Pelosi, Kucinich And Impeachment: Three Viewpoints

Nancy Pelosi on The View via Democracy Now!:

when I became Speaker — and it’s, by the way, a very important position — President, Vice President, Speaker of the House — I saw it as my responsibility to try to bring a much divided country together to the extent that we could. I thought that impeachment would be divisive for the country.
...

If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a different story.

Dennis Kucinich on Democracy Now! (same link):

I have a great deal of respect for Speaker Pelosi, and I think that since she made that statement on The View, there’s an opportunity now for us to come forward and to lay all the facts out so that she can reconsider her decision not to permit the Judiciary Committee to proceed with a full impeachment hearing.

One cold blogger on his way out the door:

Puh-leeze. A great deal of respect? For what???

If Nancy Pelosi is not aware of any of the crimes committed by this unelected president and his administration, then she is not fit to hold public office -- no office of any kind, let alone "a very important position — President, Vice President, Speaker of the House".

And if she is aware of those crimes but pretending to be unaware of them, then she deserves to be taken out and shot -- just like all the rest of the criminal enablers in this supposedly Democratic congress.

Once and for all, let's get this straight:

"Unifying the country" means nothing more or less than "legitimizing the crimes of the Bush administration".

Nancy Pelosi wants to do it, Harry Reid wants to do it; John Conyers wants to do it; Jane Harman wants to do it; so do all the rest of the national Democratic leadership, including (especially!) Barack Obama.

Impeachment would be divisive because it would acknowledge that the nation has been betrayed by its so-called leadership.

It would demand accountability.

It would give us half a chance for a decent future.

It would put most of the congress in nooses.

And that's why it's not going to happen.

House Passes War Bill: $162B More For The Destruction Of Iraq And Afghanistan

The House of Representatives [sic] has passed a bill which would fund the continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan well beyond the twice-unelected president's scheduled date of departure. And that's the good news.

Republicans [...] applauded the passage of another war funding bill without a deadline for troop withdrawals, something Pelosi and many Democrats had sought [sic] since early last year.

"The measure provides this critical funding without bogging it down with politically motivated surrender language," Boehner said.

"Politically motivated surrender language"! These monsters are so transparent, they'd make me laugh if their actions weren't so deplorable. But that's the good news.

And now the bad news: the Democrats are calling it a victory!

Included in the bill that funds continued war without a deadline, are three provisions which president Bush has already threatened to veto. With apparent support for an override in Congress, the House has "stood up" to the president on those points.

"He is reversing three distinct veto threats and signing them into law. If that ain't a victory, I don't know what is," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus [photo].

Bush can reverse any of those clauses with signing statements, so what difference does it make to him?

The bottom line: the Democrats, who control the House of Representatives [sic] and therefore the national purse-strings, have chosen to spend another $162 billion -- $540 per person -- over the next year, to keep killing people you've never met, in wars of aggression in foreign countries, which are being fought on false pretexts. And

"If that ain't a victory, I don't know what is,"

according to the so-called leader of the so-called opposition party.

Nothing in my lifetime, and probably nothing in American history, has shown as clearly as the so-called Global War On Terror just how easily corruptible and utterly corrupt the American political system is.

But even having seen it -- even seeing it more clearly every day -- we continue to drift along, sliding ever closer to the edge of a horrible abyss.

What's another $162 billion? How many more innocent people will that kill? Enough?

No! It's never enough! Next year they'll need more, and they'll need even more than they needed this year. And even if we've got a Democratic president, even if we've got a solidly Democratic Congress, will they dare to vote against it?

You must be joking.

This is the same Rahm Emanuel who denied funding and national exposure to any Democrat who was fortunate enough to win a primary but not smart enough to toe the party line. So Bob Bowman (who supports 9/11 truth) and Clint Curtis (who supports electoral integrity) were on their own for the general election, while Cynthia McKinney (who supports both) was torpedoed in the primary.

And he's running the national Democratic caucus.

All we can do at this point is drop to our knees and beg for mercy.

Torture Subpoenas: Will Administration Officials Testify? And Will It Matter?

Like the spin on everything else the Bush administration tries to hide, the spin on torture is endless and multi-layered. And everybody's buying it, or at least some of it -- except possibly some ultra-radical terrorist-sympathizers.

Thomas Ferraro for Reuters, in "Cheney aide subpoenaed to testify to Congress", writes:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was subpoenaed on Wednesday to testify in a congressional probe of the administration's treatment and possible [sic] torture of enemy combatants [sic].

Not just enemy combatants, of course, but all those classified as such, many of whom were neither enemy nor combatants. But there was no classification for "in the wrong place at the wrong time".

And there's no real need for the word "possible" here. The torture is well-established, admitted, boasted even -- but only in the "right" company, in the "right" political climate.

House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, issued the subpoena to David Addington [photo] a day after it was authorized by a House panel.

John Conyers could have been a hero of American democracy but instead he decided to be a chump. This won't change anything. Just watch.

The administration contends its aides can not be forced to testify. But Addington has indicated he may do so if subpoenaed, congressional staffers said.

Megan Mitchell, spokeswoman for the vice president's office, said, "I can confirm that we have received the subpoena. We are reviewing it and will respond accordingly."

We already have a fairly good idea of what the vice president's office would consider to be a suitable response.

The subpoena orders Addington to appear on June 26 before the House Judiciary's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which is examining the administration's treatment of detainees.

Addington reportedly played a key role in drafting U.S. strategies to combat [sic] terrorism after [sic] the September 11 attacks [sic] on the United States.

Or maybe the strategy is to foment terrorism and maybe it was drafted well before the September 11 attacks. Or whatever they were.

Bush maintains the United States does not torture, but he has refused to discuss interrogation techniques, saying he does not want to tip off the enemy.

Bush has also refused to sign a bill passed by both houses of congress which would have banned torture. In effect the president says, "We don't torture ... but we can't stop because our national security depends on it!"

The CIA has acknowledged using a simulated [sic] drowning technique known as waterboarding on three terrorism suspects, but says it stopped using that method in 2003.

Waterboarding is not simulated drowning; it is drowning. When the victim is tied down and his lungs are filling up with water, there's nothing simulated about it.

It's stopped just before the victim dies, and it can be done again and again. But that doesn't make it any less cruel or any more justifiable.

Waterboarding has been condemned by human rights groups, foreign countries and many U.S. lawmakers as torture.

It has also been outlawed by treaties signed by and therefore binding on the United States of America. So it doesn't really matter what human rights groups, foreign countries and many U.S. lawmakers think or say; waterboarding would be illegal even if they all approved of it!

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft and John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general, have agreed to testify before the Judiciary subcommittee.

That's very civil of them, but it's entirely possible that they may not have the last say in the matter.

Bush has invoked executive privilege in rejecting congressional subpoenas for a number of current and former aides, many sought in a probe of the firing in 2006 of nine federal prosecutors.

In March, the House Judiciary Committee filed suit in U.S. District Court asking it to direct White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten to produce subpoenaed documents and order former White House counsel Harriet Miers to comply with a subpoena and testify about the ousted prosecutors.

A ruling is not expected for at least several months.

... by which time all the damage these clowns have done will be permanent.

