Coalition...? Of the willing...?

It's really long past time to put paid to the Dubbyuh's myth about a "coalition" in Iraq. Of the 28 countries represented in the "Coalition", only 8 have contingents of greater than 500 troops.

As it stands now, 7 countries have pulled out, 3 are planning to pull out and 5 are planning to reduce their troops strenght with upcoming rotations. Only Armenia and Fiji (as part of a UN force) are planning new troop deployments to Iraq.

With few exceptions, the "Coalition" members were strong-armed or bribed into provide support for the war in Iraq, either in terms of manpower or in non-material support, such as flyovers and staging areas or simply statements of support for the war.

We cannot, however, belittle the sacrifices made by those "Coalition" troops anymore than we can those made by our own troops in Iraq. They are there at the orders of their government, just as our troops are. That those orders are in support of an illegal and illegitimate war is no fault of their own. It is the politicians who use them as disposable pawns in a ruthless game of realpolitik who are at fault. And as more and more people around the world and in the US realize the gross error made in invading Iraq, the smaller the "Coalition" will become, and the fewer Americans will be willing to participate in the hugely dangerous exercise in foreign adventurism that Iraq is. At that point, the Administration will either have to change its policy regarding Iraq or institute a draft to provide sufficient numbers of troops to secure the country.

So long as America bears the vast majority of the costs and casualties in Iraq, there really is no coalition...There is only us, and we will pay the price for this debacle for decades to come.

Time to take off the rose colored glasses

The recipe for civil war

By Pepe Escobar

Najaf was bombed in August. Samarra was bombed in September. Sadr City was bombed in October. Fallujah was bombed in November. Mosul may be bombed in December. And Kirkuk may be bombed in January.

This is the calendar in the runup to the Iraqi elections set for January 30 next year. Then there will be another set of questions. Will the Iraqi elections be stolen? Will votes "disappear"? Instead of Florida or Ohio, will there be demands for recounts in Fallujah and Samarra? Like Ukrainians in Kiev, will Sunnis in Baghdad take to the streets contesting the results of their elections? Will interim premier Iyad Allawi - with a little help from his Washington friends - prevail?

With most of the recent insurgent violence directed at Iraqi civilians rather than US forces, the conflict in Iraq is taking a nasty turn for the worse. A similar pattern of attacks heralded the begining of Lebanon's long civil-war. Mosul, which Ayahd Allawi can't even claim to control already in the grips of a bitter internecine struggle as Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'ites and other smaller factions, battle for control of the city. Matters took a turn for the worse in Mosul as Sheikh Faidh Muhammad Amin al-Faidhi was assasinated this past Monday. al-Faidhi, a Sunni, was well respected by Shi'ites and Kurds, and wielded a great deal of influence with the Association of Muslim Scholars, which was calling for an election boycott.

But our American Nero continues to fiddle and his puppet, Ayad Allawi, continues to insist that elections will go forward as planned in January. Unless the security situation changes drastically for the better, however, any meaningful elections are an impossibility. Iraq will continue to degenerate into a full blown civil-war as American forces stand helplessly by in their fortified compounds.



- Why don't they ever listen? -

Bobble-head Congress

Each branch of government -- legislative, executive and judicial -- has some constitutionally structured means of preventing the other branches from abusing power, since all power, in theory, derives from We, the People. Yet, as never before, the three branches are working in collusion. The result is that the office of the presidency is accountable to no body, and the Constitution can be flouted, American people lied to and political enemies destroyed with nary a whimper from anyone in Washington. The Congress is now an assemblage of 535 yes-men and women, as unimpressive a group of lackies as has ever disgraced the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol. While one need only pick a week, any week, to confirm this, the past week has been particularly instructive.

Imagine, if you would, 535 bobble-head figures all nodding yes and you would have Congress as it now stands. With only a few exceptions, no member in either house of Congress has been willing to tackle the White House head on on any issue. Rather than serving as a check to urestrained presidential power, Congress has become complicit in the Bush administration's rampant disregard for the Constitution they are all sworn to "...protect and defend from all enemies, foreign and domestic..." They have become the enemy. But our founding fathers provided us with the justification neccessary to remove the stain upon their memory and the Republic the fought and died for..."all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The Bush administration has become destructive to these ends, and it is past time to seek their removal. By impeachment or election or by such means as were used by Mahatma Gandhi to bring down the British rule in India. It is time. No, it is past time...

