THE WORLDPEACE JOURNAL
a personal perspective of current events

FREEDOM FIGHTERS (those who are trying to liberate their lands from foreign occupation like the Palestinians and the Iraqis.)
TERRORISTS (those who are trying to destabilize legitimate governments like AlQueda)

For the most comprehensive and least edited news of Iraq from both US and Middle News go to Professor Juan Cole's web page at http://www.juancole.com .  Juan Cole is Professor of History at the University of Michigan. 

June 17, 2004

RELIGION - From the beginning to the end of this week's annual gathering of Southern Baptists in Indianapolis, the two themes filled the air ? a celebration of their conservative movement within their denomination and a lament over social trends they decry as increasingly secular, hostile to Christianity and friendly to homosexuality.  As they concluded their annual meeting yesterday, Southern Baptists celebrated the 25th anniversary of the start of a political movement that shifted the nation's largest denomination to the right, along with its agencies and its seminaries in Louisville and elsewhere.  But speaker after speaker thundered against gay marriage, abortion, "secularism" and other social trends they view as signs of national decay. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040617a.htm * The reality is that secular society is democratic and inclusive and Christianity is autocratic and exclusive.  In addition, the Christian bureaucracy, like all religious bureaucracies is more concerned with preserving the bureaucracy than with spreading the word of Jesus.  The teachings of Jesus was undeniably one of anti-bureaucratic religion. For an ongoing example of the evils of religious bureaucracies go to http://www.presbyterians-r-us.com

IRAQ - Guerrillas blew up one of Iraq's main oil-export pipelines yesterday for the second time in two days, forcing a shutdown of the country's economic lifeline. A spate of pipeline attacks has underscored the vulnerability of Iraq's economy to the guerrillas as they try to scuttle U.S. efforts to install an Iraqi government friendly to America.  In the middle of the night, saboteurs blew open a pipeline just outside the southern oil port of Basra, forcing a shutdown of the line that is likely to last for several days, officials in Iraq told reporters. The attacks this week have cut off exports via Iraq's two Persian Gulf oil terminals, while Iraq's other export route - a pipeline from northern Iraq to the Turkish port of Ceyhan - has been closed for several weeks.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040617b.htm * There can be no doubt that Bush's crusade in the Middle East is a diaster.  Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.  This is what happens when foreign policy is based on guns instead of diplomacy and when lies are told by the President of the United States for the sole purpose of manipulating the people.  The Zionist fundamentalist Christian influence in the White House and Washington in general is a detriment to democracy and an impediment to peace.  It is my hope that when we elect a President in 2008, he or she will be a younger man or woman who is not a product of the American wars of the 20th Century and is a believer in God and in a secular society without the influence of religious fanatics who spread lies and deceit and manifest wars allegedly in the name of God.

AMERICAN HEALTH INSURANCE CRISIS - Almost 82 million people in the United States or one in three under age 65 had no health insurance for at least one month in the past two years, a study by a consumer group said on Wednesday.  Nearly two-thirds of those people had no insurance for at least six months during 2002 and 2003, and just over half went without benefits for at least nine months, according to the study by Washington-based Families USA.  Many of the uninsured had middle-class incomes and live in presidential battleground states where a pollster said voters' fears of losing their health benefits could tip the balance.  "The growing number of Americans without health insurance is now a phenomenon that significantly affects middle-class and working families," said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040617c.htm * The reason that Americans are uninsured is simply due to the large influence of the insurance lobby in Washington.  Bush backs the corporations to the detriment of the people.  Some solution must be found where young adults are encouraged to become doctors and health scientists while at the same time allowing profits for insurance companies.  For people to suffer in sickness in a country that is on the cutting edge of medical science is a travesty.  

BUSHWAH - The New York Times on Thursday called on President George W Bush to apologise to the American people for going to war on Iraq after an official probe into the September 11 attacks found no evidence linking Iraq and al-Qaeda.  "Now President Bush should apologise to the American people, who were led to believe something different," the Times editorial said.  "Of all the ways Mr Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040617d.htm  *  This is nto the only lie that Bush told.  He lied about everything regarding Iraq.  And unfortunately, the legacy of those lies is going to be long lived as Iraq more than likely erupts in civil war.  The US aligned interim government is not acceptible to the people.  A recent poll showed that only 2% of the Iraqis perceive the US as liberators as opposed to occupiers.  Nation building is an awesome task and Bush never had the mental ability or the compassion to deal with it.  His "might makes right" mindset is archaic.  Bush will go down as one of the worst President in American History.  The sad thing is that John Kerry is a faceless bureaucrat.  The only redeeming thing about Kerry is that he is not Bush.


May 30, 2004

ENVIRONMENT - New research shows that much less sunlight is reaching the earth than 50 years ago. "Global dimming", as it has inevitably become called, has been suspected for nearly 20 years, since a Swiss geography researcher, routinely checking sunshine levels across Europe in 1985, found that they had dropped, even on the brightest days. Studies all around the world found similar results, showing drops in sunlight ranging from 2 to 37 per cent since the 1950s.  The research, published in Science, is the first to prove that the dimming is a global phenomenon. Scientists at the New Jersey and California Institutes of Technology remembered how Leonardo da Vinci had worked out that the dark side of the moon was illuminated by sunlight reflected from the Earth. By measuring this "Earthshine" they worked out that the world is about 10 per cent darker than half a century ago. Scientists are divided over whether global dimming is a natural phenomenon or caused by pollution, such as soot particles emitted from car exhausts, and global warming, which evaporates more water from the Earth, causing more clouds. Professor Philip R Goode, who led the study, told The Independent on Sunday that the way the dimming has varied suggests that it may be a natural phenomenon.  Whatever the cause, there could be massive effects on farming and on attempts to capture solar energy as the earth "dims down".

May 19, 2004

The crush of same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses in the first state to legalize them was all but gone Tuesday. But the national debate about gay marriage appeared far from over.  One day after town clerks began implementing an order by Massachusetts' highest court to legalize same-sex marriage, couples continued to file for licenses, but with little of the fanfare that accompanied Monday's historic first wave. More than 1,000 couples sought marriage licenses Monday, according to a survey of the state's largest cities and towns by the Associated Press.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040519a.htm * It is a good thing that these people have achieved some measure of equality in society.  Secular society is democratic while sectarian society is autocratic.  Supposedly, the religious bureaucrats of all religions have mandates from God that allow them to abuse children, rape women, and steal money from church coffers.  God is in fact democratic.  That is why the world is so diverse.  It is only the exclusionary doctrine and dogma of religious bureaucracies that try to manipulate the world's population to keep "other than normal" people as second class citizens.  Of course the "other than normal" classification applies most definitely to all women.

May 18, 2004

HUMAN RIGHTS - With America's reputation at its lowest ebb in years, the US State Department published its annual promotion of human rights report, conceding the prisoner abuse scandal was a huge "cloud" over its mission, the British Telegraph newspaper reported Tuesday.  The report summarizes actions in 101 countries to promote freedom and to end abuses, including torture, the very crime American soldiers are accused of in Iraq, the paper said.  The paper quoted Lorne Craner, US assistant secretary of state responsible for promoting human rights and democracy, as saying that the awful images of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison hampered America's ability to promote human rights.  "This was a cloud obscuring what we tried to do on democracy issues. And we want to punch through the cloud and say we are not going to give up on democracy and human rights promotion," Craner was quoted as saying.  "We got things wrong and we are going to fix it," Craner told the paper.  The paper also said that in an implicit rebuke for the neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, who promoted the idea of transplanting democracy to the Middle East, Craner made it clear that America's mission had to be less ambitious.  "We can't implant democracy everywhere," Craner said. * The arrogance of George Bush took America into an unprovoked invasion of Iraq based on the lie that there were weapons of mass destruction and an Osama Saddam link.  Only later did it become a war to promote democracy in the Middle East.  Military invasions can never be the source of peace and democracy when the invasion is unprovoked.  Such a concept is totally stupid and only the neo-Nazis in the Bush administration would try to feed such a ridiculous concept to the American people.  What is worse is that they were initially successful.

May 17, 2004

IRAQ - Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday that what he had called "the most dramatic" element of his Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations was "inaccurate and discredited."  The presentation, considered a key in convincing allies and the American people that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, claimed the existence of mobile biological-weapons laboratories.  "When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me," Powell said yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press."  "It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed, and I regret it," he said.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040517c.htm * And with that, Mr. Powell says he is sorry to the families of almost 1,000 dead American soldiers and close to 5,000 wounded and maimed in Iraq.  Mr. Powell is regretful.  Not sorry.  Just regrets it.  He is saying that the CIA is stupid or liars or both.  He just read what was given him.  George Bush is really a great guy.  And life is great at the White House.  I wish that he would have said that he is just stupid and that when he was the Chief of Staff we were not in danger of his inability to sort through data for the truth.  I wish that he would resign but since he is one of the few moderate voices in the Bush administration, he would be replaced by another neo-Nazi which would be detrimental for us all.  I guess we will have to accept his regrets.  Many of those dead soldiers can have that put on their grave stones.  "Colin Powell is regretful that I am dead".  And when the children of those dead soldiers go to school, they can tell their friends that Colin Powell is regretful that their daddies and mommies are dead.

AIDS - The U.S. government has opened a new front in the battle over getting cheap AIDS drugs to the poorest countries that need them, saying it will consider approving and providing cheap, multiple-dose generics.  U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson said on Sunday the Food and Drug Administration would give fast-track approval to new ready-made, single dose cocktails -- even to copycats made in India.  U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randal Tobias said any drugs approved under the program could then be used in programs across Africa and the Caribbean, under which the United States is targeting $15 billion in aid to the countries hardest-hit by the epidemic.  Many groups, including some members of Congress, have been pressuring the U.S. government to use the cheap, multiple dose combinations. Medecins Sans Frontiers, known also as Doctors Without Borders, has been distributing them in 20 countries and say they are both cheaper and easier to take.  But the U.S. government has resisted, saying the copycats may not be safe. AIDS groups have accused the government of catering to big pharmaceutical companies that make the brand-name drugs under lucrative patents. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040517b.htm  * It is a good thing that the Bush administration is finally doing something to provide cheap AIDS drugs to the world. However, the truth is that Bush is a liar and we can expect that the will renege on his commitment.  In the meantime, AIDS is spreading around the world and people are dying.   In the meantime, killing Iraqis is more important than saving AIDS victims.  If you are trying to do something about the world's population, one method of death is as good as another.  I guess this will help Bush get his foreign relations budget in line.  No people.  No budget.  

IRAQ - A suicide car bomber killed the head of Iraq's Governing Council Monday, increasing fears that instability will make a new Iraqi government unable to function when U.S. occupiers hand it power in six weeks.  The killing of Izzedin Salim dealt another major blow to the U.S.-led coalition, battling a Shi'ite Muslim insurgency and a growing scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners.  Salim, a Shi'ite who edited several newspapers, was in the last car of a council convoy waiting to enter the "Green Zone" coalition headquarters when the bomb exploded at a checkpoint in central Baghdad, killing six people.  Governing Council members were clearly among the targets of increased terrorism in Iraq, said Mahmoud Othman, who sits on the U.S.-backed council.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040517a.htm  *  The message seems to be that anything imposed by America is to be killed.  Iraq is determined to rule itself, even if it means civil war.  In the end, Americans are going to have to clean up Bush's Iraq mess for decades to come.  There is no righteous way out of Iraq.  Nothing was learned from Vietnam because little George did not go to Vietnam.  The news from Iraq has been bad every since we defeated these people.  The only good thing that can come out of Iraq is the removal of Bush from office.  If we can remove Bush from office, peace may actually have a chance.  Get rid of Ariel Sharon and his neo-Nazi Zionists and tension in the Middle East will definitely reduce.

May 14, 2004

IRAQ - MORE MONEY MORE MONEY MORE MONEY - Top Pentagon and Bush budget officials faced a skeptical Senate committee yesterday as they tried to convince committee members to support an ambiguous $25 billion reserve fund to finance the Iraq war.  "It's unusual," conceded acting Pentagon comptroller Lawrence Lanzillotta in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.  "It's the first of a kind and we want to make certain that it is in conformity with the traditional practices to the extent we can so that we can maintain our oversight," said committee Chairman Sen. John Warner (R-Va.). "This is a very significant sum of taxpayers' money over which Congress must exercise its appropriate oversight."  Congress' main check on the White House's wide-ranging authority is its power to approve federal spending, and it jealously guards this right. The $25 billion reserve fund represents a departure from that constitutional arrangement. It would give the Pentagon the right to spend the money in any way it wants for Iraq and Afghanistan, with almost no input from Congress.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040514d.htm * The last thing we need to do is to give the Pentagon and its neo fascists a blank check.  To do that would almost guarantee an invasion of Syria and some kind of incursion into Cuba.  It is time for the idiocy to stop.  It is time to impeach the President for his lies and crimes against humanity.

IRAQ - THE DESECRATION OF HOLY PLACES - The golden dome of the Shrine of Imam Ali, one of the most sacred sites for Shiite Muslims, was hit by what appeared to be four gunshots in fighting Friday between U.S. soldiers and militiamen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.  Four holes, each about 12 inches by 8 inches, were seen on the landmark structure by an Associated Press reporter.  The holes appeared to have been caused by machine gun fire but it was unclear which side was responsible. Three were on one side of the dome and one on another.  During their crackdown on al-Sadr's militia, U.S. forces have been careful to avoid damage to shrines in Najaf and other holy cities for fear of enraging Iraq's Shiite majority.  Al-Sadr's spokesman, Qays al-Khazali, told The Associated Press that the Americans were responsible. He carried the casing of a bullet that he wrapped up in a paper tissue.  "I picked this up from the shrine. Only Americans have such bullets," he said outside al-Sadr's office near the shrine.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040514c.htm * It seems that George and his Crusaders are intent on attacking Islam's most sacred sites.  All this will give justification to the Zionists to destroy the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in preparation for rebuilding their temple.  Either George Bush is the most ignorant man on the planet or he in fact intends to make war on Islam on behalf of the Zionists and the Fundamentalist Apocalyptic Christians.

PALESTINE - Palestinian militants blew up two Israeli soldiers in an armored jeep in southern Gaza on Friday, witnesses said, in the third deadly ambush this week against the Middle East's mightiest army.  The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, part of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, said they destroyed an armored jeep in the Rafah refugee camp while soldiers were demolishing homes to widen a nearby corridor on the Gaza-Egypt border.  The attack occurred not far from the spot where militants blew up a troop carrier on Wednesday, killing five Israelis, and while soldiers were still scouring the sandy soil for remains of their dead comrades. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040514b.htm * It seems that Sharon's plan to leave Gaza is going to end up the same way the Zionists left Lebanon; in defeat.  If the Zionists leave Gaza, it is just a matter of time before they leave the West Bank.  What is interesting is that it is looking more and more like George Bush is a liability to Sharon. Looks like Bush is going to be the next Richard Nixon/Jimmy Carter clone; Nixon for his corruption and Carter for his handling of the Iran hostage crisis.  In the meantime, the Zionist are suffering some of the pain that they have inflicted on the Palestinians for the last sixty years.

BUSH - WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND - Support for the Bush administration's policies in Iraq are at the lowest point since the war began, even as a majority of Americans say the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American military personnel is confined to a few isolated incidents and a few soldiers, according to polls out this week.  For the first time since the war began, a majority of the respondents to the Gallup poll ? 54 percent ? say the war in Iraq has not been worth the costs, while 44 percent said it has been worthwhile. When the war first began in March 2003, 29 percent of Americans said the war was not worth it, while 68 percent said it was.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040514a.htm * The worm has turned and like all tyrants and sociopaths the time comes when they have to account for their bad acts.  You can fool some of the people some of the time but you cannot go on lying to the majority of people forever.  What amazes me is that Americans could not see the hollow man that George Bush has always been.  I have always wondered why people supported George.  The answer is that he spoke to what people wanted, like tax refunds, and not the truth of what made good sense.  George portrays himself as a warrior.  I see him as a dangerous murderer and torturer of innocent men, women and child.  George Bush is an impediment to peace and WorldPeace.

May 12, 2004

IRAQ - NICK BERG BEHEADING - A video posted Tuesday on an al-Qaeda-linked Web site showed the beheading, and the executioners held up his head for the camera.  Berg's father said his son was Jewish and had a fringed religious cloth with him, but he did not think Berg wore the clothing in public. Still, "there's a better chance than not that they knew he was Jewish," Michael Berg said. "If there was any doubt that they were going to kill him that probably clinched it, I'm guessing."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040512e.htm * One thing that you did not hear much of on the Zionist controlled news was the fact that Nick Berg was Jewish.  Have no question in your mind that I condemn this murderous act, but when a Jew enters Iraq, then you have to understand that he is taking his life into his own hands.  Six Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza and one American Jew was beheaded in Iraq yesterday.  Who can say that George Bush has not begun a Zionist/Christian Muslim war?

IRAQ - BUSH AND DUE PROCESS - Michael Berg claimed yesterday that his son, Nick, was held by US authorities without access to a telephone or lawyer because of suspicions that he was an insurgent or terrorist. By the time he was finally released in early April, according to Mr Berg, the security situation had so deteriorated that it was difficult for him to make his way home.  "That's really what cost my son his life, the fact that the United States government saw fit to keep him in custody for 13 days without any of his due process or civil rights," Mr Berg said.  The family's accusation comes as the Bush administration struggles to fend off allegations that it has denied the civil rights of thousands of mostly Arab detainees it is holding in military prisons around the world on suspicion of terrorism.  Mr Berg was apprehended by Iraqi officials near the northern city of Mosul on March 24, according to his father, who claims that he was then interrogated by FBI agents.  Mr Berg was released on April 6, a day after his parents filed a lawsuit in federal court naming defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a defendant, and claiming that their son was being unlawfully held. They last heard from him on April 9. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040512d.htm * The neo fascist in the Bush administration have gone a long way toward eroding the civil rights that is the foundation of American democracy.  All over the world and in America, no one is safe from the Bush Gestapo.  

CUBA - "The main impact is it puts the Cuban people on notice that the Cuban government may change its policies in response to increased sanctions from the United States," said Phil Peters, who has written about the Cuban economy for the Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank. "It's no secret the Cuban government feels besieged. Part of their message has been to keep people on their toes against aggression."  Last week, President Bush announced new measures to limit the flow of dollars to Cuba by reducing the number of trips Cuban Americans can take to the island, slashing the amount of money they can spend here and prohibiting cash transfers to Communist Party members.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040512c.htm * George has destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq and now is stirring up trouble in Cuba and talking like he is going to invade Syria.  Pretty soon he will be attacking New York City.  Anyone who says that George Bush is not a dangerous war mongering  idiot is just not reading the news.  And by the way, where is that pesky Osama bin Laden?

SYRIA - US President George W. Bush signed an order on Tuesday imposing sanctions on Syria to punish Damascus for allegedly supporting terrorism and failing to block infiltration of guerillas into Iraq, agencies reports said. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040512b.htm * As if George has not stirred up enough trouble in the world, now he is going after Syria.  Who can doubt that if he is reelected the entire Middle East will manifest Armageddon?  

