May 3, 2006 News
BBC’s coverage of Israeli-Palestinian conflict ‘misleading’
The BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “incomplete” and “misleading”, including failing to adequately report the hardships of Palestinians living under occupation, an independent review commissioned by the corporation’s board of governors has found.
Haitian president-elect turns to Cuba, Venezuela
It has been more than two years since Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who was elected with the overwhelming support of the people, was forced out of the country by U.S. officials and a right-wing “de facto” government was installed. Haitians are now waiting to see if their choice in the first election since then, President-elect René Préval, will be seated on May 14 as promised. Conditions in this impoverished country have only grown worse since the “coup-napping.”
¤ Mexico decriminalises drug possession
¤ Pakistan’s power shift
¤ When the President Joked About Not Finding WMD
¤ In Iraq, chaos by another name
¤ Torture doesn’t work
Exporting the American Model
After those weapons of mass destruction never appeared and Saddam’s al-Qaeda connection proved but a figment of the overly vivid neocon (and vice-presidential) imagination, the Bush administration wheeled out the shiniest of American exports, democracy. It had worked for Ronald Reagan in Central America in the 1980s, why not in Iraq, too? Suddenly, actual democratic elections, which administration officials had headed off or tried to contain from the moment Baghdad fell, were de rigueur, the very essence of our mission in Iraq, the true reason that we Americans were placed on this Earth. Who even recalled (or now recalls) the tawdry history of the American occupation, of the way L. Paul Bremer, our hapless viceroy in Baghdad, and his kleptomaniacal Coalition Provisional Authority did everything in their power, including canceling local elections, to ward off democracy or any significant expression of the popular will.
¤ Iraqi, 15, ‘drowned after soldiers forced him into canal’
¤ US guards kill ambulance crewman
¤ Eight killed in fresh Iraq violence
¤ Suicide bomber attacks Iraqi governor, 3 dead
¤ 14 Bodies Found in Baghdad
¤ 113 Killed in Russian Plane Crash
The worst president?
George W. Bush’s approval rating in an Opinion Research Corporation poll conducted for CNN this week is 32 percent. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone magazine has an excellent article on Bush by Princeton professor Sean Wilentz titled “The Worst President in History?” Comedian Jeff Foxworthy has a famous routine listing things that indicate you might be a redneck. Well, there are things that may indicate whether Bush is the worst president in history.
¤ A reverse thousand days
¤ Bush’s nuclear madness
¤ New Army documents reveal US knew of and approved torture
¤ Colbert comedy skit angers Bush, aides
¤ U.S. predicts U.N. support for sanctions in Iran
¥ Even thought the UN denies the US they could still attack eg Iraq
¤ Terrorist Attacks Rose Sharply in 2005
¤ United 93, anti-war sentiment, and illegal CEOs
Bull in a China Shop
Diplomacy is the art of discreetly convincing other nations to do things you want them to do by convincing them it’s in their best interests. The deft French have turned diplomacy into an art form, both in foreign and boudoir affairs. Few, by contrast, would accuse the Bush Administration of any diplomatic finesse. To the contrary, the current administration more often than not acts with all the subtly and tact of an angry bull in a china shop.
¤ Gouge and Profit
¤ Just Saying No to Imperial Intervention in Sudan
¤ Tough on Crime, to Hell With the Causes of Crime if They Make Money
May 2, 2006 News
¤ US counts cost of day without immigrants
¤ Suicide Car Bomber Targets Afghan Convoy
¤ Slaughter in Kashmir ‘will not halt peace effort’
¤ Millions mark America’s ‘day without immigrants’
Strikes on Iran too risky, says US general
Military action against Iran would be fraught with risk and would have repercussions across the region, a leading American general conceded.
¤ Outed CIA agent was working on Iran
¤ UK troops ‘doomed to fail’ in Afghanistan
¤ The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush
The United States May Have to Live With a Nuclear Iran
Unbelievably, a belligerent Bush administration is trying to rattle the saber again against Iran, because of its defiance of the United Nations Security Council’s resolution against Iran’s nuclear program. In the long term, such blustering by a superpower is only likely to speed the efforts of Iran and other countries with nuclear aspirations to get atomic weapons.
¤ Iraq future uncertain three years after Bush ‘mission accomplished’ speech
¤ Four Iraqis killed, protesters demand better security in Baghdad
¤ Three locals killed in Iraq
¤ Israeli troops kill Palestinian woman
¤ Howard Dean: ‘Culture of corruption’
¤ Happy ‘Mission Accomplished’ Day!
