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Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The Cuban government announced at 3 am Castro has stepped down. Seems odd..... a fake election within a week, perhaps an announcement to follow that Castro is dead?
CASTRO WITHOUT TEARS
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz was the illegitimate son of a Creole Sugar plantation
owner . At the age of 13 Castro helped organize a strike of the sugar workers- less to
do with class war than an ousted sons revenge.
In 1947 Castro would join the Cuban Peoples Party which accused the government
of turning Cuba over to U.S. capitalism and was very anti- Capitalist. Fidel ran for
office in 1952 but a coup led by Batista stopped the election. Castro would lead an
attack on the Moncado Barracks and was taken prisoner. In prison an officer came
forward to say he had been given poison to slip to Castro and kill him. He was court
martialled and Castro was thrust into the national spotlight.
Castro was put on trial, which was televised, and made a speech that would later be
made into a book, HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME. He was sentenced to 15 years
but was released after two and a promise from Batista of elections. Castro upon his
release joined up with Che and headed to the Sierra Maestra mountains with 80
men. Attacked by soldiers along the way, their ranks were reduced to 18. Fidel was
reported to be dead by the Cuban and then world press.
Herbert Mathews was an editor at the New York Times who decided to go to Cuba
and see if Castro was alive or dead. He found him very much alive, and in his first
article stated that Castro was pro-Capitalist and hated by the communists. This
article would change our governments approach to Castro, and no mention was
made of Castro being in a anti-Capitalist political group, or that Raoul Castro was
in the Cuban communist party.
Mathews reported that Castro had many forces and was batting Batista toe to toe.
Two years later Castro credited Mathews with bringing him to power. He was down
to 18 people, but Castro had them walk in circles to convince Mathews there were
many more. They also only had 12 rifles.
As aid from the CIA began to come in based on the Mathews fanciful articles,
Castro began taking territory away from owners and giving the land to the
peasants, who began to join up with him. Che was in charge of executing "counter-
revcolutionaries" and "deviationists" at these properties and cultivated a very
ruthless image. Former U.S. Ambassador to Cuba Earl T.
Smith would say, "We put Castro in power". A U.S. arms embargo against Batista,
and Batista being told to leave Cubaby Smith placed Castro in charge.
Once Castro was in power he received 200 million dollars in aid from the U.S. and
instant recognition of his government. Castro immediately ended the tourist trade
and outlawed prostitution. For 45 years these two acts would be praised by
supporting groups like the SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY as reason enough for
Castro's revolution.
By 1960 the U.S. owned phone system was nationalized, over 1 billion in property,
land and factories were seized by the government. Castro had declared there would
be free elections but kept delaying them. As Eisenhower tried to deal with Castro,
he moved closer to the Soviets.
Politicians who were organizing groups to aid in elections were arrested. Writers
who reported this were then arrested. Then homosexuals were told to register with
the government. They were then rounded up and sent to "work camps". We don't
know what happens to this day at those camps, as no Gay has ever been released
from them.
Castro instigated the ACTO DE REPUDIO. Party members show up at your home
or office, surround you and chant and threaten you. In 2003, 75 dissidents were
arrested for collecting signatures in favor of a referendum on Cuba's political
system. They collected over 10,000 names. Three were shot and killed, but protests
by the EU stopped more from being killed. Instead they were sentenced to 20 years
in jail. There is a group, The DAMAS DE BLANCO (which means women in white)
that dress all in white and carry white and pink parasols. They are the wives and
daughters of the 75 in jail. They are constantly attacked by the Acto repudio and
The Committee For The Revolution, an extensive neighborhood snitch network.
According to Cuba's Constitution, they had collected more than enough names for a
vote.
Spain , France and Germanyall tried to reason with Castro but were met with the
same stony silence they have received the last ten years when they offered to act as
go between with the United States to end the embargo. ( Der Speigel)
Here are things you might not know about Castro-
When the Soviet Union fell apart Castro decriminalized prostitution and welcomed
tourism. In other words, he turned to capitalism. No fool he.
He supports capital punishment, Amnesty International has repeatedly condemned
him. Members of the press caught reading western news sources get 20 years.
People with HIV are kept in work camps that neither their families or Red Cross
can visit. He is worth personally around 1 billion dollars but it could be much
higher. Romanian Lt. General Ion Pacepa the highest ranking Soviet bloc official to
defect said he was present in 1975 when Raul, Fidel and Nicolae Ceausessue agreed
to do a bi-lateral drug deal aimed at the United States.
The following is from Fidel: Hollywood 's Favorite Tyrant, Quote:
On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoovers' FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term
"terrorist" was not used at the time) by Castro-Cuban agents that targeted Macy's,
Gimbel's, Bloomindales and Manhattan's Grand Central Station with a dozen
incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The holocaust was set to go off the
following week, the day after Thanksgiving.
A little perspective: for their March 2004 Madrid subway blasts -- all 10 of them –
that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, al Qaeda used a grand total of 100 kilos
of TNT. Fidel Castro's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in
the three biggest department stores on earth, all packed to suffocation and pulsing
with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers,
including women and children -- actually, given the date and targets, probably
mostly women and children -- were to be incinerated and entombed. (I document
this episode in the book, Fidel: Hollywood's Favorite Tyrant.)
Castro planned his Manhattan holocaust short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev
foiled his plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" Castro
dreamt of yelling at the hated Yankees in October 1962, right before the mushroom
clouds. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest (Nikita Khrushchev),
Castro might have pulled it off. "If the missiles had remained," Fidel's sidekick Che
Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962 regarding the
Cuban missile crisis, "We would have used them against the very heart of the
U.S.including New York."
Some think Fidel and Che Guevara's genocidal fantasy was a bigger factor
in Khrushchev's decision to yank the missiles than Kennedy's so-called blockade.
While Castro was begging, threatening, even trying to trick Khrushchev into
launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the U.S. -- while he was ranting and
yelling and waving his arms about grabbing his Czech machine gun and "fighting
the Yankee invaders to the last man!" -- while frantically involved in all this, a
"fearful" (Alexeyev's term) Castro was also making reservations with Alexeyev for
a first-class seat in the Soviet Embassy's bomb shelter. Thus he'd emerge into the
smoldering rubble and millions of incinerated bodies and realize his lifelong dream:
his name stamped in history as the gallant David against the yankee Goliath.