IRAQ - U.S. officials had feared the shocking photographs of U.S. soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad would endanger the lives of American troops and civilians.  Also, Berg's killing happened amid a climate of intense anti-Western sentiment, which flared in Iraq after last month's crackdown on Shiite extremists and the three-week Marine siege of Fallujah west of Baghdad. Anger at the United States swelled with the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs, which continue to stir rage throughout the Arab world.  In the video, five men wearing headscarves and black ski masks stand over a bound man in an orange jumpsuit similar to prison uniforms.  "My name is Nick Berg. My father's name is Michael. My mother's name is Suzanne," the man, seated in a chair, says. "I have a brother and sister, David and Sara. I live in ... Philadelphia."  The video then cuts to Berg sitting on the floor, his hands tied behind his back, flanked by the masked men, as a statement is read in Arabic. Berg sits still during the statement, facing the camera, occasionally raising his shoulders.  After the statement, one assailant takes a large knife from under his clothing while another pulls Berg onto his side. The tape shows assailants thrusting the knife through his neck. A scream sounds before the men cut Berg's head off, repeatedly shouting "Allahu Akbar!" ? or "God is great."  "Our thoughts and prayers are with his family," White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said. "It shows the true nature of the enemies of freedom. They have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040512a.htm * There can be no doubt but that the hacking off of someone's head is a horrific criminal act.  But how can the US complain after the fact that it has abused hundreds if not thousands of prisoners in Iraq.  The British have allegedly killed 30 Iraqis.  And Scott McClellen must be talking about George Bush as well as the murderers of Nick Berg when he says they have no regard for the lives of innocent men, women and children.

May 11, 2004

IRAQ - TORTURE - Amnesty International accused British soldiers in Iraq on Tuesday of killing civilians who posed no apparent threat, widening an Anglo-American scandal over the behavior of occupation troops.  The human rights group said in a report that Britain was undermining the rule of law in Iraq by failing to investigate properly the killings of up to 37 civilians over the past year, including an eight-year-old girl.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040511a.htm * The prisoner abuse issue is one that shows the hypocrisy of Bush and Blair.  In the name of democracy and Christianity, Iraqis are tortured and humiliated.  Iraq was not a threat to the US.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  So why was there a need for this torture and humiliation.  It has to do with a lack of respect and an intolerance for certain categories of human beings.  It has to do with a belief that non Americans have no rights to Christian love or democratic principles.  It has to do with an arrogance that comes with a belief that might makes right and God loves the victor and hates the vanquished.  Fundamentalist Christians and Zionist are some of the most intolerant human beings on the planet and unfortunately they have a significant presence in the Bush administration.

GAZA - Saraya Al Quds, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad movement, claimed Tuesday responsibility for blowing up a heavy roadside bomb under an Israeli armored personnel carrier in southern Gaza City, killing six Israeli soldiers.  The group said in a leaflet that its militants planted the 50 kg roadside bomb and blew it up as soon as the vehicle that was carrying six soldiers drove on the bomb near Al-Rahman Mosque in the neighborhood of Zaytoon in the city.  It said pieces of the armored vehicle were seen flying in the air following the explosion, adding that the attack "is to revenge the Israeli army incursion into Zaytoon."  Palestinian eyewitnesses said they saw the bodies of the six soldiers lay on the ground, where other soldiers immediately called for ambulances and more reinforcements.  They said during the evacuation of the soldiers' bodies, an Israeli Apache helicopter fired a rocket at the crowds of residents, adding that five residents were arrested by the soldiers and were used as human shields to enable the soldiers to evacuate the bodies.  Palestinian medical sources said at least four Palestinians were killed, including a ten-year-old boy. About 30 others were injured, five of them in critical condition. * It seems to me that all these freedom fighters (those who are trying to liberate their lands from foreign occupation like the Palestinians and the Iraqis) and terrorist (those who are trying to destabilize legitimate governments like AlQueda) are learning from each other as well as coming together in a loose coalition of Muslims to fight the Zionists and the Christians.  It seems that no one can deny that George Bush's policies in Palestine and in Iraq have increased the incidence of terrorism and made the whole Christian world unsafe.  As each day goes by, the Muslims are gaining strength.  The roadside bombing  that killed the Israeli soldiers was perfected in Iraq.  There are many stories about the cowardice of the Israeli soldiers using innocent citizens as human shields in Palestine.  I think the attacks on the Israelis is going to increase.  And it may well be that some of those who Muslims who have experience in Iraq fighting Americans will now take what they have learned to Palestine.

May 10, 2004

IRAQ - ABU GHRAIB - In the era of Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib, 30 kilometres west of Baghdad, was one of the world's most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions. As many as 50,000 men and women no accurate count is possible were jammed into Abu Ghraib at one time, in three-metre-by-three-metre cells.  In the looting that followed the regime's collapse in April last year, the huge prison complex, by then deserted, was stripped of everything that could be removed. The coalition authorities had the floors tiled, cells cleaned and repaired, and toilets, showers, and a medical centre added. Abu Ghraib was now a US military prison. Most of the prisoners, however by September there were several thousand, including women and teenagers were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints. They fell into three loosely defined categories: common criminals; security detainees suspected of "crimes against the coalition"; and a small number of suspected "high-value" leaders of the insurgency against the coalition forces.  Last June, Janis Karpinski, an army reserve brigadier-general, was named commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade and put in charge of military prisons in Iraq. General Karpinski, the only female commander in the war zone, was an experienced operations and intelligence officer who had served with the Special Forces and in the 1991 Gulf War, but she had never run a prison system. Now she was in charge of three large jails, eight battalions, and 3400 Army reservists, most of whom, like her, had no training in handling prisoners.  Karpinski was enthusiastic about her new job. In an interview last December with the St Petersburg Times, she said that, for many of the Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib, "living conditions now are better in prison than at home. At one point we were concerned that they wouldn't want to leave."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040510b.htm * For a comprehensive article on the prisoner abuse issue, following this link.

A FISH CALL GEORGE -  GeorgeWorldNews.com, Mon 10 May 2004

Letters to the Editor Tariq A. Al-Maeena.

Prime-time George chose two regional networks to explain to the Arab world that he was unaware of the doings of his troops; of the butchery, the abuse, and the horrific torture at the hands of his men.

He appeared on Al-Hurra, a US-funded network that hardly anybody in the region cares to tune in to. Seen as a mouthpiece of an administration beset with lies and deceit, nobody bothers with this organ, which drains the US government of approximately $60 million annually, money perhaps better spent toward the development of schools or playgrounds in the inner cities in the US.

And on the Al-Arabiya network, he came off as unconvincing as the peddler trying to palm off the Brooklyn Bridge. He claims he didnt know that crimes were being carried out by his troops. Now when a commander in chief utters those words, alarm bells should ring. He didnt know?

This has become a familiar pattern with George. When faced with a distasteful situation, either a memory lapse occurs, or else he doesnt know. He didnt know that the FBI had advance knowledge of a terrorist  threat directed toward the US. Why they allowed it to happen remains unclear. He didnt know that the CIA was convinced there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but he still went ahead with the singular purpose as he stated then of finding them.

He didnt know of swirling allegations that his vice president, Dick Cheney, was profiteering from the incursion into Iraq, of fat rebuilding contracts being handed over to select companies with strong business ties to Mr. Cheney. He didnt know that his Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was reportedly an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein back in the late 1980s. Mr. Rumsfeld apparently encouraged the strong-arm tactics of the ruthless dictator.

He doesnt know that school buses carrying children were bombed by his troops in Afghanistan. He doesnt know that civilian casualties in Afghanistan as a result of his orders far outnumber the victims of Sept. 11. He didnt know of the generously used cluster bombs that were dropped in heavily populated areas in the cities and towns in Afghanistan.

Apparently, he also doesnt know of the abuses much closer to home, in a place called Guantanamo, where men are being held without counsel in defiance of every known international law, under the pretext of being enemy combatants, and subject to the same abuses which are dominating headlines in the worlds press today.

And in Iraq, the reported rape of women by occupational forces, the sadistic torture of men who resisted his advancing forces, the 500-pound bombs dropped on hospitals and mosques, and the continuous battering and killing of a weary people who today view him as no better than Saddam: He just didnt know!

Someone afflicted with such symptoms is either a barefaced liar, or a full-fledged fool. And that does not bode well for his constituents.

STEM CELL RESEARCH - Former US First Lady Nancy Reagan has urged the Bush administration to support embryonic stem cell research.  Mrs Reagan said too much time had been wasted already discussing the issue.  She is said to believe the research could lead to a cure for Alzheimer's disease, which has afflicted her husband, Ronald Reagan.  The Bush administration has blocked public funding of this type of research because of his party's ethical reservations about embryo research.  At a fundraising dinner for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation in Hollywood, Mrs Reagan said her husband was now in "a distant place where I can no longer reach him".  "I just don't see how we can turn our backs on this... We have lost so much time already. I just really can't bear to lose any more."  She said she believed stem cell research "may provide our scientists with many answers that for so long have been beyond our grasp".  It is thought to be the first time that Mrs Reagan has made a public speech on the issue, although her views have long been known.  Mrs Reagan is the latest high-profile figure to criticise the Bush administration for its decision to limit funding for stem cell research.  Former Superman actor Christopher Reeve, left severely disabled following a riding accident, and actor Michael J. Fox, who is suffering from Parkinson's disease, have both criticised the Bush administration for blocking research which they believe could improve their conditions.  Currently federal funds are not available for this type of work.  Mr Bush has told scientists he will not release US taxpayers' money for the production or investigation of new lines because it involves the destruction of human embryos. Correspondents say that with the Bush administration and anti-abortion groups strongly opposed to stem cell research, Mrs Reagan's comments add a powerful conservative Republican voice to the debate. * This is just another example of how the neo fascist (Fundamentalist Christians) are controlling George Bush.  All Bush is concerned about is his coalition of the self righteous that he has created by appealing to people's most conservative fears regarding change.  George Bush lost the popular vote in the last election; remember.  People are suffering and there is a potential cure in stem cell research. Yet in the name of  Jesus, George Bush has determined that scientific research must be limited.  In the name of Jesus, George discounts the lives of all Muslims.  George Bush is a very dangerous man.

IRAQ - Days after a military prison guard in Iraq placed a compact disk containing photographs of prisoner abuse on the bunk of an Army investigator, the military's top officer knew that the Pentagon, and the country, were facing a major crisis. The call to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came via telephone from his four-star commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid. It was Jan. 14 or 15 ? Myers can't recall the exact date. But he recalls the message: "There are reports of abuse" by U.S. guards at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, Abizaid said.  Over the secure line, Abizaid described the allegation of mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners reported on Jan. 13 by Army Spc. Joseph Darby, a reservist from Maryland. He told Myers about the disk, "Here's what basically the pictures might show."  Abizaid added, "This is a big deal."  This was the Pentagon's first explicit, high-level warning, but by no means its first hint that something had gone drastically wrong at the largest U.S.-run prison in Iraq. The now voluminous public record shows that the Pentagon received repeated reports of prisoner abuse but put a higher priority on extracting information about terrorist or insurgent attacks.http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040510a.htm * There can be no denying that Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz and the other Christian Fundamentalist and Zionist that make up the core of Bush's top advisors are very much like Hilter's top men.  These people have a tendency to ruthless and inhumane acts in the name of God and in the name of nationalism.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  There was no O'sama/Saddam link. All that was lies.  There was no threat to the United States.  But even after that was found out, the torture continued both in Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq.  Considering the bent of George Bush to violate human rights, (Remember his refusal to sign the global human rights declaration several years ago.  Only the US and Israel refused to sign.  Now you know why.  He intended to abuse human beings.) we have to have serious questions about the entire Homeland Security bureaucracy.  Remember Bush's pat on the back of Sharon for his assassinations?  George Bush and his henchmen are a very dangerous gang.  

May 9, 2004

IRAQ - On almost every issue involving postwar Iraq?troop strength, international support, the credibility of exiles, de-Baathification, handling Ayatollah Ali Sistani?Washington's assumptions and policies have been wrong. By now most have been reversed, often too late to have much effect. This strange combination of arrogance and incompetence has not only destroyed the hopes for a new Iraq. It has had the much broader effect of turning the United States into an international outlaw in the eyes of much of the world.  Whether he wins or loses in November, George W. Bush's legacy is now clear: the creation of a poisonous atmosphere of anti-Americanism around the globe. I'm sure he takes full responsibility.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040509b.htm  *  Those people who are running the White House at the moment are little more than neo-fascist.  They speak words like Democracy but their acts are an affront to democracy. They tout their Christian values yet treat the rest of the world in a most unChristian way.  On thing that can be said for George Bush, he is not afraid of making an ass of himself in front of the entire world.

IRAQ - As gruesome pictures of Americans taunting naked Iraqi prisoners hit the Internet and TV screens around the world this past week, grim-faced aides in the White House held onto a sliver of hope. Perhaps the king of Jordan, one of the country's few strong Arab allies, would help.  King Abdullah II had abruptly canceled an earlier visit to the White House last month after President Bush embraced the possibility of permanent Israeli settlements in the West Bank and suggested the Palestinians give up their claims to some lands in Israel proper.  The visit had been re-scheduled for Thursday, and perhaps the king could be persuaded to help cool the anger among Arabs and Muslims that had been ignited by the prisoner-abuse scandal.  Abdullah did his part. Standing in the Rose Garden Thursday afternoon, he expressed confidence that the United States would quickly investigate the prison abuses and prosecute those involved.  But the king exacted a price: President Bush dialed back last month's statements on Israel and the Palestinians, returning to the boilerplate U.S. stance that all outstanding issues would have to be resolved by Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040509a.htm *  As the days go by, there is less and less doubt about the fact that George Bush is an idiot.  He is totally overwhelmed by his job.  He is a Neanderthal backing the Zionist as if the Muslims in the world did not exists.  And then when he backs Sharon's unilateral withdrawal, he discovers that Sharon can't deliver.  The thing that bothers me the most is that the Bush Administration is still arrogant.  Donald Rumsfeld is undoubtedly a loose canon living in some kind of fanasty that the is the world's premeir war lord and that he can send American soldiers where ever he wants.  Well, again, the freedom fighters are showing America that big guns and big tanks are vulnerable to dedicated men and women operating in small cells.  Even with the increased troop levels, 140,000 American soldiers cannot control 25 million Iraqis. But as bad as things are, I pray every day that Dubya is not assassinated and DICK Cheney inherits the presidency. 

May 6, 2004

The Bush administration is seeking an additional 25 billion dollars for the Pentagon budget for next year because of the growing cost of US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional aides said Wednesday.  White House budget officials will discuss the proposal with top Republicans at the House of Representatives on Wednesday, CNN reported, quoting aides to Republican congressmen.  As US military encountered increasing insurgency in Iraq and was forced to keep higher-than-expected number of forces there, Pentagon officials have said the cost of the Iraqi military operation would grow.  The Bush administration has funded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with supplemental appropriations that are not includedin its budget requests for Pentagon.  Congress has passed two bills appropriating more than 160 billion dollars since the war started in March last year. The White House has said the administration does not expected to seek additional money before January.  Lawmakers said the US military will need at least 50 billion dollars to keep troops in Iraq for the next year, and the Bush administration is trying to avoid disclosing the price tag because of election-year politics.

May 3, 2004

ISLAMABAD, May 2: President Gen Pervez Musharraf has asked the nation to fight the evils of terrorism and sectarianism and to work for eliminating negative propaganda against Islam by highlighting its true spirit.  In his message on the eve of Eid Milad un Nabi 1425 Hijra, the president said: "Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, sectarianism, extremism and tyranny. "The great religion with its greatness and prudence considers these acts as ignorance."  He said: "We should promote love, affection and fraternity among ourselves, because it would result into a welfare society that conforms to the teachings of Islam." Felicitating the Muslim Ummah and particularly the nation on Eid Milad un Nabi, the President said the birthday of the Holy Prophet Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) is the time to signify real fondness with him.  We are believers of the Last Prophet to whom Allah Almighty bestowed the title of 'Rehmatul Lil Alamin' which means that his personality is a source of blessings for the entire universe, he added.  He said the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) gave the lesson of love and brotherhood and clearly taught humanity about the sanctity of human life. "The affection with Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) involves one's obligation to follow the message of Islam and conform to the teachings of the Holy Prophet (PBUH).  One should work not only for the propagation of universal love and brotherhood, but also to struggle for the achievement of these great objectives. This should be the crux of the life of a true Muslim and a believer of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH)," he said.  He said in this way, the Muslims can attain a respectable place at international level and help reflect the true spirit of Islam. -APP

April 23, 2004

FLAG DRAPED COFFINS - AND THE BUSH BAN censorship established by the White House on photos of the coffins of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq has been broken. Last Sunday, The Seattle Times newspaper rebelled against the Bush administration ban and published an article titled The somber labor of honoring the fallen, which began by describing the image of a pile of aluminum boxes draped in U.S. flags.  Last Monday, the popular news web site, Drudge Report, had as a front page headline, The media has corpses, over a photo of 18 coffins.  Footage of the inside of a cargo plane carrying coffins can be found on http://www.thememoryhole.org, where it is explained that a number of images are circulating on web sites and e-mail, sidestepping the U.S. military?s position. It also recommends sending on similar images.  Ever since the war on Viet Nam, according to thememoryhole.org, U.S. leaders have been concerned that their military actions would lose support once the body bags began to appear.  A brief article titled, Military coffins, the photos that aren?t supposed to be seen, on the same web site, says that the Bush administration has found a simple solution, prohibiting the public diffusion of such images on all the military bases.  According to The Washington Post, the policy dates from the year 2000, during the administration of Bill Clinton.  In March 2003, shortly before the war on Iraq, the Pentagon banned funeral ceremonies on military bases, as well as the presence of the media during the transfer of bodies from Ramstein, Germany to Dover, Delaware, in the U.S. During the height of the war, the measure was reinforced.  Some of the footage on the Internet dates from March 29, 2004, and was filmed from the Dover military base.  Up until this past Tuesday, the U.S. forces have suffered 100 casualties this month, making it the deadliest since the start of the war; at the same time, George W. Bush?s military decisions were being questioned by security officials.

April 22, 2004

ENVIRONMENT - An annual Earth Day poll by The Gallup Organization this week found that Americans are less worried today about the environment than they have been in the past. The shift "may reflect the tough economic situation facing the country in the past few years," noted Gallup's analyst, Lydia Saad.  Indeed, when asked whether environmental protection or economic growth should be given priority when the two interests conflict, a record low number of Americans have chosen environmental protection in each of the last two years -- 49 percent this year, 47 percent in 2003.  Moreover, in the latest poll, just 8 percent cited the environment as the most important issue facing the country in the next 25 years, down from 14 percent four years ago.  Nonetheless, Americans give the environment a more negative assessment now than in previous years. Fifty-seven percent rate the quality of the nation's environment today as "fair" or "poor," a jump of 5 percent since President Bush took office.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040422b.htm  I think fewer people care about the environment because the US is now an urban society.  People do not live on farms and they therefore cannot understand what is happening in nature.  The air is dirty in the big cities and getting worse but those who live there just consider it a natural event.  So the truth is that people agree the environment is getting worse but doing anything about it is low on their priority list.  Without clean air, there is more sickness and death.  Without clean water, there is more sickness and death.  Without food, we starve.

