghost detainees" who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib, thus encouraging violations of reporting and monitoring requirements under the Geneva Conventions.

What the official inquiry studiously avoided telling us were the actual reasons why such obsessive secrecy was deemed necessary in the first place. But clearly, such facilities are placed outside the rule of law. ...

... [S]everal years ago during the mammoth trial in South Africa of alleged war criminal Brigadier Wouter Basson, a South African Army chemical and biological warfare specialist ... provided rare glimpses into the horrors that can and did evidently occur in circumstances of extreme secrecy and geographical isolation no less pervasive and extreme as those prevailing currently in America’s gulag of secret prisons.

Evidence presented at Basson’s trial lifted the lid on some bizarre events taking place in the 1970s and 1980s at an airfield and forward military base named Fort Rev, situated at Ondangwa in the former South West Africa, (now Namibia). ...

The Namibian deception operations, under the tutelage of battle hardened former Rhodesian special forces operators, had to be kept secret at any cost. If the operations were successful, pseudo gangs consisting of turned guerrillas posing as genuine freedom fighters would be infiltrated back into the field of operations where they would in turn capture more insurgents. Some of these so-called "high value targets", would then also be turned at Fort Rev, others being useful only as a source of information. But, having served that purpose, or having resisted turning, they then presented a major security risk, because they would have picked up at least some insight into the manner and methods of pseudo operations, and this could immediately compromise the secrecy of the entire pseudo operations programme. So they could not be processed through normal channels and imprisoned in a central holding facility from which word might leak to the outside world.

The torturers and interrogators at Fort Rev got around this small problem by simply killing off survivors of interrogation. "Redundant" prisoners were disposed of without trace after being drugged and their bodies dumped into the Atlantic Ocean from an aircraft. The doomed prisoners, before being loaded onto an aircraft and dumped 100 miles out to sea, were first injected with powerful muscle relaxants which had the effect of paralysing the victim whilst leaving his mind fully conscious. An anaesthetic drug was also used, having the effect of causing hallucinations.

In the absence of digital imaging technology of the kind evidenced at Abu Gharieb, one can only speculate about the full extent to which brainwashing or the "turning" of prisoners was practised for many years in South Africa, or during France’s battle for Algiers in the 1950s, Britain’s suppression of independence movements in Kenya and Malaya in the 1960s, Argentina’s dirty war, Britain’s Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970 and 1980s, and countless other regional conflicts. Whatever happened then, and whatever the true activities currently taking place in America’s gulag of secret prisons, it is certainly the case that extreme secrecy provides an ideal environment for the application of psychological torture techniques aimed at "converting" prisoners of war into pseudo operators.

... The practice of psychological torture, never fully acknowledged, is ... allowed to persist inside the secret services as the product of intelligence strategies that have probably been standard practice for at least half-a-century or more. Abu Ghraib may be just the tip of an iceberg.
 

John Bellamy Foster, A Warning to Africa: The New U.S. Imperial Grand Strategy: Grand strategies are geopolitical in orientation, geared to domination of whole geographical regions---including strategic resources such as minerals and waterways, economic assets, populations, and vital military positions. ... At present the main, permanent U.S. military base in Africa is the one established in 2002 in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, giving the United States strategic control of the maritime zone through which a quarter of the world's oil production passes. ... U.S. grand strategists are clear that the real issues are not the African states themselves and the welfare of their populations but oil and China's growing presence in Africa.
 

William M Arkin, "Shadow Government" in the Case of a "Second 9/11": Back to the Bunker: Federal government to conduct large scale anti-terror drill - On Monday, June 19, about 4,000 government workers representing more than 50 federal agencies from the State Department to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will say goodbye to their families and set off for dozens of classified emergency facilities stretching from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs to the foothills of the Alleghenies. They will take to the bunkers in an "evacuation" that my sources describe as the largest "continuity of government" exercise ever conducted, a drill intended to prepare the U.S. government for an event even more catastrophic than the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
 

Mike Whitney, Terrorism in Iraq? Don't blame Zarqawi: George Bush is right; Iraq is "the central battlefield in the global war on terror". Regrettably, it is United States that is the main sponsor and supporter of that terror in the form of American-trained death squads.
 

America backs Israel's right to kill children
 

Surprise !
Iraq Decides It Still Needs U.S.-Led Military Presence
 

Sergeant denies murder or cover-up in Haditha
 

Fear of Big Battle Panics Ramadi: U.S. and Iraqi forces had cordoned off the city by Saturday, residents and Iraqi officials said. Airstrikes on several residential areas picked up, and troops took to the streets with loudspeakers to warn civilians of a fierce impending attack, Ramadi police Capt. Tahseen Dulaimi said.

U.S. military officials refused to confirm or deny reports that a Ramadi offensive was underway.

Thousands of families remain trapped in the city, those who have fled say. Many can't afford to leave or lack transportation, whereas other families have decided to wait for their children to finish final examinations at school before escaping.

"The situation is catastrophic. No services, no electricity, no water," said Sheik Fassal Gaood, the former governor of Al Anbar province, whose capital is Ramadi.

"People in Ramadi are caught between two plagues: the vicious, armed insurgents and the American and Iraqi troops."

Residents have been particularly unnerved by the recent arrival of 1,500 U.S. troops sent to reinforce the forces already stationed at the city. Street battles between troops and insurgents have been raging for months, but the troops' deployment left residents bracing for a mass offensive to take the town back from insurgents.

"It is becoming hell up there," said Mohammed Fahdawi, a 42-year-old contractor who packed up his four children and fled to Baghdad two weeks ago. "It is unbelievable: The Americans seem to have brought all of their troops to Ramadi."

The fearful city is haunted by memories of the battles that raged in nearby Fallouja in 2004. ...
 

Rosa Brooks, Why Good People Kill: There are several key factors that lead "good people" to do terrible things. The first ... is authority: Most ordinary people readily allow the dictates of "authorities" to trump their own moral instincts.

The second is conformity. Few people have the courage to go against the crowd.

The third is dehumanization of the victims. The Nazis routinely depicted Jews as "vermin" in need of extermination, for instance. (all emphasis added)
 

General sees slow reduction of US forces in Iraq: "As long as the Iraqi security forces continue to progress ... ."

