The Guerrilla Campaign

By Pepe Escobar Apr 14, 2007 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/ID14Ak01.html DAMASCUS - There are three overlapping wars in Iraq: the Sunni Arab guerrilla struggle against the US; strands of Sunni Arab guerrillas against assorted Shi'ite militias/death squads; and al-Qaeda in Iraq against the puppet, US-backed Iraqi government in the Green Zone. Make it four wars: the Sunni Arab guerrilla war against the government inside the Green Zone. Better yet, make it five wars: the Sadrists, from Sadr City to Kufa and Najaf, against the Americans. All strands of these five overlapping wars will never allow the United States - or Anglo-American Big Oil - to control Iraq's oil wealth. Even if the new oil law is ratified by Parliament before June, implementation will be a certified nightmare, and security for billions of dollars of necessary investment non-existent. Strands of these five overlapping wars also will never accept the long-term imposition of vast US military bases under ...

So, bush the decider, has discovered that being president is “hard work”, and has decided he doesn’t want to be president anymore. Whatever happened to all those “commandering-in-chief” powers he’s said he’s got? Listen, you know, he gets this guy, and little georgie can just sit on back for some Jack and blow for the remainder. Once again Bush looks for a Mr Fixit for Iraq By David E. Sanger April 12, 2007 http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/12/news/czar.php WASHINGTON: Four years after the fall of Baghdad, the White House is once again struggling to solve an old problem: Who is in charge of carrying out policy in Iraq? Once again President George W. Bush and his top aides are searching for a high-level coordinator capable of cutting through military, political and reconstruction strategies that have never operated in sync, in Washington or in Baghdad. Once again Bush is publicly declaring that his administration has settled on a strategy for victory - this time, a troop increase that...

Wall Street Journal and New York Times Attack Journalism - by Stephen Lendman 4/12/07 This article addresses two of the writer's favorite corporate media targets - the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page and New York Times on every page. Both broadsheets were recently in attack mode taking on two Latin American leaders deserving praise but never getting any other than occasional backhanded kinds from papers devoted to one dual core mission - supporting the power elite and their own bottoms lines... […] The Wall Street Journal and New York Times attacked two Latin American leaders unwilling to surrender their nations' sovereignty to ours with Hugo Chavez being boldly vocal about it. Since elected in 1998, Chavez charted his own independent course building a new mass social and political revolutionary movement based on participatory democratic social equity and justice. It began as his Bolivarian Revolution inspired by the vision of 18th century liberator Simo...

By Ahlam Akram Alarab Online http://english.alarabonline.org/ I do not want to flame the emotions, but I am here to present facts and to address you so that together we can think of a way to save our people. I am not going to argue whether or not Israel has the right to exist, because Israel is internationally recognised and because there is a law that gives a squatter the ownership when he takes over an empty house. But let's not forget that those houses were not empty; yet Israel is a fact today. Based on the international acceptance of modern states, Israel has earned an acknowledgement of its existence. However, Israel is at risk of losing sympathy as it continues its brutal military occupation which is condemned by international law and which is brought into all our homes by TV pictures. You ask me about the role of Zionism and the establishment of the Jewish state. Do I care about it? I cannot say I do. I know that Zionism started in 18.. something, long before the Jewish tra...

Civil and Human Rights Advocate and Political Prisoner by Stephen Lendman 4/5/07 Sami Al-Arian is one of many dozens, likely hundreds, of political prisoners in the US today but is noteworthy because of his high-profile status and as an especially egregious example of persecution and injustice in post-9/11 America with its climate of state-induced fear and resulting repression with special targeting of Latino immigrants and all Muslims characterized as "Islamofascists" because of their faith and ethnicity. One of them is Dr. Sami Al-Arian - Palestinian refugee, scholar, academic, community leader, civic activist and advocate for freedom and justice for his people imprisoned since February, 2003 on trumped up charges explained below even after a jury exonerated him on eight of the false 17 charges against him, all the ones relating to violence and terrorism, and remained deadlocked 10 - 2 in favor of acquittal on the other nine. More on this below. Al-Arian is a Kuwaiti-born...