IRAQ - THE BILL - THE DRAFT - A top Pentagon official said Wednesday the Iraqi military operation ''is going to cost us more money'' than anticipated, and the White House kept open the possibility it will seek additional funds before the end of this election year.  A rough first estimate showed that the decision to keep 20,000 troops in Iraq for some 90 days longer to deal with increased violence will cost about $700 million, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee.  Defense officials are studying their budget now to determine whether some of that can be moved from other Pentagon accounts, Myers said.  And several members of urged the administration to present Congress with a projected price tag for Iraq operations beyond 2004, a politically delicate step that the White House has said it does not intend to take in an election year.  ''They haven't asked for one single penny for next year for Afghanistan and Iraq,'' said Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. ''Give me a break. Give me a break!''  ''Every ground squirrel in this country knows that it's going to be $50 billion to $75 billion in additional money required to sustain us in Iraq for this year,'' Hagel said.  Biden and Hagel, another senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also raised the possibility that compulsory military service might be necessary to relieve pressure on U.S. troops stretched around the globe.  The nation is engaged ''in a generational war here against terrorism,'' Hagel said. ''It's going to require resources.''  ''Should we continue to burden the middle class who represents most all of our soldiers, and the lower-middle class?'' Hagel said. ''Should we burden them with the fighting and the dying if in fact this is a generational - probably 25-year - war?''  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040422a.htm  $70 billion a year and a draft to finance a 25 year war.  How many of these wars can the US afford to fight?  

April 21, 2004

GENETICS - CLONING - PLAYING GOD - Tomohiro Kono and colleagues at Tokyo University of Agriculture said the mice were the first mammals born through parthenogenesis, a form of asexual reproduction common elsewhere in the animal kingdom, in which an unfertilised egg gives rise to a viable embryo.  The achievement, published today in the journal Nature, is a landmark in reproductive biology, which may come to be seen in future as being of comparable significance to the birth in 1996 of Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal. And it may prove almost as controversial.  Scientists say the procedure is far too difficult and dangerous for anyone to consider using it for human reproduction. But the Japanese paper will open up a new field of research that could eventually lead to improvements in medicine and animal breeding.  "This is an incredible achievement but the experiments used an extremely complex procedure - more complicated than cloning," said Azim Surani, professor of physiology and reproduction at Cambridge University in the UK. "From around 600 eggs only two [live] mice were born."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040421c.htm  *  While the world focuses on war, science is quietly unraveling genetic secrets at an astounding pace.  The time is soon coming when the temptation to make a modified human being will be a reality.  Human with gills or very small humans for space travel.  To race and religion and nationality we are about to add a whole new dimension of generic prejudice, the modified human beings.

SAUDI ARABIA - At least 10 people were killed and dozens wounded Wednesday when a car bomb destroyed a Saudi security service building in the capital, witnesses said.  Saudi officials described it as a "terrorist attack" and Arab television said the body of suicide bomber had been found.  "The front of a building is blown off and smoke is still rising," a Reuters correspondent said from the scene.  Local people said they saw 10 bodies and dozens of wounded being carried into ambulances.  "We believe it is a terrorist attack," a Saudi Interior Ministry source told Reuters. He said a car packed with explosives blew up in al-Murabaa district.  The kingdom, a key U.S. ally and the world's largest oil exporter, is battling a tide of Islamist militancy linked to Saudi-born Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040421b.htm  *  The Christians are looking for an Anti-Christ to rise up in the Middle East.  Right now the two prime candidates are Al-Sadr the Iraqi and bin-Laden the Saudi.  Stay tuned.

ISRAEL - ASSASSINATIONS - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pledged today that Israel would keep killing Palestinian militants after the assassination of two top Hamas leaders in a month drew world condemnation and vows of revenge.  "We will not let up on them. We got rid of murderer number one and murderer number two and it isn't over, and the list is not short," Sharon said in a speech at the port city of Ashdod.  Angry at Israel's killing of Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi on Saturday and its assassination of its spiritual leader Ahmed Yassin on March 22, militants fired rockets and mortars at Jewish settlements and an Israeli town.  Israeli soldiers shot dead four Palestinians during confrontations with stone-throwers in what the army called a thrust into the northern Gaza Strip to stop the attacks.  Hamas, an Islamist group behind scores of suicide attacks aimed at destroying Israel, has vowed to carry out "100 retaliations" for its slain leaders. A senior Hamas leader in its Gaza Strip stronghold dismissed Sharon's latest threat.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040421a.htm  The world seems to be ignoring the fact that Sharon intends to kill the Palestinian militants until he has killed every Palestinian.  And all this because the Palestinians want the land that was taken from them in 1948 and 1967.  The UN is too weak to impose justice and the US is bent on the injustice of leaving the Palestinians in a permanent state of limbo where they have to live on the subsistence from the UN.  

April 20, 2004

PRESIDENTIAL POLL - George Bush has stretched his lead over Democratic rival John Kerry to six points, according to a poll that shows the September 11 commission hearings have not harmed the president politically.  Bush leads Kerry, 50% to 44%, among likely US presidential election voters, according to the CNN-Gallup poll. Independent candidate Ralph Nader had 4%.  A separate ABC-Washington Post poll of registered voters gave Bush a 48% to 43% lead over Kerry, with Nader trailing at 6%.  * History may show that Ralph Nader is the reason America had to suffer under George Bushit.  Without Nader in the race in 2000, Gore would have won.  It looks like he may now give Mr. Bushit another four years.

ISRAEL - NUCLEAR WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION - Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu will be barred from leaving Israel for a year for fear he will spill more state secrets once he completes his 18-year jail term on Wednesday.  The ban was due to "a tangible danger...that Vanunu wishes to divulge state secrets, secrets that he has not yet divulged and which have not been previously published," a Defense Ministry statement said.  Vanunu's brothers voiced fears for his safety during the year he will be forced to stay in Israel, where the former nuclear technician is widely despised as a traitor for revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to a British newspaper.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040420c.htm  * I think that it is highly possible that Mr. Vanunu will either be assassinated or he will be brought up on new charges of treason and sent back to jail for something he does after his release.  I doubt that he will find asylum in the US as long as little George is in control.

IRAQ - CHAOS ON THE ROAD - Although most of the world?s attention has been focused on what has been going on in the American-controlled areas, particularly around Baghdad and Fallujah, the situation in southern Iraq has gradually deteriorated, with militia forces becoming better organised and more confident.
Privately, British officers concede that their problems lie in the American handling of the situation in their areas. If the Maysan province, which contains al Amarah, Majar and Basra, were an autonomous entity, they believe they would have little difficulty in containing the trouble. But the national picture is having an adverse effect on everyone. 
The upsurge in support for Sadr and the tensions surrounding his future have only added to the problems the coalition faces in the south.  As the Land Rovers reached the bridge, the traffic slowed almost to a standstill at the last checkpoint, but they crossed without incident.  Anyone looking back could not have failed to notice the fresh posters of Sadr pasted to the large green road sign over the arrow pointing north.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040420b.htm * There is little doubt but that Iraq is in chaos.  And there is little doubt but that the country is uniting behind Al-Sadr.  I do not think that the US is going to stay in control of Iraq in the long run.  

ISRAEL - ASSASSINS - Less than a month after several countries in the United Nations Security Council condemned the killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the 15-member body met today to discuss the assassination by Israel of his replacement, Abdelaziz Rantissi, over the weekend.  Nasser Al-Kidwa, the Permanent Observer of Palestine, told an open meeting of the Council ? during which some 40 speakers were scheduled to take the floor ? that Israel continued its reign of terror against Palestinian people, as it had not ended its campaign of death and destruction in the occupied Palestinian territory and continued to carry out the extrajudicial executions of Palestinian leaders and kill, wound and maim defenceless Palestinian civilians in grave breach of international law.  The killing of Dr. Rantissi, as well as two other Palestinian men who had been with him, was the latest in a long series of war crimes committed by the occupying power, Mr. Al-Kidwa said. He added that it was carried out in fulfilment of repeated threats by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other Israeli Government and military officials to continue targeting Palestinian leaders for assassination in flagrant violation of international law and in complete and total disregard for the condemnation, pleas and demands by the international community for the cessation of such an illegal and barbaric policy.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040420a.htm  * The US endorses Sharon's assassinations.  So the discussion at the UN is a good thing but the reality is that it is falling on deaf ears.  The Palestinians have no rights and their Israeli masters have no compassion and the world at large could care less.  No oil, no power.  The Jews of Israel took the wrong message from Hitler: They have become more like him as opposed to refusing to become more like him.

April 19, 2004

IRAQ - SPAIN - Radical Islamic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has welcomed Spain's decision to withdraw its troops from Iraq "in the shortest time possible," as U.S. officials braced for more possible pullouts.  According to a spokesman in the Iraqi city of Najaf, the Shiite cleric praised Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's decision Sunday to pull Spain's 1,400-plus troops from Iraq.  Al-Sadr also is asking that people from all coalition countries put pressure on their governments to follow Spain and recall their forces, spokesman Fuad al-Turfi said.  The cleric's supporters have been fighting coalition troops since the coalition closed their newspaper and arrested one of al-Sadr's deputies in connection with the killing of a rival cleric last year.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040419a.htm *  It looks like the warring policies of Mr. Bushit are coming apart like a cheap watch.  It looks like Al-Sadr has beaten the US and when added to the ten American soldiers that died this weekend, it seems like Al-Sadr is going to be raised right on up there with bin-Laden as someone who can stop the Christian Americans.  Maybe he is going to be the anti-Christ that the fundamentalist Christians have been talking about for the last five decades.  If the U S tries to assassinate him the way Sharon kills high ranking Palestinians, things in the Middle East will explode.  And it is all because of Mr. Bushit.  Go back and read my archives and see what I said about all this eighteen months ago.

IRAQ - The US army Monday reduced the size of the force it has built up outside the Iraqi city of Najaf. The Americans were said to be ready to wait for further negotiations before acting against Shiite leader, Moqtada al Sadr.  Colonel Dana Pittard, commander of the 2,500-strong 3rd Brigade Task Force outside Najaf, said the force would be withdrawn over coming days. It would be replaced by some 2,000 troops from the 1st Armoured Division.  Iraqi Shiite clerics have warned that if US forces move into Najaf to kill or arrest Sadr it could lead to a fresh eruption of unrest. "Because of where negotiations are right now, we can wait," Col. Pittard said, according to Reuters. "We still want Iraqis to solve the problem." * One of the first principles of power is that you never make a threat that you cannot back up.  So went Mr. Bushit.  But unfortunately it is not just Mr. Bushit who suffers a loss of respect and power, it is all Americans

IRAQ - Five U.S. Marines died in an ambush near the Syrian border, the military reported, triggering a battle with hundreds of guerrillas, and five other troops died elsewhere in Iraq on Sunday, pushing the number of Americans killed in combat this month to 99.  Insurgent attacks and kidnappers' roadblocks have forced the military to curtail supply convoys and are part of the reason commanders have boosted ground forces by more than 20,000 troops.  Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces are on the border to try to stop foreign fighters from entering Iraq. He said that Damascus was not doing enough to control the border.  "The Syrians need to take this situation very seriously," he told CNN's "Late Edition."I want them to cut off that flow of foreign fighters."  Meanwhile, the top civilian administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, said Sunday that Iraqi security forces will not be ready to protect the country against insurgents by the June 30 handover of power.  The unusually blunt comments came as Bremer said the fighting across the country this month exposed the depth of the problems inside the security forces.  The announcement Sunday that Spain would pull out its 1,400 soldiers came just hours after a new Socialist government was sworn in.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040419b.htm * The whole of Iraq is burning.  The freedom fighters have been quick to learn the lessons of guerilla warfare and have accomplished much.  They have required an admission that another 20,000 soldiers (more targets) be added to the forces in Iraq, the Spanish are leaving, and now Bremmer admits what everyone has always known, that the US will not be able to turn over power on June 30th.  Hello Vietnam.  Does any remember how we tried to train the South Vietnamese to fight.  Same thing in Iraq.  And by the way, the Iraqis do not have high tech weapons and bullet proof vests.  Lastly, it sure sounds like in response to all of this, General Myers is contemplating invading Syria.  Not only do we not have enough soldiers for that, we do not have that many soldiers period.  Mr. Bushit is capable of invading Syria as a response to losing the war in Iraq.


 

April 18, 2004  

IRAQ - U.S. Marines fought a pitched battle yesterday against about 150 gunmen in Qaim, near Iraq's border with Syria, the city's police chief said.  Five marines and scores of insurgents were killed in the 14-hour clash, an embedded journalist from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper reported. A U.S. military spokesman could not confirm the report.  In other developments, the U.S. military closed down two major highways into Baghdad yesterday to repair damage from a mounting number of roadside bombs. Commanders suggested the routes remained vulnerable to attacks by insurgents who have been targeting U.S. military supply lines.

April 16, 2004 

To be updated shortly.

April 15, 2004

To be updated shortly

April 14, 2004

ISRAEL - President Bush said on Wednesday that Israel has a claim on some West Bank land that Palestinians say is theirs, in a shift in policy that could have major implications for Middle East peace negotiations.  At a joint White House news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (news - web sites), Bush cited "new realities on the ground" for the change in policy, including already existing major Israeli population centers on the West Bank.  Of Sharon's planned Gaza pullout, Bush said: "These are historic and courageous actions" and urged all parties to choose this moment to help "put an end to one of the world's longest running conflicts."  In another sensitive issue, Bush appeared to negate any right of return for Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel. He said a solution to their plight will need to be found "through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of Palestinian refugees there rather than in Israel."

IRAQ - VIETNAM - Since Operation Iraqi Freedom began 14 months ago, 671 American lives have been lost. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Web site indicates between January 1959 and May 1965, the United States lost 641 lives in Vietnam. It was only by June 1965, when another 147 lives were lost, that the Vietnam total exceeded our current casualty list.  Thus in 77 months in Vietnam, the United States lost nearly nine men per month. In the first 14 months in Iraq, or nearly one-sixth of the time, the United States has lost almost 48 soldiers per month.   President Bush promised to remove American troops on June 30. However, there are calls within this country and his administration that we cannot "stand down" to Iraqi resistance. The result of Bush's decision has political implications for both him and Kerry.  Naively believing upon liberation Iraqis would thank the United States, Bush never understood anti-Americanism could prevent this. He also misunderstood the amount of time and effort required to "create" democracy or to "nation build." Democracy is not created overnight; it requires a great deal of time and money under the circumstances.  But most importantly, the United States does not have the respect of the Middle East to rebuild Iraq.

IRAQ - Moscow said on Wednesday it would airlift over 800 Russians and citizens of ex-Soviet states out of Iraq this week despite the safe release of Russian and Ukrainian hostages in Baghdad.  "Seven flights will be made from Kuwait and Baghdad to fly out 553 Russians and 263 citizens of the Commonwealth of Independent States working in Iraq," a Russian Emergencies Ministry spokesman said, but gave no further details.  Planes will be sent on Thursday and Friday for the evacuation.  Unidentified gunmen seized three Russians and five Ukrainians On Monday working on building a power plant in Baghdad.  The hostages were released within 24 hours after the kidnappers learned some of them were from Russia, which opposes the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Ukraine has sent troops to join the coalition. Most Russian companies working in Iraq are involved in projects to rebuild the energy network destroyed by the U.S. military operation last year. Some of them hire nationals from former Soviet states.  During the hostage crisis President Vladimir Putin's advisory body, the Security Council, urged Russians to leave Iraq, but Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov later said it was up to companies to decide whether to remove their staff.  Several Russian companies have announced plans to evacuate their employees, including the biggest, Tekhpromexport, with 370 staff in Iraq.

To be updated shortly.

April 12, 2004

ISRAEL - Israeli political sources and newspapers said yesterday that the United States this week will give Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a written pledge that in exchange for an Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip, Israel will not have to give up all of the West Bank as part a future peace deal with the Palestinians.  There was no immediate comment from the United States. U.S. sources in Washington said last week "understandings" had been reached with Israel on key aspects of Sharon's plan, which calls for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and four of the 120 Jewish settlements in the West Bank.  Palestinians say Gaza and all of the West Bank, captured in the 1967 Mideast War, is theirs under a 1949 peace settlement and should be part of an independent nation envisioned by the U.S.-sponsored "road-map" peace plan.  The Israeli daily Haaretz, quoting from what it said was the planned letter from Bush, said borders to be established under any final peace accord would reflect "demographic realities," an allusion to large settlement enclaves in the West Bank.  "I do not know the exact wording," said a source in Sharon's office, "but it will definitely contain an insistence that Israel will not return to the 1967 border."  Israel would also like a U.S. statement saying that a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem "should be found within the context of a Palestinian state," meaning that Palestinians would not be allowed to return to Israel.  About 4 million Palestinian refugees from families that left Israel during the country's founding in 1948 now live in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, and many insist they have a right to return to their homes inside Israel.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040412d.htm * The bottom line is that Israel is trying to steal more land from the Palestinians, keep East Jerusalem and keep the Palestinian refugees out of Israel.  All that is happening here is rewarding naked aggression.  The Israelis have stolen land that was not theirs.  Even after carving Israel out of the Middle East, the Zionist are still not satisfied.  They want all the land that God allegedly gave them 3500 years ago.  In the end, it appears that there will have to be more decades of violence because the U N will not get involved.  The U S should not be dictating terms in an area that affects the entire world.  Especially when those terms have little to do with justice and everything to due with the Zionist influence in Washington.

IRAQ - THE United States plans to hand over "sovereignty" in Iraq at the end of June - that is barely ten weeks from now. Given the upsurge in violence over the past week, that timetable looks highly optimistic, to say the least. However, we are where we are, and cool heads have to prevail. As the SNP leader, John Swinney, writes in The Scotsman today, even those who opposed the war in the first place recognise that Iraq cannot be abandoned to its fate. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040412c.htm * There is no way out of Iraq.  It is an American tar baby.  Mr. Bushit alienated the entire world.  No one wants to help Mr. Bushit now. They want to teach him a lesson. The only way to bring in the Europeans and others who Mr. Bushit alienated is to get rid of Mr. Bushit. Then John Kerry can come in a apologize for the arrogance of his predecessor and then and only then can the UN get down to solving the Iraqi problem.  However, in the long run it will be the Americans who fund the lion's share of the reconstruction of Iraq.  The invasion by Mr. Bushit will have lasting effects for decades to come on America and the rest of the world.

IRAQ - The situation in Iraq is a mess. Coalition troops are dying almost by the day and civilian casualties are climbing.  For those of us who opposed the war, who warned of its consequences, this comes as little surprise. However, we must do more than ask how we got into this mess - we must also ask how we get out of it. How do we build a stable, secure, peaceful Iraq?  It is not good enough for the anti-war movement to stand on the sidelines and say ?This is not my war, I don?t have to help sort it out.? The reality is that while we did not want Blair and Bush to invade Iraq in our name, they did and we have to face up to the consequences of that action.  This means that we have a double task ahead of us. We must hold Bush and Blair to account and chart a course out of the mess they have created.  Last week, I met with the United Nations in New York to discuss the way forward. Kieran Prendergast, Kofi Annan?s Scots-born specialist in conflict resolution was hotfoot from Cyprus and the peace negotiations there.  His message was stark. Without a political roadmap, Iraq will continue its slide into violent chaos. We need to chart the way out of the mess - and we need a deadline that focuses everyone?s mind and drives the process.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040412b.htm * There was no real plan for going into Iraq other than playing cowboy.  There were not enough troops and there was no exit plan, nor any plan to create democracy nor any contingency plan.  It was a Bushit fly by the seat of the pants invasion.  Now all the worst nightmares are coming true. There are so many different anti-American factions involved now that there is no way to stop all the violence in the near future.  The Shiites and Sunnis have no control over the old Saddam loyalist nor the AlQaeda groups.  No one is in control of Iraq and so there is no one to talk with who has authority to speak for the entire country.  One good thing that has come out of this is that Mr. Bushit is no longer talking about invading Iran and Syria and North Korea.  America needs to learn a real good and lasting lesson in Iraq lest it be tempted to invade another country unprovoked.