Oh wait! It already is!

The spin is global and pervasive. China's Xinhua says, "U.S. House panel subpoenas former, present gov't officials on torture":

WASHINGTON, May 6 -- A U.S. House panel subpoenaed several former and present high-ranking Bush administration officials on Tuesday to testify on the issue of alleged torture [a little better] of terror [sic] detainees.

Some of the detainees were captured and sold for ransom. The Americans were offering huge bounties for terror suspects in late 2001, and Pakistan's president Pervez Musharraf wrote in his autobiography of receiving millions of dollars in exchange for detainees.

Among [the officials subpoenaed] are John Yoo, a former top Justice Department official who authored hugely controversial memos on interrogation techniques used on detainees, and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief-of-staff David Addington, who was heavily involved in preparing the memos.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith and former Assistant Attorney General Dan Levin also agreed to testify on the issue before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

The subcommittee said former CIA Director George Tenet is still in negotiations for testimony.

Subcommittee chairman Jerrold Nadler said torture is "un-American and yet it has been used by this government against those in our custody and control."

Torture is certainly not un-American. Americans have been training torture teams (which they call security forces") -- and death squads -- for employment in foreign countries for decades. But the torture -- and the death squads -- have been "clandestine". In other words, it's considered un-American to admit these grotesque facts, much less to obsess about them.

Xinhua continues:

"Now we know that these so-called 'enhanced' interrogation techniques were approved at the highest levels of government. Torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, besides being contrary to American values and traditions, have proven to be an ineffective means to obtaining actionable intelligence," [Nadler] added.

"Enhanced interrogation" is not about obtaining actionable intelligence. It's an instrument of oppression. But who's counting?

Malcolm Nance might be counting; he has an intimate knowledge of waterboarding and he's not afraid of saying what he knows. I doubt he would ever be asked to testify, but here's some of what he might say:

I know waterboarding is torture - because I did it myself

In the media, waterboarding is called "simulated drowning," but that's a misnomer. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning.

Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

How much of this the victim is to endure depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim's face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs that show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration. Usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch. If it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia - meaning, the loss of all oxygen to the cells.

The lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threatened with its use again and again. Call it "Chinese water torture," "the barrel," or "the waterfall." It is all the same.

Speaking of "all the same", Jim Freeman isn't counting on anything changing because of this sudden rash of subpoenas:

[T]he Democrats, including (but not limited to) Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Henry Waxman, John Conyers, Hapless Harry, Chuck Schumer and [...] Patrick Leahy, are all in on this long and ugly list of impeachable offenses, some of them treasonable. They are co-conspirators.

Anybody feel like arguing with Jim Freeman on this one? The floor is yours, if you want it...

Bush Affirms His Legacy, Vetoes Ban On Torture

President Bush announced on Saturday that he had vetoed an intelligence authorization bill passed by both houses of Congress.

The mainstream press has focused on one particularly gruesome aspect of his decision: the bill the president vetoed would have restricted the range of interrogation techniques that could be used by the CIA; in particular, it would have banned waterboarding -- simulated drowning which has been recognized as torture and banned by all civilized countries for centuries.

In his weekly radio address to the nation, our first openly pro-torture president said:

The bill Congress sent me would take away one of the most valuable tools in the war on terror — the C.I.A. program to detain and question key terrorist leaders and operatives.

It wouldn't do that, of course. It wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from detaining people. And it wouldn't stop the C.I.A. from questioning them. It would only limit the techniques that could be used during the questioning.

But it would establish a limit. This is one of the crucial points -- and one which has nothing to do with the core issues. The bill would place limits on the president and his administration, and therefore it must be vetoed. Bush will never willingly sign any legislation which limits what he and his administration can do.

Fortunately for the president, this bill concerns terrorism, so it gives him a chance to use his favorite line:

We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks.

This is false, of course. The president's neglect, or abdication, or repudiation, of his higher responsibility -- to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, as required by his oath of office -- is sufficient grounds not only for impeachment and removal from office, but also for criminal charges of treason, followed by a trial which could only end in a conviction and a public execution. No person of peace and goodwill could deny this; one could only hope that some "enhanced techniques" would be applied along the way.

But unfortunately much of the American public remains unaware of this, and the president is not about to tell them. Instead he continues to catapult the propaganda. Thus, in keeping with his self-appointed "highest responsibility", Bush listed the "plots" that have been "foiled" by "enhanced" interrogations:

The program helped us stop a plot to strike a U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti, a planned attack on the U.S. consulate in Karachi, a plot to hijack a passenger plane and fly it into Library Tower in Los Angeles, and a plot to crash passenger planes into Heathrow Airport or buildings in downtown London. [...] Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland.

If you've never heard of any of these claims about how interrogations under torture have led to foiled terrorist plots, don't feel badly about it. Nobody else has ever heard them either -- not even the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller, who said:

"I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack."

In trying to justify his veto to the nation, the president said:

The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the C.I.A. to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision.

This statement is potentially misleading on many fronts simultaneously, but it's tough to tell because so much about the detainees and the means by which they have been interrogated is classified, and because so much of what the government has told us about these things has proven to be false.

Of special interest is the assertion -- made continually by the administration and others (including some supposedly dissident journalists) -- that "specialized interrogation procedures" have been used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists".

To make sense of this assertion, you have to do some mental gymnastics.

By "specialized interrogation procedures" he means the techniques prohibited by the Army Field Manual. As the AP reports, the Field Manual prohibits

hooding prisoners or putting duct tape across their eyes; stripping prisoners naked; forcing prisoners to perform or mimic sexual acts; beating, burning or physically hurting them in other ways; subjecting prisoners to hypothermia or mock executions; and waterboarding

The president says the "enhanced" techniques are only to be used against "a small number of the most dangerous terrorists". What does he mean by "small"?

According to Reuters,

CIA Director Michael Hayden told Congress last month that government interrogators used waterboarding on three suspects captured after the September 11 attacks.

Elsewhere it has been claimed that "enhanced interrogation techniques have been used against only 14 of the most hardened al Q'aeda terrorists.

But it is very difficult to take these assertions seriously.

When the furore over destroyed interrogation videotapes erupted, we were told the interrogations were taped because "enhanced techniques" were being used and the tapes were meant to provide insurance against potential claims of excessive force or abusive behavior. But if this is so, then why were the tapes destroyed? If they showed no abuse of detainees, they would have provided powerful support for the government's position that only legal techniques were used.

In the absence of those tapes, one can do little more than speculate about the reasons why an additional 24,000 interrogations at Guantanamo were also videotaped. Were "enhanced techniques" used in those interrogations as well? If so, then we've been lied to about the extent of abusive interrogation. And if not, why not? The prisoners at Guantanamo are said to be "the worst of the worst"; the "enhanced techniques" are said to yield crucial information; why wouldn't our interrogators use all the tools available to them? Don't they want us to be safe?

We can only speculate here because the truth is so comprehensively buried. But it's reasonable to assume that torturers don't want us to know much about what they're doing. As Bush explained in his radio address, he vetoed the bill in part because it banned secret techniques.

