I’ve always been a big fan of Justin Raimondo’s commentary. His latest offering at antiwar.com entitled Mikheil Saakashvili: War Criminal - A politician’s hubris causes untold human suffering is as poignant as ever. An excerpt…

“Amid all the geopolitical analyses and ideological posturing on the occasion of the Three-Day War between Russia and Georgia, we are losing sight of the very real human costs of this conflict: thousands of civilians killed and grievously wounded, a city, Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia, in ruins, and the hopes and dreams of the inhabitants of this largely overlooked backwater dashed on the rocks of a politician’s hubris.

That politician is Mikheil Saakashvili, the all too glib president of Georgia, whose slickness is so apparent that it seems to leave an oily residue on every word he utters. The decidedly apolitical, non-ideological Web site Reliefweb put it this way:

“The place that has suffered most is South Ossetia which is home to both ethnic Ossetians and Georgians, the latter accounting for about a third of the population. The destruction there has been appalling and it looks as though many hundreds of civilians have died, in the first place as a result of the initial Georgian assault of August 7-8. Gosha Tselekhayev, an Ossetian interpreter in Tskhinvali with whom I spoke by telephone on August 10 said, ‘I am standing in the city center, but there’s no city left.’

“Ossetians fleeing the conflict zone talk of Georgian atrocities and the indiscriminate killing of civilians.”

They may be talking of Georgian atrocities, but we in the West have not heard them – nor will we, given the bias of our media, which is in thrall to the Georgia lobby and its U.S. government sponsors. The “mainstream” has already settled on a narrative to explain events in the Caucasus, and nothing short of a South Ossetian holocaust will wake them from their hypnotic state. The Russians, in their view, have got to be the bad guys, i.e., the aggressors. Anything that doesn’t fit into that storyline is cut from the script.”

Patrick Buchanan’s insights are also very astute…

“Mikheil Saakashvili’s decision to use the opening of the Olympic Games to cover Georgia’s invasion of its breakaway province of South Ossetia must rank in stupidity with Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s decision to close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships.

Nasser’s blunder cost him the Sinai in the Six-Day War. Saakashvili’s blunder probably means permanent loss of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

After shelling and attacking what he claims is his own country, killing scores of his own Ossetian citizens and sending tens of thousands fleeing into Russia, Saakashvili’s army was whipped back into Georgia in 48 hours.

Vladimir Putin took the opportunity to kick the Georgian army out of Abkhazia, as well, to bomb Tbilisi, and to seize Gori, birthplace of Stalin.

Reveling in his status as an intimate of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and John McCain, and America’s lone democratic ally in the Caucasus, Saakashvili thought he could get away with a lightning coup and present the world with a fait accompli.

Mikheil did not reckon on the rage or resolve of the Bear.

American charges of Russian aggression ring hollow. Georgia started this fight – Russia finished it. People who start wars don’t get to decide how and when they end.

Russia’s response was “disproportionate” and “brutal,” wailed Bush.

True. But did we not authorize Israel to bomb Lebanon for 35 days in response to a border skirmish where several Israel soldiers were killed and two captured? Was that not many times more “disproportionate”?”

Antiwar’s Justin Raimondo makes some excellent points regarding the recent attacks on Barack Obama in connection with his attendance of Rev. Jeremiah Wright church and some of the inflammatory things that Wright has said over the years.

Before I provide a quote from the article, which is certainly a must read, I wanted to point something out. What religious leaders have had access to President Bush during his tenure in office and what have some of them said? Do some digging and you’ll find some rather disgusting results.

That said; this portion of Raimando’s piece struck me as extremely well put…

“In the case of Obama, the assault is taking the form of an attack on the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the now-retired pastor of Obama’s church whom Obama describes as a religious “mentor” in his autobiography The Audacity of Hope. Again, the basic strategy is to make Obama answer for each and every one of Wright’s pronouncements, no matter how wacky or lame-brained, such as the contention that AIDS was created by the U.S. government. Aside from the logical fallacy inherent in the guilt-by-association tact – after all, Obama didn’t say AIDS was a U.S. government plot, Wright did – implicit in all this is the assumption that all blacks believe the same thing, that they are a collective entity linked by some sort of ethnic consciousness, and, therefore, Obama can and must be held responsible for Wright’s opinions on every subject under the sun, including those he had no knowledge of.

So, what, aside from the AIDS comment, did Wright say that was so terrible? The War Street Journal piece simply quotes these, without offering much of an argument for their iniquitous nature. Here’s Wright on racism and foreign policy:

“We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college. Racism is alive and well. Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run, Jesse [Jackson], and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body.”