IRAQ - Gunmen have kidnapped seven Chinese citizens in Iraq, the latest in a spate of hostage-taking, and Beijing has appealed to Baghdad to rescue them.  Sunday's abductions threatened to overshadow a visit to China by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, a key force behind the American-led invasion of Iraq, which Beijing opposed. Cheney arrives in Beijing on Tuesday.  The seven Chinese men -- Xue Yougui, Lin Jinping, Li Guiwu, Li Guiping, Wei Weilong, Chen Xiaojin, and Lin Kongming -- entered Iraq from Jordan on Sunday morning and were abducted in Falluja, west of Baghdad, the official Xinhua news agency said.  It did not identify them further or say what they were doing in Iraq. Falluja lies on the main highway from Amman, the capital of Jordan, to Baghdad.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040412a.htm  * It doesn't really make any sense to me why the Chinese would be targeted except that they were mistaken for Japanese.  Regardless the bottom line is that Iraq is not safe for anyone.  The reality is that Mr. Bushit has created unmitigated chaos in the Middle East.

About 70 U.S.-led coalition troops and around 700 Iraqi insurgents have been killed in fighting across Iraq since April 1, but there is no authoritative figure on Iraqi civilian deaths, U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt said Monday.  Kimmitt's comments were the first full casualty statistics released by the military since a bloody uprising by a radical Shiite militia started April 4 and U.S. forces began their siege against Sunni insurgents in Fallujah early April 5.  "The coalition casualties since April 1 run about 70 personnel. ... The casualty figures we have received from the enemy are somewhere about 10 times that amount, what we've inflicted on the enemy," Kimmitt told a Baghdad press conference.  "In terms of civilian casualties, there is no reliable, authoritative figure out there. We would ask the Ministry of Health, once Iraqi control ... is allowed back in Fallujah, they can get a fair, honest and credible figure and not one that is somehow filtered through some of the local propaganda machines," he said.  By an Associated Press count, based on individual statements issued by the military, 62 U.S. Marines and soldiers and at least two non-U.S. coalition soldiers have been killed since April 4.  Around 880 Iraqis have been killed, according to an AP count, based on statements by Iraqi hospital officials, U.S. military statements and Iraqi police.  Besides casualties in Fallujah, that number includes an unknown number of Iraqi fighters, members of Iraqi security forces and civilians killed in fights between insurgents and coalition soldiers in various parts of the country.  The number includes more than 600 Iraqi dead in Fallujah reported by the head of the city's hospital, Rafie al-Issawi, said Sunday. He said the numbers came from registries of bodies brought to the hospital and four main clinics.   * As I have already said, just like in Vietnam, the death cournt is ten to one in favor of the U S. What is also interesting is that there is no real numbers for the Iraqi deaths because about six months ago there was an announcement that Iraqi deaths would no longer be tallied.  This was so Mr. Bushit would not have to account for all those good Iraqis he is killing in the name of democracy.  What I am reminded of, knowing Mr. Bushit's fascination with old cowboy movies, is the old West saying, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian".  

POPE - Amid some of the tightest security ever seen at the Vatican, Pope John Paul issued an Easter condemnation of terrorism yesterday and urged world leaders to bring peace to Iraq and other flashpoints.  
Speaking to tens of thousands of people in St Peter?s Square and tens of millions of television viewers and radio listeners, he railed against "a logic of death" pervasive in the world.  "May [humanity] find the strength to face the inhuman, and unfortunately growing, phenomenon of terrorism," he said in his Urbi et Orbi (to the city and the world) message.  The Easter season had been marked by unprecedented security for fear of an attack at the heart of Christianity or elsewhere in Italy. Many more police - in uniform and plainclothes - were on hand than in the past to check people as they entered the Vatican area.  Police had sealed manhole covers near St Peter?s and diverted traffic at night to thwart possible suicide bombers.  The Polish pope, who afterwards wished the world a Happy Easter in 62 languages - including Arabic and Hebrew - painted one of the bleakest pictures of the world that he ever has in his 26 Easters as Roman Catholic leader.  He said the international community had its work cut out for it in trying to deal with conflicts, and asked God to sustain world leaders "in their efforts to resolve satisfactorily the continuing conflicts" in Iraq, the Holy Land and Africa.  St Peter?s Square was bedecked with thousands of flowers and hundreds of trees but the mood and the Pope were decidedly more glum than in the past. The Pope spoke of a world "troubled by many threatening shadows" and yet still hoping for light and peace.  "Take heed all of you who have at heart mankind?s future! Take heed men and women of good will! May the temptation to seek revenge give way to the courage to forgive; may the culture of life and love render vain the logic of death; may trust once more give breath to the lives of peoples," he said. * What the Pope did not say is that terrorism is associated with the Muslims.  Interesting because it is the Zionists who are terrorizing the Palestinians and the Americans who are terrorizing the Iraqis.

April 11, 2004

911 - BUSHIT - President Bush says he received no information prior to September 11, 2001, indicating a terrorist attack on America was imminent.  It was a memo prepared for the president about a month before the September 11 attacks. The top-secret document detailed what was known at the time about possible al-Qaida activities in the United States.  Seldom, if ever, has the White House released classified information shared with the president during an intelligence briefing. Mr. Bush says the memo shows that there was no indication that al-Qaida was about to hijack planes and fly them into buildings.  "There was not a time and place of an attack," he said. "It said Osama bin-Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that."  Speaking during an Easter Sunday visit to a military base in Texas, Mr. Bush said he was satisfied that federal agents were dealing with the terrorist threat. He said if there had been evidence of an attack on American soil, he would have done everything in his power to prevent it.  Members of the September 11 commission are now studying the document, released Saturday. The commissioners will hear later this week from the former and current heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  * Well there was no evidence the Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he was linked up with Osama.  But that did not stop Mr. Bushit from making up those lies and invading Iraq.  I do not recall a letter from Saddam saying he was going to nuke New York.  I do not recall Iraqi tanks rolling into Kuwait.  I am sure the terrorist are glad that without a clearly written threat full of exacting details that Mr. Bushit is going to keep on clearing brush on his little ranch.

AFGHANISTAN - OPIUM POPPIES - The dazzling blankets of purple, crimson and white petals of his neighbors' fields shimmer in the light wind, heralding a hefty crop, but Turialai's plants have only just started blooming, sprouting a few mauve blossoms atop a patch of light-green plants.  The delay does not worry him. He knows that unlike all the previous years, when his small field had yielded barely enough wheat and corn to feed his family of 15 people, his next harvest will be in demand. Because this year Turialai, who like many Afghans uses only one name, has planted his country's No. 1 cash crop: opium poppies.  "Opium traders will come," the 25-year-old, who has just finished high school, said with confidence. "The demand for opium is very high."  Opium production has been steadily increasing in Afghanistan since the demise of the Taliban in 2001, international drug-control experts say, undermining the volatile nation's fragile security, funding international terrorist networks such as Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda and threatening to turn Afghanistan into a failed narco-state.  Last year Afghanistan produced nearly 4,000 tons of the drug, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. That represents about three-quarters of the world's opium -- just 500 tons less than the country produced at the peak of its opium production in 1999, when the Taliban called the opium trade "un-Islamic" and imposed a two-year ban on poppy cultivation and heroin production, apparently to hike opium prices.  The drug trade accounted for more than half of Afghanistan's national income in 2003, fetching $1 billion for farmers and $1.3 billion for traffickers, the U.N. agency estimates. Its experts say that that land under poppy cultivation may rise by 30 percent or more this year, and the unseasonably warm temperatures and abundance of water for irrigation will aid the prospective bumper crop.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040411b.htm   * So what have we accomplished in Afghanistan. We removed the Taliban and turned the country back over to the War Lords and the drug dealers and increases the funding for terrorism around the world.  Why doesn't Mr. Bushit just go ahead and send the defoliators to Afghanistan and kill all those poppies?  Why? Why? Why?  The same reason that he supports the now corrupt government of Haiti; a stop over from South to North America on the drug highway.

IRAQ - VIETNAM - LEBANON - Americans struggling to make sense, or maybe political hay, out of the violence convulsing Iraq turn almost reflexively to the searing experience of the Vietnam War.
Israel is haunted by another parallel: its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which for Israelis of a certain generation was their Vietnam. It too was envisioned as a bold mission to combat terrorism and reshape part of this region to be stable and friendly to the West. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040411a.htm * We never learn. 
You cannot fight a conventional war in the modern world. The modern war is about terrorism, guerilla warfare and freedom fighters.  When you send a giant with billion dollar tanks and aircraft and guided missiles to swat a handful of committed terrorist hiding in jungles both tropical and urban, you are going to take causalities indefinitely.  You fight terrorism by dealing with the root causes; poverty and injustice.  You do not just kill the terrorist.  135,000 Americans cannot control 25 million Iraqis.

April 10, 2004

IRAQ - A top U-S general says a new battalion of Marines is bolstering forces surrounding the Iraqi city of Fallujah.  In a Baghdad news conference, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said the Marines are only firing back when attacked by rebels in the city west of Baghdad.  Kimmitt says Marines will end their pause in offensive operations if talks between Iraqi political leaders and city officials don't produce results.  The general says if the Marines hadn't stopped their attacks they might ``have had the entire city by this point.''  He says U-S forces are ``well into the city'' and ready to move when the command comes. * There is no way that the Marines or any other military force will control Fallujah.  Not unless they kill a lot of civilians.  There are too many of the general population sympathetic to the uprising.  Four Americans were killed and in response there are now 46 American soldiers dead and 460 Iraqis (the same 10 to 1 lie that was told during the Vietnam conflict).

IRAQ - BREMER'S MISCALCULATIONS - "Bremer follows in the footsteps of Saddam," screamed the headline in al-Hawza, a tabloid newspaper run by firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr. With incendiary language, the article accused L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, of deliberately starving the Iraqi people.  A month later, on March 28, Bremer ordered the weekly paper shut down. According to U.S. officials, Bremer believed that after months of waiting, the moment was right to pressure Sadr to capitulate to American demands to disband his growing militia, which had attacked American troops in the past.  But instead of relenting, Sadr and his supporters responded with protests, the seizure of government buildings and a spate of violent attacks. He unleashed a major revolt in Shiite-dominated parts of Baghdad and southern Iraq that has become the gravest challenge to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.  Several American and Iraqi officials now regard Bremer's move to close the newspaper as a profound miscalculation based on poor intelligence and inaccurate assumptions. Foremost among the errors, the officials said, was the lack of a military strategy to deal with Sadr if he chose to fight back, as he did.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410i.htm *  There seems to be no end to the arrogance of the American occupation of Iraq.  Over and over again the Bush Administration has shown it contempt for the Iraqis.  Mr. Bushit thinks these people are subhumans and that comes from all the Zionists and fundamental Christians that surround him.  The arrogance of these people is well know.  They are all on a mission from God to impose their worldview on the world society.  The "rebels" in Iraq are in reality freedom fighters.  They want control of their country.  They want to work out their own problems.  They may accept a U N peacekeeping force but they will never accept an American occupation.  Especially one that is stealing their natural resources.  The truth is coming out that Mr. Bushit was unprepared to deal with world events.  Everything Mr. Bushit has done since he took office has made things worse in the world society and more dangerous for Americans everywhere. Mr. Sadr may well be the anti-Christ; or the Christian nemisis.

  HAITI - Haiti's crisis comes at a bad time for the Bush administration, which is trying to fill a power vacuum left by ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide while coping with mounting casualties in Iraq.  Secretary of State Colin Powell visited last week and pledged U.S. support, but said the administration will not spend more than the $55 million earmarked for Haiti ? about $20 million less than last year and a fraction of the $235 million that flowed months after the 1994 intervention.  Less money means less chance of getting guns off the street, though everyone agrees that is the only way to secure the Caribbean country.  It's very different from the 1994 intervention when President Clinton, overriding opposition from the U.S. military, Congress and public, sent 20,000 troops to reinstate Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president. Those troops arrived after the Haitian military that ousted Aristide agreed to stand aside.  "The difference is we asked for American help in 1994," said Rodny Jean-Baptiste, a 32-year-old gas station attendant. "Today, the U.S. troops aren't bringing anybody back, and they're not really helping."  "It's hard to take seriously our efforts in Haiti given they (Marines) are working alongside ... known killers," said U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat who supports Aristide.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410h.htm * Again, Americans are sponsoring a corrupt government, refusing to allocate the resources necessary to actually solve the problem and attempting to respond with the least possible amount of effort. The real problem is that a few very wealthy people control 8 million poor.  This is the kind of situation the Americans support all around the world.  It is not democracy.  It is colonial imperialism.

TIBET - In the summer of 1987, Tom Peosay, an NBC cameraman, went on what was intended to be a vacation, trekking in Nepal. Soon enough, it wasn't.  Peosay outlines how Mao Zedong's cultural revolution in China created a deep rift in Chinese/Tibetan relations. As China dismantled its own ancient culture and rejected religion, Tibet glorified its own centuries of learning, prayer and quest for enlightenment. When the Chinese sought to impose cultural revolutionary doctrines on the Tibetans, by destroying ancient scriptures and burning temples, initially, it was with a misguided altruism, Peosay said.  Now, as China offers economic incentives to more and more Chinese to relocate in Tibet, Lhasa, its holy capital, is rapidly being filled with the ills of development. High-rise towers and shopping malls are being erected. Brothels meant to service the substantial Chinese military population are many, and growing. No longer practising overt military oppression, the Chinese have glommed on to a more gradual but perhaps more effective strategy: cultural assimilation and displacement.  Through it all, Peosay says, is the astonishing resilience of the Tibetan people.  "When we were there, the Chinese were so unhappy, relocated to a distant outpost. But the Tibetans, despite all the awful things that had been done to them, were happy," he said.  Their example is one from which anyone can learn, he said. "The Tibetans have had every incentive to become violent in their protests ? to become terrorists, in fact ? but the Dalai Lama teaches them that's not the way to go. It's an ancient culture with non-violence and tolerance at its core. How can we not want to protect that?"  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410g.htm * The Tibetan culture is targeted for extinction by the Chinese.  It is doubtful that they will succeed.  The real question is whether one can fight evil in the name of peace.  I believe one can.  The reality of the world is that force only succumbs to force.  Sometimes in a civilized society the leaders can be shamed into granting concessions.  But in a closed society like China, non-violence does not have much of an impact.  In India, Ghandi represented 350 million Indians challenging 100 thousand Brits.  In Tibet, the numbers are reversed and even more lopsided.  Trying to violently resist could also be suicidal.  It is hard to know what to do but non-violence is not always the answer.  One can be an advocate for peace without being a pacifist.  In Iraq, non-violence has led to more abuse of the Iraqi people.  Americans do not respect passive resistance.  Americans had no problem exterminating the Native Americans.  The Native Americans had land that the Americans wanted.  The Iraqis have oil. And the Americans like the Russians and the Chinese have no qualms about using violence in the name of God and in the name of peace and in the name of democracy.

IRAQA few of Washington's allies in Iraq are blinking in the face of escalating violence, terrorist threats and mounting domestic pressure to bring their troops home. But all are holding firm to their commitments at least for now.  Only a few nations with small troop contingents expressed new reservations about remaining in Iraq Friday despite the explosion of bloodshed and the abduction of at least five foreign nationals three Japanese, an Arab from east Jerusalem and a Syrian-born Canadian.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410f.htm * The freedom fighters in Iraq are testing all sorts of methods to rid themselves of the Imperialistic Americans.  But taking and killing hostages is not a solution. This sort of action will backfire.  It will make the hostage takers look like barbarians.  Killing the foreigners is acceptable but taking them hostage and murdering them is not.  Either way the foreigners die.  Strange how the world is so used to mass murder and killing that distinctions are made regarding how death is administered.

IRAQ - Wearing tracksuits and mingling with the locals, they stand in the open, waiting to dart out and fire rocket-propelled grenades at a passing United States convoy before melting back into the town?s gritty alleyways.  The fighting around the town of Abu Ghraib is a deadly cat-and-mouse game that has turned a key highway to Baghdad into a no-man?s land.  Once again plumes of black smoke rose over the road yesterday, visible for miles around. An attack on a convoy carrying fuel had left at least half a dozen lorries ablaze. Bodies were thrown on to the street, according to at least one witness. The US military said one soldier and one Iraqi driver were killed in the attack.  Iraqi insurgents in the area said they had seized four Italians and two Americans as hostages, a claim that initially appeared to be confirmed by a Reuters reporter who said he saw two captive foreigners being hauled into a mosque in a village near Abu Ghraib.  The young men with RPGs and AK-47 assault rifles who rule the streets do not seem like diehard Saddam loyalists or followers of al-Qaeda. They mingle with the locals, standing out in the open until they rush to attack. Others ride in groups of four or five in cars, within sight of the Americans.  "I direct my speech to my enemy Bush and I tell him that if your excuse was that you are fighting Saddam, then this thing is a past and now you are fighting the entire Iraqi people," Sadr said in a sermon, delivered by a deputy at the Imam Ali Shrine, Shiite Islam?s holiest site, in Najaf.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410e.htm * When the locals support the freedom fighters, then that means the freedom fighters are supported by the general population.  Mr. Bushit and his administrative deny this support even as they watch it in action.  The bottom line is that Mr. Bushit will tell any lie he feels will achieve his goals.  I doubt there has been any president who has told more blatant lies to the Americans people that George Dubya Bushit.

AFGHANISTAN - An Afghan warlord, whose forces have overrun a northern province, issued a stark warning to the country?s president yesterday - sack the defence and interior ministers or your government will fail.  Even as a delegation led by the deputy defence minister, General Mohibullah, met General Abdul Rashid Dostum to urge him to withdraw his fighters from Faryab province, the militia advanced further.  Speaking for the first time since his forces attacked Faryab on Wednesday, Gen Dostum complained he had not been consulted about the deployment of hundreds of national army troops to the province to restore order. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410d.htm * It looks like Afghanistan is going to revert back to the pre-Taliban days where the various warlords carved up the country in endless fighting with each other.  No one can deny that both in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the U S has destabilized both governments.  In Afghanistan, the poppy fields have flourished and sent money to the terrorists and in Iraq, a civil war is about to take place that may engulf the entire Middle East.

IRAQ - Up to 200,000 Iraqi believers, many of them Shias, crowded into the precinct of Baghdad's largest Sunni mosque yesterday to denounce the American occupation and pledge solidarity with the people of Falluja as well as the uprising led by the Shia cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr.  It was the largest show of joint support by Iraq's Sunni and Shia communities.  "Long live Moqtada, long live Falluja, long live Basra, long live Kerbala," they shouted, naming the various cities where Shias have attacked coalition forces. Many punched the air with their fists.  "It is a year since America with its ally, the British devil Tony Blair, launched its attack. The Americans invaded the land of Iraq, but they did not penetrate its people or their souls," Dr Harith al-Dhari, the main preacher at the Umm al-Qura mosque thundered into a loudspeaker, as the overflow crowd sat on the lawns and concrete concourse.  "A year has passed and where is the democracy they promised? Instead, we have terror and censorship and rivers of blood," he went on.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410c.htm * It is interesting that Mr. Bushit has caused a peace to take place between the Shiites and the Sunnis after centuries of fighting.  This shows the strong hatred the people of Iraq have against the Americans.  The problem is that the U S is killing more and more innocent Iraqis everyday with no plan to stop in the near future. All this means is more and more hatred toward America.  There is no one more incompetent to lead the world than Mr. Bushit.