(Read together with the following)

Hundreds of Iraqi soldiers deserting
 

British troops, insurgents battle in Iraq
 

The fax that reveals the US is flying terror suspects to Europe’s secret jails: THE intercepted top-secret fax contained information that America never wanted the world to know – that the US was holding war-on-terror captives at clandestine “black site” prisons in eastern Europe.
 

An army where wounded soldiers are on their own; Iraqi recruits can't go to a military hospital -- there is none
 

Killing makes good PR -
Iraq, Terror Votes Come at a Good Time for GOP: War and terrorism will take center stage in Congress next week, as both chambers vote on an emergency military spending bill and the House devotes a day to debating a resolution on Iraq and the "war on terror."

House Republican leaders say the decision to focus on Iraq and terrorism was made long ago. But GOP officials concede that the killing of Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi by a U.S. airstrike this week would make it easier for the Republicans to defend Bush administration policies.
 

U.S. Seeking New Strategy for Buttressing Iraq's Government: One of the senior officials ... said that the decision to hold a joint cabinet meeting on Tuesday, between Mr. Bush's top advisers and the newly appointed cabinet of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq via a video link from Baghdad, was intended to set an agenda for the new government ... and ... to begin to let go of the bicycle seat and find out if the Iraqi government can stay upright with less American support.
 

US approves USD 2.46 billion to Israel, the largest sum received by any country (Meanwhile, ensuring that Palestinians starve to death)
 

Israelis Fear Spread Of War Crimes Cases: Laws passed in wake of Nuremberg trials now being pressed in Europe against Israeli generals
 

Palestinian girl buries family killed in shelling: "Don't leave me alone."
 

PHOTOS, Gaza Massacre
 

Khalid Amayreh, Israel introduces new travel restrictions: According to Palestinian human rights organisations, the new restrictions involve barring Palestinians carrying foreign passports, including those married to a Palestinian spouse, from re-entering the West Bank after leaving for their adopted country of citizenship, even for a brief visit.

The new measures also affect long-time foreigners residing in the West Bank such as college professors, NGO employees, religious figures and naturalised spouses of Palestinian residents in the West Bank.

Aljazeera.net tried repeatedly to get the Israeli army spokespersons to clarify policy with regard to foreigners staying in or wanting to enter the West Bank.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli interior ministry said Israel had the right to bar whoever it wanted from entering the "territories".
 

Extracted joyfully !
Ben Metcalf, On Simple Human Decency: ... Because I am loath to violate whatever fresh new mores the people have agreed upon, or have been told they agree upon, and because I do not care to have my ass kicked repeatedly in a holding cell while I beg to see a lawyer, I almost hesitate to ask the following question. I will ask it, though, out of what used to be called simple human decency:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

Let me be clear that I have no wish to perform such a deed in fact, nor do I want anyone else to destroy bodily what is, at least in the technical sense, a fellow human being. (Let me be equally clear that the above qualification, although true, is intended primarily as a legal ploy and should in no way be attributed to my claimed pacifism, which today's prosecutor might find a way to use against me. I would also like excused from the proceedings my personal feelings for George W. Bush, embarrassment and rage, as they could probably be turned to my disadvantage as well.) In truth, I bring neither a message nor a promise of violence. I seek only to gauge what level of discourse is still acceptable in this country by asking, in the hope that I might someday participate in that discourse, whether I am free to posit that it would probably be great fun, and a boon to all mankind, if I were to slaughter the president of the United States with my bare hands.

True, George W. Bush is an ignorant, cruel, closed-minded, avaricious, sneaky, irresponsible, thieving, brain-damaged frat boy with a drinking problem and a taste for bloodshed, whose numerous crimes have been abetted by the moral corruption of his party cohort and whose contempt for American military lives alone warrants his impeachment, but what has it ever won us to say so? How has it profited the people for their writers to argue that a wealthy, comfortable citizen deserves a wealthy, comfortable retirement when we all know full well that he has earned confinement and conviction and perhaps even a request for that barbaric death penalty he so loudly supports? What goal, besides an impoverished guarantee of my own personal “freedom,” is served by a refusal to acknowledge that I might easily, and enjoyably, rid us of this man forever with my very hands?

As long as I (that is, the corporeal, arrestable “I”) wish no real damage upon the president, I (the other “I”) should theoretically be free even to enhance the scenario at hand for the enjoyment of my public. In place of the initial question I might ask instead, “Am I allowed to write that I would like to kidnap George W. Bush and fly him to a prison in some faraway land where his ‘rights’ are no longer an issue, there to put a bag over his head and make him stand for hours on one leg while I defecate on his New Testament before chaining his arms to the ceiling until he dies of a heart attack, after which I will claim that he never existed?” Here, though, taste, if not simple human decency, again rears its delicate head: I doubt that I could bring myself to read such a thing, let alone write it.
 

Sarah McLachlan, World On Fire
 

Guardian, Cruel and illegal: The demented logic of Dr Strangelove hung like a ghost this weekend over the US military's response to the suicide of three prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Announcing the news, the first successful suicides since detainees began to arrive in 2002, the camp's commander, Rear-Admiral Harry Harris, said the deaths were "not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us". ... (emphasis added)

Suicide has a primal potency which can shock in a way other human acts do not. This was true, in a very different context, of the death of Dr David Kelly and it makes it probable that the deaths of the three detainees, two Saudi and one Yemani, will redouble attention on Guantánamo. In the Arab world, it will further darken America and Britain's reputations, already sullied by images of abuse at Abu Ghraib and the orange suits, shackles and hoods of Camps X-Ray and Delta. The US military has argued that the 41 unsuccessful suicide attempts at the base so far, together with hunger strikes - including eight prisoners now - are a political act intended to capture world opinion. ...

What is most horrific about Guantánamo is not the way prisoners are treated physically - though details of forced feeding through the nose in the UN's recent report are grotesque - but the abandonment of judicial process by a nation whose identity is built on constitutional rights. ...
---------------------------------

('Asymetric'? The Guantanamo prisoners have have been hauled away, caged, and deprived of any shred of civil/legal rights. They know their situation to be beyond hopeless. Treated as non-humans, they could rot away into infinity. 'Asymetric'? Rather like the sign at the entrance to Nazi death camps: ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
 

Stephen Lendman , Comments on Greg Palast's New Book Armed Madhouse: Living in the US under a rogue administration bent on world conquest and dominance, I can easily understand what Greg might have had in mind by his title. But as he explained, he chose it from his late teacher Allen Ginsberg who wrote: "The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse." He also explained before he became an investigative journalist he was a "forensic economist" meaning he cut deeply into the inner workings of companies like Enron and Exxon-Mobil (my favorite one to pick on because they make it so easy for me to do) to learn what they've really been up to - no good for sure as everyone now knows about Enron which was little more than a crime organization posing as a legal business.