Of course, Wright’s contention that “no black man will ever be considered for president” is refuted by the very fact of Obama’s front-runner status. Perhaps only Hillary Clinton – who recently offered Obama the vice presidency, in spite of the fact that he’s ahead of her by every measure – and a few yahoos out in the sticks are stuck in this old mindset. As for the rest, it’s undeniably true. We do have more black men in prison than in college – way more. Racism is alive and well; driving while black is still a dangerous pastime. This country was founded with a near-fatal flaw in the constitutional order, one that permitted slavery to continue for another hundred years. While I don’t agree with everything Wright says in this statement, I don’t see anything that isn’t part of the broad spectrum of popular opinion in this country, though a lot of what he says may be considered out of bounds for the elites.

Kessler, however, is convinced that it is only necessary to repeat what Wright has said: no explanation is really required. In the same vein, he continues citing Wright:

“Mr. Wright thundered on: ‘America is still the No. 1 killer in the world…. We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns, and the training of professional killers…. We bombed Cambodia, Iraq, and Nicaragua, killing women and children while trying to get public opinion turned against Castro and Ghadhafi…. We put [Nelson] Mandela in prison and supported apartheid the whole 27 years he was there. We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God.’

But of course the American government is the number-one killer in the world: we pride ourselves on it. Why else would our “defense” budget exceed the military expenditures of all other nations combined? We glory in our ability to kill, and we don’t hesitate to exercise our talents. In Iraq alone, the U.S. invasion has led to as many as a million deaths.

The racial aspect of all this is dramatized, in rather vivid terms, by the Pentagon’s refusal to count Iraqi deaths. Only American casualties are reported, because only Americans matter, as John McCain avers in his rationalization of the war and continued occupation:

“We’ve been in Japan for 60 years, we’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me.”

As long as it’s mainly Iraqis being killed, then that’s just fine with McCain. Another war he supported, and continues to valorize, killed, maimed, and traumatized millions of Vietnamese, but the “gooks” – as McCain unapologetically put it – don’t count, either. It was American, not Vietnamese, casualties that triggered our retreat from Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, too, where water-boarding was a routine method of interrogation, we slaughtered thousands, justifying our savagery with the “progressive” (at the time) rhetoric of moral and cultural uplift, the 19th-century equivalent of “it takes a village.” Teddy Roosevelt, McCain’s idol, preached this doctrine and was lionized by the liberals of his era as a great innovator and a heroic figure.

Racism is closely linked to imperialism, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand why. Since, by definition, a policy of conquest means conquering foreigners, and these peoples are often, albeit not always, of another race, it behooves the conqueror to rationalize his aggression in racial terms. “Take up the white man’s burden” – up until very recently, Kipling’s poetic phrase has been the leitmotif and battle cry of the global Anglo hegemon. It was, and is, a world order founded on racism, mercantilism, and militarism, the three pillars of hegemonist thought. Yet the Wall Street Journal has its own version of history and is certainly no critic of mercantilism, either historic or contemporary. In any case, the Journal’s real beef with Wright isn’t mentioned until midway through Kessler’s piece:

“His voice rising, Mr. Wright said, ‘We supported Zionism shamelessly while ignoring the Palestinians and branding anybody who spoke out against it as being anti-Semitic…. We care nothing about human life if the end justifies the means….’”

One wonders on what grounds Kessler or the Journal would dispute Wright’s contention; alas, we can only speculate, since no argument is even attempted. The evil of Wright’s remarks is apparently self-evident – except it isn’t.

We have supported Israel unconditionally, in spite of Israel’s defiance on the settlements issue and its continued occupation of conquered territory that imposes what former President Jimmy Carter rightly likens to a system of apartheid. Worse, we have encouraged Israeli aggression, cheering on and actively aiding the invasion of Lebanon and conflating Israel’s right of “self-defense” with a policy of expansionism.

As for branding critics of Israel as anti-Semites, is Kessler really maintaining that this never happens? It’s the smear-of-first-resort of the Israel-first lobby, as professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have recently discovered. Everyone knows that to traduce this terrain is to walk through a political minefield, which is why most American politicians scrupulously avoid it – a testament, by the way, to the trenchancy of the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis that the Israel lobby wields an inordinate and ultimately unhealthy influence over the conduct of American foreign policy.

There was a similar brouhaha from those quarters when Obama opined that “nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.” The Lobby’s antennae quivered – doesn’t he know who holds the official monopoly on suffering? – and they’ve been on him ever since.

The rest of Kessler’s piece is an extension of the guilt-by-association technique, in which a new factor is added to the Obama = Wright equation: Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. Wright’s church magazine apparently gave Farrakhan some sort of award, so now the equation is Obama = Wright = Farrakhan. This feeds directly into the widely circulated rumor that Obama, having imbibed Islam in Indonesia, is a secret Muslim – a jihadist at heart.