IRAQ - At least three more American service members were killed yesterday, bringing the death toll for the week to 46, as the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein's government arrived accompanied by fierce fighting in all but the far north of Iraq.  Gunmen running rampant on Baghdad's western edge attacked a fuel convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver and causing a fiery explosion. Reuters said the soldier belonged to the Tennessee-based 13th Corps Support Command.  Two American soldiers and a number of civilian contractors were missing after the convoy attack, Pentagon officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.  Al-Jazeera Arab television said at least nine people were killed. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410b.htm * The reality is that there are not enough troops in Iraq to stop small groups of freedom fighters from picking off Americans.  The country is too big and the Americans are spread out too thin.  Mr. Bushit is not going to allow an increase in the troops.  But if he doesn't the weekly death tolls are going to be increasing as the Iraqis get better at ambushing Americans in all their endeavors.  At the same time, increasing the number of troops simply increases the number of targets.

911 - President Bush was given an intelligence briefing, entitled Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States just weeks before the September 11 attacks, it emerged yesterday.  Details of the August 6 briefing in 2001, which warned of terrorist preparations being made for hijackings on American soil, surfaced in testimony given by the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to a commission of inquiry studying the September 11 attacks.  The existence of the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) had been publicly known for some time, but Ms Rice's confirmation of its title and some of its contents pushed it centre stage in the explosive political row over whether the al-Qaida attacks could have been prevented.  The emotive significance of the briefing - in the form of a memorandum sent to the president summarizing potential threats to the US - is all the greater because at the time he received it, Mr Bush was on a month-long "working holiday" at his Texas ranch and spent much of the following days fishing and clearing undergrowth on his land. He did not cut short his vacation or apparently take dramatic steps in response to the briefing.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040410a.htm * Does it surprise anyone that Mr. Bushit would ignore the 911 warnings.  Considering how Mr. Bushit was queer to invade Iraq, one must consider whether he was looking for a major terrorist event to provide him the public support to invade Iraq.

April 9, 2004

Globalisation and the US pose a more serious threat to the world than war and terrorism, according to a BBC poll.  Corruption came second on a list of the biggest problems facing the world, the survey of BBC viewers worldwide found.  Conflicts - war and terrorism - ranked third, with 50%, followed by hunger, 49%, and climate change with 44%.  BBC World asked 1,500 viewers of its news and international channel for the biggest problems in the world with 52% saying the US and globalisation.  We were a little surprised that global superpowers and corruption were ranked top but we will track whether they are gaining from topical interest or are of greater long-term significance BBC World Respondents from Europe, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, Africa and Australasia, ranked the power of the US and large corporations as the biggest worry (52.3%).  BBC World's head of research and planning Jeremy Nye said: "We were a little surprised that global superpowers and corruption were ranked top but we will track whether they are gaining from topical interest or are of greater long-term significance."  Wars and terrorism were ranked as the top concerns in Europe and the Middle East despite ranking third overall.  Illiteracy was ranked sixth overall with 38% followed by nuclear proliferation, also 38%, and the persecution of minorities with 36%.  Lack of drinking water and basic sanitation was ranked 12th, with 20%, while 16% rated migration as the most important problem.

IRAQ - CHAOS - American policy in Iraq is running deeper and deeper into trouble. Coalition forces are not only going head to head with insurgents in the so-called Sunni Triangle ... but they have also vowed to destroy the 10,000 Shia militia loyal to the fugitive cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Though the insurgents may represent extreme views ... moderate Iraqi opinion will be alienated as the US and its allies try to crush them ...http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040409b.htm *  Nothing is going right in Iraq.  I am reminded of the biblical prophesy "If you sow the wind, you will reap the whirlwind."  So it goes in Iraq.  Each day things get worse. What I find most interesting is the body count.  During Vietnam there was a ten to one ratio of Vietnamese to Americans killed.  This seems to have carried over to Iraq.  There have been about 40 Americans killed this week and about 426 Iraqi murdered.

IRAQ - CIVIL WAR COMING SOON - The US army tried but failed to open talks with insurgents in the city of Fallujah on Friday, while Japan vowed to keep its forces in Iraq despite a threat to kill three of its citizens kidnapped there.  US forces also said they had recaptured the city of Kut, 160km south-east of Baghdad, from Shi'a Muslim militiamen, but fierce new fighting broke out in a Sunni Muslim town close to the capital.  
Russia, a leading opponent at the United Nations of last year's US-led invasion, meanwhile urged the United States to stay the course to avert all-out civil war and the break-up of Iraq along religious and ethnic lines.
The unidentified official told Russian news agencies that there was a danger that "the Shiite front will spread and the situation will worsen, which could lead to civil war and break up Iraq into three parts, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish." 
He repeated the Russian government view that the United Nations must take a greater role because "only a legitimate government, which will be supported by a majority of the Iraqi population, can end the crisis in this country."  But he said it would achieve nothing to send in a UN peacekeeping force, since "the UN blue helmets will be killed just the same. For the Iraqi partisans, there is no difference between foreign troops in the country." http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040409a.htm * The match has been touched to the powder keg.  There is no way that the U S forces are going to retake all these cities that are in revolt.  The worse nightmare of the Iraqi war was a possible urban house to house fight.  Well, here we are.  There are not enough soldiers to take all these cities.  And as men are concentrated in one town or another, other towns are taken over by the freedom fighters.  Now men and women who have served a year in Iraq will not be allowed to come home because by rotating troops in but not allowing them to rotate out, Bush can increase the forces in Iraq unofficially.  It is wrong to extend the tours of these soldiers.  But Mr. Bushit only cares about his re-election.  

April 8, 2004

AFGHANISTAN - Forces of a renegade adviser to President Hamid Karzai overran the capital of a northern province on Thursday, creating a fresh security headache for Afghanistan's Western-backed government.  General Abdul Rashid Dostum's largely ethnic Uzbek militia invaded Faryab from neighboring provinces on Wednesday, prompting the central government to send national troops there on Thursday in an attempt to maintain control.  Dostum's forces have been involved in several rounds of fighting for territory since the overthrow of the Taliban in late 2001. A federalist, he unsuccessfully opposed Karzai's bid for a strong presidency in a constitutional assembly in January.  Anayat charged that Dostum, whose private army is among those targeted for demobilization by Karzai, launched his assault after Kabul rejected his demand to be appointed defense minister or army chief of staff.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408k.htm * Afghanistan is reverting right back to where it was before the Taliban took over.  The Russians could not control Afghanistan.  No one has ever been able to control these people for long periods of time.  AlQaeda is not even gone from the country.  As the warlords regain control, they will give safe harbor to bin-Ladin.  And speaking of bin-Laden, there is not much in the press about why he has not been captured.  Now that we know that he was a problem all the way back to the end of the Clinton administration, four years later he is still a free man.  Is it possible that the U S with all its military might and its satellites really does not know where he is?  

IRAQ - The neoconservative elites who launched America into war with lofty rhetoric about overthrowing Arab tyranny are now witnessing mass resistance against the most brutal tyranny in the region today--their own. The combination of a renewed insurgency in the Sunni center and an explosive popular rebellion in the Shiite center and south presents a damning indictment of America's colonial occupation of Iraq. As children in rags run in the streets to hurl stones at American tanks and as those tanks fire furiously into homes and buildings to crush a growing two-pronged rebellion, one thing above all seems clear: Iraqis demand real liberation, not Bush's farce. And they are willing to challenge the most powerful army in the world to win it. While the recent assertiveness of resistance in the so-called 'Sunni Triangle' is surprising given the relentlessness of the US Army's Operation Iron Hammer offensive, the crucial element of the escalated rebellion is the armed struggle taken up by prominent Shia leader Moqtada Sadr, who commands the allegiance of a significant and growing portion of Iraq's majority Shiite population, particularly the poor. The emergence of an uprising by that section of society most brutalized by Saddam deals a death blow to two main lines of the Bush administration's war propaganda: First, it is no longer possible to smear the resistance as merely a ragtag collection of terrorists, Ba'athists, or outsiders; and second, it is equally impossible to claim the occupation is being carried out in the interests of any Iraqis--unless Halliburton fatcats and Blackwater mercenaries have been handed out citizenship.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408j.htm * The reality is that just like the weapons of mass destruction and the AlQaeda Saddam link that were lies, now there is the lie that things are under control and it is just a matter of time before everything is wonderful in Iraq.  And then there is the lie that the U S will turn over control to the Iraqis on June 30, 2004; when the governing council will have no means to implement and enforce its pronouncements.  The Bush Administration is living in fantasyland and trying to bring the American public into their dream world.  One thing that wasn't true but is true now is the fact that there is now an Iraq AlQaeda link.

IRAQ - "You can be certain that if (U.S. generals) want more troops, we will sign deployment orders so that they'll have the troops they need," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference Wednesday, though he insisted fighting was not spinning out of control.  The United States has about 135,000 troops in Iraq.  In Britian Thursday, former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said that U.S. forces were fuelling violence in Iraq by "acting like warriors."  A fundamental change of tactics to peacekeeping was needed, said Cook, who quit PM Tony Blair's Cabinet over the war.  There have been 637 U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war, 447 in hostile action. Of the total, 498 were killed after May 1, 328 in hostile action.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408i.htm * It was said at the beginning of the Iraq invasion that we did not have enough troops and we did not have a plan.  Both of those predictions are proving to be true.  Mr. Bushit thought he would just colonialize Iraq and everyone would be so happy to be rid of Saddam that they would love the Americans. Not.  And why not?  Because we are killing Iraqis just like Saddam.  We did not bring democracy to Iraq.  Mr. Bushit simply set up his friends of America governing council.  Each day more and more innocent Iraqis are murdered by U S troops.  The truth is the truth.

IRAQ - As violence spreads across Iraq, U.S. forces are pursuing an aggressive but perilous strategy of trying to suppress uprisings and neutralize troublemakers without provoking more unrest, anger and bloodshed. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408h.htm * The most obvious is the most hidden.  The fact is that every single day, Americans are killing Iraqis.  This policy is doing nothing but angering the people who see the Americans as nothing more than the new Saddam.  You don't kill your friends.  And you do not kill in the name of peace.

911 - The commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks announced yesterday that it has identified 69 documents from the Clinton era that the Bush White House withheld from investigators and which include references to al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and other issues relevant to the panel's work.   The White House turned over 12 of the documents to the commission yesterday, officials said. But 57 others, which were not specifically requested but "nonetheless are relevant to our work," remain in dispute, according to a commission statement. The panel has demanded the documents and any similar ones from the Bush administration.  Yesterday's announcement came just 14 hours before national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to testify publicly in front of the 10-member bipartisan panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The commission has feuded for months with the White House over access to documents and witnesses, and Rice's agreement to testify came after weeks of refusals from White House lawyers.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408g.htm  *  There is no doubt but that the documents will show that Mr. Bushit was not paying attention to AlQaeda because he was totally focused on invading Iraq.  The American public is in no mood to allow Mr. Bushit to withhold evidence from the investigating committee.  Things have changed somewhat since Watergate.  Presidents know now that when these committees make demands, it is useless to put up barriers.  The worst case scenario could be impeachment.

MR. BUSHIT - Gray is the new black, quiche is the new pizza and George Bush is the new Tricky Dick ? or so goes the sophisticated analysis from the left this week.  Judging by the festivity, there is still plenty of Nixon left to kick around. On Monday, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy burbled that "the president has created the biggest credibility gap since Richard Nixon." Every paper from Wilkes-Barre to Grand Rapids ran the story.  Meanwhile, Richard Clarke, having enjoyed his wretched 15 minutes of being known as "Bush's John Dean," was pre-empted by the real John Dean and his new book on how Iraq is "worse than Watergate."  "The American people weren't told the facts," the former Nixon counsel says of the run-up to Iraq. "They were misled about the facts about the connection between weapons of mass destruction and the ties to Iraq and al-Qaida, and this was a deception." Not to mention, he suggests, possibly an impeachable offense.  Unhinged rantings aside, everywhere we turned, in the midst of one of the more emotionally raw periods of the Iraq war, journalists, politicians and pundits were dusting off the N-word, "Nixon," the American political equivalent of German politicians tossing off lines about each other's "Nazi tendencies." The point was to infect Bush with an odor of criminal duplicity.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408f.htm * I think the number one comparison between Mr. Bushit and Tricky Dick is the lying.  The second is the secrecy.  The third is the fascist inner circle of do or die conservatives who think they know what is best for the world.

IRAQ - Al-Sadr, regarded as the man who instigated the latest fighting, issued a warning that Iraq would become "another Vietnam" for the United States.  "I call upon the American people to stand beside their brethren, the Iraqi people, who are suffering an injustice by your rulers and the occupying army. . . . ," he said in the statement issued from his office in Najaf. "Otherwise, Iraq will be another Vietnam for America and the occupiers."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408e.htm * Well the death count is rising significantly and the Vietnam comparisons sure seem to apply.   Iraq seems to be headed for increased chaos.  And consider that 135,000 American soldiers no matter how well armed cannot control 25 million Iraqis if they unite in their resolve to challenge the American occupation of their country.  It seems that the Iraqis have found their voice in Al-Sadr.

ENVIRONMENT - The rate of deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rose 2.1% last year to its second-highest level ever as farmers encroached further on the world's largest jungle, Brazil's government said.  The high rate of destruction alarmed environmentalists, who said too little was being done to combat the problem by the government, which has vowed to reduce the level this year.  "I am worried, the figures are too high," said Rosa Lemos de Sa of conservation group WWF Brazil. "The tendency is for it to stay high unless drastic measures are taken, and I don't see the government doing anything drastic."  Preliminary figures from Brazil's Environment Ministry showed deforestation in the Amazon jumped to 23,750 sq km in 2003 from 23,266 sq km in 2002. The 2002 data was recalculated, it said.  The Amazon, an area of continuous tropical forest that is larger than Western Europe, has been described as the "lungs of the world" because of its vast capacity to produce oxygen.  Environmentalists fear its destruction because it is home to up to 30% of the planet's animal and plant species and is an important source of medicines.  Deforestation has often lurched higher and lower on the fortunes of Latin America's largest economy and the amount of credit available to farmers.  "It's only thanks to the adverse economic climate the deforestation didn't go even higher last year," said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth in Brazil.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408d.htm * The population of the world is increasing and the use of fossil fuels is causing global warming.  In addition, deforestation is increasing and my continue until Brazil is a desert.  And no one seems to be listening.

ENVIRONMENT - A dramatic and irreversible rise in sea levels could result from the melting of the Greenland ice sheet if global warming continues unchecked.  Scientists say the melting of the massive ice sheet on Greenland - which has been stable for thousands of years - could increase sea levels by as much as 7 metres (23 feet). Such a rise would inundate vast areas of land, including cities at sea level, such as London. Some densely populated regions, such as Bangladesh, may disappear.  For the ice sheet to begin melting, ambient temperatures around Greenland would need to rise more than 3 degrees Celsius, Jonathan Gregory, a climate scientist with the Met Office Hadley Centre and the University of Reading, said. The concentrations of man-made greenhouse gases would probably reach levels that would trigger the melting by about the middle of the century.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408c.htm * The world is changing a lot faster than is acknowledged and I do not think it is going to take hundreds of years for global warming to impact on the global environment.  If the trade winds change, then warmer air could result in a faster melting of the ice cap as well as melting of the ice in Antarctica. And the faster the melt, the faster the melt.  In other words, once things spin out of control, the whole world is in trouble.

IRAQ - When Anglo-American troops were hesitating on the outskirts of the Shiite holy city of Najaf during last year's invasion of Iraq, the revered cleric Ayatollah Syed Ali al-Sistani told fellow inhabitants not to resist. Up the road, Baghdad's sprawling Shiite slum was one of the few places where the invaders were greeted with flowers.  Yet today, an anti-occupation insurrection is roiling across Iraq's Shiite heartland.  Just as George W. Bush turned worldwide post-9/11 sympathy for America into anger, American troops have turned whatever goodwill they had engendered into outright hostility.  Just as Bush's main reasons for the war turned out to be bogus, the explanations proffered by the American troops for their mounting troubles in Iraq have been delusory.  In maintaining that the occupation was popular and resistance to it limited to "enemies of freedom," America has been blaming, variously, "Baathist bitter-enders," Iranian or Syrian "agent provocateurs," Islamists (homegrown and foreign), anti-Shiite Al Qaeda Sunni terrorists, and "Saddamists in the Sunni triangle."  The fallacy of such propaganda stands exposed today as Iraqi resistance is clearly coalescing into what looks like a burgeoning national war of liberation by both the Shiite majority and Sunni minority.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408b.htm  * The war in Iraq is looking more and more like a Nazi or Russian occupation.  The war was about oil, not about human rights because Mr. Bushit is not about human rights.  He is about corporate greed and imperialism. The problem is that 25 million armed Muslim Iraqis are not going to sit back and be murdered and controlled by a Christian America.

RWANDA - GENOCIDE - With Western leaders conspicuous by their absence, Rwanda marked the 10th anniversary of its genocide on Wednesday as bewildered and angry as ever at the world's failure to stop one of the 20th century's great crimes.  "We will see each other again in heaven," a choir sang under hot, sunny skies at a memorial site where a crowd of barefoot Rwandans in tattered clothes watched from a hilltop as African presidents arrived in gleaming four-wheel-drive vehicles.  Women in traditional dress held up portraits of lost loved ones, some of the 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates killed amid dithering by Western nations who were preoccupied by other crises and unwilling to put their troops in harm's way.  "It will take eternity for the detestable and guilty indifference of the international community to be forgotten," said Louis Michel, foreign minister of the former colonial power Belgium, which lost 10 peacekeeping troops to Hutu killers on April 7, prompting Brussels to withdraw its other soldiers.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040408a.htm  * "What do you think about apathy?" the man was asked.  "Who cares", he replied.  What do you think about 800,000 victims of genocide?  Same answer.  Where were those Jews who are always talking about the Nazi Holocaust.  That was allegedly 6 million Jews in as many years.  Well this was 800,000 in 100 days. 

April 7, 2004

IRAQ - The costs of the war in Iraq have outweighed the benefits of removing Saddam Hussein, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told a Danish newspaper.  ?It?s positive that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when one weighs the costs, it?s clearly the negative aspects that dominate,? Blix told daily Jyllands-Posten in an interview.  The Swedish diplomat has criticised the United States and Britain for going to war without UN approval rather than allowing his team to continue its hunt for banned weapons.  In the interview, Blix said the war had contributed to a destabilisation of the Middle East and a move away from democracy in the region, adding that even though Iraqis had been spared life under a dictator, it was at too high a cost.  ?Bush declared war as a part of the US war on terror, but instead of limiting the effects of terror, the war has laid the foundation for even more terror,? Blix said.  Blix was scorned by the United States and Britain for failing to conclude Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction ahead of their invasion. But a year on, no such weapons have been found. 

IRAQ - WMD - Weapons inspector David Kay warned the CIA last July that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but it took months before the US Congress and the American people were told , according to a special report in the May issue of Vanity Fair Magazine.  Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was the main reason cited by President George W. Bush when he launched a war against President Saddam Hussein four months earlier.  Kay said that after he concluded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq he received a phone call in Baghdad from CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who told him: "We have to be very careful how we handle this." http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040407e.htm  *  This is just another example of the lies that Bush has told to the public regarding Iraq.  The idea was to control the Middle East oil and the WMD lie was the excuse.  Now each day more and more Americans die as the Iraqis have regrouped and refined their methods of ridding Iraq of non-Iraqis.