I suspect not enough people know about Greg in the US. That's because the dominant corporate media won't go anywhere near him. Why? Because he uncovers and discloses some of the most important information we should know that gets people upset when they find out about it. That's not the kind of material an empire wants in circulation nor its corporate media. ...

Greg's book (Armed Madhouse) is an important contribution for readers to gain insight into the machinations of the Bush administration from stealing elections to waging war on Iraq and the world and much more as well. You won't learn than ever on CNN or National Public Radio which has about as much to do with the public as Pravda did in the former Soviet Union. I highly recommend the book as I did his earlier one The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. I've written on that subject myself and know how true it is. Those of us living in the US are governed by a band of out-of-control rogues wanting total world dominance with no "outliers" allowed abroad or dissent at home. The result is a dangerous world for us all and one in which our only defense is good information. Only from that can we understand the problem and know why we need to work for our own self-preservation. ...
 

Mike Whitney, When Suicide becomes Resistance: ... "Everything has changed"; principles have been abandoned, commitments discarded, liberties forsaken. America will no longer play by the rules. There are no more guarantees on personal freedom; the law is being reshaped to meet the requirements of new world order.

After 4 years of imprisonment, isolation and torture; we shouldn’t be surprised that 3 inmates finally succeeded in killing themselves at Guantanamo. Their suicides are a triumph over a system that is entirely designed to maximize human suffering. Each of these men had been exposed to the dehumanizing abuse and mistreatment which was authorized at the highest levels of government and which has been widely reported in the media. ...

For the victims, the only way to preserve their tattered dignity, was to take their own lives; a choice that demonstrates the depth of their hopelessness. Their deaths should be seen for what they are; a final act of resistance against a manifestly cruel and unjust system.

... We should be grateful to the 3 men who sacrificed their lives in the struggle against barbarity and cynicism. They have nudged us ever-closer to the day when Bush and company will be held accountable for their crimes. Maybe then we can tear down the gun-towers and block walls at Guantanamo and erect a monument to the countless victims of this vile and vicious regime.
 

(No link available)
Nizar Sakhnini, 12 June 2006, COMMENTS ON THE SITUATION IN PALESTINE: Israel’s criminal act of killing innocent civilians picnicking on the peach was not surprising.

What was surprising is the shameful stand of the PNA President who insists on calling for a referendum that would lead to nowhere.

Israel is going on with their ‘unilateral’ acts aiming at ethnic cleansing and land grab that had been going on since 1948. This requires an Arab strategy for restoration of stolen Arab lands and rights.
 

William Bowles, al-somebody or other: Well folks, the 'new' leader of 'al-Qu'eda in Iraq' has been named (already). Can't remember it offhand, not that it matters, it's al-somebody or other. I've posted a page of newslinks on his 'death' if you can be bothered to read through the endless drivel that's been generated. (See also the 'Zarqawi' section for more on the fabled foe of Western 'civilisation'.)
 

Paul Craig Roberts, Will the White House Moron Bring On Armageddon?
 

More collateral damage -
Children Among Dead in U.S.-Led Iraq Raid
 

A Note on the Death of Abu Museb Al-Zarqaawi: ...[T]he rule has been, and is, that the U.S. forces can kill anyone and everyone, no matter how young or old, if they happen to be unlucky enough to end up where some U.S. mission planner thinks a valuable target is located. Bombs away!

... [I]nnocent children (and others) are killed as a matter of policy. We are supposed to cheer (or moan) depending on whether the particular Mr. Bigs are actually killed, but as for the rest, well, they are as insects on the ground. Sometimes blood money is paid out by military “civil affairs” officers to grieving families, sometimes not.

Yet we are bombarded with war propaganda about children going to newly re-opened Iraqi schools and grimy looking Iraqi kids getting inoculations by military medics. All hail democracy! It’s for the children!

Iraqi parents just have to hope that their little Iraqi loved ones don’t happen to end up underneath one of those precision guided laser bombsights of democracy… To America, those deaths don’t count, aren’t even acknowledged, much less condemned. They are just somebody else’s children who got in our way. To George Bush’s Wehrmacht, those kids don’t even exist.
 

NSA Blocking Whistleblower Russell Tice From Telling Committee About Shocking, Illegal Activities: Tice said he told the staffers everything he knew. But he said the aides did not say how, or if, they would follow up on his allegations.


Play! You were going to order a Pizza, no?
 

You cannot imagine how many people want the U.S. to be rid of bush and his terrorist administration. Many, many, many more are borderline, as well.
All the jerks need to do is to keep on with the lunacy of attacking places like Ramadi. It shows to U.S. citizens and to the world what CRAZY PEOPLE are in control here. Like the U.S. went to help liberate Europe from the Nazi Terror Machine during WW2 -- we need troops from around the world to liberate us from the Bush Fascists. And that's the TRUTH! It's not quite the time, but it will be soon. And wouldn't that be a reversal of everything we know here. The world would be turned upside down.

Nothing like a good shakeup to clear the air and the land and the water!
 

Chris Floyd, Gitmo Sings the Tombstone Blues: I was going to write something about the prisoner suicides at Bush's Cuban concentration camp, and the Pentagon's ludicrous "explanation" that the deaths were, simultaneously, both a carefully planned act of "asymmetric warfare" and also an outburst of pure mumbo-jumbo among primitive darkies who had somehow concocted the mystical belief that if three of them died then all the prisoners would be freed.

....but then I remembered that Bob Dylan had covered all this more than 40 years ago, in the middle of another godforsaken military adventure that saw torture, murder and mass destruction wielded in the name of democracy and freedom, way back when George W. Bush was still a high-school creep chugging brewskis and chasing tail, long before his apotheosis as the law-transcending War Leader. It was these lines from "Tombstone Blues," from the 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited:

Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief,
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly,
Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry!"
And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky,
Saying, "The sun's not yellow, it's chicken."
 

Haaretz.com, The blood on our hands: It was easy for us, much, much too easy, to have gone through this entire weekend, and still not see the blood on our hands.