The bill Congress sent me [...] would restrict the C.I.A.’s range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army field manual. [...] Limiting the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key Al Qaeda operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures...

Given the torturers' penchant for secrecy, we must assume that we don't know very much about torture and "enhanced" interrogations -- that what we do know is only the "tip of the iceberg".

But what we already know is enormous and horrific; and the government's justification for its practices have all turned out to be false!

Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School has been leading a team of researchers through the documentation pertaining to the detainees at Guantanamo, as provided by the government. The research team has been using the government's own data to evaluate the claims made by the administration and has produced a series of reports whose conclusions are eerily similar: the government's assertions which are supposed to justify the policies have been spectacularly untrue.

One report, "The Meaning of Battlefield", provides the following executive summary:

The Department of Defense has continually relied upon the premise of “battlefield capture” to justify the indefinite detention of so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay. The “battlefield capture” proposition -- although proven false in almost all cases -- has been an important proposition for the Government, which has used it to frame detainee status as a military question as to which the Department of Defense should be granted considerable deference.

Further, just as the Government has characterized detainee’s initial captures as “on the battlefield,” Government officials have repeatedly claimed that ex-detainees have “returned to the battlefield,” where they have been re-captured or killed.

Implicit in the Government’s claim that detainees have “returned to the battlefield” is the notion that those detainees had been on a battlefield prior to their detention in Guantánamo. Revealed by the Department of Defense data, however, is that:

• only twenty-one (21)—or four percent (4%)—of 516 Combatant Status Review Tribunal unclassified summaries of the evidence alleged that a detainee had ever been on any battlefield;

• only twenty-four (24)—or five percent (5%)—of unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee had been captured by United States forces;

• and exactly one (1) of 516 unclassified summaries alleged that a detainee was captured by United States forces on a battlefield.

Just as the Government’s claims that the Guantánamo detainees “were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces,” do not comport with the Department of Defense’s own data, neither do its claims that former detainees have “returned to the fight.”

The Department of Defense has publicly insisted that “just short of thirty” former Guantánamo detainees have “returned” to the battlefield, where they have been re-captured or killed, but to date the Department has described at most fifteen (15) possible recidivists, and has identified only seven (7) of these individuals by name. According to the data provided by the Department of Defense:

• at least eight (8) of the fifteen (15) individuals alleged by the Government to have “returned to the fight” are accused of nothing more than speaking critically of the Government’s detention policies;

• ten (10) of the individuals have neither been re-captured nor killed by anyone;

• and of the five (5) individuals who are alleged to have been re-captured or killed, the names of two (2) do not appear on the list of individuals who have at any time been detained at Guantánamo, and the remaining three (3) include one (1) individual who was killed in an apartment complex in Russia by local authorities and one (1) who is not listed among former Guantánamo detainees but who, after his death, has been alleged to have been detained under a different name.

Thus, the data provided by the Department of Defense indicates that every public statement made by Department of Defense officials regarding the number of detainees who have been released and thereafter killed or re-captured on the battlefield was false.

We knew it was false all along, didn't we? At least we should have suspected it. There's a tendency for this administration to lie about everything.

Unfortunately, most of our so-called "opposition" politicians haven't caught a whiff of this tendency, or else they've chosen to ignore it in the hope that it will go away. So the political reactions to the veto were interesting.

Senator Ted Kennedy, the "Massachusetts liberal" much derided by "conservatives", suggested that Congress should override the veto, which shows how out of touch with reality he is. As if more than a dozen Republican Senators and more than 50 Republican Congressmen would ever vote with the Democrats, against the president, for a bill he had already vetoed! But Kennedy said:

"Unless Congress overrides the veto, it will go down in history as a flagrant insult to the rule of law and a serious stain on the good name of America in the eyes of the world."

America's "good name" "in the eyes of the world" was gone a long time ago, but Senator Kennedy cannot mention that and remain in national office. Politicians of both parties must maintain the fiction that America is beloved in the eyes of the world, or else they risk being marginalized as "not serious". Forget the truth of the situation; the rhetoric is all that matters.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, one of the key Democratic enablers of the current administration, gets this point, if nothing else; she threw in some sanctimonious manure of her own:

"Failing to legally prohibit the use of waterboarding and other harsh torture techniques undermines our nation's moral authority, puts American military and diplomatic personnel at risk, and undermines the quality of intelligence."

Talk about undermining our nation's moral authority!

Let's talk about failing to initiate impeachment proceedings -- oh no, let's not! Impeachment is off the table!

And once again the story-line has been predictable: a pack of lies from a president who was never legitimately elected in the first place, followed by some ass-covering by the people who should have been standing in his way for years, all wrapped up with a bow by the allegedly liberal New York Times, which headlined this particular story "Bush's Veto of Bill on C.I.A.Tactics Affirms His Legacy".

In one sense, it's impossible to argue: Bush's legacy is now securely more despicable than any two American presidents combined, and he's still counting.

But in another sense, it's impossible not to scream!

Stark For A Day: I'm Dreadfully Sorry

California Congressman Pete Stark, whose "incendiary comments" last week "offended" supporters of the president, his war, and his health care policy, survived a censure motion yesterday in the House but gave a teary apology nonetheless.

It reminded me of 2005, when Dick Durbin apologized for his remarks about Gitmo. Durbin's remarks were called "reprehensible" by the White House and the media echoed the line -- without ever bothering to mention how reprehensible was the policy Durbin had criticized.

Pete Stark's inflammatory comments were not especially lucid in my opinion -- he said the president sent troops to Iraq to have their heads shot off for his amusement -- but most Americans didn't consider them criminal. In a CNN poll, 88% of the respondents said they didn't think Stark should apologize. But he did anyway. With tear ducts wide open.

“I want to apologize to my colleagues — many of whom I have offended — to the president and his family and to the troops,” Stark said. He added that he hoped the apology would allow him to “become as insignificant as I should be” as the House moves forward on critical, divisive issues.

Stark then left the podium, wiping away tears as Democratic colleagues surrounded him with supportive handshakes.

Thanks, Pete. Thanks for standing up for the people who supported you! What's the matter, 88% isn't good enough for you? What do you need? 90? 95?

Here's the speech Pete Stark should have delivered but didn't:

Dear Fascists:

You want me to apologize. You want to censure me. You want me to take my words back.

Go screw.

I said what I said. Why should I pretend I didn't? What good would that do?

If you were offended, good. You deserve to be offended. More than that, you deserve to be hanged. We all do.

In 2000, we got a serial failure for president, and he was never even legitimately elected. We all knew it. Everybody in politics knew it! But we played along as if everything was just fine.

Less than a year later, our unelected president sat and listened to little children reading a book about a goat while "terrorists" hijacked airplanes and attacked us. Then he awarded Medals of Freedom to the heads of the national security agencies that had failed to protect us. And we smiled and nodded.

The administration has claimed for the past six years that it must have everything it wants, including the power to wage offensive war anywhere in the world, and the power to disregard the Constitution that we are all sworn to protect. And the administration tells us it needs these things in order to protect us. But it has never been held to account for failing to protect us six years ago.

And in those six years we have unearthed irrefutable evidence, proving in a hundred different ways that the story we've been told about those attacks must be false. But not a single member of this chamber has the courage to stand up and say so. May God have mercy on our yellow souls.