The smear campaign against Obama has just begun. As he wins primary after primary, racking up delegates and leaving Hillary in the electoral dust, these gusts of slanderous invective will take on full gale force. What we are witnessing is the first stage of a calculated attempt to characterize the putative Democratic nominee as a secret Muslim, a black nationalist, and a 3 a.m. threat to hearth and home.

The author of this piece, Kessler, is the head honcho over at Newsmax.com, a site that is the prototypical example of right-wing “movement” hackery. During the Clinton years, it used to run stuff about Vince Foster and the alleged Clinton connection to his death. Today they are shilling for the Clintons, carrying out the widely noted Clintonian scorched-earth strategy of making Obama unelectable, then biding their time until 2012. Talk about strange bedfellows – or, on second thought, not so strange.

Clearly, Obama is the candidate the neoconservatives fear and loathe: the loathing is on account of his antiwar views, at least when it comes to Iraq, and the fear stems from the fact that campaigning against him will be difficult. Hillary they can handle: she’ll mobilize the troops and weld together the fractured Republican coalition in opposition.

The War Party is in full battle mode, and it is determined to destroy Obama. Will it succeed? Stay tuned…”

I’m tired. Not a lot of sleep last night. I spent it in one of those semi-states of sleep, the sort where you’re aware that you have to be mindful of something that requires that you remain somewhat conscious but are still trying to sleep at the same time.

It’s clear and sunny here again today, as it has been this past week. In fact, it’s been uncommonly beautiful for this time of year, even given the chill the wind provides here on the West Coast that has the annoying ability to cut through everything that you’re wearing and go straight to your bones. We share that phenomenon with the UK, where it’s routine business as well.

I’m rambling, and I’m aware of it. I’m rambling because I’m having one of those mornings that I’m finding it difficult to concentrate. I’m having one of those mornings because, as has been the case over the last month, the list of things to touch upon grows so quickly every day that it seems almost impossible to retain it all and then translate it into something cogent.

Just off the top of my head there’s…

The recent revelation that the Canadian Armed Forces have stopped the transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities because of a report of abuse on the 5th of November of last year despite the fact that last May, after a scandal broke regarding the Canadian transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities that were known for their use of torture, the government claimed that it was taking steps to immediately rectify the situation.

The recently released Manley Report, which, although critical of numerous aspects of the mission in Afghanistan, has basically provided the government with what can only be viewed as a blank cheque with regards to Canadian combat operations in that country. Of course, the report is non-binding, but its ramifications on a political level are extremely convenient. Canada, of course, is only one of three nations involved in direct combat operations in Afghanistan, and of the three represents the smallest contingent. That being the case, our losses, compared to those of the United States and the UK, are wholly disproportionate. The debate, however, remains transfixed on our continued support of the mission’s objectives, to help stabilize the nation and provide it security, even though other members of ISAF, with considerably larger forces in country, continue to refuse to have their contingents involved in direct combat operations. There is also the concern that even though our efforts are aimed at ensuring democratic stability in Afghanistan, that its implementation is, in effect, the representation of Western regional aspirations, and therefore not dissimilar to Soviet regional aspirations in the 70’s when the USSR was responsible for aiding in the supplanting of a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. Thus, the real test of Afghan democracy will come when the nation has been secured and Western exploitative practices begin in earnest.

That is certainly not to say that the Taliban should be allowed to run rampant and plunge the nation into complete chaos, only that precluding the possibility of negotiations for the purposes of resolution is counter productive. Ultimately, there are always going to be those that support some, if not all, of the Taliban’s agenda, which raises a very important question: must those that do be wholly eliminated before progress can be made? And if they are not, what assurances do we have that there will not be a resurgence in the future that could seriously threaten the stability of the country, even after it possesses a well trained and equipped military? Given that, is it not fair to say that Western military involvement, on even the smallest of levels, will be required in Afghanistan for years to come?

Of course, all of that doesn’t even touch on the realities of the Pakistani frontier and the support covertly supplied those in opposition to the current Afghan government by elements within the Pakistani military establishment itself.

The possibility that Kenya could explode at any moment despite last minute attempts at political reconciliation aimed at stemming violence. As it stands now, the country is already in the early stages of a humanitarian crisis and also on the cusp of what could quickly turn into a genocidal event.

The recent disparity of global markets.

The continuing unrest in Pakistan.

The case of Canadian Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, who has been held at the facility since 2002. Khadr was captured at the age of 15 and, as the French Foreign Ministry recently pointed out…

“…all children associated with an armed conflict should be treated accordingly. As a minor at the time of the events, Mr. Khadr must be given special treatment — a point on which there is a universal consensus.”