UNQUOTE. (source)
( http://hnn.us/roundup/archives/11/2005/12/#18870 )
In 1958 under Batista Cuba had the second highest income rate of all Latin
American countries. In fact the people were ahead in wages over many countries in
Europe. $3 an hour was the Cuban wage for agricultural workers, France was $2.73
and so was Germany.
In 1842 slaves in Cuba received 8 ounces of meat. Today Cubans are rationed 2
ounces. Slaves got 4 ounces of rice, today Cubans get three. Slaves got 16 ounces of
starches, today Cubans get 6.5 ounces. Slaves got 4 ounces of beans- today they get 1
ounce.
In 1958 Cuba had a higher standard of living than Ireland and Austria, almost
double that of Spain and Japan. Cuba under Batista had more doctors and dentists
than Britain, and a lower infant mortality rate than France or Germany- in fact the
13th lowest in the world. Today Cuba is 24 th – from the top. In 1958 under Batista,
85% of Cubans were educated and literate. All this was in place before Castro.
In 1975 Kissinger partially lifted the embargo on Cuba, any U.S. company with
foreign subsidaries can do trade using those foreign companies. U.S, companies did
over 1 billion dollars worth of trade with Cuba last year alone. We are their largest
food supplier and fourth largest import partner.
Posted at 07:18 pm by Psychomike
Who is Raul Castro, Cuba's new leader?, Irish Peace Accords On Way To East Timor, U.S. Out Of Ideas On Iran, Serbs Burn Border Crossings, WHAT TO DRINK WHEN CASTRO DIES!
They were expelled from their first school together. They fought in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra together. And, following their victory over the forces of Fulgencio Batista, they have ruled Cuba together for nearly 50 years.
But although Fidel became a worldwide icon, instantly recognisable by his first name alone, his younger brother, Raúl, has remained a virtual unknown.
Even in Cuba, people know little about the mysterious and deeply private man who has effectively run the country since Fidel Castro underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006.
Now that Fidel has officially stepped down as head of state, the question is being asked: Who is Raúl Castro and how will he rule the country? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3396201.ece?token=null&offset=0
Raul has the Venezuela model and the model of China to select from. The model of China retains one party rule but allows party members to run factories. Or he can just let things run as they have. Castro, faced with growing complaints from tourists over accomedations on the island and wide spread prostitution spoke of playing down and even ending tourism. Money does not appear to have been re-invested in the hotels in a long time.
The day Castro dies would be a good day for a cigar and a Cuba Libre cocktail in our Cuban communities. I know I'll have one. The toast? I'll reveal that the day it happens.
Fri, 04/13/2007 - 12:12pm by partysugar 2,862 Views
Now before you go and wonder why today's happy hour is a regular old rum and coke, let me explain... a cuba libre is not a regular old rum and coke, it's a classic cocktail that could even be considered sophisticated. The drink originated after the Spanish-American War in which the Americans fought to liberate Cuba from Spain's reign (which is kind of ironic bearing in mind the US-Cuban relations in the years to come). The soldiers who were aiding in the fight mixed Cuba's rum with America's coca-cola, topped it with a squirt of lime and saluted to the country's freedom. Cuba Libre in Spanish actually means free Cuba. So the next time you are thinking of ordering a rum and coke, order a cuba libre instead, it's what I always do. To take it to the next level, read more
Cuba Libre
From Drinkalizer
ice cubes
3 ounces rum
1 1/2 tablespoons lime juice
Chilled cola
Slice lime
Put ice cubes in a highball glass, add the rum and lime juice, fill with cola and garnish with a slice of lime. http://www.yumsugar.com/208485
Everyone has a view of Castro pro or con, mine happen to be con, but here you can find a treasure trove of films on Castro good, bad and ugly.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?sourceid=gmail&q=Fidel+Castro+documentary&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv
Consistency, we are told, is the hobgoblin of small minds. When it comes to Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, though, our government’s thinking seems to have gone cosmic. On the one hand, the White House is warning the world of Iran’s development of nuclear-armed missiles that could hit Europe. On the other, it continues to sanction U.S. funding of Russian institutes known to be helping Iran built large reactors and rockets.
Tracking this inconsistency requires not only an agile mind, but a strong stomach. http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YjM1NDIzNTc3Njg5NThlYTI5NTliYWRiZGJlNTI3MTI=
Ireland can play a vital role in resolving global conflicts by sharing experiences of its troubled history, it was claimed today.
Minister for Foreign Affairs Dermot Ahern will travel to Timor Leste for an official visit tomorrow to unveil the government’s new Conflict Resolution Unit, promised under the Programme for Government.
The Asian country will be the first state to be assisted by experts from the unit, which it is hoped will appoint roving ambassadors to trouble spots around the world.
The two-day trip, which will include a series of high-level meetings with government ministers and aid projects, comes just over a week after a double assassination attempt on the fledgling nation’s leadership.
“Timor-Leste is in a transition phase, moving from conflict to stability and prosperity,” Mr Ahern said.
“Ireland wants to play its role in helping Timor, sharing our experience of conflict resolution and of building partnerships and a workable peace.
http://www.eecho.ie/news/story/?trs=mheysnojsncw As many of you know from coming here I have long credited the unpublisized work of the Irish and South Africans in bringing a cease fire agreement (no, it wasn't the surge) in Iraq http://civildefense.blogdrive.com/archive/cm-09_cy-2007_m-09_d-30_y-2007_o-0.html and I've advocated these accords to be used in areas around the world in collapse or civil war. I have also advocated its use with terrorist groups as the first real instrument ever devised for peace in those situations. But I still don't understand why the mainstream newsmedia passed on the story of peace in Iraq and why it wasn't covered here. It leaves the false, dangerous assumption that the surge ended the fighting, which leaves the door open to massive military strikes. Bad idea. No time to return to conventional battle tactics. Start using the accords.
At least four Somali policemen have been killed in the heaviest fighting in Mogadishu for several weeks.
Government forces and their Ethiopian allies have now sealed off the city's main Bakara market where fighting began on Monday, traders have told the BBC.
Many of those who remain in Mogadishu earn their living in Bakara but the government says it is a stronghold of the Islamist insurgents.
Last week, the UN warned that Somalia was the world's "forgotten crisis".
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7252351.stm
Groups of "angry" Serbs set fire Tuesday to two border crossings linking the north of newly independent Kosovo with southern Serbia, Kosovo police said.