Our cruel and stupid unelected president declared limitless, endless war on the rest of the world and we gave him the money to do it -- hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, whenever he asked for it. And what's worse, we pretended we had no choice.

In 2002, in 2004, and again in 2006, we saw convincing evidence that our elections had been rigged, but we never said a word. Instead we carried on -- to our great shame -- as if our government were legitimately elected. And we kept on giving this criminal administration whatever it wanted.

We authorized warrantless surveillance, to be used against anyone, anywhere, for any reason, and with virtually no Congressional oversight. We claimed we had no choice; we had to do it, otherwise he would have canceled our summer vacation, or called us "soft on terror", or some such thing. It didn't matter that nobody would have believed him. But it did matter that we didn't want to fight. So we didn't. We had an excuse, it was a good excuse, and we used it shamelessly.

We legalized a new "definition" of torture under which the unelected president himself gets to decide what the word means, and a new system of "justice" under which people can be incarcerated indefinitely without charge or hearing or even a right of appeal. The correct word for this is "treason". And we are all guilty.

We allowed the president to claim that he could designate anyone anywhere an "enemy combatant" and have that person killed without any due process whatsoever. And when the president announced that "terrorists" had been dealt with in this way, we stood and cheered. We deserve to be hanged by the neck until dead.

Fortunately for me on this fine Beltway day, my political opponents, though they consider me their enemy, are not asking for my neck. All they're asking for is an apology. And they shall have one!

To Nancy Pelosi: The last time I checked, I didn't work for you. I work for the people of my district and the people of my state and the people of the nation, in that order -- but I do not work for you. I frankly don't give a damn what you think about my remarks, or what you think about anything else, either.

We could have had this criminal administration impeached by now if it weren't for you and your bootlicking. And I'm sorry, but you're one of the people who should be apologizing.

To George Bush: I've heard you lie so often and so hatefully about so many things that I have begun to disbelieve every single thing you say. For a moment last week I did actually believe you wanted our soldiers to get their heads blown off just for your own amusement. It is, after all, the only justification you haven't used, and I naturally assumed it was the real reason for the war.

But I was wrong about that, as so many good American citizens have informed me over the past few days. It's not only for your amusement, sir. It's also for your enrichment. And that of your "base". I'm sorry I didn't mention that last week, sir. And I apologize.

To 88% of America and 99% of the world: I am truly sorry for what America has done, for what America has become, and for what the Congress -- including me, sad and sorry Pete Stark -- have allowed this unelected president to do to this once-proud country, and to the world.

There's no way around it. We all deserve to hang. And I, for one, am dreadfully sorry.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Defies The Decider Guy

Quick, now: what do the following have in common: Turkey, Armenia, Congress, Genocide, Arms Sales, and the War in Iraq?

You give up?

Brian Knowlton, International Herald Tribune:

Bush urges Congress to reject Armenian genocide resolution

WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush and two top cabinet members urged lawmakers on Wednesday to reject a resolution describing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians early in the last century as genocide - a highly sensitive issue at a time of rising U.S.-Turkish tensions over northern Iraq.

"We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915," Bush said in a brief statement from the White House. "But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to relations with a key ally in NATO, and to the war on terror."

He spoke hours before the House Foreign Affairs Committee was to vote on the resolution. The House speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi, is said to be prepared to forward the matter to the full House, where more than half the 435 members are co-sponsors.

Passage would be symbolic - but the symbolism, the administration asserts, could seriously jeopardize the delicate relationship with Turkey.

(more here, mirrored here)

Glenn Kessler, Washington Post:

White House And Turkey Fight Bill On Armenia

All eight living former secretaries of state have signed a joint letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warning that the nonbinding resolution "would endanger our national security interests." Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists, including former congressman Bob Livingston, to defeat the initiative.
...

The State Department, which collected the signatures of the former secretaries of state, has lobbied against the resolution, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried and U.S. Ambassador Ross Wilson calling lawmakers yesterday to "urge them not to vote for this," according to an interview Fried gave the Anatolia news agency.

The Turkish Embassy is paying $100,000 a month to lobbying firm DLA Piper and $105,000 a month to the Livingston Group, and it recently added communications specialists Fleishman-Hillard for nearly $114,000 a month, according to records filed with the Justice Department. Turkish lawmakers were on Capitol Hill yesterday, warning that passage would put military cooperation with Turkey at risk.

Meanwhile, leading the charge for the resolution are grass-roots groups such as the Armenian Assembly of America, with 10,000 members, a budget of $3.6 million last year and phone banks that are running on overtime calling members of Congress.

(more here, mirrored here)

Turkish Weekly:

Turkish-US military deals threatened by Armenian Bill

Any possible Turkish retaliation to an Armenian "genocide" resolution that the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs is expected to approve tomorrow is said to be likely to expand to include lucrative arms procurement deals between Turkey and the US.
...

The passage of the “genocide resolution” by the House alone (though it is not legally binding for the administration) is likely to have a serious negative impact on the Turkish public and to further affect the already damaged Turkey-US relations.

The most vulnerable areas in terms of possible Turkish retaliation are said to be limiting usage of the Habur border gate with Iraq for US goods, including oil and military spare parts, as well as limiting or even closing the İncirlik airbase in southern Turkey to US access. İncirlik has been heavily used by the US for its operations both in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

Any Turkish action to limit or close both Habur and İncirlik to US use will jeopardize US combat operations in Iraq, said an Ankara-based Western diplomat.
...

Another significant region of cooperation between Turkey and the US said to be at risk from the genocide resolution is arms procurement. Turkey was one of the leading countries in 2006 for US arms sales, totaling an estimated $2.1 billion.

Those US sales to Turkey have mostly taken place in the form of foreign military sales credits that did not involve any international tender being opened by Ankara. Turkey signed an arms deal based on foreign military sales with the US worth over $13 billion last year that involved Turkish purchase of an additional 30 F 16 fighters and Turkish participation in the US-led Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) project.

Turkey’s Undersecretariat for the Defense Industry (SSM) has in the meantime eased contract terms and conditions for the purchase of arms through international tenders -- conditions that were mainly affecting US companies due to the Turkish request for the transfer of high technology which ran contrary to US legal restrictions.

(more here, mirrored here)

Associated Press via the Wall Street Journal:

Turkey Bombs Positions Of Suspected Kurdish Rebels

SIRNAK, Turkey -- Turkish warplanes bombed positions of suspected Kurdish rebels Wednesday, and the prime minister said preparations for parliamentary approval of a military mission against separatist fighters in Iraq were under way.

Turkish troops blocked rebel escape routes into Iraq while F-16 and F-14 warplanes and Cobra helicopters dropped bombs on possible hideouts, the Dogan news agency reported. The military had dispatched tanks to the region to support the operation against the rebel Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, in response to more than a week of deadly attacks in southeastern Turkey.

Turkish authorities also detained 20 suspected Kurdish rebels at a border crossing with Iraq, the office for the governor of Sirnak said in a statement.