One reason is that we don't watch Al Jazeera. Another is that we don't really see ourselves.

We immediately found no end of ways to disengage from the tragedy of a family erased for the crime of picnicking on a beach.

The ineffable anguish in the image of a girl running on a beach where her family lay in pieces on the sand, was shown again and again and again on Al Jazeera, but it passed swiftly from Israeli television screens and from the Israeli consciousness, replaced, in many cases, with indignation over the world's propensity to pre-judge and condemn us.
 

(This comes with a warning. Nonetheless, I say: Watch it.)
Video (3 min.), Death On A Gaza Beach: Huda Ghalya a 7 year old Palestinian girl screams in horror as she watches her dead parents and other family members being removed from the beach after an Israeli Bomb attack
 

Video (53 min), Promises and Betrayals: Britain and the Struggle for the Holy Land - An intriguing look at how the British double-dealing during WWI ignited the conflict between Arab and Jew in the Middle East. A disturbing picture of a duplicitous wartime government.
 

Bombs kill at least 14 in Iraq's Kirkuk


75,000 forces to be deployed in Baghdad


Judge tells Saddam defense to wrap up case
 

Anger erupts in Saddam courtroom: US lawyer Curtis Doebbler complained the defence was "at a serious disadvantage" because of the handling of the trial.

"We want to work for justice, but that can only happen by having a fair trial and, under the current circumstances, that doesn't seem possible," Mr Doebbler said.

He added that it took the prosecution more than five months to present its case, while the defence is being "rushed" to conclude within weeks.

"Our witnesses have been intimidated by the court and have been assaulted," Mr Doebbler added.

Last week, the court announced that four witnesses had been arrested for accusing the prosecutor of trying to bribe them to give false evidence.

Judge Abdel Rahman clarified the court's position on Monday, saying: "We reached a decision that these witnesses were lying and we took action against them."

In the previous session, the defence disputed whether 15 people from the list of 148 dead in Dujal were executed. It said 10 were still alive and five had since died.

Correspondents say the witness testimony could be wrapped up soon, with the defence lawyers and defendants then allowed to make their closing statements.

The judges could then give their verdict as early as next month.
 

Israeli Airstrike Kills 10 Palestinians: The deadly airstrike came just hours after hundreds of Palestinian police loyal to Abbas went on a rampage against the Hamas government, riddling the parliament building and Cabinet offices with bullets before setting them ablaze in retaliation for an attack by Hamas gunmen in the Gaza Strip. The rampage raised new fears the Palestinians were headed toward civil war.


Israel Says It Didn't Cause Beach Blast
 

Bush, aides admit Iraq insurgency still tough


'New American Century' Project Ends With a Whimper
 

BUSH VISITS BAGHDAD
 

Dahr Jamail, Ramadi: Fallujah Redux - It has always been just a matter of time before the US military would finally get around to destroying Ramadi, the capital city of al-Anbar province. After all, Ramadi is not far from Fallujah, and so similar to Fallujah both tribally and in their disdain towards the idea of being occupied, that many people in Ramadi even refer to Fallujah as "Ramadi." I know many people from Ramadi who lost relatives and friends during both US assaults on Fallujah, and the level of anti-American sentiment has always been high there.

By now, we all know the scene when the US military in Iraq decides to attack an entire city ...

The media blackout on Ramadi is already rivaling the blackout on the draconian measures employed by the military during the November 2004 siege of Fallujah, if not surpassing it. Thus far, the military have remained reluctant to allow even embedded reporters to travel with them in Ramadi. With each passing US assault on an Iraqi city, the media blackout grows darker - and with Ramadi, it is the darkest yet.

Similar to Fallujah, thousands of frightened residents of Ramadi are fleeing the city, then being turned away from entering Baghdad. With no tents, food, or aid of any kind being provided to them by the military, which is a war crime, they are left with nothing but what they carry and no place to go. These refugees are now adding to the horrific statistic of over 100,000 displaced families within Iraq, the majority of whom are so as the result of massive US military operations which have a tendency to make entire cities unlivable.

Reports from sources within Ramadi for weeks now have been that US soldiers have been inhabiting people's homes in order to use their rooftops as sniper platforms, innocent people are being shot daily, and people are confused - do they risk leaving and having nowhere to go, or risk staying in their homes and possibly being killed?
 

Malcom Lagauche, IT’S ALL A BIG HAZE: To many people, the subject of Iraq from the time of August 2, 1990 until today has been a big haze. So many things have occurred that it appears like the world experienced many versions of the ongoing U.S.-Iraq war. However, it is still one ongoing war that has included many battles and there is no end in sight.

One part of the big haze that probably has escaped the memory of most people is the last week of the George Bush I presidency. Incidents of that week were used as a warmup for future belligerence against Iraq.

Bush wanted to leave in place the mechanics to be able to attack Iraq at any time, for no reason other than bravado, even though the U.S. signed a cease-fire agreement with Iraq in March 1991.

From March 1991 to January 1993, the embargo took hold. Iraqis began to suffer and die. But, there were no U.S. military attacks against Iraq.

During Bush I’s last week, he decided to change that and set the stage for ongoing military action against Iraq, under the guise of many names, such as the "no-fly zone," etc.

On January 13, 1993, news broadcasts were interrupted to proclaim that the U.S. was bombing Iraqi anti-aircraft sites. No one expected this, so the talk was intense about the new operation.

The Pentagon again showed the world videotape of pinprick air strikes in which only military targets were hit. However, it did not show the house in southern Iraq that was blown to bits. When this information came out, Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams admitted the error.

But, the next day, the same Dick Cheney the U.S. now has as its vice-president, and in 1993 was the Secretary of Defense, appeared on a CBS news show. He denied the strike and stated:

This is the same kind of gibberish we heard from Saddam Hussein during the course of the war itself. We went after military targets. We struck only military targets.

Again, the dirty liar Saddam was to blame for U.S. pilots dropping bombs and somehow a house happened to get in the way.

Up to January 19, 1993, just one day prior to the inauguration of a new U.S. president, the media were highlighting Iraq as an issue. One thing was made absolutely clear: the U.S. public was ready for immediate resumption of anti-Iraq propaganda.

This one-week period of January 1993 may not have represented a massive military engagement against Iraq. However, its legacy was very damaging as the stage had been set for any U.S. president to bomb Iraq at any time with no reason, creating a big haze that still permeates peoples’ minds today.
 