By Charles Sullivan http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17472.htm 04/03/07 "ICH" -- -- I have been thinking a great deal of late about government and its relationship to the citizenry. It should be obvious that any government that claims to be of the people and for the people must also serve the people. Yet it is clear that the current government does not serve the people—it exploits them. When sixty-four percent of the citizenry demand an end to the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the government responds not by withdrawing its troops, but by escalating the war, that government cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. What is it then? It is a government of the wealthy; a corporate, fascist government of the highest order. It is a government that spurns ordinary people and uses its power against them. It is the opposite of the kind of representative government it purports to be. It extorts tax dollars from its citizens and sends them to ...

Giuliani To Media: Lay Off My Wife Lou Young Reporting (CBS) Apr 2, 200 http://wcbstv.com/topstories/local_story_092170628.html [...] "The former New York City mayor is fending off increased media scrutiny of his third wife -- the former Judith Nathan. Rudy is now asking the media to back off. "Attack me all you want," Giuliani said. "There's plenty to attack me about. Please do it. But maybe, you know, show a little decency." That's a tough sell for a man who suggested he might invite his wife into cabinet meetings..." Chewy boobs, rudy. You've already made your wife fair game. I'll bet your wife sweats bullets too every time you have a news conference. The Washington Post May 26, 2006 "... the mayor announced ... that he was leaving his wife (who learned of her husband's intents while watching the news conference on television) and taking up with his girlfriend..." The New York Times May 11, 2000 Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani...

No hoods. No electric shocks. No beatings. These Iranians clearly are a very uncivilised bunch Terry Jones Saturday March 31, 2007 The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2047128,00.html I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press becau...

By allowing the right-wing whackos alito and roberts onto the supreme court, the Congress of the Untied States has put the end to America. America has become a shooting star across the sky of history, blazing its way to the obscurity of dusty history books. The dream is ended, the promise gone, never to be reborne in our lifetime. That dream was never real, but an ideal that the United States at least made some gestures to. But when was the last time you’ve seen the American Empire even make a pretense to a fair and equitable world order, or even a domestic order? The killing and carnage in the American occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq continue unabated, even in the face of the repudiation of those policies by the American people in the 2006 elections. And now... Supreme court won't decide Guantanamo appeals 4/2/07 http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070402/pl_nm/guantanamo_prisoners_court_dc_1 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A closely divided Supreme Court said on Monday it would not deci...

By Lorenzo A. Canizares Sunday, 01 April 2007 Many Americans are counting days and minutes waiting for the November 2008 Presidential elections. The expectations are that the result of the Congressional elections of 2006 will also carry to the presidential elections. Even astute political observers like Harold Meyerson has said "If the United States is still in Iraq come November 2008, the Democrats will sweep to power." I have no doubt that if a fair election is held in November of 2008 that whoever is the Democratic presidential candidate will win with a significant margin. But, can we be so naïve to expect an administration that has spent so much time manufacturing lies, hyping threats, underestimating costs, ignoring rational warnings, painting unrealistic futures, and viciously attacking its opponents will sit passively while the country is handed to their political enemies? If we start from the premise that this administration began its term in power through usurping it...

by Arthur Silber March 29, 2007 http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/03/when-deaths-of-innocent-do-not-matter.html Matt Taibbi describes with highly accurate precision the true nature of the pathetic, stinking charade that has just taken place in Congress : As for everyone else -- specifically, the Democrats who sponsored and passed the timetable measure -- they benefited from the bill most directly, riding a crest of antiwar sentiment and setting the Democrats up as the party that will look the best in the eyes of frustrated, war-fatigued voters in 2008. But lost amid all of this antiwar posturing were a series of inconvenient truths. One was that the bill was always going to be meaningless because Bush was always going to veto it, there were never going to be enough votes to override the veto, and everybody knew there were never going to be enough votes to override the veto. The second is that the timetable measure was buried in an emergency spending bill to pay for military ope...