The military activity followed attacks by PKK rebels that has killed 15 soldiers since Sunday and prompted Turkey's government to push for a possible cross-border offensive against separatist bases in Iraq. Turkish Kurd rebels have been fighting for autonomy in southeast Turkey since 1984 in a conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday that preparations for a parliamentary authorization for a cross-border mission were under way, but didn't say when the motion would reach the floor. A member of the governing Justice and Development Party said a request for parliamentary approval for a cross-border ground offensive was unlikely to come to the floor before the end of a four-day religious holiday on Sunday.

On Wednesday, an opposition nationalist party that has long been advocating an incursion into Iraq called on the government to swiftly take the motion to parliament and said it would back it.

If Parliament approves, the military could choose to immediately launch an operation or wait to see if the United States and its allies, jolted by the Turkish action, decide to crack down on the rebels.

A cross-border operation could hurt Turkey's relationship with the U.S., which opposes Turkish intervention in northern Iraq, a region that has escaped the violence afflicting much of the rest of the country.
...

Turkish troops targeting the guerrillas suspected escape routes in mountainous areas in Sirnak province have "squeezed" a group of about 80 rebels on Mount Gabar, in Sirnak, the Hurriyet newspaper reported. Escape routes were being bombed by helicopter gunships while transport helicopters were airlifting special commando units to strategic points.

Turkish troops were also shelling suspected PKK camps in the regions of Kanimasa, Nazdur and Sinath, in northern Iraq, from positions in Turkey's Hakkari province, just across the border, Hurriyet reported. Tanks were positioned near the town of Silopi, in Sirnak province, the paper said.

The paper said the government would impose an information blackout on its preparations for a possible cross-border offensive.

(more here, mirrored here)

Have you got all that? As far as I can tell, it boils down to a question of language. We're not supposed to call a historical crime against humanity by its rightful name because that would put a crimp in the current crime against humanity, which we are also not supposed to call by its rightful name.

So in the long run, this might be very good news:

A U.S. House committee on Wednesday defied President George W. Bush by passing a resolution calling the 1915 massacre of Armenians genocide, a step the White House warns could damage U.S. goals in the Middle East.

The measure, passed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee by a 27-21 margin, will be sent to the House floor, where Democratic leaders say there will be a vote within weeks.

Bush Threatens To Ground Congress, Senate Passes Surveillance Bill

Here's another big surprise: more bad news for the former constitutional republic, and more good news for the power-hungry "unitary executive". As reported by Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima on the front page of today's Washington Post,

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.

That's not all it gives.

The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance.

The 60 supporting votes came from all 43 Republicans, plus 16 "Democrats" and the "Independent" Joe Lieberman.

Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.

This is how subtly things are done now -- if the Congress doesn't give the president what he wants, they'll have no summer vacation.

As the article notes, it's another manifestation of a familiar tactic:

Last year, the administration mounted a similar high-pressure campaign on the eve of a congressional recess, to revise legislation governing the interrogation and trial of detainees.

It's almost ludicrous. It is ludicrous. It's almost if you don't clean up your room you can't go out and play. But rather than cleaning up its room, Congress is being asked to concede more of the Bill of Rights to an executive intent on accumulating as much power as possible. Thus the destruction of post-democratic America continues.

The legislation, which is expected to go before the House today, would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas.

That's not all it would expand. And the chilling thing is, Bush doesn't even need it.

The legislation will "give our intelligence professionals the essential tools they need to protect our nation," [White House] spokesman Tony Fratto said.

But this is yet another lie: our intelligence professionals already have all the tools they need -- all they lack is the freedom to expose the truth!

In order to protect our nation from another 9/11, we would have to find out what happened on the 9/11, and that is the one thing that must never be allowed to happen. We would have to shed the fiction that the Bush administration was somehow incompetent when it chose to ignore the warning signs. We would have to shed the fiction that al-Q'aeda terrorists working from a cave and armed will cell-phones and box-cutters somehow orchestrated the greatest concentration of war-games ever staged, effectively stripping the Eastern Seaboard of its air defense system. And that's just for starters.

This bill further weakens the FISA system that was already weakened in the wake of 9/11, after which the administration said it had everything it needed to fight the so-called Global War On Terror. But there was still a modicum of oversight, and that's the other thing -- aside from the truth about 9/11 -- that this administration will not permit.

Congressional Democrats and the White House clashed throughout the day not only over the scope of the changes in the law but also over whether the other side was bargaining in good faith. Democrats said they were convinced that their proposal met key the demands of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) quoted him as saying that the bill "significantly enhances America's security."

But Republicans cited a letter from McConnell yesterday afternoon calling the proposal unacceptable and warning that it would prevent him from protecting the country adequately from terrorist attacks.
...

"We did everything he wants," Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said of McConnell, "and now he says he doesn't like the bill. They didn't move the goal post; they moved the stadium."

This is how it's done. They always move the stadium. We're six and a half years into it, and still just noticing?

Pelosi herself accused the Republicans of not caring "about the truth."

This is not only false but it's also misleading. Republicans do care "about the truth". They always want special treatment for the truth -- they want to see it buried as often as possible -- and they usually get it, because Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi don't care about the truth. In fact, the Democrats currently in Congress -- especially Nancy Pelosi -- have made it clear that they don't even care about the people who elected them, who want above all else for these very same Democrats to start acting like an opposition party and stop this rogue administration in its tracks, regardless of their summer vacation schedules.

Of course White House officials lie about this sequence of events, just as they have lied about everything else:

White House officials disputed Democrats' account of the tentative deal, and Republicans said McConnell's objections were justified by the Democrats' decision to subject more surveillance to oversight by a special intelligence court than the administration wants.

What the administration wants is no meaningful oversight at all from any court, special, intelligence or otherwise.

The "compromise" the administration has offered makes this quite clear: no oversight until 120 days after any surveillance has started, and then court oversight only on generalities, not on specific cases.

"We have worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution," Bush said at a news briefing after a meeting with counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters yesterday morning. "But we are not going to put our national security at risk."

As usual, none of this is true.

One of the problems with our national discourse is that when Bush and his friends speak of "national security", they don't mean what most people think they mean. They mean their own security, Bush's continuing tenure in office, and so on. They couldn't care a bit less about the security and safety of the nation and its people and they have made that abundantly clear, time after time after time.

They can't even come up with reasonable explanations of why they want all this power. Instead they spin wild tales:

White House officials complained that Democratic proposals do not give them a crucial tool: the ability to begin wiretapping without having to go to a court. "Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said. "All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

As Bob Parry points out, terrorists know about government surveillance. They assume that their email and cell phone communications are being monitored.

The terrorists also had no reason to know or to care that the U.S. government was or wasn’t getting wiretap approval from the secret court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They simply took for granted that their communications could be intercepted and acted accordingly.

It never made sense to think that al-Qaeda terrorists suddenly would get loose-lipped just because the FISA court was or wasn't in the mix. The FISA court rubber-stamps almost all wiretap requests from the Executive Branch for domestic spying, and overseas calls don’t require a warrant.

The reality is not reflected in mainstream media accounts, and there's usually no hint of it to be found in the statements of our Congressional "opposition".

But this legislation is not about protecting the people of the United States from terrorists. It's about protecting the illegitimate and unelected rogue government of the United States from its own people.