AIDS - ANOTHER BUSH LIE - The global effort to combat the three deadliest infectious diseases - AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria - had a rare celebration 14 months ago when President George W. Bush pledged in his 2003 State of the Union speech to donate $15 billion to fight AIDS over three years. Since then, U.S. outlays have been a small fraction of the promised amount.And the United States is refusing to finance AIDS programs that use generic drugs, which cost far less than brand-name drugs.American officials say their concern over development of drug-resistant disease strains is one factor in their opposition to programs that use generic drugs. But critics of the U.S. position say the Bush administration is simply doing the bidding of the big pharmaceutical companies.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040407d.htm * People in Africa are dying from AIDS and AIDS is spreading due to the lack of treatment.  Yet Bush continues to protect American corporations and refuses to forward the $15 billion it committed to fight AIDS.  The Bush plan was for the Americans to spend the $15 billion by purchasing drugs from American drug companies.  The real effect was a show of battling AIDS while at the same time transferring wealth from all Americans to the wealthy owners of the drug companies.  Just like the war in Iraq.  Money is spent in Iraq which really goes to American corporations who supply the military and rebuild Iraq.  So again the same plan is executed, the American public transfers their wealth to the rich corporate owners and executives in America.

IRAQ - The Shiite revolt in Iraq against the occupation regime of the USA and its allies is an undoubtedly significant event. For the first time in the 12 months since the occupation began, the USA is witnessing an outbreak of popular wrath of such great force. Moreover, the rebels represent the part of Iraqi population whose loyalty Washington saw as assured. Shiites, who had accounts to settle with Saddam Hussein, were supposed to be grateful to the Americans for overthrowing the hateful dictator. It has turned out, however, that the occupation regime is not acceptable to Sunnis and Shiites alike, despite differences between the two religious groups.  The Shiite revolt has exposed the falseness of Washington's claims that the Iraqi people as a whole support the allied troops, while limited resistance is mounted only by a small part of Sunnis incited by Saddam's relatives. But nearly everyone in Iraq has taken the road of resistance - with the exception of the Kurds who keep their sentiments secret.  A year after the seemingly victorious war, the Americans are again bombing Baghdad and conducting intimidation operations in Falluja. This means that the war has not ended and, unlike last year, it is now being waged not against Saddam Hussein but against the Iraqi people, who have seen the true goals of the US presence in their country. The US Iraqi war is a classical example of the imperialist foreign policy of the late 19th and early 20th century. It was then called gunboat diplomacy. Today gunboats have been replaced with tanks, aircraft and missiles, but this has not changed the essence, which is to grasp control of countries with rich mineral resources, dominate them, and create military bases and deploy troops in the occupied territories. Washington thought the Iraqi operation would be simple, easy and painless. This was a major miscalculation. As the Russian saying goes, it looked good on paper but you forgot about the pitfalls.  The "carrot" of democratic paradise promised to the Iraqis did not convince them. The situation in the occupied country is becoming more and more complicated, the Iraqis' resistance is growing (as proved by the latest events) and will become more fierce. I must agree with Senator Edward Kennedy (Dem.), who the other day described Iraq as "George Bush's Vietnam" and accused the president and his administration of deliberately distorting information.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040407c.htm  * There is little doubt that the invasion of Iraq was a grab for oil.  Everything Mr. Bushit said about the Iraq invasion was a lie: weapons of mass destruction, a connection between Osama and Saddam, the people of Iraq would welcome us.  All imperialistic lies.  And now we have over 600 dead and the toll is mounting.  How many Americans must die for oil?  And what is more, terrorism around the world has increased since Mr. Bushit took office.

IS IRAQ THE NEW VIETNAM - OPINIONS - http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040407b.htm * More and more each day, Iraq looks like Vietnam without the jungles.  At the beginning of the war, the military fear was an urban fight.  Well the urban fight has come.  The opinion was that there would be a lot of causalities if the fighting came to house to house room to room battles.  It sure looks like we are there.  It sure looks like the Sunni Shiite civil war is going to be put on hold while they join forces to kill American soldiers.

IRAQ - MORE BODY BAGS - As many as a dozen American Marines were killed on Tuesday when their position was attacked in the Iraqi city of Ramadi near the Sunni hotbed of Falluja, a U.S. defense official said.  In Crawford, Texas, where President Bush (news - web sites) is spending the week, the White House had no immediate reaction to the stunning toll. "We've seen the reports," said a senior administration official, who said any more substantive reaction would come later.  Defense officials said the fight in Ramadi was intense. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040407a.htm * I think that it is significant that the initial reaction of the White House was not even a word of empathy for the families of the slain. Just more dead bodies.  As long as Mr. Bushit's daughters are safe in some bar, nothing else matters.  This is just more denial like the refusal of Mr. Bushit to allow photographs of the dead soldier's coffins returning to America.  The problem is that Mr. Bushit does not understand the need for closure for the families of the honored dead.  Tell America to make room on the mall for another war memorial.

April 6, 2004

IRAQ - WACO REVISITED - U.S. forces will face a bloody, Waco-style confrontation if they try to arrest a radical Shia cleric who unleashed widespread insurrection in Iraq over the weekend, an American expert in Shia affairs said yesterday.  "What we know is the military sorts of force are the worst way to deal with apocalyptic groups like the Branch Davidians and the Sadrists," said Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, referring to the firebrand Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr. "Muqtada al-Sadr's movement is apocalyptic, and apocalyptic movements tend to see things in black and white and tend to see any kind of move toward them as the end of the world," Prof. Cole said.  Mr. al-Sadr is guided by a messianic notion in which he and his followers are enjoined by God "to ascend into exalted heavens," he added.  "I can see the same kind of scenario [as Waco] unfolding in Iraq, but on a much larger scale that may well affect the whole country -- a horrible inferno."   http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040406f.htm * It is incredible that ultraconservatives have such learning disabilities.  They cannot adjust to reality.  Waco was destroyed by Janet Reno.  And then Tim McVeigh killed several hundred people in Oklahoma City in response.  Now we have Bush waging a religious war in Iraq and the whole country is in revolt.  The Shiites that America is supposedly installing in power are in revolt.  America has no friends in Iraq and as each day goes by and more and more Iraqis are murdered, the level of hatred against America increases. 

RWANDA - GENOCIDE - Rwanda is marking the 10th anniversary of the genocide in which some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed by Hutu militias.  The slaughter was triggered by the shooting down of a plane with Rwanda's Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana onboard on 6 April 1994. It ranks alongside the Holocaust of the Jews as one of the worst atrocities of the 20th Century.  Rwanda's leader Paul Kagame has accused France of helping prepare the genocide.  This was not some chaotic African tribal war, as portrayed by Western governments at the time, but a well-executed political plan.  At the time, the West - specifically Britain and the United States - conspired to ignore the clear evidence of genocide and refused to help a small United Nations force on the ground here in Rwanda which was trying to stop the massacres.  The killing continued for 100 days before a Tutsi-dominated rebel army seized control.France was the closest ally of the Hutu regime in 1994. It is well known that French military advisers worked with the Hutu government army right up to the beginning of the genocide.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040406e.htm * I wonder why the Jews did not send a representative to Rwanda to make a statement about genocide on a global scale other than just genocide about the Jews?  Because the Holocaust is not about global genocide but only about the Jews as being the only persecuted people's on the earth.  Did George Bush send a representative? No.  Mr. Bushit is only interested in peace and justice and democracy is in places that have black gold (oil).  No oil.  No rights.  The United States under Mr. Bush has refused along with Adolph Sharon to sign the world declaration on human rights.  All the other nations of the world signed.  It is a sad thing when the world's only super power is run by a imperialistic sociopathic liar.  The United States is in a position to promote peace and prosperity on a global scale.  But what it has done in the last three years is to come close to starting a global Christian Muslim war.

IRAQ - THE SADR FACTOR - The US is examining the possibility of sending more troops to Iraq if the situation there gets out of control, a top Central Command official has said.  The official confirmed that commanders had been asked to present such options, but said the US military did not believe it was needed.  The comments came on the second day of anti-coalition protests by supporters of radical Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040406d.htm * Even the fact that more troops are being considered is an indication that things are getting worse and not better in Iraq.  And the more resources that are sent to Iraq, the fewer resources there are to deal with terrorism which is the more real threat to Americans. Anyone seen Mr. bin-Laden lately?   Iraq is the "mother of all tar babies".  I think that whereever ole Saddam is he is having a laugh at Mr. Bushit.  The only way to change American policy is to change Presidents.  How many body bags will it take before the American public has had enough Bushit?

SPAIN - TERRORISM - SPAIN will suffer terrible new attacks that would make "blood flow like rivers" unless it pulls its forces out of Iraq, according to a letter purportedly written by an al-Qaeda-linked group.  Spanish authorities revealed on Sunday night that the Ansar group had contacted the Spanish newspaper ABC the previous evening demanding Spain announces the withdrawal of troops from both Iraq and Afghanistan by the following day.  If not, the fax said, "there will be more killings" and the country would be turned "into hell".  As the nation began a week of religious processions in the run-up to Easter, this new threat could not be better timed to cause maximum fear and unrest.  Ansar - who claimed responsibility for the 11 March bombings in Madrid - has a history of striking during holiday periods and using suicide bombers in crowds.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040406c.htm *  Well the biggest mistake Spain ever made was standing next to Mr. Bushit and his lap dog Tony Blair.  90% of the people were against the Iraqi invasion and they repeated that message a few days after the bombing by changing leaders.  The terrorists know that they are making worldwide points in Spain and so I expect to see more bombings this Easter week.  There is also the revenge factor for the deaths of the bombers yesterday.  It seems there are more conspirators free to continue to wreak havoc.  All this for a token 1,300 Spanish soldiers in Iraq.   Like they really make a difference on the ground in Iraq.

911 - Condoleezza Rice was, perhaps, in the best position to galvanize the government to take action against terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks because as national security adviser she sat at the nexus of the intelligence, foreign policy, defense and law enforcement agencies who shared responsibility for counterterrorism measures.  That is why, as the White House scrambles to defend against charges that President George W. Bush and his advisers paid too little heed before Sept. 11 to the threat of terrorist attacks, Rice finds herself at the center of the storm.  "It wasn't until after Sept. 11 that most of us realized that for the first time in human history, a nonstate actor, a group of religious extremists at the very bottom of the international system, had the capability to inflict devastating damage on the very pinnacle of the international system," Blacker said. "That was without precedent. "  Still, the reality is that Rice has virtually no public utterances about Al Qaeda to point to as evidence that she was as engaged in the issue as she was in Bush's other foreign policy issues. In February 2001, George Tenet, director of central intelligence, told Congress that terrorism was the top threat facing the United States. Even four months later, as intelligence warnings about possible attacks by Al Qaeda began to surge, a June 2001 address that Rice delivered to the Council on Foreign Relations on "Foreign Policy Priorities and Challenges of the Administration" made no mention of terrorism.  Her background, as she herself acknowledged, was as "a Europeanist." And when she briefly dropped her self-confident tone, the then-46-year-old professor and former Stanford provost conceded that as a campaign adviser to Bush, she found herself "pressed to understand parts of the world that have not been part of my scope."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040406b.htm * Ms. Rice is supposed to be a smart person yet her global view left out a very large part of the global society.  There are no other superpowers.  The problem in the world is the billions of poor people.  The problem in the world is the colonialism and imperialism that the United States still represents.  The problem is that the world is a lot more dynamic and interconnected than the Bush bunch understand.  And that was to all or our detriment.  The greater problem is that everything the Bushites have done since 911 has made things worse and not better.  The world is a much more dangerous place since Cowboy Bushit took charge of the world's greatest power.

IRAQ - U.S. administrators in Iraq declared a radical Shiite cleric an ''outlaw'' Monday and announced a warrant for his arrest, heightening a confrontation after battles between his supporters and coalition troops killed at least 52 Iraqis and nine coalition troops, including eight Americans.  American officials would not say when they would move to arrest Muqtada al Sadr, who is holed up in the main mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad, guarded by armed supporters.  ''We don't fear death, and martyrdom gives us dignity from God,'' said Sadr, a 30-year-old firebrand who has frequently denounced the U.S. occupation in his sermons.  The Americans ''have the money, weapons and huge numbers, but these things are not going to weaken our will because God is with us,'' he said in a statement sent to the Arab TV station Al Jazeera, which provided a copy to The Associated Press.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040406a.htm * If the United States takes Mr. Sadr into custody, then the whole of Iraq is going to ignite. The problem is that it will look more and more like a Christian Muslim action.  With the U S endorsement of Adolph Sharon's assassination of Sheik Yassin, harming another Muslim cleric will be suicidal.  This is another reason that the U S needs to restrict its pet rattlesnake Israel.  Israel is interfering with U S policy.  Israel is an ongoing threat to peace and WorldPeace.  The U S needs to issue a warrant for the arrest of Adolph Sharon and try him for war crimes against the Palestinians.  This would immediately reduce the terrorists threats around the world.

April 5, 2004

IRAQ - President Bush said on Monday the United States would stick to a June 30 deadline for the transfer of Iraqi sovereignty to an interim government, but he added Washington would maintain a military presence in Iraq after that date.  "My intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same," Bush told reporters after a making speech on job training at a community college.  "The message to the Iraqi citizens is, they don't have to fear that America will turn and run. And that's an important message for them to hear. If they think that we're not sincere about staying the course, many people will not continue to take the risk toward freedom and democracy." * What a lie.  What authority will the U S to stay in Iraq if the governing council tells us to leave?  How are our troops going to be supported if the police do not back us up?  What is going to happen if civil war breaks out?   

IRAQ - JUNE 30 PULLOUT 

ISRAEL - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has suggested that he no longer feels bound by a three-year-old commitment to President Bush not to harm Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader.  Mr. Sharon's spokesman, Raanan Gissin, said that Israel had no immediate intention to act against Mr. Arafat. But the substance and timing of Mr. Sharon's threatening remarks, in an interview published here today, were significant.  His comments came as Israelis entered the Passover holiday braced for threatened retaliation by the militant group Hamas for the killing two weeks ago of its spiritual leader, Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Mr. Gissin said that, with 58 intelligence warnings of possible attacks, "The level of alerts is at an all-time high today."  Mr. Sharon appeared to be signaling that he felt new freedom to act against Mr. Arafat in the event of a devastating terrorist attack.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040405a.htm * It is amazing to me how the U S is trying to arrest Mr. Sadr in Iraq as a murderer and could care less about the bragging of Adolph Sharon regarding the killing of Sheik Yassin and now his intention to kill Arafat.  There is no way to make sense out of this except that Mr. Bushit is mentally defective.  Sharon is a murderer with genocidal tendencies.  He has control of nuclear weapons.  He is a much bigger threat than a low ranking Muslim cleric who hates America's invading military.  What American would put up with a foreign force on its soil?  The Iraqis are fighting the occupying force in their country.  And that occupying force is the United States of America.


 

 

April 4, 2004

IRAQ - THE KILLING FIELDSThe American military death toll in Iraq rose to at least 610 Sunday, following the announcement of several deaths over the weekend.  As of Friday morning, the Department of Defense said 596 U.S. service members had died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq last year. Of those, 406 died as a result of hostile action and 190 died of non-hostile causes. The department did not provide an update over the weekend.  The British military has reported 58 deaths; Italy, 17; Spain, eight; Bulgaria, five; Ukraine, three; Thailand, two; Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia and Poland have reported one each.  Since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq had ended, 458 U.S. soldiers have died 297 as a result of hostile action and 161 of non-hostile causes, according to the Department of Defense as of Friday.  Since the start of military operations, 2,988 U.S. service members have been injured as a result of hostile action, according to the Defense Department's figures as of Friday.  The latest deaths reported by the military:  One U.S. soldier was killed Sunday in a battle at the Spanish garrison in Najaf.  Seven U.S. soldiers were killed Sunday while fighting Shiite militiamen in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City.  Two Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Division were killed after attacks in Anbar province Saturday. 

TERRORISM - THE CLINTON PAPERS - The commission probing the military and intelligence issues surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks will soon decide whether thousands of classified counterterrorism documents from the Clinton White House were unduly held back by President Bush's aides.  The Bush administration granted the federal panel access to the documents in question Friday after Bruce Lindsey, who was legal adviser to former President Clinton, said officials didn't turn over all of Clinton's records to the panel.  On the counterterrorism issue, Lindsey charged Thursday that the commission wasn't getting a full picture of Clinton's anti-terrorism policies because the Bush administration had forwarded only 25 percent of the 11,000 records the former president wanted to provide the panel.  While such records are sealed by law for five years after a president leaves office, an exception was made to allow early access for the Sept. 11 panel. But the National Security Council and Bush administration attorneys released only a fraction, Lindsey said.  Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore are scheduled to meet privately with the 10-member commission in the coming weeks to discuss whether anything could have been done to prevent the attacks.  A CBS News poll taken this week said seven in 10 Americans believe the Bush administration is either hiding something or lying about what it knew before the Sept. 11 attacks about possible terrorist attacks against the United States.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404i.htm * So far it seems that the commission is actually getting to the bottom of why 911 happened.  It is interesting that Bush was unable to stonewall the investigation.  The one sentence truth is that Bush was so focused on Iraq that he didn't pay attention to Al Queda.  Condi Rice is just a mindless Bush parrot added to the administration to fill the female racial quota.  That being said, I do not think she is stupid enough to lie and then be prosecuted for those lies.  Hopefully she paid attention to the Martha Stewart trial.  Personally, I think her testimony is going to create a lot of rabbit trails that are going to show Bush to be the mindless socio path that he is.

IRAQ - SHIITE RIOTING - Supporters of an anti-American cleric rioted in four Iraqi cities Sunday, killing eight U.S. troops and one Salvadoran soldier in the worst unrest since the spasm of looting and arson immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein.  The U.S. military on Sunday reported two Marines were killed in a separate "enemy action" in Anbar province, raising the toll of American service members killed in Iraq to at least 610.  The rioters were supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. They were angry over Saturday's arrest on murder charges of one of al-Sadr's aides, Mustafa al-Yacoubi, and the closure of a pro-al-Sadr newspaper.  Near the holy city of Najaf, a gunbattle at a Spanish garrison killed at least 22 people, including two coalition soldiers ? an American and a Salvadoran.  Fighting in the Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City killed seven U.S. soldiers and wounded at least 24, the U.S. military said in a written statement.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404h.htm  * This rioting would probably not have happened had Sharon not killed Shiek Yassin.  That assassination created all kinds of tension among the Muslims.  It is stupid for the U S to try to silence al-Sadr because he will just be replaced by someone more radical. It is better to let these people have their say and let the people determine what is and isn't the truth.  The truth is that the U S invaded Iraq without provocation to steal their oil.  The Sunnis hate the Americans and now the Shiites are in open revolt.  What is ridiculous is that Bush thinks he can leave Iraq by June 30, 2004. The U S will leave Iraq like it left Vietnam, in shame.  Bush was such a cowboy when he unilaterally declared war on Iraq and told the U N to go to hell, now he has to go back begging for help.  Actually, I think the American people will see that John Kerry would be the better man to clean up the Bush mess in Iraq.