The incidents occurred around 11:30 am (1030 GMT) at the Gate 1 and Gate 31 border crossings at Jarinje and Banja respectively, police spokesman Veton Elshani told AFP, adding that there were no reports of casualties. In another incident that police could not confirm, a Serb media source told AFP that a customs building had been set on fire by Serb protesters http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-7BYHVA?OpenDocument
Posted at 09:04 am by Psychomike
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Posted at 09:04 pm by Psychomike
ClintonVsBush:The Awful Truth
BUSH MERELY CONTINUED THE CLINTON FOREIGN POLICY PLANS
One of the greatest propaganda myths today is that George Bush created a foreign policy out of thin air. In fact, the reality is that all he did was continue the policies of Bill Clinton. Let's take a look at the sanctions we pushed the UN into putting in place that resulted in 1 million dead, a half million of them kids. Over Weapons of Mass Destruction that we are told, did not exist.
"It's a hard choice, but I think, we, think, it's worth it."
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright response to a May 11, 1996 60 Minutes question about the over half a million children killed by the [Iraqi] sanctions "Death of 500,000 Children 'Worth It'
"What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about, if we can't use it?"
... as remembered in Colin Powell's memoir. Powell wrote that he almost had an aneurysm, he was so upset at her. [abcnews bio]
Here she is saying she supported the deaths of kids on 60 Minutes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK_QshS2EW8
The UN backed sanctions on Iraq- and the insistence of the U.S. for those sanctions are clear:
Like many Irish readers, and others overseas who approached me requesting a response, I was shocked by the degree of over-simplification and misinformation contained in the article by the US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, published in these pages (August 4th).
Ms Albright ordains that the UN sanctions must continue. This despite their failure and human cost, as determined by UNICEF to be the death of some 5,000 children under five years of age each month, and that excludes teenagers, adults and the elderly also dying unnecessarily under the UN embargo. One can only assume that she calls for its continuation to meet American ambitions for suppression of Iraq and control of the Middle East.
The status quo sustained by US-driven sanctions has made for a certain stability within Iraq under Saddam Hussein as required by nervous neighbours. This is combined with an instability outside of Iraq enabling the US, Britain and others to sell vast amounts of weapons to the Arab countries. Thus the US economy is thriving on arms sales with the resulting impoverishment of the Arab world. http://www.commondreams.org/views/081100-104.htm
BOMBING THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Clinton claimed WMD factories were all through the Middle East. As he bombed them, shocked owners of these factories claimed they weren't making WMD at all.
http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/khartoumbomb.html
President Clinton was impeached for the wrong crimes. Unlike most Republicans, I never thought Clinton should have been impeached for his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Yes, it was immoral, but as my wife likes to say, Americans elected him to be President, not Pope.
At the beginning of the impeachment drive, I agreed with those who argued, "Nobody died because of Clinton's extramarital affair." Surely, I thought, other Presidents had done much worse actions that had cost people's lives. However, Clinton's later acts to distract Americans from his extramarital affair were truly criminal and impeachable, causing thousands, of deaths. I agree with the essay "The Blood on Bill Clinton's Hands," except for one major shortcoming: OSC left out the most serious, and most blatant, of Clinton's war crimes.
The people of Serbia, Kosovo, the Sudan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are not the only or most obvious victims of Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The day before the House impeachment vote, Clinton bombed Iraq, delaying the impeachment vote. He continued the bombing throughout all the days of the impeachment vote. Only an hour or two after the House impeachment vote ended, Clinton ended the bombing, saying, "We have achieved our objectives." Of course, because the objective was to delay and distract from the impeachment vote! In all other respects, the bombing hurt U.S. and international interests.
Clinton gave several excuses for bombing Iraq on the eve of the impeachment vote, especially the (bogus, but unquestioned) claim that Iraq had stopped cooperating with UNSCOM inspectors. In reality, Iraq's cooperation with UNSCOM inspectors had actually been increasing, despite U.S. attempts to provoke a confrontation. However, knowing the impeachment schedule, Clinton had directed UNSCOM chief Richard Butler to write a report that Iraq was not cooperating. Even Scott Ritter, the former chief UNSCOM weapons inspector who quit because he thought the weapons inspectors were not tough enough, said that the White House had been on the phone with UNSCOM "shaping" the report to make sure it would justify bombing Iraq during the impeachment trial.
Clinton actually used the Muslim holy month of Ramadan as an excuse for the timing of the bombing. This may have fooled the American media, but didn't fool Muslims, as Clinton continued the bombing even after Ramadan had started (but halted the bombing as soon as the impeachment vote ended).
Sure, Clinton said he had unanimous agreement from his national security advisers to bomb Iraq. So what? No matter what day he asked his national security advisers, they would always agree to bomb Iraq, so why ask on that particular day, a day before the impeachment vote?
Fact: the UNSCOM inspectors were not kicked out of Iraq in December 1998 by Saddam -- President Clinton had UNSCOM chief Richard Butler pull out the UN inspectors so he could bomb. United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was understandably angry that Clinton ordered out not just the U.S. inspectors, but all United Nations inspectors (which he had no authority to do).
Fact: ever since Bill Clinton ordered the UNSCOM inspectors out of Iraq so he could bomb (the day before the impeachment vote), there have been no UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. So when Clinton said (as soon as the impeachment vote ended), "We have achieved our objectives," was one of those objectives to permanently remove weapons inspectors from Iraq?
Fact: days before the UNSCOM report came out, Clinton was in Israel, already telling Prime Minister Netanyahu that he was expecting a negative UNSCOM report, and that he would soon be bombing Iraq. Clinton knew the contents ahead of time because he was "shaping" that report.
Fact: because of Clinton's December 1998 bombing, Iraq began challenging the U.S. and British "no-fly zones," which they had not been doing before. The risk to U.S. pilots is negligible (no U.S. plane has ever been hit), but it has given the U.S. and Britain an excuse for nearly daily bombing of Iraq (not just radar sites, but cities, towns, shepherd's camps, etc.). Since December 1998, this illegal bombing has killed about two hundred Iraqis, including shepherds with their flocks, families in their houses, and small children, and injured many more. It helps to put faces on the victims. I saw a photo of a cute, smiling little girl named Isra, from the Abu-Khasib neighborhood of Basra, who lost her right arm when a U.S. IGM-130 missile hit her neighborhood at 10:10 AM, January 25, 1999 (for a picture of her, see http://www.vitw.org/airwar.html). This ongoing bombing would not be happening except for Clinton's attempt to distract from the impeachment vote.