Truth About Iraqis, So you thought Iraqis would receive justice?: Sovereignty in Iraq. It is worth remembering those three words when you weigh the number of atrocities committed by US troops and private security (former US, UK, South African and other military personnel) firms against the number of those charged, punished or even incarcerated.

For those who talk to me about democracy, stuff yourselves. It lies dead next to all the children the "democratic" troops have murdered.
 

Edward B. Winslow, Same-sex marriage being used to divert attention from Iraq, torture and Bush's power grab
 

Saddam defense witnesses have final say as trial speeds up: Judge Rauf Abdel Rahman adjourned the trial until June 19, after six witnesses were heard on what he announced earlier would be the final day of testimony from the defense.
 

Anas Altikriti, The fluctuating value of life: Why does a terrorist attack on the transport system in London that kills and injures dozens, draw utter condemnation and creates shock amongst us all, yet an attack by the Israeli military on a beach in Gaza killing and wounding dozens, including young children on a seaside outing, fails to register the same decibel levels?


Video (59 min), Chalmers Johnson: ”The Last Days of the American Republic”: The largest element in our budget of discretionary spending goes for national security. We are spending today more on national defense, so-called really on war, than all the other nations on earth combined. That’s an astonishing figure. Its also amazing to see that perhaps, 20,000 insurgents in Iraq have fought to a standstill 130,000 of the most-highly trained, heavily equipped troops on earth.


Iraqi 'error' triggers US raid: 2 children among 9 dead


Video (16 min), Guantanamo: A History of Torture - Guantanamo is a complete construction. It's a system of total psychological torture, designed to break down every detainee contained therein, designed to produce a state of hopelessness and despair that leads, tragically, sadly in this case to suicide.


Zachary Katznelson, A tunnel without end: The US version of the Guantánamo suicides is disgraceful. The cause of death was gross injustice.
 

Military condemns music video on killing Iraqis: The Marine Corps condemned on Tuesday as "clearly inappropriate" a music video purporting to show a Marine strumming a guitar and singing a song about killing Iraqis, to the laughter and cheers of other troops.

"We're looking into it," ... a U.S. Marine Corps spokesman at the Pentagon said ...
 

Bilderberg 2006, Full List of Attendees (Which of these august luminaries is your personal representative?)
 

Bush visit may have downside for al-Maliki (Bet Baby Blue Eyes never thought of that.)
 

Chris Floyd, Howdy Doody in Babylon: Too bad the president didn't have time to take a leisurely stroll around that "George W. Bush Square" that Richard Perle promised us we'd see in Baghdad within a year after the invasion, eh? I'll bet the locals would have loved to meet and greet their liberator. Oh well, maybe next time!
 

Regarding the waging of 'asymetric' warfare -
US 'neglects mental health of Guantanamo inmates': "The Bush administration has systematically and deliberately denied these men their most basic rights through a policy of choking off all contact, communication, information and hope."

"[It has] consistently fought to keep these men from lawyers, doctors and others who were willing to help them."
 

Truth About Iraqis, O Iraqis, they make songs now celebrating your deaths!
 

Marine: Video, song about killing a 'joke'
(Can you imagine the consequences, were there a song about killing Bush?)
 

Olmert approves arms shipment to boost Abbas
 

Revealed: the shrapnel evidence that points to Israel's guilt: Israel has dismissed continuing calls for an independent international inquiry into the beachfront explosion which killed seven members of a Palestinian family in Gaza last Friday after its own internal military investigation decided it was not responsible for the blast.

As the military investigation team insisted that artillery fire had stopped by the time the explosion occurred and suggested it had been caused by a bomb planted in the sand, Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, declared: "The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces."

But the official interpretation was strongly challenged by a former Pentagon battle damage expert who has surveyed the scene of the beach explosion. He said yesterday that "all the evidence points" to a 155mm Israeli land-based artillery shell as its cause.


US test fire kills three Iraqis: An artillery round fired from a US military base near Hibhib (about 20km north of Baquba) struck a building in the nearby town, a statement said.

Two Iraqis were killed instantly, while a third died later from her wounds.

This comes amid investigations of a number of incidents in which civilians were killed by US troops.


Iraqi 'error' triggers US raid: 2 children among 9 dead: Local residents accused the Americans of targeting civilians and a man wearing a white dishdasha held up the charred body of a toddler whose head had been blown in half.

Mohammad Abbas, a relative of the victims, said the raid was triggered by an error on the part of a local guard in the village of Hashmiyyat, west of Baqouba, where the raid was carried out.

"We were sleeping on the rooftop at midnight when a local guard fired in the air as he saw individuals whom he thought were insurgents ... unfortunately they turned out to be US troops on foot patrol," he said.

"The US forces responded fiercely and struck several houses first and later concentrated on one house. We later discovered that nine members of the house, including seven children and youngsters, were killed while four members are missing."


Global Military Spending $1.12 Trillion - US Is 80% Of Increase (Makes me feel so safe.)
 

Baghdad crackdown begins; 4 die in blast


Attacks on students worry young Iraqis: Associated Press figures show at least 42 university students and 11 elementary and high school students have been killed since April 28, 2005. Thirty-eight teachers, professors, school administrators, school security guards or school bus drivers died in the same period.

The tally indicates there has been a surge of attacks on university students since April 2006 — 36 of the 42 reported deaths occurred during that time, and seven students were abducted. Attacks on teachers also were up, with 19 deaths reported since April of this year.

Luma George, a 20-year-old Christian who is studying to be a teacher, now wears an Islamic headscarf known as a hijab as she is driven to and from school.

"Gunmen threatened to kill us if we did not wear a hijab," she said, adding that she has had trouble concentrating on final exams because of the violence.

Ali Murad al-Jubouri, a 22-year-old science student, said some of his friends left school. He said he decided to stay, but he and some friends were living in classrooms to avoid using the roads every day.

He said he believed insurgents seeking to block progress in Iraq were targeting students "because they are the educational threads and the country will count on them."

Jassim, however, had a simpler explanation.

"They are Iraqis and every Iraqi is a target," he said.

Professor Issam al-Rawi, head of the Iraqi Association of University Lecturers, said 220 professors have been killed since the war began and hundreds more have left Iraq after being threatened.

The most recent killing was Tuesday, he said, when Baghdad University professor Hani Jassim al-Duleimi was gunned down in front of his house.