The Canadian government has refused to intercede in Khadr’s case.

Gaza. While many have taken to illegally entering Egypt so that they can attempt to get food, fuel, and other sundries, Israel’s position remains steadfast, that being that the blockade is a move against the continued rocket attacks emanating from Gaza into Israel. The majority of the United Nations Security Council has labeled the blockade a violation of international humanitarian law and a collective punishment against the entire population, but the United States refuses to support that position without the inclusion of language that supports Israel’s concerns regarding the actions of Palestinian militants. Caught in the middle are, as usual, the 1.5 million residents of Gaza itself.

The firing of Linda Keen, President of The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, hours before she was to appear before a House committee in Ottawa. Keen was fired, according to Federal Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn, due to the government’s ‘lack of confidence in her leadership’. This, of course, happened after the Commission’s attempt to have the Chalk River facility closed due to safety concerns and government’s decision to ignore the Commission.

The realities of the sanctions against Iran.

The ruinous economic reality of America’s imperialist adventures.

The frightening resurgence of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.

Media attacks on Heath Ledger following his death.

The Jose Padilla affair.

The continued humanitarian crisis unfolding in Somalia.

The Sudanese government’s decision to make Musa Hilal, a man accused of coordinating the Janjiweed militias in Darfur, an advisor to Federal Affairs Minister Abdel Basit Sabderat.

And So Forth

In truth, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Iraq is, of course, absent – primarily recent events in Baquba - as is the ever-evolving telecommunications scandal in the US and the Sibel Edmonds affair, the unrest in Zimbabwe, and events in Chiapas.

Last, but certainly not least, there are also those voices that tend to make excellent arguments on a routine basis, such as Robert Fisk, Stephen Zunes, and (for your viewing pleasure), the always brilliant Chalmers Johnson…

Ray McGovern raises a good point. Why wasn’t Petraeus sworn in? From Antiwar.com…

“That’s all I said in the unusual silence on Monday afternoon as first aid was being administered to Gen. David Petraeus’ microphone before he spoke before the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees.

It had dawned on me that when House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-Mo.) invited Gen. Petraeus to make his presentation, Skelton forgot to ask him to take the customary oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I had no idea that my suggestion would be enough to get me thrown out of the hearing.

I had experienced a flashback to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in early 2006, when Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) reminded chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) that Specter had forgotten to swear in the witness, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and how Specter insisted that that would not be necessary.

Now that may or may not be an invidious comparison. But Petraeus and Gonzales work for the same boss, who has a rather unusual relationship with the truth. How many of his senior staff could readily be convicted, as was the hapless-and-now-commuted Scooter Libby, of perjury?

So I didn’t think twice about it. I really thought that Skelton perhaps forgot, and that the 10-minute interlude of silence while they fixed the microphone was a good chance to raise this seemingly innocent question.

The more so since the ranking Republican representatives had been protesting too much. Practicing the obverse of “killing the messenger,” they had been canonizing the messenger with protective fire. Ranking Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) began what amounted to a SWAT-team attack on the credibility of those who dared question the truthfulness of the sainted Petraeus, and issued a special press release decrying a full-page ad in today’s New York Times equating Petraeus with “Betray-us.”

Hunter served notice on any potential doubters, insisting that Petraeus’ “capability, integrity, intelligence … are without question.” And Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, rang changes on the same theme, unwittingly choosing another infelicitous almost-homonym for the charges against Petraeus – “outrageous.”

Indeed, Hunter’s prepared statement, which he circulated before the hearing, amounted to little more than a full-scale “duty-honor-country” panegyric for the general. On the chance we did not hear him the first time, Hunter kept repeating how “independent” Petraeus is, how candid and full of integrity, and compared him to famous generals who testified to Congress in the past – Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Schwarzkopf. Hunter was smart enough to avoid any mention of Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, who fell tragically short on those traits.

If memory serves, the aforementioned generals and Westmoreland were required to testify under oath. And this was one of the more embarrassing sticking points when CBS aired a program showing that Westmoreland had deliberately dissembled on the strength of Communist forces and U.S. “progress” in the war. When Westmoreland sued CBS for libel, several of his subordinates came clean, and Westmoreland quickly dropped the suit. The analogy with Westmoreland – justifying a White House death wish to persist in an unwinnable war – is the apt one here.

If Petraeus is so honest and full of integrity, what possible objection could he have to being sworn in? I had not the slightest hesitation being sworn in when testifying before the committee assembled by John Conyers (D-Mich.) on June 16, 2005. Should generals be immune? Or did Petraeus’ masters wish to give him a little more assurance that he could play fast and loose with the truth without the consequences encountered by Scooter Libby?