Maybe Americans don't care about the hundreds of Iraqis Clinton killed during the impeachment trial bombings of Iraq, and the scores of Iraqi civilians (and sheep) killed during the almost daily bombings of Iraq in the two years since then. Most Americans, incredibly enough, don't even know we're still at war, that we've been bombing Iraq every other day for the last two years!
Okay, for the sake of argument, say we can forgive Clinton for killing a few hundred or thousand Iraqis with bombs.
Bombs are merciful compared to what Clinton has done to the innocent children of Iraq, the most vulnerable of all, by maintaining ten years of the harshest sanctions in the history of mankind, begun on August 6, 1990, and kept in place at the insistence of the United States. On May 12, 1996, television's "Sixty Minutes" interviewed Madeleine Albright (then U.S. ambassador to the UN, now Secretary of State). Leslie Stahl asked Albright, "We have heard half a million children have died [from economic sanctions in Iraq]. That's more children than died in Hiroshima. Is the price worth it?"
Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice. But the price, we think, is worth it."
I believe there is a special place in hell reserved for Madeleine Albright.
Yes, even four and a half years ago, 500,000 Iraqi children had already died as a direct result of economic sanctions. Over one million Iraqi civilians have died from the sanctions, mostly children under age five. Those are not Iraqi figures -- those figures come from Unicef, the World Health Organization, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN's Department of Humanitarian Affairs, and other international sources. The "oil-for-food" program is so ineffectual that two consecutive UN directors of that program (Denis Haliday and Hans Von Sponeck) resigned, out of protest that they were presiding over a humanitarian disaster which can only be called genocide. They were UN Assistant Secretaries General, the highest ranking UN personnel ever to resign for reasons of conscience. Now Denis Haliday and Hans Von Sponeck are touring America and other countries, pleading for an end to the sanctions on Iraq.
Embargoes during peacetime are tough enough, but after a devastating war, they are disastrous. http://www.ornery.org/essays/2001-01-26-1.html
After 911, Bush followed the advice of the heads of CIA and the FBI. They were Clinton's appointees, and they told Bush the same things they told Clinton.
They also had no idea 911 was coming. So they failed on every front.
Yet we are told what Bush did over WMD in Iraq was bad, while what Clinton did was good.
911 was not a plot brought about in the months Bush occupied government. It was the result of a failure to infiltrate our enemies camp for 8 years after the first attack in 1993, which no one remembers.
Still not convinced? Explain this:
With the main Democratic contenders positions so similar, observers are looking toward the politicians' voting history to see how they might act if elected.
"Unlike Barack Obama, who was against the war from the beginning, and John Edwards, whose shift to an antiwar position was earlier and apparently sincere, Hillary Clinton came out against the war barely a year ago when public opinion polls showed it would be virtually impossible to get the presidential nomination unless she did otherwise," said Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and author of a three-part series on the candidates' foreign policies for the online journal Foreign Policy in Focus.
Zunes argued that among the Democrats, Hillary Clinton is the least likely to end the war.
"Hillary Clinton has supported Bush policy from the beginning," Zunes told OneWorld. "The Bush administration has also claimed that they want to pull back combat brigades and lessen the U.S. troop presence, but Hillary Clinton, like the Bush Administration, has basically said that whether or not we can do this depends on the situation on the ground and given that the situation on the ground is unlikely to improve much, I am personally skeptical that a Clinton administration would be very different than a continuation of the Bush administration." http://www.antiwar.com/glantz/?articleid=12231
The Bill Clinton war on Iraq strategy passed on to Bush, continued with Hillary. So why on earth do Democrats hate Bush so much?
Bush has even continued to support Clinton's bankrupt Kosovo Independence moves. A pro Islamist government that backs Al Qaeda and is supported by Iran. In Europe. HAVE WE LOST OUR MINDS?
Note to Intel agencies: INFILTRATE. DISRUPT. SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. GUIDANCE. PROPAGANDA ALTERNATIVES. REALIZE YOU ARE FIGHTING IDEALISTS. ASK INTEL GUYS FROM WW2 HOW TO INTERROGATE. Please. Posted at 11:34 am by Psychomike
Friday, February 15, 2008
THOUSANDS OF GITMO VIDEOS EXIST, PRINCESS DIANA CONSPIRACY THEORIES UP IN SMOKE, SRI LANKA: THE SECRET WAR!
So, as much as I love and respect him, I don't trust him and his fellow superdelegates to decide for me and the American people who should be the Democratic nominee -- and, therefore, most likely the next president of the United States.
I want voters to make that decision. The superdelegates, my brother included, have not been elected by anybody to name the nominee. They've either been appointed by the Party or, as in my brother's case, have automatically inherited the role simply because they are elected officials. This isn't the place to debate the entire history of superdelegates. Suffice it to say, however, they were created by the Party machine decades ago for the express purpose of giving Party insiders the ability to thwart the popular will.
After what Democrats went through in Florida in 2000, we should be the first to reject any such funny business. We should be as opposed to superdelegates changing the course of an election as we were to the Supreme Court appointing George W. Bush president. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ari-emanuel/my-brother-the-superdeleg_b_85924.html
The key words above are "should be". In 1968 Humphrey didn't bother to run in the primaries against Eugene McCarthy and RFK. He had already been told by the real Mayor Daley he had it in the bag using the superdelegates. At the convention when he was chosen people had to be dragged out by the police. Delegates who had been robbed of the vote threw stuff down on police at the Hilton Hotel. The riots went on for three days and nights.
The Superdelegates were ended in the 70's, and quietly brought back in the 80's by the Clinton camp who thought it would keep a leftist from taking over the party. Or was it, planning ahead?
There is also another major problem. Obama has based his entire campaign on bringing the nation together. If a racial civil war breaks out at the Convention, even if he won, who would buy that promise?
ANOTHER CONSPIRACY THEORY BITES THE DUST:
After 69 days of evidence into events surrounding the death of Princess Diana, Mohamed Al Fayed's allegations of high-level conspiracies and cover-ups began to crumble in an extraordinary hour of cross examination yesterday as his former director of security at Harrods admitted he could not substantiate any of them.
John Macnamara, a former Scotland Yard detective chief superintendent who was in charge of Fayed's own investigation team for five years after the Paris crash in August 1997, grew increasingly uncomfortable at the inquest as he was repeatedly forced to acknowledge that he had no evidence, apart from what Fayed told him, that the princess had been engaged to Dodi Fayed, or had been pregnant at the time of their deaths.
The acknowledgments ran counter to the constant claims for more than a decade.