"This violence will set our country back centuries," al-Rawi said, "We'll end up with an ignorant generation."
 

Bush: Iraqis determined to take over from US (I think on TV Bush said something like: "I looked the Iraqi PM in the eye and knew blah blah blah and I told him he has the support of the U.S. government and we never go back on our blah blah blah.")
 

Paper: Rumsfeld expels US media from Guantanamo Bay
 

Delinda C. Hanley, Rachel Corrie: Will Americans Get to Hear The Voice of an American Anne Frank?
 

The secret story of Mossad and the World Trade Center attack: Told for the first time — the story of Mossad's advance knowledge about the 9-11 attack and how the US Army reported that Mossad "has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

The Clinton-Bush cover story is coming rapidly unraveled....more to come in this breaking story.

[Headings]
- The unresolved role of Mossad in 9-11
- What the Israeli government knew about 9-11
- Israeli role in 9-11?
- DoD warns about Mossad 'targeting US', framing Arabs
- The Odigo Warning: Israeli employees get e-mail warnings of 9-11
- Sharon's screaming match with Shimon Peres
- Mossad alert — warning or play?
- Arab charges of Mossad-CIA plot
- The Jewish Defense League bombing plot
- The Anti-Defamation spy scandal
- The 125 phony Israeli 'art students' and the 9-11 hijackers
- Why Israeli soldiers don't trust their own government
- Female Jewish Bomber Murders 12 in Jerusalem
 

Pentagon to Disclose Interrogation Tactics (Yes, definitely)
 

Dave Lindorff, The Case of the Missing $21 Billion
 

How To Deal With Police Officers - Magic Words?
 

Ehsan Ahrari, Baghdad's unwelcome visitor: [Bush] wanted to look Maliki in the eyes and assure him that the United States stood with Iraq.
 

Greg Palast, Keeping Iraq's Oil In the Ground
 

Charles Sullivan, The Flag of the Corporate States of America: We have troops stationed at permanent bases all over the world and they are not fostering democracy, they are suppressing it. These acts are committed under the banner of the stars and stripes and given noble explanations in the commercial media. Every day the madmen who are running the government are planning new horrors, an endless litany of death and mayhem to be committed in our name for corporate profits. So forgive me if I do not pledge allegiance to the flag of the corporate states of America. Pardon me if I do not get choked up with pride when I see a bumper sticker that reads, “These colors don’t run.” Most people, it seems to me, have no clue about the atrocities that are being committed by their government. They do not want to know.
 

Paul Levy, Where Is The Voice Of Sanity: Something is being revealed to us about ourselves by the fact that we are being ruled by people who are mad. Imagine, what would we do if we truly recognized that our government is being run by people who have collectively gone mad? What would we do if we realized that the leader of the most powerful nation on the planet, the person with his finger on the button, is a genuine psychopath?
 

Ramzy Baroud, Trying Times for Palestinians: ... Never since the concoction of the Israeli state and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of nearly one million Palestinians in 1947-48, has an Israeli government been as determined as that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to settle its account with the Palestinians, in so vile and careless a way. [ . . . ]

Time is running out. Palestinians are under total isolation, aside from friendly but superficial gestures from some Arab and Muslim countries. Coupled with their failure to transcend above factional divides and, pitiful and untimely quarrels, Palestinians are allowing Israel the time and the pretense to carry out Sharon’s racist vision to the last letter. The Israeli wall – in its most literal and figurative senses – is closing in, and ordinary, defenseless Palestinians are feeling the brunt of the siege and the inhumanity of the Israeli occupation more than ever before. It’s time fore Palestinian factions, and those who still posses the wisdom and the courage to unite, to speak out and to divert their energies to serve their nation’s honorable fight for freedom. Indeed, Palestinians are living in one of the most critical and historic times. Let it not be the most shameful as well.
 

Father Rejects Son's Gitmo Suicide: Mourners packed the home of a Yemeni who died at the American prison in Guantanamo Bay as his family dismissed U.S. claims he committed suicide and accused prison authorities of murdering him.
 

Gul Jammas Hussain, Kissinger: Criminal Defender of Israeli Domination: The minutes of a secret 1975 U.S. National Security Council meeting attended by President Ford, reveal Henry Kissinger grumbling, “It is an act of insanity and national humiliation to have a law prohibiting the President from ordering assassination.” ...

The time was September 11, 1973. The country was Chile. The event was the bloody overthrow of a democratic government. ...

He has been the architect of human misery, has sanctioned the destruction of civilian populations, ordered the assassination of “inconvenient” politicians, and approved of the kidnapping and disappearance of soldiers, journalists and clerics. What an insult to human intelligence that he continues to give his opinion on global affairs and writes columns for The Washington Post, rather than being taken to the gallows, or at the very least put behind bars.

Among the scores of present and former diplomats maligning Islam, no one can match Henry A. Kissinger - the 56th Secretary of State of the United States from 1973 to 1977, and National Security adviser from 1969 to 1975 - for duplicity and the twisting of facts. He is a writer par-excellence and inimitable in telling untruths. In his piece for the Post, A Nuclear Test for Diplomacy, he redefined the standards of jaundiced political writing. In his nonsensical comparison between Iran and North Korea, and discussing the dangers of nuclear proliferation in the Far and Middle-East, made with the most sensible phrasing, he never once mentioned Israel.

Israel, by the way, has 200 to 500 thermonuclear weapons and a sophisticated delivery system. Many of Israel's nuclear warheads are targeted on Iran, including new, nuclear-armed, U.S.-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles on its Dolphin-class submarines in the Indian Ocean. And it also possesses chemical and biological weapons.
 

Iraq conflict fuels rise in global refugees: Over 40 percent of Iraqi professionals have fled the insurgency-wracked nation since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
 

60 UK soldiers a month suffer mental illness
 

ACLU Sues Pentagon for Info on Database of Antiwar Citizens: Anti-war groups and other organizations, including a Quaker group — the American Friends Service Committee — protested after it became public that the military had monitored anti-war activities, organizations, and individuals who attended peace rallies.

"The U.S. military should not be in the business of maintaining secret databases about lawful First Amendment activities," said ACLU attorney Ben Wizner. "It is an abuse of power and an abuse of trust for the military to play any role in monitoring critics of administration policies."
 

John Pilger, The war on children: The most vulnerable people in Gaza are suffering the worst acute mental and physical trauma as a result of Israel's actions: almost half the population is under 15.