With the microphone finally fixed, much became quickly clear. Petraeus tried to square a circle in his very first two paragraphs. In the first, he thanks the committees for the opportunity to “discuss the recommendations I recently provided to my chain of command for the way forward.” Then he stretches credulity well beyond the breaking point – at least for me:

“At the outset, I would like to note that this is my testimony. Although I have briefed my assessment and recommendations to my chain of command, I wrote this testimony myself. It has not been cleared by, nor shared with, anyone in the Pentagon, the White House, or Congress.”

Is not the commander in chief in Petraeus’ chain of command?

As Harry Truman (D-Mo.) would have said, “Does he think we were born yesterday?”

According to a recently published piece at Salon.com, two former CIA officers have come forward and backed claims recently made by the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe that President Bush knowingly ‘squelched top-secret intelligence’ regarding Iraq’s possession of WMD’s. An excerpt…

“On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.”

Years after the fact, there simply is no arguing that the politicization of intelligence occurred, nor that the Bush administration was determined to invade Iraq no matter the lack of solid intelligence. In fact, they relied on entirely baseless sources, such as the now discredited ’Curveball’, for some of their information simply because it supported their position.

This outrage, which I have always believed to be a matter of impeachment, has always been vastly overlooked. The books were cooked, and the information that has come to light since, that proves it, has fallen on entirely deaf ears.

How much video footage exists in which the President, Vice President, and others unequivocally state that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction? And since that time, how many of them have been seriously confronted about the blatant lies employed that led to an invasion and occupation that has since claimed the lives of some 4,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of innocent people?

And do note that I did just employ the term seriously confronted.

As Gordon Prather points out, sometimes the trusty fox doesn’t raid the chicken coup…

“Days after Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei made his most recent “confidential” report to the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Cheney Cabal sycophantic editorialists at the Washington Post charged ElBaradei with being a “Rogue Regulator,” behaving as if he was “free to ignore” the Board, using his IAEA Secretariat to “thwart” the will of leading members of the IAEA “above all, the United States.”

Well, obviously these rogue editorialists haven’t read or don’t comprehend (a) the IAEA Statute or (b) Chapter VII of the UN Charter or (c) the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons or (d) the Iranian Safeguards Agreement or (e) any of the recent IAEA Board of Governors resolutions dealing with Iran or (f) the recent Security Council resolutions dealing with Iran or (g) any of ElBaradei’s recent reports to the IAEA Board.

The IAEA – whose General Conference currently comprises 144 member-states – has as its primary mission the facilitation throughout the world of the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes.

The IAEA Board of Governors has the authority to carry out the functions IAEA in accordance with the IAEA Statue, subject to its responsibilities to the General Conference.

The IAEA may conclude one or more legally binding Safeguards Agreement with a nation-state, wherein IAEA “inspectors” are authorized access “at all times to all places and data and to any person … as necessary to account for source and special fissionable materials” subject to the Safeguards Agreement, for the exclusive purpose of determining “whether there is compliance with the undertaking against use in furtherance of any military purpose.”

On May 15, 1974, Iran entered into such an agreement with the IAEA – to remain in force as long as Iran remained a party to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons – wherein all Iranian “source or special fissionable materials” and activities involving them were to be made subject to IAEA Safeguards “with a view to preventing diversion of nuclear energy from peaceful purposes.”

ElBaradei’s most recent report has once again verified to the Board, to the IAEA General Conference, to all NPT-signatories and to the Security Council “the non-diversion of the declared nuclear materials” by Iran.

That’s wonderful! Even though the United States egregiously fails to honor its legally binding commitments made pursuant to the NPT and IAEA Statue, as best ElBaradei can determine, Iran continues to honor its commitments.

So why are Cheney Cabal media sycophants so upset?

Well, on February 4, 2006, under extreme pressure by the United States, the IAEA Board of Governors adopted an outrageous resolution in which it concluded that for “confidence” to be built “in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program” it was “deemed necessary” for Iran to, inter alia;

“implement transparency measures, as requested by the Director General, including in GOV/2005/67, which extend beyond the formal requirements of the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol, and include such access to individuals, documentation relating to procurement, dual use equipment, certain military-owned workshops and research and development as the Agency may request in support of its ongoing investigations.”

Did you get that? The IAEA Board deems it necessary for ElBaradei to satisfy himself of the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program, past and present. And the UN Security Council subsequently agreed, applying sanctions on Iran until such time as ElBaradei so satisfies himself.

So, if Iran doesn’t (a) suspend indefinitely its uranium-enrichment activities, (b) ratify the Additional Protocol to its Safeguards Agreement, or (c) cancel the construction of a heavy-water moderated reactor at Arak, as far as the IAEA Board and Security Council resolutions are concerned, it doesn’t matter so long as ElBaradei so satisfies himself!