¤ Bush challenges hundreds of laws
¤ Iran Pushes for Talks With U.S. on Nukes, Security
¤ 300,000 March in Manhattan at Anti-War Protest
Iran – Inside Bush’s Brain
Understandably, since the publication of Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article about secret Bush Administration planning for an air attack on Iran, there’s been a lot of speculation about what’s going to happen. Will George Bush and Karl Rove dare to reprise their Iraq ploy and once again bang the drums for war just before an off-year election? Will Dubya actually pull the nuclear trigger? While pundits have explored the policy and political consequences of an attack on Iran, they’ve ignored an equally important consideration: How does President Bush actually make decisions? And, what does this suggest that he’s going to do about Iran?
¤ The Israel Lobby
¤ Take Back the Oil Companies!
¤ The War on Terror on the Lodi Front
¤ Iranian envoy asks U.N. to stop U.S. threats
¤ Bomb Hidden in Minibus Kills 2 Iraqis
¤ Has a clearness of the purpose been lost?
¤ Immigrant protests hit US
¤ Bolivia nationalises gas industry
¤ Bolivian President Seizes Gas Industry
May 1, 2006 News
Evidence of Fraud Found by Iraq Audit
An American initiative to use private security companies to protect Iraq’s oil and power infrastructure collapsed amid reports of possible fraud, missing weapons and destroyed documents, according to a federal audit released Saturday. Under a program named Task Force Shield, the U.S. paid two security firms $147 million to train and equip tens of thousands of Iraqis to safeguard oil pipelines and transmission towers, the audit found.
Billions wasted in Iraq, says US audit
In one case, the inspection team found that three years after the invasion only six of 150 health centres proposed for Iraq had been completed by a US contractor, in spite of 75% of the $186m (£100m) allocated having been spent.
¤ U.S., EU split on handling nuke defiance
¤ Report on Iraq Reconstruction Is Mixed
¤ Why shouldn’t Iran have nuclear weapons?
Putting a Smiley Face on Disaster
U.S. military spokesman in Iraq sure picked a weird day to put a smiley face on the situation over there. “All indications now are that the acts of violence—ethnosectarian violence is decreasing,” said Major General Rick Lynch from Baghdad on Thursday, according to the New York Times. I’m not sure what all those indications are that Major General Lynch was referring to. I doubt he was referring to the fact that on that very day, the sister of Iraq’s vice president was gunned down in a drive-by killing.
¤ Bush’s misbegotten Iran plan
¤ ‘I’m Already Against the Next War’
¤ U.S. rejects Iran inspection offer
¤ American rhetoric against Iran reminiscent of run-up to Iraq war
¤ Rice: U.S. may press Iran not only via UN on nuclear issue
¤ Bush challenges hundreds of laws
¤ Toll mounts as Sri Lanka’s peace falters
¤ U.S. Prepares for ‘Day Without Immigrants’
¤ Wiseguy Bush sends in the clones
¤ EU Imposes More Trade Sanctions on U.S.
¤ The U.S. Embassy will be the De facto Capital of Iraq
¤ Giving the President a Pink Slip in New York City
¤ Hideous Kinky
¤ Massive protests in NY demand end of Iraq war
¤ Arab League to pay Palestinian salaries
¤ Stephen Colbert Speaks Truth to Power
¤ The case against sanctions on Iran
¤ Movie Promotion Confused With Bomb in L.A.
¤ Dollar starts the big slide against major currencies
¤ ‘Taking Out’ Iran’s Nuclear Facilities: Not So Fast
¤ Puerto Rico Closes Government Offices
“Flight 93” the movie, why?
Why would anyone make a 9/11 movie based on a number of cell and air phone calls that might have been scientifically impossible on September 11, 2001, simply because the technology couldn’t handle calls of that distance, six to seven miles up. Well, they made Flight 93 because the calls were used as spin-evidence that a band of brave Americans fought off a smaller vicious band of terrorists, when in fact the entire event is surrounded in a mire of questions? Like the once-quarried bog that supposedly swallowed Flight 93’s 757 in a grassy field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, leaving a smoking hole, grave deep, some 20 by 10 feet wide, and little else.
¤ How Did Human Remains End Up Miles From Flight 93’s Crash Site?
¤ Oil ‘will hit $100 by winter’
Robert Fisk: Seen through a Syrian lens,
In Syria, the world appears through a glass, darkly. As dark as the smoked windows of the car which takes me to a building on the western side of Damascus where a man I have known for 15 years – we shall call him a “security source”, which is the name given by American correspondents to their own powerful intelligence officers – waits with his own ferocious narrative of disaster in Iraq and dangers in the Middle East.
Calls for resignation are meaningless without any changes in policy
If the war on terror is a plan to preserve and promote the values of the civilised world against barbarism, then nobody told Mohammed al-Kahtani. Since Kahtani has been incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, he has been stripped naked and straddled by a taunting female guard, made to wear knickers on his head and a bra, and told that his mother was a whore. He has been shaved, held on a leash and forced to bark like a dog, put in isolation for five months in a cell continuously flooded with artificial light, deprived of heat, treated to a fake kidnapping and pumped with large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet so that he urinated on himself.