Social Insecurity

Never mind the $2 trillion spending gap if Dubbyuh's scheme for social security privatization gets pushed through Congress. According to a study comissioned by Paul O'Neil while he was Secretary of Treasury, the Fiscal Imbalance, the current federal debt held by the public plus the value in today's dollars of all projected non-interest spending, minus all projected federal receipts, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $51 trillion. That's nearly 5 years worth of the total current US GDP to pay for future expenditiures, primarily in the form of Social Security payouts as well Medicare and Medicaide claims. Sound fiscal policy mandates a fiscal imbnalance of zero...zip...nada.

This information was supressed by Dubbyuh's White House, but was revealed by economist Laurence Kotlikoff in a book entitled "The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America's Economic Future"which was released last spring, so both presidential candidates had the information available to them, both failed to address it. This is the "economic Armageddon" Stephen Roach, of Morgan-Stanley, spoke of recently. It is a case of "fiscal child abuse" because, unless we deal with this problem now, our descendents will be paying for it for the foreseeable future. According to Mr. Kotlikoff if a 78% tax rate were to be imposed now, we might just cover the expense. If we wait 5 years, that tax rate would jump to 84%. There is no easy way to solve this problem and it will require sacrifices on the part of all of us, and soon, to dodge this bullet. But the easy way seems to be the only way Dubbyuh and his merry band seem willing to entertain. Or at least any way which benefits Dubbyuh' political pimps and johns, the rest of us can suck hind tit.

All hail to Caligula's horse

Bush's new head of homeland security is perfect for the job

Sidney Blumenthal,
Thursday December 9, 2004

In the legend of the war on terrorism, Bernard Kerik, with his trademark shaven head, bristling moustache and black belt in karate, occupies a special place as rough and ready hero. Having risen from military policeman to narcotics detective to New York City police commissioner, he finds himself on 9/11 shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Rudy Giuliani. As the towers crumble the mayor confides in his buddy: "Bernie, thank God George Bush is president."

In line with other second-term cabinet appointments - Alberto Gonzales as attorney general, Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state - Kerik will be an enforcer, a loyalist and an incompetent. The resemblance is less to Inspector Clouseau or Chauncy Gardner than to Caligula's horse.

Dubbyuh is only further insulating himself from the realities of the world he is creating. Unable to acknowledge, let alone accept responsibility for, his errors and their tragic consequences he is appointing dogmatically, fanatically loyal people to his cabinet in order to protect his fragile psyche. We have, ladies and gentlemen, an oedipal, narcisstic psychopath occupying the Oval Office. Be afraid.

In Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania, 1+1 doesn't equal 2

Prof. says vote numbers don't add up

By Rob Zaleski,
December 9, 2004

Surely there must be some logical explanation.

That's the first thing Steven Freeman thought the night of Nov. 2, after exit polls showing that John Kerry would win most of the key battleground states turned out to be wrong, and George W. Bush ended up being re-elected by nearly 3.5 million votes...

Either the exit polls were off or the count was off, says Freeman, who has a Ph.D. in organizational studies from MIT.

"And beyond that, every deviation was in the same direction" - showing more support for Kerry than the actual vote - "so I thought that ought to be explained as well. And the more I looked into it, the more interesting it was."...

...Freeman concluded in a paper on Nov. 10 - a paper, by the way, he has revised twice since - that the odds of exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were roughly 662,000 to 1...

One stands a better chance of dying in a plane crash.

"Citing the disturbing fact that official results diverged sharply from a range of surveys of voters a polling places, Republican Senator Richard G. Lugar said, "A concerted and forceful program of election-day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the leadership or cooperation of governmental authorities." - Greg Palast

But the good Senator from Indiana wasn't talking about US elections, he was talking about elections in Ukraine, whose Supreme Court has since ruled the elections invalid and ordered new elections.

The Scum Also Rises...Part 2

Prisoner abuse was worse than officials admitted, documents show

By Drew Brown

Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - More than two months after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq shocked the world, an official memo described how military intelligence officers witnessed further prisoner abuse in Baghdad but were threatened to prevent them from reporting it.