He went on to admit that, despite having made sworn police statements, he had no evidence of a criminal conspiracy on the part of the British and French security services, or the then British ambassador to Paris, or the Duke of Edinburgh to kill the couple, or that the princess's bodyguards had been paid by British intelligence to lie about the crash - again all allegations made by his former employer.
Macnamara conceded US intelligence had told him they had no material relating to the princess's death and had never kept her under surveillance, as the Fayed side have alleged. He also acknowledged that a police statement he had signed stating that he had identified Dodi's body on its return to England was false. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/15/monarchy/print
AND ANOTHER ONE:
This video uses the 911 Truth video - and takes it apart scene by scene.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6243624912447824934
THOUSANDS OF GITMO INTERROGATION VIDEOS EXIST
Seton Hall Law's Center for Policy and Research has discovered new evidence of a longstanding government practice of recording interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. In light of the national debate about the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) destruction of video recordings, the report proves that the two CIA tapes that were destroyed were only a tiny fraction of perhaps 24,000 recorded interrogations.
A May 2005 report by Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley confirms that each interrogation at Guantanamo was videotaped. Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt issued a report the following month stating that more than 24,000 interrogations of detainees took place at Guantanamo over a three-year period. In the meantime, the Bush administration has announced it will pursue the death penalty for six detainees who will stand trial for crimes related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law, commented, "Our students proved that Guantanamo interrogations were videotaped, which impacts the impending trials of the six detainees. We all want to see the perpetrators of 9/11 punished. But if the tapes of those interrogations still exist, it is imperative that we understand, before these trials start, whether the information was obtained through standard interrogation procedures or through torture."
Captured on Tape, the Center's seventh Guantanamo Report, is based entirely on the government's own documents, most of which were procured through Freedom of Information Act suits. The prior Reports have been cited by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, the House Appropriations Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security; and introduced into the Congressional Record.
Included in Captured on Tape: -- Federal judges ordered that "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay" be preserved. -- The CIA admits to destroying at least two videotapes. -- Seton Hall Law has discovered records indicating that the more than 24,000 interrogations conducted at Guantanamo were videotaped. http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/31040
STOLEN LAPTOP REVEALS IRANIAN NUKE PLANS
The U.S. has recently shared new intelligence with the International Atomic Energy Agency on key aspects of Iran's nuclear program that Washington says shows Tehran was directly engaged in trying to make a bomb, diplomats said Thursday.
One of the diplomats said Washington also gave the IAEA permission to confront Iran with at least some of the evidence in an attempt to pry details out of the Islamic republic, as part of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's attempts to investigate Iran's suspicious nuclear past.
The diplomats suggested that such moves by the U.S. administration would be a reflection of Washington's' drive to pressure Iran into acknowledging that it had focused part of its nuclear efforts toward developing a weapons program.
The U.S. is leading the push for a third set of U.N. sanctions against Iran. Tehran insists its program is intended only to produce energy and has refused U.N. demands that it suspend its uranium enrichment program — technology that can produce both fuel for nuclear reactors and the fissile material for a bomb.
A recent U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran had a clandestine weapons program but stopped working on it four years ago has hurt Washington's attempts to have the U.N. Security Council impose a third set of sanctions.
While the Americans have previously declassified and then forwarded intelligence to the IAEA to help its investigations, they do so on a selective basis.
Following Israel's bombing of a Syrian site late last year, and media reports citing unidentified U.S. officials as saying the target was a nuclear installation, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei turned in vain to the U.S. in asking for details on what was struck, said a diplomat who — like others — spoke on condition of anonymity in exchange for divulging confidential information.
Over the past two years, the U.S. already has shared material on a laptop computer reportedly smuggled out of Iran. In 2005, U.S. intelligence assessed that information as indicating that Tehran had been working on details of nuclear weapons, including missile trajectories and ideal altitudes for exploding warheads.
After declassification, U.S. intelligence also was forwarded on two other issues: the "Green Salt Project" — a plan the U.S. alleges links diverse components of a nuclear weapons program, including uranium enrichment, high explosives testing and a missile re-entry vehicle — and material in Iran's possession showing how to mold uranium metal into warhead form.
IAEA experts have uncovered activities, experiments, and blueprints and materials that point to possible efforts by Iran to create nuclear weapons.
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=45946
THE SECRET WAR IN SRI LANKA
While violence in Pakistan and Afghanistan get lots of attention, most of the action in the region is taking place far to the south, in Sri Lanka. There, a civil war between ethnic Tamil separatists and the government, accounted for over half the combat and terrorist deaths in the region (Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh) this year. It's true that Pakistan and Afghanistan account for most of the remainder, and largely because international terrorist organizations like al Qaeda have set up their bases along the Pakistani-Afghan border. But most of the fighting is now going on far to the south, where the 25 year old civil war is grinding to a conclusion (with the rebels losing.)
Sri Lanka is in the tropics, so weather does not slow down the violence, as does Winter in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus, while nearly 8,000 have died in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the last year, nearly 3,000 have died in Sri Lanka. Even taking climate into account, there's a pretty violent conflict taking place in that island nation off the southern tip of India. http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htatrit/articles/20080215.aspx
IS PUTIN WORTH BILLIONS?
During his final annual press conference as President of Russia today in Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin offered a tantalizing sound bite, especially for his critics:
“I am the richest man in Europe and the whole world.”
Of course, he was speaking in terms of “emotions” from “the people of Russia,” not allegations that he had secretly amassed $40 billion in wealth while president, mainly shareholdings in energy companies.
Mr. Putin dismissed those claims, which were proliferated by Stanislav Belkovsky, a prominent political analyst, and first published in a German newspaper before ricocheting to the British daily The Guardian, the Op-Ed page of The Washington Post and other publications. Nothing has been proven.
Mr. Belkovsky said his information came from sources inside the Kremlin, an assertion that Mr. Putin was only too happy to characterize dismissively today: “They picked it out of their noses and smeared it on paper,” Mr. Putin said.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/putin-charmingly-denies-amassing-billions-in-office/
HOW EAST TIMOR LEADER WAS SET UP FOR MURDER ATTEMPT
THE two leaders smile for the camera after a lunch of goat, lamb and chicken, washed down with wine, having struck a peace deal that should have heartened East Timor's frail democracy.
One is the rebel leader Alfredo Reinado, who only weeks later would be killed in an attack on the home of the other man, President Jose Ramos-Horta, who was shot and is fighting for his life.
Their clandestine meeting on January 13 held out the prospect of a new dawn of national unity. But that hope, captured in the smiles for the camera, evaporated as surely as the mountain mist in the four weeks that followed.