Not that they pose much of a threat.

Webster Tarpley: 'Cheney Determined To Attack In US With WMD This Summer'

I'm not sure what to make of Webster Tarpley's newest warning on the state of the world. Much of what he says is obviously true and many other points are well documented. Yet he makes quite a few uncorroborated statements, some of which seem quite far-fetched to me, and I'm not inclined to accept any of them -- let alone all of them -- on his say-so alone. On the other hand, it's still an interesting read, containing much useful information.

The good folks at Total 411 dot info posted the following excerpt:

Cheney Determined To Attack In US With WMD This Summer: Only Impeachment, Or A General Strike, Can Stop Him

"The greatest threat now is "a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities."
Dick Cheney on Face the Nation, CBS, April 15, 2007

By Webster G. Tarpley | July 21, 2007

A few days ago, a group of lawyers from western Massachusetts met with the local congressman, Democrat John Olver. Their request was that Olver take part in the urgent effort to impeach Bush and Cheney. Olver responded by saying that he had no intention of doing anything to support impeachment. He went further, offering the information that the United States would soon attack Iran, and that these hostilities would be followed by the imposition of a martial law regime here.

According to reports in the British press, the Cheney war party has gained the upper hand in the secret councils of the Bush White House, pushing aside the purported hesitations of Miss Rice, Secretary Gates, and the NATO allies to chart a direct course towards war with Iran:

'The balance in the internal White House debate over Iran has shifted back in favour of military action before President George Bush leaves office in 18 months, the Guardian has learned. The shift follows an internal review involving the White House, the Pentagon and the state department over the last month. Although the Bush administration is in deep trouble over Iraq, it remains focused on Iran. A well-placed source in Washington said: "Bush is not going to leave office with Iran still in limbo." ...at a meeting of the White House, Pentagon and state department last month, Mr Cheney expressed frustration at the lack of progress and Mr Bush sided with him. "The balance has tilted. There is cause for concern," the source said this week. ... "Cheney has limited capital left, but if he wanted to use all his capital on this one issue, he could still have an impact," said Patrick Cronin, the director of studies at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.' ("Cheney pushes Bush to act on Iran; Military solution back in favour as Rice loses out; President 'not prepared to leave conflict unresolved'", Guardian, July 16, 2007.)

Deluded supporters of the Democratic Party may soon have to throw away their pathetic countdown clocks, those self-consoling little devices that remind them of how much time remains until noon on January 20, 2009, the moment when it is thought that Bush will finally leave office. These countdown clocks make no provision for the Cheney doctrine, which calls for a new super 9/11 with weapons of mass destruction in the US, to be used as the pretext for a nuclear attack on Iran and for martial law at home. Those who think the Republicans cannot hold the White House in 2008 have forgotten that neocons always prefer a coup d'etat to an election. As Cheney told Bob Schieffer of CBS's Face the Nation on April 15, 2007:

'The greatest threat now is "a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities."'

Pelosi and Reid need to toss out their fatuous countdown clocks, and get out their impeachment stopwatches - fast.

Thanks to Total 411 dot info for catching this and posting an excerpt.

You can read the entire piece at Revere Radio dot net, or if white text on black is not your idea of fun, here.

Can A Dictator Be Impeached?

In "The Logic of Impeachment", Bob Parry of Consortium News dot com writes:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has taken impeachment “off the table,” in line with Official Washington’s view that trying to oust George W. Bush and Dick Cheney would be an unpleasant waste of time. But there is emerging a compelling logic that an unprecedented dual impeachment might be vital to the future of the United States.

Emerging? The logic supporting impeachment was clear six years ago, and has only become clearer since then. But it's nice that more dissident journalists are starting to notice.

If some historic challenge is not made to the extraordinary assertions of power by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, the United States might lose its status as a democratic Republic based on a Constitution that adheres to the twin principles that no one is above the law and everyone is endowed with inalienable rights.

The time for that consideration is long past, in my humble estimation. The judicial system is ruined and the Obscene Court can be counted on to give this obscene president anything he demands. The Congress is cowed and bought -- between the big money lobby and the memories of anthrax and assassination, and after the DLC's betrayal of their grassroots supporters by failing to fund their most truthful candidates -- and can be counted on for a pajama party but no substantive opposition. The electoral system is ruined and there is no way to vote the bums out. In fact we voted the bums out in 2004 but they didn't leave. So where does the United States base its claim to be "a democratic Republic"?

Over the past six-plus years, Bush has trampled on these traditional concepts of liberty and the rule of law time and again, even as he professes his love of freedom and democracy. Indeed, in Bush’s world, the word “freedom” has come to define almost its classical opposite.

Six-plus years of abuse and now the "compelling logic" supporting impeachment is "emerging"?

This ain't some chump we're talking about here; Bob Parry was one of the great investigative journalists of his generation. His fearless work on the Iran/Contra scandal, and many other important national stories, caused both the AP and Newsweek to throw him overboard: "Sorry, Bob, you tell too much truth!"

Nowadays he's on his own, and he's chosen not to talk about election fraud, or 9/11 as an inside job, or false flag terror in any way at all, yet he's still doing a great job chronicling all the administration's other outrageous abuses of power -- and even without election fraud, even without any 9/11 truth, it still adds up to a compelling case for impeachment. Or at least the logic supporting such a conclusion is "emerging".

As the current outrageous abuse of power,

Bush’s latest affront to the traditional American concept of checks and balances was to bar the Justice Department from handling contempt-of-Congress complaints lodged against White House aides who have invoked executive privilege rather than testify about the politically tainted firings of nine federal prosecutors, ones who didn't measure up as "loyal Bushies."

In Bush’s view, federal prosecutors can enforce the laws only the way he sees fit – and thus once he tells a subordinate not to testify, the Justice Department has no choice but to rebuff any efforts by Congress to compel testimony.

So, the “unitary executive” gets to decide how much congressional oversight will be allowed, regardless of an existing law which makes it the duty of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia to take congressional contempt citations to a grand jury.
...

Bush is daring Congress to either mount a constitutional battle or submit to his will.

Well, exactly! Bush -- that is to say, Karl Rove -- doesn't think Congress is up to the challenge, and he's probably right about that. Worse: even if Congress managed to drag such a battle into the courts, the Obscene Court stands firmly in Bush's corner, by the widest 5-4 margin anyone could ever ask for, and he -- Rove -- has nothing to fear from the judiciary.

And in the meantime the elephant fascist noisemakers are still clamoring for another domestic terror attack, just like 9/11 only worse, which would obviate any attempt -- congressional or judicial or otherwise -- to rein in the criminals who have taken over our country.

What to do, what to do? I asked this question of one of my friends recently and he said, "Well, exactly. What do you do about a dictatorship?"

Impeachment is clearly called for, but is it enough? More to the point, I suppose, is it even possible?

I don't know; that's why I'm asking: Can a dictator be impeached?