The memo was the most recent in a collection of government documents released Tuesday. It was dated June 25 and written by Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, who directs the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lowell described how two DIA officers, assigned as interrogators to a special operations unit designated as Task Force 6-26, witnessed evidence of prisoner abuse while working at an unnamed "temporary detention facility" in Baghdad.

The extensive collection of government documents suggests that abuse of detainees in Iraq and elsewhere was more widespread and systematic than senior officials have admitted publicly. The officials repeatedly have tried to characterize abuse last year at Abu Ghraib as an isolated series of incidents. A small number of low-ranking soldiers already have been prosecuted or are awaiting trial in these cases.

The documents released Tuesday, however, reveal that senior U.S. officials, who claimed they were unaware of the abuse, were repeatedly informed of accusations of abuse through official channels. They also suggest that these and other reports of abuse failed to trigger investigations into what increasingly appears to have been a widespread pattern of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, Iraq and at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba.

In a memo sent upranks by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, the abuse of prisoners was described, but only as a "problem", not as a matter requiring corrective action. This memo went to Stephen J. Cambone, Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence. Mr. Cambone reports to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. So knowledge of ongoing abuse of prisoners in Iraq goes all the way up to Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who...did...nothing.

In condoning what was torture, nothing more or less, the Bush adminstration only further stiffened resistance to US forces in Iraq and further jeopardized the lives of any US troops who should fall into guerilla hands. The aggressive indifference of the Administration to these reports is simply a measure of the unfitness to command, at any level, of the members of this Administration.

The C.A.S.E. for recounting Ohio's votes.

The sunshine and brillant blue sky mocked the enthusiastic crowd in front of Ohio's statehouse today, as biting winds rattled the trees and sent flags snapping on their masts. The crowd had gathered for a rally sponsored by Citizens’ Alliance for Secure Elections. C.A.S.E. is a non-partisan organization of people from all over Ohio working to ensure reliability, security and access for all Ohio voters.

As I arrived, "The Carpenter Ants", warmed the crowd up with their mix of soul/gospel/bluegrass tunes. As they finished their set, Susan Truit, a founding member of C.A.S.E., stepped up to begin presenting speakers at the rally.

The speakers included Anita Rios, Co-Chair of the US Green Party; Judith Powell, a local black activist; Reuben Herrera, Chairman of Adelante - Latino/Latina Democrats, Greg Moore of the NAACP; John Bonifaz, founder of and and general counsel to the National Voting Rights Institute; Harvey Wasserman, senior editor of "The Columbus Free Press"; Bob Fitrakis editor of "The Columbus Free Press" and Greg Palast, BBC documentarian, investigative journalist and irritant to all of the right people.


The goal of the rally was to gather support for action leading to a timely and accurate recount of all of Ohio's ballots from the 2004 election. Standing in the way of this is Ohio Secretary of State and chairman of Ohio's committee to re-elect the president, J. Kenneth Blackwell.

While Mr. Blackwell could have certified the election results as early as December 2nd he has, instead, chosen to wait until December 6th. This is one day before he certifies Ohio's electors. Two lawsuits to attempt to force Blackwell to certify the results earlier were denied in the federal courts as the courts determined "no harm" would be done to the plaintiffs as a result of delaying the vote certification. Of course, the harm done by an illegitimate presidency to the nation as a whole is irrelevant.

For more the full rundown on election issues in Ohio, go here:

The FreePress

Greg Palast at C.A.S.E. rally in Columbus, Ohio

The Scum also Rises

U.S. lawyers file complaint over abuses in Abu Ghraib
Rumsfeld, others named in case taken to German court

SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER NEWS SERVICES

BERLIN -- A group of American civil rights attorneys filed a criminal complaint in German court yesterday against top U.S. authorities, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for acts of torture committed at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The complaint also names former CIA Director George Tenet; the former commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez; and seven other military leaders.

Attorneys from the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights said they filed the complaint because they were disappointed in U.S. investigations into the Abu Ghraib abuses and hoped the filing would prompt an investigation by German authorities.

Just how wrong have things gone in this country, when a foreign government is asked to look into the misdeeds of our own government? Ever since the attrocities at Abu Ghraib were revealed, the Bush administration ahs stone-walled or quashed any investigation into it.