Ramos-Horta, displaying the mettle of his Nobel peace prize, went unarmed and without security to the mountain village of Maubisse to talk through differences with the heavily protected Reinado, and to forge a deal that would have seen the army renegade and his rebels forgiven for alleged multiple murders and armed rebellion.
According to East Timor's Economics Minister, Joao Goncalves, the rendezvous was relaxed and friendly. The plan, brokered with the help of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva, went like this: Reinado and his men would surrender to house arrest by New Zealand troops, be tried on the charges but pardoned under an amnesty that Ramos-Horta would declare on May 20, the sixth anniversary of independence for the world's poorest country.
"I suggested to Reinado it would be better for him to surrender immediately and submit himself to the court process so when he was granted amnesty, it looked as though he had submitted to justice," Goncalves told the Herald this week. He agreed, and a deal was essentially done. After the lunch they parted with a handshake, agreeing to meet again within days.
It all went awry, of course. http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/wouldbe-assassin-wined-and-dined-horta/2008/02/15/1202760599867.html Posted at 09:28 am by Psychomike
Monday, February 11, 2008
DOES OBAMA FACE AN INCREASED RISK OF ASSASSINATION?, CHAVEZ THREATENS OIL TO U.S., CIA HAS NO IDEA HOW TO INTERROGATE, DEMOCRATS HEADING TO RACIAL CIVIL WAR AT CONVENTION
Breaking the Drug Taboo: Group of Traumatized Veterans Get Experimental Ecstasy Treatment
"We need to be positioning ourselves now to provide the assistance that our veterans need," said House Committee on Veterans' Affairs chairman Bob Filner (D-CA) during a hearing, called "Stopping Suicides: Examining the Mental Health Challenges Facing the Department of Veterans Affairs," held in December 2007. "Not only for those brave men and women who are returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also for our veterans from previous conflicts. We cannot afford to put this issue off."
Filner's choice of words is instructive, as are his sentiments: With upwards of 25 million veterans in the United States, not counting those overseas in the morally murky theater of Iraq and Afghanistan who may return home sometime after the 2008 presidential election, that's a lot of assistance and funding needed to head off what he called a "rate of veteran suicide [that] has reached epidemic proportions," to the point that it has doubled the suicide rate of civilians. Safeguards already put into place have failed, for a variety of reasons, and given the severity of the mental and physical problems carried by returning soldiers, some daring out-of-the-box thinking is not only desperately needed, but required.
Enter the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and its currently funded trials using 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methamphetamine -- otherwise known as MDMA, or ecstasy -- to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the U.S. Army had carried out lethal dose studies of MDMA back in the 1950s, work which was not classified until the close of the 1960s, it was only centered on animals and was mixed in with a variety of other compounds. At the closure of that research, MDMA languished in clinical obscurity until its rise as a club drug in the '80s and '90s brought it the kind of attention that dooms better drugs to Schedule I classifications -- that is, illegality -- and lesser drugs to approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin became aware of MDMA in 1982, and since then has been convinced of its therapeutic uses. Accordingly, his organization has coordinated and/or funded recent studies into MDMA treatment of PTSD and has its eyes set on a higher goal.
"We're looking to make MDMA into a prescription medication in the United States, United Kingdom and elsewhere," he explained by phone. http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/76576/
Ecstasy has long been reported to help people in depression, but the drug also makes the user trusting, even in situations they shouldn't be. That would also make it a far more valued interrogation tool than waterboarding! An offshoot of ecstasy called MOLLY has no hangover and leaves the user with a feeling of euphoria for up to 1 week afterwards. There is a saying in psychiatriac circles, "prozac suicide" which refers to the fact that while it takes 2 weeks for the drug to take effect there are some who commit suicide during this period. Clearly MOLLY could be used twice in the period the patient is waiting for the prozac to take effect. But that requires out of the box thinking. The next article shows, such thinking is sadly lacking:
CIA HAS NO IDEA HOW TO CONDUCT INTERROGATIONS
Col. Steve Kleinman, a U.S. Air Force Reserve interrogator, 50, who had served in Panama and both Iraq wars, was one of the speakers that fall day. In a conversation earlier this month, Kleinman said he was horrified by America's turn to what Dick Cheney has called "the dark side" in the war on terrorism: indefinite detention in the name of national security, torture in the name of intelligence collection. And so he fought against it. Kleinman joined an effort, sponsored by the Intelligence Science Board—an interagency intelligence-advisory panel—to get the intelligence community to finally renounce torture. His speech at Fort Hunt was a subtle rebuke of the use of torture, comparing the war on terrorism to an earlier era, when interrogators shunned brutality.
Suddenly, at Fort Hunt that October day, a veteran approached Kleinman. "I never laid a hand on one of my prisoners," the older man said. "That allowed me to do my job and retain my humanity." Kleinman was moved. "I thought, when's the last time I heard an interrogator concerned about that?" he recalled.
Many interrogators today are, in fact, concerned about that. But the program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.
In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA's interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.
Those with intimate knowledge of the program say that in many cases, U.S. interrogators haven't even been able to learn the basics about many of those they hold or have held, to say nothing of whatever crucial information they possess. "How do you separate the sheep from the wool? There's no fingerprints, no DNA," said a former senior intelligence official who helped set up the CIA's interrogation program, and who would not speak for attribution. "You don't know if you have Osama bin Laden or Joe Shit the rag-man."
Worse than a crime, to paraphrase Tallyrand, interrogation by the CIA has been—and remains—a blunder.
That, of course, is not how the Bush administration has portrayed the CIA's interrogations. "This program has been, and remains, one of the most vital tools in our war against the terrorists," President Bush said in his September 2006 acknowledgment of its existence. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations a year later, Gen. Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, said that the intelligence produced by the interrogation program "is absolutely irreplaceable." This month, Hayden's boss, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, told Lawrence Wright of The New Yorker, "Have we gotten meaningful information [from the program]? You betcha. Tons!"
Yet, until 9/11, the agency had limited experience with interrogation, and had few people on staff who had even conducted one. Most of the CIA's experience had involved consulting with partner intelligence agencies on how to torture, sometimes using methods learned from the Nazis, instead of conducting interrogations itself—as demonstrated by the infamous Kubark torture instruction manual of the 1960s.