APN Reports: House Budget for Fiscal Year 2008 Funds Iraq Occupation Into 2009

Here's the latest from Matthew Cardinale, the News Editor of Atlanta Progressive News (with my emphasis):

EXCLUSIVE: US FY08 Budget Funds Iraq Occupation into 2009

(April 02, 2007)

(APN) ATLANTA – The US House’s Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2008 also projects $50 billion of spending in 2009 on “Overseas Deployments and Other Activities,” primarily for use in Iraq, Atlanta Progressive News has learned.

US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) appears to be the only Democrat to have opposed the Budget because of opposition to funding the Occupation; the other Democrats who opposed were Conservative Democrats.

Even progressive Democrats–other than Kucinich–who opposed the Supplemental just a week ago voted yes on the Budget, including US Reps. Lee, Lewis (D-GA), Waters, and Woolsey. Messages left with the Offices of Lee, Waters, and Woolsey were not returned today.

"The President's FY08 budget requests funding for the Iraq war well into 2009 and the Democrat budget accepts that timeline. On the most important issue of our time, we are falling right into line with the President's plan for the war and his requests to fund it," Kucinich said in a press release obtained last week by Atlanta Progressive News.

The press release was also sent to the corporate media, Kucinich’s spokesperson confirmed; however, they all appear to have ignored it.

You got that? Amazing! Or is it? Or is it just that we're still not sufficiently jaded?

"The supplemental that just passed the House last week calls for a withdrawal of troops by August 2008. Why does the budget fund the war for perhaps an entire year past the withdrawal date in the supplemental?... If we were serious about trying to stop the war, the budget would not contradict the supplemental," Kucinich said.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) Office suggested to Atlanta Progressive News on Thursday the $50 billion could have been for training the Iraqi military or watching US Embassies in Iraq.

Pelosi spokesperson Drew Hammill told APN yesterday that he had checked into it and the funding was indeed for those specific purposes. When asked today why those purposes were not specifically listed in the Budget, Hammill said that those are only possible uses of the 2009 Overseas dollars and referred APN to the US House Budget Committee.

"I’m not going to get into specific purposes because it’s just a Budget, not an Appropriation," Hammill told APN.

"August 2008 is a starting point and not an ending point," he said, referring to the target beginning withdrawal date included in the US House Supplemental.

Pelosi’s Office confirmed it’s a possibility that the US Occupation of Iraq could still be going on in 2009 with the withdrawal only beginning in August 2008.

So when will the troops be finished leaving? "I don’t think you’re going to get an answer to that," Hammill said.

The Budget Committee confirmed APN’s analysis of the bill.

Did you catch that too? So did I! Therefore, IMVHO, the following steps are immediately required:

(1) Read the rest of the story here.

(2) Join me in thanking Matthew Cardinale and Dennis Kucinich.

(3) Help put a curse on the rest of the Congress and on the corrupt American mass media.

(4) Pass this story along!

(5) There is no step five.

Trap? Counter-Trap? Iran Crisis Deepens: We Must Stop This Now!!

Tensions between Iran and the UK haven't lessened any since my last post on the topic; quite the opposite, in fact. Here's a snippet of the latest news, from the UK's Times Online: Iran rebuffs Blair’s plea for release of captives

The Iranian Foreign Minister accused a group of captured British servicemen last night of having committed an act of “aggression”, only hours after Tony Blair appealed for their release.

“The charge against them is their illegal entrance into Iranian territorial waters,” Manouchehr Mottaki, the Foreign Minister, told a press conference in New York.

In a telephone conversation with Mr Mottaki last night Margaret Beckett, the [UK] Foreign Secretary, “made extremely clear our view that our personnel were operating in Iraqi waters, called for their immediate return, and asked for immediate consular access to them”, a spokesman said.

But Mr Mottaki told the conference that Iran had already provided British officials with details, including GPS coordinates, of the servicemen’s arrest. The British Ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to explain why 15 service personnel in two inflatable boats had strayed into Iranian territorial waters.

OOPS! GPS coordinates? This could get icky.

As you might expect, Larisa Alexandrovna is very concerned. At her blog, At-Largely, she writes: Iran crisis grows:

We are in a very serious situation with the Iran/UK stand-off on the 15 soldiers and marines who were allegedly (according to Iranian officials) found in Iranian waters - which would violate international law. The UK account was that the 15 Brits were in Iraqi water and that the Iranians took them hostage. The problem is, the UK has yet to release evidence showing the position of Iranian ships in Iraqi water, which leads me to suspect that Western version of events is not accurate. Although apparently this minor issue of evidence seems to have eluded the corporate press.

Anyone following my reporting on what the US has been doing inside Iran - for several years now - sees right away why the Iranians would be concerned about foreign elements in their territory. The fourth estate has resumed its role in selling us a war by omitting relevant facts, such as US covert activities inside Iran, and by not asking the tough questions, such as, where is the evidence that the Iranians were in Iraqi waters?

And forgive me for saying so, but ... ahem ... what if they weren't? What if the Brits were in Iranian waters when they were captured?

Would that make any difference at all at this point?

Or have we left reality in the dust again?

As usual, Justin Raimondo has just a few thoughts on the matter: The Coming War With Iran: Is it inevitable?

The timing of the recent incident in which 15 British sailors were arrested by Iran at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway for purportedly entering Iranian waters couldn't have been more provocative if it had been planned that way. And perhaps it was. The question is, however, who did the planning?
...

We are supposed to believe that the Iranians entered Iraqi waters to "ambush" the Brits, who were engaged in what is described as a "routine" patrol of the disputed waterway in search of suspected smugglers. Car smugglers were offloading their merchandise onto a barge when they were approached by the Brit patrol and fled into Iranian waters – but not before "irking" the British crew:

"The suspected smugglers complied with the British orders and the crew returned to its rigid hull inflatable boats (rhibs) to continue its patrol, only to turn around and see the traders laughing in its direction."

Laughing at Her Majesty's sailors, who were guarding the civilized world from the pernicious plots of car smugglers, was surely an act of war. After all, isn't a car a "weapon of mass destruction" in present-day Iraq? The Brits weren't going to let the Iranians off the hook quite so easily, and the next day they returned to the same waters to find the same smugglers plying their trade. The British patrol made a beeline for the smugglers, but this time the smugglers didn't run – and the poor naïve Brits walked right into the trap. No sooner had they boarded the vessel than they were surrounded on all sides by Iranian gunboats. Last anybody heard of their fate, they were in Tehran and the Iranians were talking about putting them on trial for espionage.

The Iraqi commander in charge of guarding Iraq's territorial waters, Brig. Gen. Hakim Jassim, has a different story to tell, as reported here:

"The Iraqi military commander of the country's territorial waters cast doubt on claims the Britons were in Iraqi waters. 'We were informed by Iraqi fishermen after they had returned from sea that there were British gunboats in an area that is out of Iraqi control. We don't know why they were there.'"

Ah, but I suppose it depends on which fisherman you ask. At any rate, no fisherman in the area will be interviewed by anyone in the Western news media any time soon, because, as the UK Independent notes, all reporters have been "ordered away" by coalition forces.
...

The Lobby is pushing hard on this one, and, politically, the War Party has lined up the leadership of both the Democrats and the Republicans, as Pelosi's capitulation on the Iran proviso makes all too clear. As long as domestic political support for an attack spans both parties and includes the key element of "liberal" Democrats like Pelosi and Chairman Dean, all systems are "go" for war with Iran.