IRAQ - POWELL SHIFTING BLAME TO CIA - The Iraqi National Congress, a U.S.-funded group of former Iraqi exiles, supplied the four defectors whose claims that Saddam Hussein had mobile biological warfare facilities now are being questioned by Secretary of State Colin Powell.  Returning from a visit to Germany and Belgium, Powell on Friday acknowledged that the information that underpinned the charge, which he called ''the most dramatic'' part of his United Nations presentation, is now in doubt, as is the veracity of the defectors who supplied it.  Powell's questioning of the defectors' claims puts added pressure on a bipartisan commission named by President Bush in February to examine the quality and use of prewar intelligence that Hussein had secret stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear weapons in violation of a U.N. ban.  'It appears not to be the case, that [the defectors' information] was that solid,'' Powell said aboard his aircraft. ``The commission that is going to be starting its work soon, I hope will look into these matters to see whether or not the intelligence agency had a basis for the confidence that they placed in the intelligence at that time.''  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404g.htm * If you want to see someone who sold out all of his credibility to Mr. Bushit, look at Colin Powell.  Here is the man who was the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying that he doesn't understand the workings of the intelligence community.  Mr. Powell seems to indicate that anything that comes from the intelligence mill is true.  Is that the way he ran the Joint Chiefs of Staff; believing everything/  It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that defectors and traitors have an agenda. Duh. Colin Powell is just another Condi Rice.  Both are sellouts in office for the purpose of giving color to the Bush Administration.

GENOCIDE - RWANDA - President Paul Kagame denounced the "deliberate failure" of international powers to stop the slaughter of up to one million people, at the opening of the formal commemoration of the Rwandan genocide 10 years ago.  "We should always bear in mind that genocide, wherever it happens, represents the international community's failure, which I would in fact caracterise as deliberate, as a convenient failure, to take responsibility," Kagame told an international conference in Kigali.  "When genocide takes place, the international community should not shy away from its responsibilities.... How could the lives of one million Rwandese be considered so insignificant?" he said.  Praising survivors of the carnage and heaping blame on global powers who many say could have stopped it, the three-day international conference was the first of multiple events to mark the 1994 genocide, which according to UN figures killed 800,000 and according to Kigali led to one million deaths.  Conference participants earlier on Sunday were shuttled to areas outside the capital to pay homage to the victims.  At the churches in Nyamata and Ntarama, south of Kigali, some 15,000 people were massacred after they sought to take refuge there. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404f.htm  * What I want to know is where were all those Jews and Zionist who keep broadcasting their holocaust story about the atrocities of the Germans.  They have set themselves up as the world's foremost keepers of the genocide legacy.  But alas, African Blacks, like Muslim Palestinians have no value to the Zionists.  They are not able to generalize their holocaust story beyond Jews.  Translated, that means that only Jews have any value in the world society because they are God's chosen people.  There is only one genocidal holocaust and that belongs exclusively to the Jews.

ISRAEL - NUCLEAR WEAPONS - When Mordechai was released from solitary confinement in March 1998 Israel admitted he posed no threat to its security; yet his many applications for parole have been refused, because of his brave defiance and refusal to admit any guilt. Indeed, Mordechai's opposition to nuclear weapons remains steadfast and his cruel punishment has not broken his spirit.  Mordechai Vanunu was a technician at Dimona, Israel's nuclear installation, from 1976 to 1985.  He discovered that the plant was secretly producing nuclear weapons.  His conscience made him speak out and in 1986 he provided the London Sunday Times with the facts and photos they used to tell the world about Israel's nuclear weapons programme.  His evidence showed that Israel had stockpiled up to 200 nuclear warheads, with no debate or authorisation from it own citizens.  On 30th September 1986, Mordechai was lured from London to Rome. There he was kidnapped, drugged and shipped to Israel. After a secret trial he was sentenced to 18 years for 'treason' and 'espionage' though he had received no payment and communicated with no foreign power.  He was held in complete isolation for 11 years, only allowed occasional visits from his family, lawyer and a priest, conducted through a metal screen.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404e.htm * I wonder if Mr. Bushit is going to confront the Israelis for their nuclear weapons.  No. They are exempt because they are God's chosen people.  Not the Christians or Muslims but the Jews are God's chosen people and they have a lot of influence in Washington and so they will not be confronted with their illegal acts.  Israel is a major nuclear power.  But what is stupid is that if they try to use those weapons on any of their neighbors, the fallout will kill them.  If we are going to be fair about nuclear non-proliferation, then we need to confront the Zionist's nuclear weapons program. Does anyone think that is going to happen?

ISRAEL - MORE ASSASINATIONS - Meanwhile, Israeli Health Minister Danny Naveh reiterated threats against Arafat, saying he was a "more serious obstacle" than murdered Hamas founder and leader Shaikh Ahmad Yasin.  Israel assassinated the wheelchair-bound Yasin earlier this month in the occupied Gaza Strip.  Naveh, a member of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party, also reiterated calls for Arafat's expulsion from his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ram Allah.  Sharon has confined Arafat there for more than two years.   In interview with the Haaretz daily on Friday, Sharon hinted both Arafat and the head of the Lebanese resistance group Hizb Allah, General Secretary Sayyid Hasan Nasr Allah, might be next on Israel?s hit-list.  "I wouldn't suggest either of them feels immune... Anyone who kills a Jew or harms an Israeli citizen, or sends people to kill Jews, is a marked man, period," he said in one of his most threatening remarks to date.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404d.htm * All of this is against international law.  All of this shows how weak the enforcement of international law really is.  There will never be WorldPeace without world law.  Political assassins like Sharon must be tried for their murderous acts and executed.  We executed the Nazis after World War II.  We need to do the same for war mongers like Ariel Sharon.

IRAQ - THE BUSH AND BLAIR PACT - President George Bush first asked Tony Blair to support the removal of Saddam Hussein from power at a private White House dinner nine days after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001.  According to Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, who was at the dinner when Blair became the first foreign leader to visit America after 11 September, Blair told Bush he should not get distracted from the war on terror's initial goal - dealing with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.  Bush, claims Meyer, replied by saying: 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.' Regime change was already US policy.  It was clear, Meyer says, 'that when we did come back to Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions'. Elsewhere in his interview, Meyer says Blair always believed it was unlikely that Saddam would be removed from power or give up his weapons of mass destruction without a war.  Faced with this prospect of a further war, he adds, Blair 'said nothing to demur'.  Details of this extraordinary conversation will be published this week in a 25,000-word article on the path to war with Iraq in the May issue of the American magazine Vanity Fair. It provides new corroboration of the claims made last month in a book by Bush's former counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, that Bush was 'obsessed' with Iraq as his principal target after 9/11. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404c.htm * The evidence keeps mounting that Bush was obsessed with Iraq and ignored Al Qaeda.  It is typical of a man of limited intelligence to be able to focus on one issue only. The entire American domestic agenda has been on hold for almost four years because we have a one trick pony in the White House.  The world is more insecure and tense due to the actions of George Dubya Bushit.

911 - A review of the Bush administration's deliberations and actions in the summer of 2001 shows that the White House's impulse to deal more forcefully with terror threats within the United States peaked July 5 and leveled off until the Sept. 11 attacks.  The review is based on interviews with current and former officials and an examination of the preliminary findings of the independent commission investigating the attacks.  With terror warnings mounting over the summer of 2001, the review suggests, the government's response was often scattered and inconsistent as the new administration struggled to develop a comprehensive strategy for combating Al-Qaida and other terror organizations.  On July 5, 2001, as threats of an impending terror attack against the United States were pouring into Washington, Rice and Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, summoned top officials from many domestic agencies to a meeting in the White House Situation Room.  That was as far as the Bush administration ever got to placing the nation on high alert before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.  The warnings during the summer were more dire and more specific than generally recognized. Descriptions of the threat were communicated repeatedly to the highest levels within the White House. In more than 40 briefings, Bush was told by George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, of threats involving Al-Qaida.  The review suggests that the government never collected in one place all the information that was flowing into Washington about Al-Qaida and its interest in using commercial aircraft to carry out attacks, and about extremist groups' interest in pilot training. A congressional inquiry into intelligence activities before Sept. 11 found 12 reports over a seven-year period suggesting that terrorists might use airplanes as weapons. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040404a.htm * Well it seems that the Bush Administration was asleep at the wheel. They were so busy counting the potential oil money that would come out of Iraq that they did not pay attention to the real threat of AlQaeda.  This is what happens when you hire someone like Condi Rice as a token female/Black to run a critical agency.  She puts the Administration spin on all intelligence or just discounts it.  It is like her fellow administrator Colin Powell another man of color who after being head of the joint chiefs of staff does not know how to evaluate suspect intelligence from Iraqi defectors and traitors.  What an idiot.  What a liar.  And these people are running out country?

April 3, 2004

TERRORIST - AMERICAN HELL - A strategy paper posted on a Web site sympathetic to al-Qaeda lists Jews, Americans and Britons as main targets, and calls on militant cells worldwide to "turn the infidels' lands into hell".  The document, describing targets militants should hit, portrays itself as "diplomacy written in blood, decorated with body parts and perfumed with gunpowder".  It was in the latest issue of a guerrilla warfare manual posted on Web sites that covers subjects ranging from ideology to weapons handling.  -- Federal counterterrorism officials have issued a bulletin to police departments around the United States warning that terrorists might try to bomb rail lines and buses this summer.  The bulletin, which an official described as an advisory rather than an alert, said that major U.S. cities are possible targets and that a "viable" bomb made of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and diesel fuel "could be concealed in standard luggage." That explosive mixture was used in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040403c.htm  *  And we are being told that things are getting better.  The reality is that terrorism is on the rise since Mr. Bushit destroyed Afghanistan and unilaterally invaded Iraq and most recently has endorsed the assassination of Shiek Yassin by the murderous Ariel Sharon.  

IRAQ - Citing a need to protect the troops, the Marine Corps operating in Fallujah and elsewhere in the volatile Sunni Triangle of central Iraq is restricting the information it releases about insurgent attacks that kill Marines.http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040403b.htm * Well this is an election year and the less press there is about dead America soldiers the better.  Bush will not allow the photographing of coffins coming back to America from Iraq and so why should there be any coverage of how our soldiers are being killed.  Soon it will be a matter of national security to even admit that any soldiers have been killed in Iraq.  I have not seen a story about the arrival of these coffins.  I guess all that is done in great secrecy.  It would seem that some photos would have been taken.  Where are they?

TERRORISM - The Department of Homeland Security announced yesterday that it planned to require travelers from 27 industrialized nations -- including longtime allies such as Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Japan and Australia -- to be photographed and electronically fingerprinted when they arrive in the United States.  Officials described the move as a critical security measure intended to protect the country from future terrorist attacks. Once the program goes into effect by Sept. 30 at 115 airports nationwide and 14 seaports, only diplomats, Canadians and Mexicans carrying border cards -- which are typically used for 72-hour visits to the United States -- will be exempt from the new rules. The program will be expanded to border crossings later.  In Paris, bartender Kerwan Borne scoffed. "Bravo, welcome to the dictatorship. Why don't they put a bar code here," he said, pointing to the back of his neck, "and stick a microchip in your arm?" http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040403a.htm * No one can deny that as each day goes by the repercussion of terrorism are increasing.  There is more and more intrusion into the lives of the average citizens, there is less and less freedom.  And we have to admit that since George Bush took office the threat of terrorism has increased.  The world is becoming more and more unsafe because of the opium now growing in Afghanistan that fund terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, the continued murderous acts of Ariel Sharon and the Zionists against the Palestinians.  Osama is still at large and is motivating more and more people around the Muslim world to revolt against the imperialism of America.  At the bottom of this mess we have oil.  Since the end of the Soviet Union there is no one to challenge the United States other than Osama bin Laden.  As a result, the United States under George Bush has not made the world more free and just and secure but just the opposite, it has become more tense and dangerous, less free and less just and less democratic.  The United States now rules the world virtually unchallenged and the world is not a better place for it.

April 2, 2004

911 INVESTIGATION - The Bush administration agreed yesterday to let the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks review about 9,000 pages of documents from the Clinton archives, which the White House had earlier refused to release, despite the conclusion of federal researchers that they were relevant to the panel's work.  The agreement, announced by White House spokesman Scott McClellan and confirmed by commission officials, was aimed at cutting short another high-profile battle between the administration and the Sept. 11 panel in the midst of the presidential election campaign. The Bush White House has feuded with the commission repeatedly over access to documents and witnesses, and this week capitulated to demands for public testimony from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.  But in comments to reporters in Huntington, W.Va., McClellan declined to say whether the White House would agree to actually hand over any of the disputed documents at issue, raising the possibility of further disputes. Most of the records are highly classified and are directly related to terrorism and national security issues, officials said.  Some commission members said yesterday that the lack of disclosure of the Clinton documents raises the possibility that the Bush administration has withheld other relevant records as well. They said the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, may need to seek a review of other documents that were produced by individual agencies but not turned over by the White House.  "We can't afford to have documents that are relevant to our inquiry being withheld on a technicality," said Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic commission member who served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. "This is not litigation. This is finding facts to help the nation, and we should not treat this as if we're adversarial parties here."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402g.htm * The truth seems to be that the Clinton documents show that the Bush administration ignored the work that Clinton had done to stop terrorism and focused on the cold war strategy of Cold War missile defense.  This is a global application of the Vietnam wrong thinking.  All the military advantage we had in Vietnam could not defeat the local freedom fights (terrorist). Now we are looking at the same thing on a global scale. All the missiles in the world are not going to protect America from one lone motivated terrorist with a bomb strapped to his back.  America is so incredibly free and access to guns and other bomb making material is so easy that if we were infiltrated by even a dozen committed terrorists, 911 would look like a minor incident.  As each day goes by the terrorists are increasing their network.  Local groups with diverse objectives and goals are learning from each terrorist attack.  Each group is connected in the sharing of tactics while maintaining their independence from any umbrella organization.  To join together in an umbrella organization would create lines of communication that could be easily tracked by the United States with it super technical computers.  If you look at the global view, what you see is America provoking terrorism through its imperialistic and undemocratic influence in the world and that terrorism resulting in more and more control of the population by the few.  In this case, the few are the Zionists and the Fundamental Christians who permeate the Bush administration and who are funded by the imperialist corporations who in the name of profit are slowing but surely economically enslaving all Americans.

ISRAEL - THE DOME OF THE ROCK - Israeli police entered a Jerusalem holy site and used stun grenades and rubber pellets to quell Palestinians throwing rocks at police and Jewish worshippers at the end of Friday prayers at the Al Aqsa Mosque, according to a police spokesman. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402e.htm  "No one threw stones," Adnan Husseini, director of the Islamic Waqf, told Reuters news agency. "They [police] started doing this every Friday to scare elderly worshippers as younger ones are already banned. This is flagrant violation of freedom of worship."   http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402f.htm * There can be no question but that the goal of the Zionists is to find an excuse to destroy the Dome of the Rock so they can rebuild their Temple in its place.  Israel has begun to assassinate whoever it will in violation of international law.  Sharon started the current conflict between the Jews and the Muslims when he strutted over the plaza of the Dome of the Rock on September 28, 2000.  Now he is about to station troops on the plaza.  The question is whether the U N will step in before or after the Dome of the Rock is destroyed?

ISRAEL - Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister, revived the threat of a military move against Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority President, last night.  Mr Sharon was said, by Israeli television, to have indicated that Mr Arafat cannot remain confined to his Muqata headquarters in Ramallah forever. Mr Sharon said it was not impossible that Israel would act against him.  His remarks were being interpreted in Israel as largely designed to reassure the right wing of his Likud party, as he seeks to convince them of the wisdom of his plan to disengage from Gaza ahead of a planned referendum of party members if, and when, he secures US backing for the plan.  Some right-wing ministers would like to see the implementation of a Cabinet decision taken in principle last September to "remove" Mr Arafat from the Muqata. There were hints last week, after the assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, that Mr Arafat could be a target.  At the same time, Israeli intelligence has been laying increasing emphasis on the part played by militants linked to Fatah in suicide attacks. Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence agency, has suggested that up to 20 prominent militants are sheltering in the Muqata. But as one government source stressed that there had been "no change of policy" since the September Cabinet decision, doubts remained over whether there were any plans to move against Mr Arafat in the foreseeable future.  Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Friday threatened his long-time foe Yasser Arafat with assassination in barbed comments in which he called the veteran Palestinian president a poor insurance risk.  Sharon, who is under fire in Israel over his plan for a Gaza pullout and over a bribery scandal, also included Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group, in threats issued in a series of newspaper interviews.  "I wouldn't suggest either one of them should feel secure. I wouldn't propose that any insurance company give them coverage," Sharon told Israel's Haaretz daily.  "Anyone who kills a Jew or harms an Israeli citizen, or sends someone to kill Jews, is a marked man. Period."  Sharon's most explicit threat yet against Arafat came 10 days after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a helicopter strike in Gaza. Hamas, dedicated to destroying Israel, has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings.http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402d.htm * There can be no question in anyone's mind but that Ariel Sharon is a murderer and a progeny of Adolph Hitler.  The unfortunate thing is that without the backing of the United States, Sharon would not have the means to kill at will.  The policy of the United States of carte blanc support for Sharon and Zionism must be changed.

AFGHANISTAN - OPIUM - Britain has bungled its command of an international campaign to rid Afghanistan of opium poppy, and its failure has contributed to an unprecedented increase in heroin production, a senior US official said yesterday.  In an unusually critical report, the state department's senior narcotics official, Robert Charles, told a congressional committee hearing that British efforts had been painfully slow at a time when Afghanistan was poised for a bumper heroin season.  Mr Charles claimed this would be disastrous for Afghanistan. Without a crackdown on opium poppy, the country would rapidly slide into the grip of drug lords and become increasingly lawless.  Last year, there was a bumper crop of Afghan drugs, and this year promises an even better season. Unseasonably warm temperatures in the southern provinces of Helmand and Nangarhar have brought forward the planting season.  The early spring - and Britain's ineffectual policing - now threatened to expand the area of Afghan farmland under poppy cultivation by as much as 100% in 2004, Mr Charles said.  Despite the urgency, Britain had barely begun to destroy some 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of poppy that were slated for eradication this year in Nangarhar and Helmand, the committee was told.  The two provinces are at the centre of poppy cultivation, and Britain's reluctance to crack down here could encourage farmers throughout Afghanistan to plant poppy.  "Unless direct, effective and measurable action is taken immediately, we may well be looking at well over 120,000 hectares this year," Mr Charles said.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402c.htm * Well we have to ask ourselves why these crops are not being destroyed.  Maybe its because of the money that is being made by Britons on the drug trade, maybe it is the fact that without the drug money more aid will have to be poured into Afghanistan.  But the reality is that this drug money is funding terrorism worldwide.  Thank you George Bush.  The Taliban were out of control in their Fundamentalist mindset but what is happening now seems to be worse.