Far from being a “Rogue Regulator,” behaving as if he was free to ignore the IAEA Board and the Security Council, ElBaradei has just done what he was told to do, concluding an agreement with the Iranians which he believes – if implemented – will satisfy him whether or not Iran intends to build nuclear weapons.”

I believe that’s what they refer to as a man without a country.

Via AFP…

“An independent US government auditor on Friday cast doubt on US military statistics expected to show a huge dip in sectarian violence in Iraq under the current troop surge strategy.

Comptroller General David Walker said there was a “significant difference” of approach between the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which he heads, and Pentagon evaluations of violence in Iraq.

“The primary difference between us and the military is whether or not violence has been reduced with regard to sectarian violence,” Walker told the Senate Armed Services committee.

A GAO report published this week on 18 benchmarks for progress for the Iraqi government set down in law by Congress, found that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s administration had failed to reach targets for cutting violence.

“It is unclear whether sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased — a key security benchmark,” the report said, pointing to the difficulty in judging whether a killing was sectarian or criminal in nature.

In long-awaited testimony on Monday to Congress on the progress of the surge, Walker said war commander General David Petraeus will cite a large decrease in sectarian violence.

“I think you need to ask him how he defines sectarian violence,” Walker told senators.

“The other thing you have to look at is if it’s sustainable.”

Some reports say Petraeus will argue that sectarian violence in Iraq has fallen by up to 75 percent under the surge.

“We could not get comfortable with (the military’s) methodology for determining what’s sectarian versus nonsectarian violence,” Walker told senators.

“You know, it’s extremely difficult to know who did it, what their intent was.”

Walker was unable to go into further details, as the rest of the GAO’s conclusions in the report on sectarian violence have been declared secret by the Pentagon, and urged senators to read the classified version of the study.”

Oh to be a fly on the wall at a Senate Arms Services Committee meeting.

They’ve all returned to Parliament. The Accordance Front, a Shia bloc loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr, and the eleven members of the National Dialogue Front, a Sunni-Arab bloc led by Saleh al-Mutlaq.

The reason? Oil – and the imminent debate concerning it. Stay tuned.

Daniel Ellsberg was a United States Marine. He worked for the Rand Corporation, was a noted Hawk, worked for the Pentagon under John McNaughton, served in Vietnam as a military observer for the Pentagon, and was an ardent supporter of the Vietnam war.

That is, until he realized that the war that was being advertised was not the one being waged.

When he return to the United States he left the Pentagon, returned to Rand, and was a contributing author of the 7,000 page, 47 volume study entitled - United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense.

Being that Ellsberg was a contributing author, he was able to get Rand to pull some strings and allow him to obtain a copy of the top secret study, one which Congress did not even know existed. In it’s 7,000 pages, which Ellsberg read twice, he discovered the horrible truth about what he had once not only supported, but promoted. The study revealed the sham that was the Gulf of Tonkin incident, among numerous other transgressions and secrets unknown to both Congress and the American public. They were also not limited to a single administration, but ran through numerous ones.

And so this proud United States Marine, a man that had served his country in one capacity or another for most of his adult life, embarked on one of the most patriotic acts in American history.

During the night he would smuggle parts of the study out of Rand, where it was kept in his office in a locked safe, and began the arduous task of photocopying all 7,000 pages with the help of a former Rand employee and friend, Tony Russo.

The act itself was, in truth, highly illegal. Then again, when such knowledge is kept from the public, how does one define illegality and patriotism?

Ultimately, after exhausting innumerable avenues, excerpts from the study were printed by the New York Times. On the 28th of June, 1971, he surrendered himself to authorities in Boston and was charged with espionage, theft, and conspiracy. But despite the fact that he was, in truth, facing a lifetime in prison for leaking the study, the case against him was dismissed after it was learned that The Plumbers had broken into the office of his psychiatrist and stolen his files in hopes of finding information to use against him. Charles Colson, a White House Council, would later plead no contest to obstruction of justice with regards to their theft.

In the years since, Daniel Ellsberg, once an ardent Hawk, has been a dedicated activist. And in a piece posted today at Antiwar.com entitled Libby And Vanunu, he continues to make incredibly intelligent challenges to the abuse of power, be it in the United States or elsewhere.