Well ... all systems may be "go", but that doesn't make it inevitable. Maybe we can stop it before it starts! And if we can, we must!!

Here's the House of Representatives. You can find your Representative using the search box at the top left corner.

And here's the Senate. You have two Senators and you can find them using the box at the top right corner.

Please contact these people TODAY and tell them not to attack Iran! And read this post for more good background and action suggestions.

Does it seem hopeless? Not quite. Things may look grim, but there's still a chance to prevent a disastrous war.

We'll never know what we can do until we try. And millions of lives are at stake.

The Senate. The House. Please!

Iran Warns US Not To Make Any "Stupid Move"

Reuters: Iran's military warns U.S. against "stupid move"

Iran's army commander has warned the United States and other Western powers not to make any "stupid move" over Tehran's nuclear work, and suggested they would be surprised by Iran's military response if they attacked.
...
Iran is embroiled in an escalating dispute over its uranium enrichment, which Iran says is for fuel for power generation but the West suspects is aimed at making nuclear bombs.
...
Armed forces chief Ataollah Salehi said Iran's military was stronger now than when Iran fought against Iraq in 1980-88.

"And if our bullying enemies make a stupid move, they will certainly be surprised," the daily Siyasat-e Rouz quoted him as saying on Friday.

Haven't we had enough surprises? Can we possibly avoid one more?

There's still time for you to make a difference. Please phone Nancy Pelosi (202-225-0100) and your "elected" representatives (888-851-1879) and tell them not to let George Bush start another war without Congressional approval.

Then tell them not to grant such approval.

We've got too many wars going on already.

There's No Left Left!

It's funny how one thing can lead to another, and how sometimes you don't get what you need -- until you need it!

In the comment thread of yesterday's post about Robert Kagan, we sort of accidentally got talking about Glenn Greenwald, and that started me thinking (again) about Left and Right (and a few other things too), and I finally found a way to express a few thoughts which have been in the back of my mind for a long, long time, hoping for an opportunity to get out. In light of this long-awaited breakthrough, I hope you'll forgive me if I recycle some of what I wrote yesterday.

~~~

I think we make a big mistake when we try to model politics as a one-dimensional continuum. A more realistic model might be n-dimensional, where n is the number of issues on the table.

But that still wouldn't account for the fact that there are usually more than two ways to lay out the options for each issue. In other words, even single-issue politics doesn't usually fit on a one-dimensional continuum.

Start dealing with multiple issues simultaneously and it gets messy fast, even with a relatively small group of people. Expand it to include hundreds of millions of people and the paradigm doesn't fit in the slightest.

Therefore, classifying everything in terms of Left and Right doesn't add clarity to the discussion -- in fact, by trying to collapse the infinite variety of humanity into a single dimension, it destroys clarity. But that's how most people "understand" politics.

In the USA, for reasons which go way back in the national history, the entire Left-Right continnum has been dragged so far to the Right that now there's no Left left.

The so-called "centrist" Democrats are, by any reasonable standard, very far-Right, and most of the so-called "liberal" Democrats are at best moderately-Right.

What used to be called the Center, still passes for Center in most European countries, and would be considered slightly Right of Center in most of Latin America, is not even part of the continuum anymore.

But hardly anybody talks about this. And when they do, they catch a lot of flak. So apparently we weren't supposed to notice.

~~~

Stranglely (or maybe not!), while I was struggling to find those words, Ohmy News of Korea was publishing an opinion piece in which Lee Roberts absolutely nails it:

The United States, which proclaims itself a democracy, is the only developed country on the planet with a political spectrum that lies entirely right of center. There is no left wing, or even centrist position in the political public domain. Even the first-ever "socialist" Senator, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is no more than a moderate liberal when his political skin is scratched. The bulk of the Democratic Party is equivalent to the Christian Democrat movement in European terms, and would find themselves on the right wing of the Tory party in the United Kingdom (or the right wing of Blair's New Labor, which now dominates the right axis of Britain's political spectrum). Bill Clinton would not have nurtured a friendship with a genuine representative of labor, and found in Blair a kindred spirit, someone who transferred his allegiance without a blink to Bush. He was able to do so because there are very few fundamental disagreements between America's two parties.

Neither party is willing to cut back on corporate excesses; neither party will confront the insurance industry and give America a national health system; neither party disagrees with the aims of hegemony in the Middle East; both oppose progressive movements in Latin America and elsewhere; both believe deeply in American empire and domination; both are dedicated to the continued growth in America's nuclear arsenal. The Democrats are no more outraged [than the Republicans] by the slaughter of more than half a million innocent civilians in Iraq, or the thousands in Lebanon. Both parties are totally committed to the aims and goals of Israel and opposed to any concessions to the Palestinians. As I write, it has been announced that Pelosi and her Senate counterpart, Harry Reid, will make a bipartisan display of unity in support of Israel, by appearing alongside Dick Cheney at the March meeting of the ultra-reactionary American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC has dominated American foreign policy for decades, strengthened since 2000 by the Project for a New American Century, the Bush shadow cabinet, which drew up the blueprints for American empire and the conquest of Iraq and Iran.

None of the Democratic candidates for the presidency, with one exception, is committed to any fundamental change. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have only a whisper of difference between them and both are dedicated to the maintenance of corporate America. The exception is Dennis Kucinich, who having no other serious political party with which to affiliate continues with a tiny band of centrists, to push the Democrats into genuine opposition, to no avail.

There's a lot more, and it's very good. And Lee Roberts catches some flak, too, in the comments thread, mostly (ok -- all!) from people who (I have to say it) seem so out of touch with reality that they cannot even imagine that what they've just read might possibly be true.

It is indeed a very sad situation. But it is not without its opportunities.

In "Debating a Neocon", Stan Goff, describing his debate (shortly after the 2004 "election") with Patrick Clawson, wrote:

In every case, I agreed with him that Democrats wanted to attack Iraq, too, and that they had attacked it as often as possible throughout the eight-year administration of Bill Clinton­ who by the way had killed more Iraqis than George W. Bush. I also pointed out that Democrats, not Republicans, were the most vocal in calling for a return of military conscription, and that Kerry not only said he wouldn't withdraw from Iraq, but that he would expand the troop numbers making him the Lyndon Baines Johnson of Southwest Asia. Not only that but any smart Democrat right now would be whooping for joy that they won't get the next four years [2004-2008] hung around their necks, because the forces in motion­ including maybe stagflation and the deepening defeat in Iraq are bigger than either party of the rich.
...

One might think the audience was put off by all this; that the conservatives were offended when I called George W. Bush "Dick Cheney's meat puppet," or worse, that those who had desperately voted Kerry would be offended by my speaking the unspeakable about him being another bourgeois war-candidate.

Not so. People on both sides were anxious to talk after the debate, asking for references and links to some of the information, seeming suddenly stimulated to ask new questions in the face of information to which many had obviously never been exposed. They weren't angry. They seemed almost relieved, like they'd been locked in and suddenly found a key.

I could be wrong -- I've been wrong once before! -- but I think the same is true today, only more so.

We have all sorts of keys, but they won't do us much good unless we share them.