Young CIA officers weren't trained in interrogations. "How to resist torture was the only thing related to interrogation at the training program," said one former senior official in the Directorate of Operations. "There was no thought, no commentary, or any practicality on how to apply it." The landmark Church and Pike commissions of the 1970s that examined illegal CIA programs further reinforced the CIA's impulse to avoid, whenever possible, activity with a high political cost and marginal benefit. http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/cia-largely-in-the3
The strongest argument against 911 being a CIA conspiracy, is the incompetence the agency has displayed. Over and over again.
I got some heavy emails from people over the superdelegate issue- and my saying it could break out at the convention in violence far beyond the 1968 Convention. Moments ago, I received my email update from Truth Out, a leftist site. I am no longer the only person saying this:
See for yourself: Democrats headed for racial civil war at their convention
The following article reminds me that 5 years ago I wrote here that Pakistan was not our ally. When we went into Pakistan unknown to Americans our Intel took control of the nukes they had, because at least 3/4 of Pakistan's Intel supported Osama and the Taliban. For propaganda purposes most Americans think we funded Osama and the Taliban during the war against the Soviets, in fact, Bhutto and her Intel formed and funded the Taliban who in turn allowed Osama to set up training camps. Pakistan has refused to go into the areas Osama is thought to be, and has released everyone from atomic secrets spies to Al Qaeda memebers. Pakistan isn't so much an ally as it is our pal while we occupy it. Bhutto had spoken during her exile to U.S. feminist groups that she only supported Al Qaeda because she thought they would only use limited violence, not 911. How Americans could cheer that still haunts me.
Pakistan army failures 'put the West in peril'
The West remains at constant risk of large-scale al-Qa'eda terrorist attacks because the Pakistani military requires years of training before it will be able to combat militancy, a Western military official has warned.
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Pakistan has deployed about 100,000 troops to the tribal region where about 1,000 have been killed
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More than six years have elapsed since the September 11 attacks on the United States but the Pakistan army remains unequipped and untrained for counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism operations, the official told The Daily Telegraph.
He gave a comprehensive account describing how al-Qa'eda has been able to preserve its sanctuary in Pakistan by backing an insurgency in the lawless border tribal areas.
"If we [the West] have a reasonable degree of co-operation it may take two to three years for them [the Pakistan military] to be bought up to a level," he said.
"But realistically the way things are going it will take five years," he added.
As a result, he warned, there is a possible "worst case scenario that there will be another catastrophic event in the West and then everything else in between."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/11/wpak111.xml See what I mean?:
Afghanistan backs "bin Laden in Pakistan" charge
Afghanistan said on Sunday it backed a senior U.S. official's assertion that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar were operating from neighbouring Pakistan.
Afghanistan has long said al Qaeda and Taliban leaders receive safe refuge in parts of Pakistan's lawless tribal regions, souring relations between the neighbours. But since a large tribal council last August, the two countries agreed to work more closely to fight the joint militant threat and ties have improved.
The U.S. official said Bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri and other network members were operating out of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas, bordering Afghanistan.
Mullah Omar and other ousted Afghan Taliban leaders, meanwhile, were directing insurgent operations in Afghanistan from the Pakistani city of Quetta, said the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pakistan has rejected the charge, but a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai welcomed it.
"We are glad that finally a high-ranking American official confirmed this matter," said spokesman Humayun Hamidzada.
"The government of Afghanistan has said for years the administration centres, havens and regrouping bases of the enemies of Afghanistan and Taliban are outside Afghanistan." http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=40420
After the assassinations of RFK, JFK and Martin Luther King conspiracy freeks tried to tie them all together. Folks, it was not a plot to eliminate "progressives". Oswald was a loner that killed a policeman and tried to kill a Texas politician. RFK was the victim of our first terrorist from the Middle East. But we didn't know it at the time. During the trial Sirhan Sirhan said "he and his friends" were angry that RFK wanted to sell nuclear weapons to Israel. That was why he killed him. It was not a conservative plot to wipe out liberals. Sadly, at the time we did not do further investigation into Sirhan's "friends". We didn't even know it was a terrorist action. Today I believe it would be handled much differently. The killing of King may have been paid for by racists, but when one looks at all the Blacks in government jobs, police and fire departments, etc it clearly backfired. I raise this because of the following article, more thoughts follow:
Barack Obama 'will be assassinated within months' if he wins presidency
World champion boxer Bernard Hopkins, who will fight the undefeated Briton Joe Calzaghe in April, believes black Democratic contender Barak Obama would be assassinated "within months" if he became US president in November.
Hopkins, the world light-heavyweight boxing champion, told The Independent on Sunday: "I don't think America is ready for an African-American in the White House. If he gets the nomination they won't let him become president, but if they do, it will be for a short time, maybe less than a month or two. His life would be in jeopardy.
"People may say it is time for change but when it comes down to it, I don't think America is ready for that type of heat."
Hopkins, 43, arguably the most politically controversial figure in US sport since Muhammad Ali, has been accused of being racially motivated for saying he would "never lose to a white boy". He refused to retract the comment when he came face to face this week with Calzaghe, the undefeated world super-middleweight champion, in London. http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article3421106.ece
Every single candidate runs the risk of being killed by Al Qaeda. To Al Qaeda it doesn't matter who they are, what gender they are or what color they are. Comments like this show that the public has no idea after all these years since Sirhan Sirhan what we face.
US Captures Alleged Shiite Militia Chief
US Captures Alleged Shiite Militia Leader, 1 Other Suspect in Latest Raids South of Baghdad
U.S. soldiers captured a suspected Shiite militia commander and one other suspect Monday, the latest of several days of raids in Shiite holy cities south of Baghdad.
The arrests came a day after car bombs and gunmen struck new U.S. allies, police and civilians in northern Iraq, killing as many as 53 people in a spasm of violence that coincided with a visit by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Baghdad.
The main suspect detained Monday is believed to be in charge of criminal operations for "special groups" in the Iraqi provinces of Wasit, Babil and Najaf, the U.S. military said in a statement. He was allegedly involved in coordinating weapons shipments and planning attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces, it said. It did not characterize the second suspect. http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=4271001
Can someone tell me why we are supporting the formation of an Islamist state that is backed by Iran and supports Al Qaeda? Please? Anyone?
Kosovo split - new Cold War with Russia?
No Blows Likely Over Kosovo Split, but Chill Between Russia and West Seen Deepening
Russia may not come to outright blows with the West over Kosovo, but independence for the province seems sure to deepen the Cold War-style chill settling over Europe.
Detaching Kosovo from Serbia will likely aggravate disputes over a host of sensitive security issues ranging from missile defense to NATO membership for the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.