Arthur Miller wrote, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied."

Miller's truth was a glimpsed reality on television on 9 June when Israeli warships fired on families picnicking on a Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations. What that represents is a final solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children.

This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month.

Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Gaza, now sealed like an open prison and terrorised by the sonic boom of Israeli fighter aircraft, has a population of which almost half is under 15. Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads a children's community health project, told me, "The statistic I personally find unbearable is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma . . . 99.2 per cent had their homes bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shooting; a third saw family members or neighbours injured or killed."

These children suffer unrelenting nightmares and "night terrors" and the dichotomy of hav-ing to cope with these conditions. On the one hand, they dream about becoming doctors and nurses "so they can help others"; on the other, this is then overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experience this invariably after attacks by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes are no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".

The struggle in Palestine is an American war, waged from America's most heavily armed foreign military base, Israel. In the west, we are conditioned not to think of the Israeli-Palestinian "conflict" in those terms, just as we are conditioned to think of the Israelis as victims, not illegal and brutal occupiers. This is not to underestimate the initiative of the Israeli state, but without F-16s and Apaches and billions of American taxpayers' dollars, Israel would have made peace with the Palestinians long ago. Since the Second World War, the US has given Israel some $140bn, much of it as armaments. According to the Congressional Research Service, the same "aid" budget was to include $28m "to help [Palestinian] children deal with the current conflict situation" and to provide "basic first aid". That has now been vetoed.
 

Patrick Martin, Bush in Baghdad: The most remarkable fact of the visit was that the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, was informed of Bush’s presence in his country only five minutes before he was ushered in to meet the US president. Until then, Maliki had been led to believe he was going to the US embassy to participate in a videoconference with Bush and his war cabinet, ensconced in the presidential retreat at Camp David, Maryland.

Maliki’s ignorance of Bush’s arrival demonstrates that the government installed in Baghdad by the American invaders lacks one of the most essential attributes of sovereignty: it has no control over who comes into the country.
 

Ibrahim Ebeid, Mr. PRESIDENT WE DO NOT BELIEVE YOU: The occupation of Iraq was not for democracy, because democracy, security and progress do not exist in the new Iraq. This war was for oil and above all on behalf of “Israel”, the Zionist racist settler entity in Palestine.

US intelligence, military sources and Western media confirmed to us recently that Zionist military advisers are helping US Special Forces build assassination squads to murder Iraqis, a fact that we knew long ago.

Mr. Bush claims that Iraq is liberated, progress and security are marching forward. Yet, when he sneaks into Iraq secretly he stays in the fortified Green Zone, cornered in four square miles.

Mr. President, I would like you to read the following paragraph about Education in Iraq before your father started his war of aggression against the Cradle of Civilization.

- The number of kindergartens rose from 71 to 119 between 1979 and 1990 with an annual increase of 67.6 percent.

- The number of nurseries rose from 135 to 646 in the period 1968-1990 with an annual increase of 212.1 percent. The number of children enrolled at the nurseries rose from 14530 to 86508 with an annual increase of 468.3 percent. [ . . . ]

- The secondary schooling showed a great progress. The number of secondary schools rose from 118 to 292 with an increase of 14 percent. The number of their students rose from 17903 in 1971 to 101127 in 1990 with an increase of 46 percent. The number of secondary schools teachers rose in the period 1971-1990 from 820 to 3751 with an increase of 35 percent. Considerable progress was also achieved in vocational education, in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region. The number of vocational schools rose from 6 to 34 in the period 1970-1990 with an increase of 46 percent. The number of this students rose from 974 to 13201 with an increase of 12 percent.

Please Mr. President, do not tell us any more lies because we do not believe you.
 

10 Iraqis pulled from bus, gunned down
 

Tehran Times, Bilderbergers slither away


Prison Planet, Did Hillary Clinton Attend Bilderberg Conference?: Bilderberg has a proven history of acting in a kingmaker capacity. Both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair attended before becoming President and Prime Minister and the mainstream media reported that Bilderberg selected John Edwards as Kerry's running mate in 2004.

('DEMOCRATIC PROCESS' = Limitless money, invisible power & massive media hype)
 

The funny man -
Video (brief), Bush and those pesky shades
 

Don't inhibit police, Blair says: [Blair said they] were doing a superb job and he stood "101%" behind them when they acted on intelligence.

Mr Kahar, one of the two brothers arrested and later released in the raid, said on Tuesday: "Is he 101 per cent behind the bullet which went into my chest?
 

Video (clip), United States Border Patrol: Hilarious interview with George Bush talking about the US stepping up our efforts to increase border patrol with Mexico. Keep a close eye on the fence in the background during the interview.
 

More! -
Wayne Madsen, June 15, 2006 -- Although the major media and the White House spinmeisters have worked overtime to squash the story of marital problems between George W. Bush and Laura Bush over the reported affair between the President and his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, WMR is continuing to pursue it. We recently learned from a noted Washington socialite that Laura Bush has been seeing an old romantic flame, described as a wealthy businessman from Texas. Mrs. Bush is said to have been comforted by the male friend over the years as she weathered her husband's various extramarital trysts.
 

Wayne Madsen, June 15, 2006 -- The Chesapeake Bay is becoming ... a place where people simply disappear: The latest victim of the "Chesapeake Triangle" is Philip Merrill, ... Last Sunday, Merrill's sailboat, the Merrilly, was found drifting with the engine running off Breezy Point in Calvert County, Maryland. Although Merrill's wallet was found on board, there was no sign of Merrill, an experienced sailor who, after an extensive search, was declared dead. A witness who found the drifting Merrilly said there was some blood found in the back of the boat.

Washington has experienced similar inexplicable losses in the Bay. On Sep. 26, 1978, retired CIA Deputy Director for Strategic Research John A. Paisley's sailboat was found moored off Solomon's Island, Maryland, south of where Merrill's boat was found. Later, Paisley's body was found in the nearby Patuxent River, his submerged body tied to diving weights. Although Paisley was shot through the head, police ruled it a suicide. Paisley was involved with the electronic intercept programs of both the CIA and NSA and may have had important information on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy that he was about to impart to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

On April 28, 1996, former CIA Director William Colby, who was cooperating ... in investigating a national pedophile ring said to involve George H. W. Bush ... went missing at his home at Rock Point on Cobb Island in Charles County, southwest of where Paisley's boat was found. After Colby's canoe was found adrift, his body was later discovered on the shoreline of the bay. Colby, a veteran of CIA missions in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, was said to have lost his footing and drowned.