by Rodrigue Tremblay April 2, 2007 "Today the world faces a single man armed with weapons of mass destruction, manifesting an aggressive, bullying attitude, who may well plunge the world into chaos and bloodshed if he miscalculates. This person, belligerent, arrogant, and sure of himself, truly is the most dangerous person on Earth. The problem is that his name is George W. Bush, and he is our president." - Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School, September 22, 2002 "When people speak to you about a preventive war, you tell them to go and fight it. After my experience, I have come to hate war. War settles nothing." - Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th president of the United States "Force always attracts men of low morality." - Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) When Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) muses aloud about how the U.S. Constitution could take care of a would-be dictator president, who is dismi...

War with Iran augurs a global conflict by Justin Raimondo March 30, 2007 Our "free" media is so eager to accept the official British explanation of why their sailors/Marines wound up in Iranian custody that most Western "news" accounts are ignoring all evidence to the contrary, such as the trenchant observation of former British diplomat Craig Murray: "The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker. But there are two colossal problems. "A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force. "B) Acce...

Let’s see. It took the bush one day to get to Washington, D.C. after the Sep 11 attacks. The slow-footed bush took three days to get to New Orleans after Katrina. It’s taken little georgie SIX weeks to inspect Walter Reed after the publication of the conditions the wounded veterans were enduring. How long you figure it’ll take him to get to the next disaster?

by Stephen Lendman 3/29/07 Emma Lazarus' memorable words on Lady Liberty's pedestal once had meaning as a new nation grew. No longer in a country hostile to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse, the homeless and many others not making the grade in a white supremacist Judeo-Christian state worshiping wealth and privilege. No welcome sign is out for the unwanted poor and desperate. At best, they're ignored to subsist on their own. At worst, they're scorned and abused, exploited and discarded like trash or labeled "terrorists" in a post-9/11 world of mass witch-hunt roundups aimed at Muslims because of their faith or country of origin and Latinos coming north to survive the fallout from NAFTA's destructive effects on their lives. Immigrants of color, the wrong faith or from the wrong parts of the world are never greeted warmly in "America the Beautiful" that's only for the privileged and no one else. They're not ...

British Marines Captured by Iran: Fake Maritime Boundaries By Craig Murray Global Research, March 28, 2007 Craig Murray Web Site I have been unpopular before, but the level of threats since I started blogging on the captured marines has got a bit scary. It is therefore with some trepidation that I feel obliged to point this out. The British Government has published a map showing the coordinates of the incident, well within an Iran/Iraq maritime border. The mainstream media and even the blogosphere has bought this hook, line and sinker. But there are two colossal problems. A) The Iran/Iraq maritime boundary shown on the British government map does not exist. It has been drawn up by the British Government. Only Iraq and Iran can agree their bilateral boundary, and they never have done this in the Gulf, only inside the Shatt because there it is the land border too. This published boundary is a fake with no legal force. B) Accepting the British coordinates for the position of both HMS Corn...

Pocket change, and don’t do it again. But, you send 5 bucks to a Muslim charity, you’re off to Guantanamo. ITT fined $100 million for illegal exports Manufacturer admits to exporting night vision materials to China, Singapore and Britain without U.S. authorization. March 27 2007: 1:32 PM EDT -- By CNN Producer Mike M. Ahlers http://money.cnn.com/2007/03/27/news/international/itt_export/index.htm WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The leading manufacturer of night vision gear for the Defense Department has admitted sending classified materials overseas and will pay a $100 million penalty, according to federal prosecutors, who say the actions of ITT Corp. have jeopardized the security of U.S. soldiers. ITT, based in Roanoke, Va., exported classified or sensitive technical data to China, Singapore and Britain without having obtained authorization from the United States, prosecutors said. The conviction is the first involving a major defense contractor violating the Arms Export Control Act, prosecutors s...