"There are several different issues coming together — that's what makes it so dangerous," said Anatol Lieven, a Russia expert who is a professor at King's College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington.
Kosovo is sacred to Serbs, who call it the cradle of their statehood and religion. The province also strikes a chord in the President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin — for reasons beyond the roots Russia shares with Slavic, Orthodox Christian Serbia.
Kosovo stands as a symbol of Russia's weakness in the post-Soviet era. Despite its fury over the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia — denounced by Boris Yeltsin as a return to the "Stone Age" — Moscow recognized a peace deal that put the mostly ethnic Albanian province under the control of the U.N. and the Western alliance.
Putin has built his popularity on restoring Russian pride, pushing to recapture its global clout and showing increasing assertiveness toward the West. That means acquiescence is off the table. http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=40693
U.S. Said to Seek Execution for 6 in Sept. 11 Case
Military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty for six Guantánamo detainees who are to be charged with central roles in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, government officials who have been briefed on the charges said Sunday.
The officials said the charges would be announced at the Pentagon as soon as Monday and were likely to include numerous war-crimes charges against the six men, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former Qaeda operations chief who has described himself as the mastermind of the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
A Defense Department official said prosecutors were seeking the death penalty because "if any case warrants it, it would be for individuals who were parties to a crime of that scale." The officials spoke anonymously because no one in the government was authorized to speak about the case.
A decision to seek the death penalty would increase the international focus on the case and present new challenges to the troubled military commission system that has yet to begin a single trial.
"The system hasn't been able to handle the less-complicated cases it has been presented with to date," said David Glazier, a former Navy officer who is a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.
In addition to Mr. Mohammed, the other five to be charged include detainees officials say were coordinators and intermediaries in the plot, among them a man labeled the "20th hijacker," who was denied entry to the United States in the month before the attacks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/us/11gitmo.html?_r=1&ex=1360386000&en=ff607f41aa20f69f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
The man who gave Al Qaeda 1 million dollars as a reward for 911 is threatening to turn off Venezuela oil to the U.S. Note to CIA- why is this man alive?
Chavez threatens US oil cutoff
Venezuelan President Threatens to Cut Off Oil Sales to US, Calls Exxon Mobil 'Outlaws'
President Hugo Chavez on Sunday threatened to cut off oil sales to the United States if Exxon Mobil Corp. wins court judgments to seize billions of dollars in Venezuelan assets.
"If you end up freezing (Venezuelan assets) and it harms us, we're going to harm you," Chavez said. "Do you know how? We aren't going to send oil to the United States. Take note, Mr. Bush, Mr. Danger."
Exxon Mobil has gone after the assets of state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA in U.S., British and Dutch courts as it challenges the nationalization of a multibillion dollar oil project by Chavez's government.
A British court has issued an injunction "freezing" as much as $12 billion in assets.
"I speak to the U.S. empire, because that's the master: continue and you will see that we won't sent one drop of oil to the empire of the United States," Chavez said during his weekly radio and television program, "Hello, President."
"The outlaws of Exxon Mobil will never again rob us," Chavez said, accusing the Irving, Texas-based oil company of acting in concert with Washington.
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=40748
East Timor president wounded in attack
East Timor President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta was shot in the stomach during an attack on his home Monday by renegade soldiers, an army spokesman said.
East Timor television reported that Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao's home also came under fire, but that no one was hurt.
Ramos-Horta was being operated on at an Australian army hospital in the capital, presidential adviser Agusto Zunior told The Associated Press. It was unclear whether his injury was life threatening.
One of Ramos-Horta's guards was killed in the attack, army spokesman Maj. Domingos da Camara said.
Two cars passed Ramos-Horta's house on the outskirts of the capital, Dili, at around 7 a.m. local time and began shooting, da Camara said. A rebel soldier wanted on murder charges for a flare up of violence in 2006, was killed in a shootout with guards, he said.
http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=40907
Talks with pirates over hijacked Sakhalin-bound tugboat continue
Talks with pirates who seized a tugboat carrying a Russian-British-Irish crew off the coast of Somalia almost two weeks ago are continuing, a spokesman for the Danish owner said on Monday.
The Svitzer Korsakov vessel, intended for use in the Sakhalin II oil and gas project led by Russian energy giant Gazprom, was seized on February 1 during a voyage from St. Petersburg to Russia's Far Eastern island of Sakhalin via Singapore.
"A British company with experience of resolving such conflicts is continuing talks with the pirates," said Andrus Tamm.
"We hope that the situation will be settled in the near future and the vessel and its crew will be able to make their way to Sakhalin," he continued, also commenting that the pirates had made their financial demands clear. He did not give details, however.
The captain of the six-man crew is British. Another four crew members are from Russia and the ship's engineer is Irish. All of the crew members remain on board the vessel, and are reportedly in good health, Tamm added. http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080211/98892014.html Posted at 06:22 am by Psychomike
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Iraq Al Qaeda In Collapse!
Al-Qaeda leaders admit: 'We are in crisis. There is panic and fear'
Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an “extraordinary crisis”. Last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis from al-Qaeda to the US military “created panic, fear and the unwillingness to fight”. The terrorist group's security structure suffered “total collapse”.
These are the words not of al-Qaeda's enemies but of one of its own leaders in Anbar province — once the group's stronghold. They were set down last summer in a 39-page letter seized during a US raid on an al-Qaeda base near Samarra in November.
The US military released extracts from that letter yesterday along with a second seized in another November raid that is almost as startling.
That second document is a bitter 16-page testament written last October by a local al-Qaeda leader near Balad, north of Baghdad. “I am Abu-Tariq, emir of the al-Layin and al-Mashahdah sector,” the author begins. He goes on to describe how his force of 600 shrank to fewer than 20.
“We were mistreated, cheated and betrayed by some of our brothers,” he says. “Those people were nothing but hypocrites, liars and traitors and were waiting for the right moment to switch sides with whoever pays them most.”
Assuming the two documents are authentic — and the US military insists that they are — they provide a rare insight into an organisation thrown into turmoil by the rise of the Awakening movement. More than 80,000 Sunnis have joined the tribal groups of “concerned local citizens” [CLCs] that have helped to eject al-Qaeda from swaths of western and northern Iraq, including much of Baghdad.
US intelligence officials cautioned, however, that the documents were snapshots of two small areas and that al-Qaeda was far from a spent force.
They said that while the number of car bombs had fallen over the past year, the organisation had do | | |