An excerpt…

“There is no question that the information Vanunu revealed to the press in 1986 – primarily, that Israel, which has never signed the Nonproliferation Treaty nor opened its nuclear operations to any international inspection, had been for some time a nuclear weapons state, with an arsenal larger than that of Britain and perhaps larger than that of France – was regarded as secret in Israel and his revelation was illegal. On the other hand, no other nuclear weapons state had kept this status secret from its own people and the world: again, with the exception of South Africa, which revealed its earlier secret arsenal at the same time it disbanded it, along with apartheid. Moreover, by 1986 this program (aside from the scale Vanunu revealed, which was a surprise even to CIA) was a secret almost exclusively from those Israelis and others (including, officially, the American government) that chose to believe Israel’s ambiguous and deliberately deceptive denials.

In any case, it was information that Vanunu’s fellow citizens deserved urgently to have had long before, in time to reach an informed, democratic judgment and influence on their country’s policy. In my opinion, Mordechai Vanunu did what he should have with the information he acquired. I hope that I would have done the same in his position. His readiness to accept the personal risk that his truth-telling actually entailed – that he would suffer a long prison sentence (and the longest time in solitary confinement known to Amnesty International, which defined it as a human rights violation) – is deserving of worldwide admiration, and, I hope, emulation. His continued restriction and persecution after serving his sentence, his new return to prison for six months on a pretense of preserving 25-year-old secrets that he has yet to reveal (and which the restrictions do not protect), are illegal and outrageous.”

Today in Iraq, 231 Iraqis lost their lives and 311 more were wounded. With regards to the effects of President Bush’s ‘surge’, the BBC provides some insight…

The US costs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq this year are up by one third, and could bring the total overall costs for both wars to in excess of 1.4 trillion dollars (slightly more than the United States owes China).

Two short films shot by Kay. One of my niece Lilah, and one of the infamous ‘snapping turtle!’…

Having spent the last week here in Las Vegas talking with numerous Americans about the war in Iraq and their government, the overwhelming answer that I am often confronted with is that they’re either too tired of the subject or simply don’t have the time to follow what’s occurring overseas or even in their own halls of power.

Don’t get me wrong, 99.9% of those I have spoken to here are against the war and dislike the Bush administration intensely, but they grow dismissive when the issue of alternative courses of action is brought up. For many of them, they concede that there is no solution to the war in Iraq, yet routinely claim that were the United States to abandon the country that it would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda.

As I have written tirelessly of late, a reality that has been echoed by various preeminent academics and authors, al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia would most likely be the first group to be expunged from the national landscape were the United States to withdraw. The presence of foreign fighters in the country would not be as tolerated by the majority of the Sunni insurgency, and certainly not by the Shia, as the administration suggests. Thus, this idea that al-Qaeda is an ominous presence in Iraq that has the ability to actually seize formal control of the country is nothing more than propaganda. And by the conversations that I have had, that propaganda seems to be working.

It should not be dismissed that Iraq certainly has become a noted destination for foreign fighters, primarily from the likes of Saudi Arabia and Syria, but having said that, their influence is not as nationally significant as has been made out by the White House and Pentagon disinformation machines. True, the attacks undertaken by them commonly produce the grimmest results, often killing scores of Iraqi civilians, but therein lies the schism between their murderous objectives and those of the groups that comprise the majority of the insurgency itself, whose main priority has always been the deterrence of the occupation. Of course, the sectarian violence that has gripped the nation can also not be overlooked, and that the objectives of some have quite obviously become two dimensional – anti-occupational combined with actions against other Iraqi religious groups. There is also the matter of extremist groups operating within various government ministries to contend with as well, which, over the last several years, has only aided in worsening the situation.

That said, it is of massive importance at present to monitor what is being said of Iran, whom various individuals within the administration, primarily those aligned with the Cheney cabal, have been focusing on with greater zeal of late.

As Gareth Porter points out in an article at Antiwar.com today, claims being made by the United States with regards to Iranian support for the Taliban are vastly over simplified and in no way actually address the sort of complexities that might ‘confuse’ the average American – the exact same tactic used to paint al-Qaeda in Iraq as the foremost enemy…

“In a development that underlines the tensions between the anti-Iran agenda of the George W. Bush administration and the preoccupation of its military command in Afghanistan with militant Sunni activism, a State Department official publicly accused Iran for the first time of arming the Taliban forces last week, but the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan rejected that charge for the second time in less than two weeks.

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns declared in Paris Jun. 12 that Iran was “transferring arms to the Taliban in Afghanistan,” putting it in the context of a larger alleged Iranian role of funding “extremists” in the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Iraq. The following day he asserted that there was “irrefutable evidence” of such Iranian arms supply to the Taliban.

The use of the phrase “irrefutable evidence” suggested that the Burns statement was scripted by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. The same phrase had been used by Cheney himself on Sep. 20, 2002, in referring to the administration’s accusation that Saddam Hussein had a program to enrich uranium as the basis for a nuclear weapon.

But the NATO commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, pointed to other possible explanations, particularly the link between drug smuggling and weapons smuggling between Iran and Afghanistan.