But with the revelations of the DOJ memos approved by Alberto Gonzales and IRC reports of conditions at Guantanamo Bay being nothing short of torture, the moral bankruptcy of Dubbyuh's administration is being revealed. The attrocities at Abu Ghraib and the mistreatment and torture of detainees at Gitmo show a government dedicated, not to the ideals of "freedom loving people", but rather one dedicated to power at any cost...achievement of the ends by any means necessary...a callous disregard for human suffering. To win the "War on Terror", our government must live up to the ideals it so blatantly pays lip service to. Otherwise the war is lost, the terrorists will have won, not because of their moral or military superiority, but because of the weakness, the shortsightedness, the hypocrisy and utter moral bankruptcy of our elected leaders.

Fallujah and Jeddah, A Tale of Two Cities

Fallujah...A hotbed of anti-American activity in Iraq. Or, at least it was until the USMC rolled over it. Of course, the guerillas simply rolled up their operations and moved them elsewhere. So, while our Marines get capped by second and third stringers in the insurgency, the big boys(on both sides) run the show from a safe distance.

Also of interest is Fallujah's historical ties to Wahhabism. Ibn Abdul Wahhab spent many years in what is now Iraq and Saudi Arabia, and spread his teachings through out the region. His area of influence also encompassed what is now Fallujah, and for nearly two centuries that city has had a strong wahhabi following which even Saddam Hussein could not supress. Their dedication to a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam makes Jerry Falwell look like a drunken sybarite.

Now, let us turn to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Today, the US consulate compound came under attack from unknown Islamic terrorists. While no US personnel were injured, eight people are known dead with two of the attackers captured. While Saudi authorities attribute the attacks to a "deviant group", a common catch-phrase for followers of Osama bin Laden, it should be noted that Osama and the House of Saud spring from the same philosophical roots...Wahhabism.

Now, US forces are mopping up in Fallujah and, in the process, desecrated several mosques and sites sacred to the al-Muwahhiddun, or Wahhabis an attack is made on a US compound in Saudi Arabia. Now, with the Saudis brutally efficient secret police network, they should have caught this attack before it happened. There is every evidence that the attackers were well trained in small-unit tactics and were wearing combat fatigues and flack-jackets. Could there have been support for this attack from inside the Saudi state or even the government?

But this is just paranoid speculation...Or is it?

And Nero fiddles...

Surprise! The dollar is continuing its slide, accelerated somewhat by last weeks disappointing employment numbers. Economists were expecting in the neighborhood of 200,000 jobs, only about 112,000 were created.

As a result, Japan is now threatening a huge dollar sell-off to protect its fragile economic recovery. According to Kaoru Yosano, chairman of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party's policy committee, Japan is going to ask for a strong dollar policy from Dubbyuh's administration that amounts to something more than vague talk. Japan is also going to ask other G7 nations to demand that the Administration deal with the massive deficits that are the driving force behind the dollars slide.

But when we look at the policy stance of Dubbyuh's administration, social security privatization and tax-cuts, will deliver a $2 trillion plus hit to the US budget in the years to come. This could lead the US to a situation similar to Argentina, which followed similar policies and wound up defaulting on $100 billion in foreign debt in 2001. Given the size of the US economy, its outstanding debt overseas and its foreign trade deficit, the effects of such a collapse in the US are magnified far beyond the scale of what happened in Argentina.

The situation is reaching a point where Stephen Roach, of Morgan-Stanley, gives the US only a 10% chance of avoiding "economic Armageddon". This bearish outlook is being echoed by many others in the economic community.

The fact that Dubbyuh and his merry band don't find anything particularly worrisome here should give us all pause to wonder just how long our very own American Nero is going to continue to fiddle. With the US soaking up nearly $2.6 billion a day over overseas just to keep the doors open in Washington, one cannot help but wonder when the excrement is going to intersect the fan-blade. When it does, don't blame me...I didn't vote for his dumb ass.

Our only consolation is that the mid-term elections in '06 will allow us to put those members of congress, who have permitted the administration to spend tax-dollars like a drunken sailor on liberty, out to pasture. Hopefully, it won't be too late at that point, but it's not looking good.