IRAQ - DESECRATED BODIES - No, United States President George Bush and 150,000 American troops won't be chased from Iraq by the murder and mutilation of four U.S. civilian security agents. Bush is not Bill Clinton, and Iraq is not Somalia.  The president's credibility is on the line as he faces re-election. He can't cut and run. He crushed Saddam Hussein's tyranny at a cost of 13,000 Iraqi lives, and promised democracy and stability to 23 million people. He can't now let Iraq become what it was not before: An anarchic launch pad for terror. Nor do most Americans want him to. They have $120 billion and 600 U.S. soldiers' lives invested in this war.  Still, American nerves have been jangled by the Somalia-like images of corpses being pulled from burning wreckage and hung on display. Like the images of Saddam's statue being torn down, or of Saddam captured in his hiding-hole, the charred bodies dangling from a bridge may become icons of this war, unless they are eclipsed by worse.  The horror in Falluja, near Baghdad, has left Americans looking for light at the end of this tunnel. A majority now doubt the war was worth it.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402b.htm * The fact is that there is no way the George is going to stop this kind of behavior in the future.  If it happens again, Americans will want out of Iraq as soon as possible and regardless of the consequences.  This is the reality of occupying a nation against its will.  We are told each day that things are getting better by the White House but the reality is that things are really getting worse.  Terrorism and resistance to America's presence is increasing daily and like cancer is spreading all over the world.  These primal acts of a occupied country should send a message to America that people all over the world prefer the bad government of their own leaders to the the good government imposed from the outside.

ISLAM - RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE - The resignation Thursday of Beverley Hughes, Britain's minister for immigration, adds another dose of political poison to an issue that has rapidly become toxic across Europe. Her resignation, after confessing that she had "misled Parliament" about a complex illegal immigration scam, comes at the end of a very bad week for those like Prime Minister Tony Blair who had hoped Britain was making a better job of absorbing mass immigration than most of its European partners.  The tone was set last week with a forthright speech by the former head of the Anglican Church, the last Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who denounced moderate Muslims for failing to condemn the "evil" of suicide bombers. Islam, he argued, was "authoritarian, inflexible and under-achieving." He went on to stress the "glaring absence" of democracy in Muslim countries, and urged moderate Muslims to "resist strongly" the takeover of Islam by radicals, and "express strongly ... their abhorrence of violence done in the name of Allah."  "The West has still much to be proud of, and we should say so strongly. We should also encourage Muslims living in the West to be proud of it and say so to their brothers and sisters living elsewhere," Carey added. By contrast, he went on, "Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, we find authoritarian regimes with deeply entrenched leadership, some of which rose to power at the point of a gun and are retained in power by massive investment in security forces."  The former archbishop, who had worked devotedly while in office for the cause of inter-faith understanding and dialog, was instantly denounced as a racist and religious imperialist for his pains.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040402a.htm * When you have these types of mindsets in high office, you have the terrorism that exists in the world today.  Some may call this arrogance.  I call it ignorance.  In America, within its borders, all nations, all races, all religions live in peace.  So these kinds of pronouncements are just stupid comments from a retarded mind.

ISLAM - RELIGIOUS PREJUDICE - A conservative German state on Thursday became the nation's first to ban Muslim teachers from wearing headscarves in public schools.  Legislators in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg approved the law with dissent only from the opposition Green party, which argued it was unbalanced because it still allowed Christian symbols in the classroom.  The measure could be open to challenge because Germany's supreme court ruled last year that teachers are allowed to wear headscarves unless state laws ban them and that any such laws should treat all religions equally.  At least four other German states have proposed legislation banning Muslim teachers from wearing headscarves in school. * This is nonsense.  A scarf, a cross; what is the difference.  The difference is that the majority of the Germans (those who killed Jews and other racially inferior people) are Christians.  Are all women who wear scarfs Muslims.  Or is there a distinction between black scarves and colorful scarves.

ISRAEL - THE TEMPLE MOUNT - The site of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli security forces on Friday is known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, and to Jews as the Temple Mount.  It is a 35-acre walled esplanade on a hilltop in the Old City of Jerusalem, where the Al Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock mosques sit atop the ruins of the biblical Jewish temples.  In Jewish tradition, it is the place where King David kept the Ark of the Covenant, and where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son Isaac. Jews believe the Second Temple, whose destruction by the Romans in 70 A.D. came to symbolize the start of the long Jewish exile, lies under the compound.  Muslims revere the site as the spot from which they believe Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven.  At the Israeli-Palestinian peace summit at Camp David in July 2000, negotiators were unable to agree on who would have sovereignty over the site.  An unofficial agreement worked out by Israeli doves and some Palestinian officials in 2003 gave the Palestinians sovereignty over the Al Aqsa Mosque compound, while assigning Israel control over parts of the Western Wall--the remnants of the temple destroyed in 70 A.D.--which runs alongside the compound.  In September 2000, then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the site, provoking a series of violent clashes. The clashes escalated into widespread Palestinian riots and led to the current round of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. * I can't help but believe that these clashes were not provoked by the Zionists as an attempt to take over the Temple Mount.  Once that is done, it will just be a matter of time before the Zionists destroy the Dome of the Roce and the Al Aqsa mosque.  The Israelis have been illegally occupying the Temple Mount since they took over the area in the 1967 war.  The international community does not recognize their ownership of this area.  Jerusalem must become the world's first international cities run by the United Nations and open to all peoples of the world.

April 1, 2004

AFGHANISTAN - Nations from around the world pledged hundreds of millions in new funds on Wednesday to help stabilize and rebuild Afghanistan, with the United States accounting for about half of the contributions so far.  At an international donors conference here, 65 delegations representing more than 50 nations assembled a financial package for Afghanistan that development officials said would likely exceed $4 billion in the next year and would pay for national elections in September and building up the country's infrastructure.  A study by the World Bank, the Afghan government and the Asian Development Bank, which announced its own pledge Wednesday of $1 billion in loans and grants, said that the country would need as much as $28 billion in outside funds over the next seven years. Another study, by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that only dramatic and sustained aid would prevent Afghanistan from backsliding. Asserting that reconstruction efforts so far have been undercut by poor security and irregular disbursals of foreign aid, the report said that "without a dramatic increase in international focus and resources, Afghanistan could deteriorate into that which the international community has been working to prevent - a failed state serving as a breeding ground for terrorists and narco-traffickers."  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040401f.htm * There can be little doubt that the $4 billion is not enough to solve the chaos in Afghanistan the opium nation of the world.  George Bush destroyed the country and left nothing in its place.  The same thing that is about to happen in Iraq.  Afghanistan is about to return to the pre Taliban days.  Meanwhile the opium fields of Afghanistan continue to fund terrorist world wide.  Without a doubt, Bush has increased the funding for terrorism with his half baked destruction of Afghanistan.

ZIONISTS- EVERYONE IS ANTI-SEMITIC - The Israeli government has written to the BBC accusing its Middle East correspondent, Orla Guerin, of anti-semitism and "total identification with the goals and methods of the Palestinian terror groups" over a report on a 16-year-old would-be suicide bomber last week.  Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for diaspora affairs, complained that Guerin had portrayed the army's handling of the arrest of Hussam Abdu, who was captured with explosives strapped to his chest, as "cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes". He said this revealed "a deep-seated bias against Israel".  Israeli embassies urged newspapers across the globe to run the story as part of a campaign by the government to highlight the use of children as potential suicide bombers.  A week earlier, when a 12-year-old boy, Abdullah Quran, was stopped while unwittingly carrying explosives at an army checkpoint, Israeli embassies called news editors to insist they cover the story and warn that failure to do so would be viewed as bias against Israel.  When several news organisations failed to report it, an Israeli newspaper called for their correspondents to be expelled, including Sky's Emma Hurd and Stephen Farrell of the Times.  CNN sources say the network has bowed to considerable pressure on its editors. Israeli officials boast that they now have only to call a number at the network's headquarters in Atlanta to pull any story they do not like.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040401e.htm * The Zionists in America are treacherous.  The truth is that they do own a lot of the media outlets and control much of the entertainment industry.  The Zionists are a danger and an impediment to WorldPeace.  These people are more radical than the worst Muslim terrrorist.  The difference is that they have them money and the media sources and they are entrenched in the Washington bureaucracy.  However, they have a history of overplaying their hand.  If you are interested in what the Zionists are up to then visit http://www.jewwatch.com.  I do not vouch for nor endorse this web page.  I am just pointing out that it has some information on the subject.

HAITI - ARISTIDE - Haiti's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, has lodged a lawsuit in Paris claiming coercion involving US and French officials forced him from power, his lawyer and legal authorities said.  The suit, for "threats, death threats, abduction and illegal detention" was lodged Tuesday, Aristide's lawyer, Gilbert Collard said.  It designates the defendant as "X" - a French legal term for persons unknown - but specifically makes mention of the French and US ambassadors in Haiti, Thierry Burkard and James Foley, as well as a French writer, Regis Debray, and the sister of French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, Veronique Albanel, in the deposition.  US forces escorted the former president from his official residence and provided the aircraft that carried him out of the country, while France - Haiti's former colonial ruler - has played a key role in setting up an interim government after Aristide's departure.  Collard said Aristide's US lawyers were to engage a similar action in the United States, but did not elaborate.  France's foreign ministry has said that Aristide signed a formal resignation letter that opened the way to a new administration being set up in Haiti.  But Collard said the resignation - made "at night, while in the hands of armed soldiers" - was unconstitutional and therefore invalid.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040401d.htm  * The truth seems to be that Aristide was removed from power by Mr. Bushit, the great preserver of democracy.  Ole George is promoting democracy in Iraq and undermining it in Haiti.  What has happened is that the old colonial straw man has been returned to power.  Again, what is in Haiti that makes all this worthwhile.  The answer is the drug corridor from South America to North America.  Just follow the money if you want to know what is going on.  No one is going to believe that Mr. Bushit is a humanitarian.  Haiti's poverty is not a part of the Bushit agenda.

911 - U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver a major policy speech on Sept. 11, 2001, that focused on missile defense, not terrorism, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.  Citing former U.S. officials who have seen the text, the newspaper said the speech was designed to promote missile defense as the cornerstone of the Bush administration's national security and contained no mention of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden or Islamic extremist groups.  According to a review of public statements, the administration did address terrorism, but devoted far more attention to pushing missile defense, the newspaper said.  "Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism rated lower on the list of priorities, as outlined by officials in their own public statements on policy," the newspaper said.  The White House declined to release the complete text of Rice's speech since it was not given but did confirm the accuracy of excerpts given to The Post, the report said.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040401c.htm  * Well after all the Bushit, we now have concrete proof that Mr. Bushit was not paying attention to AlQaeda before 911.  And it is probably true that Ms. Rice did not even know who Osama was.  It was not in her prepared speech that was to be delivered on 911.  No, Mr. Bushit was trying to push missle defense against who?  It was not a matter of against who but for who.  And the for who is corporate America who would build the defense system.

INTERNATIONAL LAW - The United Nations' World Court in The Hague, Netherlands, ruled Wednesday that the United States violated the rights of 51 Mexicans sentenced to death here by not notifying them they could contact their consulates when they were arrested.  Three Mexican nationals sentenced to death in Illinois courts -- Mario Flores, Gabriel Solache and Juan Caballero -- already had their sentences commuted by former Gov. George Ryan last year. Solache and Caballero are serving life sentences. Flores' sentence was reduced to 40 years, and he has already served nearly half of it, making him eligible for release later this year.  It was unclear Wednesday whether the United States or state prosecutors would comply with the court's ruling to review their cases.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040401b.htm  *   The can never be WorldPeace without world law. It is good to know that the World Court is no longer afraid of the United States.  There is nothing more devastating to chaos in the human society than just laws.  The Palestinians need to file a suit in the World Court for damages and claims regarding the U N's taking of their property and giving it to the Zionist in 1948.  

IRAQ - HATRED - Jubilant residents dragged the charred corpses of four American contractors through the streets Wednesday and hanged them from the bridge spanning the Euphrates River. Five American soldiers died in a roadside bombing nearby.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040401a.htm * I thought Mr. Bushit said that the Iraqi people would embrace the invasion of their country?  The truth is that no American is safe in Iraq.  The truth is that there will probably be more of these barbaric acts.  Whatever it takes to get the attention of the world as to the injustice of what is happening in the Middle East.  Who can deny that things are spinning out of control.  As it says in the Christian Bible, those who sow the wind reap the whirlwind.  Mr. Bushit no longer has any credibility in the world.  A change of Presidents is mandatory to settling down the chaos that Mr. Bushit has created.


March 31, 2004

ENVIRONMENT - The United Nations is warning that dangerous dust storms in Asia are becoming an increasing threat to health and the environment.  Experts speaking at the U.N. Environment Program conference in South Korea said the dust storms, which originate in Mongolia and China, are five times more frequent than they were 50 years ago.  Scientists say such storms pose serious health risks as they soak up toxic pollutants from industrial sections of China. They blame the storms for respiratory-related problems and deaths as well as the loss of crops and livestock as far away as Japan, South Korea and the Pacific basin.  U.N. officials say they are working to create an early warning system for regional governments to target dust and sand storms.  The warning comes one day after South Korean officials issued a dust alert for much of the country. They say dust levels in Seoul in 2002 were twice the level deemed hazardous to health. * There is no question but that this is more evidence of global warming that the United States denies due to the fact that its use of oil is one of the major causes of greenhouse gases.

IRAQ - In one of the bloodiest days in weeks for the U.S. military, five troops died when a bomb exploded under their military vehicle west of Baghdad on Wednesday. At least four foreign nationals, including one American, were killed in a separate attack and some of the bodies were burned, beaten and hanged from a bridge.  The explosive device that killed the American troops blew up when their vehicle ran over it, U.S. Army Col. Jill Morgenthaler said in Baghdad. The attack happened in Anbar province, which encompasses Fallujah, Ramadi and other towns where anti-U.S. insurgents are active. http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040331f.htm * And the body bags keep coming home. But George refuses to allow Americans to see the coffins as they are off loaded in America.  These men and women need to be honored and remembered and it is another piece of evidence of the callousness of Mr. Bushit.  If I lost a son or a daughter in Iraq, I would want the whole world to see the cost of war in general the cost to me personally and the supreme sacrifice that my child made for his country.

AFGHANISTAN - OPIUM - Afghanistan is seeking as much as $27.5 billion in aid to support reconstruction at a meeting of donor countries in Berlin for the third international conference since the overthrow of the Taliban in December 2001.  ``There are high expectations of this conference,'' German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said in a speech opening the two days of talks involving about 60 nations. ``Every success we achieve in Afghanistan on the road to more freedom and security is progress not just for the people in the country. Every success is progress for us all.''  The Afghan government estimates it needs $27.5 billion in the next seven years to help rebuild and curb its farmers' dependence on growing opium poppies. Afghanistan is the world's largest opium producer and poppy cultivation last year was near record levels, a U.S. State Department report said.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040331e.htm *  The poppies of Afghanistan are funding the terrorist worldwide.  Thanks to George Bush.  He destroyed the Taliban and destroyed the AlQaeda bases but Osama is still on the loose and the amount of money going to terrorism from the Afghanistan drug trade is out of control.  More short sighted half baked Bushit.

OIL - THE PRICE OF GASOLINE - In a sign of growing concern about the political fallout from soaring gas prices, the White House has been scrambling to formulate a strategy to deal with consumers' concerns about prices at the pump.  Energy Department and White House officials held an unusual Saturday meeting to discuss how to respond to rising gas prices, which hit a record high this week of $1.75 per gallon nationwide and $2.13 per gallon in California.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040331d.htm * The Bushit administration is the oil administration.  And guess what?   The price of oil is going higher and higher and higher and the corporate oil profits are funding the Bushit campaign for reelection. Actually every American is funding the Bushit every time they put gas in their car.  DICK Cheney will be king when he leaves office.  No one has done more to rape the American public in the name of oil, oil, oil.  DICK will be able to write his own ticket in any oil corporation in America.

PRESCRIPTION DRUGS - MORE BUSHIT - "Public support is dropping for the Medicare prescription-drug law pushed by President Bush and passed by the Republican-controlled Congress last year, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows. The erosion follows months of criticism from Democrats and disclosures that the administration withheld higher cost estimates from Congress.   Instead of providing the election-year boost among seniors that Republicans expected, the new law has generated more opposition than support among Americans ages 65 and older, the poll shows. Support among Americans of all ages also has declined.  The declining support and increased uncertainty among Americans suggest that Democrats' attacks and the administration's handling of the issue are taking a toll. Just 35% of those polled approve of Bush's handling of Medicare, while 55% disapprove. That reflects a steady decline over the past year, as health care has become Bush's most troublesome issue in terms of public opinion.  Beyond the dispute over benefits, the Bush administration is being criticized for withholding information from Congress during last year's debate. The chief actuary of the Medicare program, Richard Foster, testified last week that he was ordered to keep from Congress his estimates of the law's costs. The Congressional Budget Office had projected the 10-year cost at $395 billion; Foster's figures show it could cost $534 billion.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040331c.htm *  Well just like the oil corporations support for George, the medical and drug companies are also on the band wagon.  The drug companies make money at the expense of the American public.  Every time an American buys prescription drugs, money goes into the Bushit reelection campaign fund.  No American is safe from the abuse that corporate America is foisting on them thanks to Mr. Bushit.  Lies, lies and more lies.  Mr. Bushit is a sociopath who has no compunction about lying.

TERRORISM - CENTRAL ASIA - Founded in the early 1950s by Palestinians in Jordan, HT is today active in more than 30 countries worldwide, including Western Europe. It arrived in Central Asia in the mid-1990s, and is now active in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Only in the latter is it seen as having a possibly significant presence, however. According to a June 30 report by the International Crisis Group, "Estimates of [HT's] strength vary widely, but a rough figure is probably 15,000 to 20,000 throughout Central Asia."  With the geographically isolated IMU still regrouping militarily and HT maintaining a policy of nonviolent organization-building, observers differ, sometimes profoundly, in their assessments. The majority view is that the increasingly repressive regimes in Central Asia, and in Uzbekistan in particular, themselves pose the greatest threat to regional stability by creating ideally wretched conditions to nurture an implacably radical opposition. Meanwhile, a vocal minority insists that the IMU, HT, and perhaps other movements that have yet to catch the public eye, still represent the gravest danger.  But the miserable conditions that observers note are not particular to Central Asia. Sadly, many of the world's countries are dismal places ruled by dingy regimes. Those places where Islamist movements have come to power - Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, for example - have suffered from pervasive misgovernment, gross socioeconomic inequalities, and a dearth of basic freedoms.   The preceding suggests that observers need to move from general questions about the "threat of radical Islam in Central Asia" to specific queries about the precise numbers and backgrounds of new sympathizers, as well as any ties between existing organizations like HT and other groups with a more proactive agenda. Though some information is available, too much of it stems from media controlled or hobbled by regimes with a vested interest in presenting a specific version of a "threat" that they can then exploit for their own purposes. The information needed to answer the questions posed above cannot be gleaned from tidy reports of varying veracity; it must often be obtained the old-fashioned way - on the shifting ground where it first emerges. From our present vantage point, the availability such vital information may well be the most pressing issue of all.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040331a.htm  * Until we work on the root causes of terrorism and quit focusing on simply killing the terrorist, the world will continue to live in fear. You do not kill ants one at a time. You find the ant bed and destroy it.  Then there are no more ants.

IRAQ - THREAT TO US; NO - THREAT TO ISRAEL; YES. - Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States, but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.  Inter Press Service uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001 - the 9/11 commission - in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch US ally in the Middle East.  "And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell," said Zelikow.  The administration, which is surrounded by staunch pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawks, is currently fighting an extensive campaign to ward off accusations that it derailed the "war on terrorism" it launched after September 11 by taking a detour to Iraq, which appears to have posed no direct threat to the US.  http://PoliticalCommentary2004/e040331b.htm * The Zionists and Christian fundamentalist and their hawkish mindsets are responsible for Iraq and AlQaeda.  It seems that the U S policy to protect Israel is killing Americans and creating chaos world wide.  It is time to purge the White House of these socio-paths and their mandate from God to create chaos in the name of Israel.

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