WMR has learned ... that while Merrill headed the [U.S. Export-Import] Bank from 2002 to 2005, the bank routed a significant amount of money to entities associated with the Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli mafia -- the shadowy network that his been linked to fugitive Marc Rich, his one-time lawyer "Scooter" Libby, Jack Abramoff, Adam Kidan, and various Russian oligarchs who are now exiled in Israel to avoid extradition for their various crimes. The EX-IM Bank under Merrill's tenure also financed U.S. reconstruction projects in Coalition Provisional Authority-occupied Iraq, programs that resulted in the loss of billions of U.S. taxpayers' funds. Merrill had also supported using future Iraqi oil and natural gas revenues to finance Halliburton and Bechtel oil industry infrastructure projects in the occupied country. In May 2003, Merrill told a congressional committee that the locking of Iraqi revenues for future U.S. projects had "real merit."
 

U.S. identifies al-Zarqawi's successor (Too marvelous how promptly these guys make themselves available over the Internet to further legitimize the continued 'War on Terror' and occasional unfortunate slaughter of innocents. By the way, whatever happened to 'The Long War' ? Not catchy enough?)
 

Baghdad sees an end to al-Qaeda as more than 100 rebels killed
 

The New Jersey attorney general and other state officials are being sued by the federal government to end their further inquiries on the extent of telephone firms' participation with the National Security Agency (NSA)
 

Ah, . . . yes!
Text of al-Zarqawi safe-house document
 

Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely: "What this decision says is the next time there is a terror attack, the government is free to round up every Muslim immigrant in the U.S., based solely on their ethnic and religious identity, and hold them on immigration pretexts for as long as it desires."
 

Kurt Nimmo, New “al-Qaeda in Iraq” Boogieman: Abu al-Masri: It is Job One for the neocon-infested Pentagon to hitch the Iraqi resistance to “al-Qaeda” and thus the attack on America, never mind there is not a shred of evidence “al-Qaeda” had anything to do with the latter event, that is unless you think “inside job” when the word “al-Qaeda” is mentioned.
 

(What if there were 1,000 Michael Bergs to every 'George Bush' ?)
Chris Floyd, Father's Day: The Dangerous Notions of Michael Berg: ... [I]t is foolish to oppose the cherished values of our 21st century civilization: violence, bluster, ignorance and fear. It's foolish to take upon oneself the responsibility to break the cycle of violence at last, to say: "Let it end with me, if nowhere else; let it end now, no matter what the provocation; let something new, something more human, some restoration take root in this bloodstained ground."

But what if such folly is the only way for humankind to begin climbing out of the festering pit we have made of the world?
 

Ron Jacobs, Bush's Iraq Junket; Publicity Stunts as Public Policy: Let's get something clear here, George Bush's visit to Baghdad on June 13, 2006 was a publicity stunt. ...

Two men hanging themselves out of despair in a prison is not.
 

Kathy Kelly, Honest Abe and the Residents of Ramadi; Look Them in the Eye: The U.S. government claimed success because its forces hunted down and eliminated Abu Musab Zarqawi. Zarqawi must be killed, we were told, because he took hostages, brutalized them, and killed them. Now it appears that U.S. policy makers are holding a whole city hostage, brutalizing civilians and preparing to kill many of them. ...

... During his one term in the House of Representatives, Lincoln denounced the war against Mexico as unnecessary and unconstitutional. He derided President Polk for deciding to begin a war which took from Mexico territory that now comprises the entire states of California, New Mexico, and Texas, plus parts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah. "God of heaven has forgotten to defend the weak and innocent ... and permitted the strong band of murderers and demons from hell to kill men, women, and children, and lay waste and pillage the land of the just."

If President Bush were to deliver these words, perhaps he could look in the eyes of people in Ramadi and discuss security and freedom.
 

HOW
TO
bypass
Internet
Censorship
 

Google's not-so-very-secret weapon
 

Norman Solomon, Hillary Clinton's Big Problem; Premature Triangulation: If Hillary Clinton thinks she can postpone an all-out confrontation with the antiwar movement until a time and place of her tactical choosing, she's going to be very disappointed.
 

First US Female Conscientious Objector Sentenced
 

Lebanese man confesses to assassinating senior Hezbollah and Palestinian militants on behalf of Israel
 

Michael Ledeen goes to Rome, raising red flags about a potential war with Iran: Some believe that Ledeen -- a long-time advocate of Iranian regime change -- was involved in the Niger forgeries scandal.
 

George Monbiot, Behind the spin, the oil giants are more dangerous than ever: The green rebranding of Shell and BP is a fraud. Far from switching to biofuels, it's drilling and devastation as usual
 

Major oil discovery in northern Iraq
 

Christian Science Monitor, US in Iraq greatest danger to global peace?: The continued US presence in Iraq is frequently seen as a greater threat to world peace than the possibility of Iran having nuclear weapons, according to an annual survey of global attitudes conducted by a leading, US independent opinion research group.
 

7 explosions hit Baghdad within 5 hours
 

House Passes Symbolic Iraq Resolution: 256-153 Vote For Resolution Against Arbitrary Troop Withdrawal - "Retreat is not an option in Iraq."

The administration was so determined to get out its message that the Department of Defense distributed a highly unusual 74-page "debate prep book" filled with ready-made answers for criticism of the war.


FINAL VOTE RESULTS FOR ROLL CALL 288, Declaring that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary
 

Kurt Nimmo, Telling Lies about Ahmadinejad: Buried in the Week in Review section of the New York Times is an admission that Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never said Israel should be “wiped off the map,” a reference to a mistranslated phrase bandied about the corporate media over the last several weeks as an example of Iran’s intention to attack Israel ...


Spiegel Online, "We Are Determined" (Interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad)
 

Israel admits Gaza beach shell report flaws
 

xymphora, Israeli spy rings in Lebanon and the Hariri assassination: It is starting to look more and more likely that the assassination of Hariri, blamed by the Israelamericans on Syria, is just another in this long line of Israeli assassinations that have occurred in Lebanon. The other aspect to this, which may have September 11 implications, is how easily the Mossad operates in the world of what appears to be radical Islamist terrorist groups.