Gen. McNeill repeated in an interview with US News and World Report last week a previous statement to Reuters that he did not agree with the charge. McNeill minimized the scope of the arms coming from Iran, saying: “What we’ve found so far hasn’t been militarily significant on the battlefield.”

He speculated that the arms could have come from black market dealers, drug traffickers, or al-Qaeda backers and could have been sold by low-level Iranian military personnel.

McNeill’s remarks underlined the US command’s knowledge of the link between the heroin trade and trafficking in arms between southeastern Iran and southern Afghanistan. The main entry point for opium and heroin smuggling between Afghanistan and Iran runs through the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan to the capital of Zahedan. The two convoys of arms which were intercepted by NATO forces last spring had evidently come through that Iranian province.

According to a report by Robert Tait of the Guardian Feb. 17, Sistan-Baluchistan province has also been the setting for frequent violent incidents involving militant Sunni groups and drug traffickers. Tait reported that more than 3,000 Iranian security personnel had been killed in armed clashes with drug traffickers since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

McNeill further appeared to suggest in the interview with US News that not all the arms coming from the Iranian side of the border were necessarily Iranian-made. Munitions in one convoy, he said, “were without a whole lot of doubt in my mind Iranian made,” implying that the origins of the arms was not clear in other cases.

McNeill’s rejection of Burns’ accusation reflected the views of Afghanistan’s Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, who told Associated Press on Jun. 14 that it was “difficult” to link the arms traffic to the Iranian government. Wardak said the arms “might be from al-Qaeda, from the drug mafia or from other sources.”

The clash between key civilian officials and the command in Afghanistan over the explanation for the arms entering Afghanistan from Iran followed a series of news stories in late May and early June quoting an anonymous administration official as claiming proof of a change in Iranian policy to one of military support for the Taliban. These anonymous statements of certainty about such a policy shift, for which no intelligence has ever been claimed, pointed to Cheney’s office as the orchestrater of the campaign.

Given the very small scale of the arms in question, Cheney’s interest in the issue appears to have much less to do with Afghanistan than his aim of ensuring that President Bush goes along with the neoconservative desire to attack Iran before the end of his term.”

Linkage is crucial when it comes to the wholly ambiguous tenets of the War On Terror. When the United States invaded Iraq, one of the lies employed was that the regime of Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks, which, rather unbelievably, many Americans still believe to be true. It is, of course, not true at all, but the lie provided linkage to an event that the American people could easily identify with and thus created a basis of popular support for military action. As the occupation of Iraq dragged on, new ways to detract from the initial lies told the public were thus employed. Rather than the insurgency representing an anti-occupational movement, it was painted as being a predominantly al-Qaeda based movement, again providing linkage that the American people could easily identify with. This same tactic is currently being employed against Iran, who is being accused of aiding the Taliban, once again providing linkage that many Americans can easily swallow. The fine print, of course, is of little consequence.

As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf (though it should be noted that the context of the quote was to do with his belief of such practices by the Jewish people) - “…people will doubt the truth of a small lie, but never a big one.” No matter the context in which Hitler initially meant it, it holds true to this day, especially in the hyper-media age in which we live. The simplicity of inaccurate information on a large scale is entirely more believable and reasonable to the largely selfish and distracted intellectual capacities of most. Complexities require examination, examination requires time, and who wants to spend their time trying to come to terms with something that is not entirely black and white when voices in government are offering you just that – black and white.

The unfortunate truth about placing ones faith in the ‘black and white’ is that it inevitably leads to the production of bodies, all of which, in their deathly reposes, are tinged with gray – a shade that we should all take more time to examine.

One of the best ways to target your own population with regards to the use of disinformation is to leak stories to the press that any undertaking in that regard is meant to influence anyone but them.

In an entry posted on May 26th, I linked this article from The Guardian in which US officials were quoted as saying that Iran was…

“…secretly forging ties with al-Qaida elements and Sunni Arab militias in Iraq in preparation for a summer showdown with coalition forces intended to tip a wavering US Congress into voting for full military withdrawal…”

The entry itself was written to comment on a White House backed CIA disinformation campaign aimed at destabilizing the Iranian government. Ironically, less than a month later, it seems the cat is out of the bag. As Gareth Porter writes…

“A media campaign portraying Iran as supplying arms to the Taliban guerrillas fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, orchestrated by advocates of a more confrontational stance toward Iran in the George W. Bush administration, appears to have backfired last week when Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Dan McNeill, issued unusually strong denials.

The allegation that Iran has reversed a decade-long policy and is now supporting the Taliban, conveyed in a series of press articles quoting “senior officials” in recent weeks, is related to a broader effort by officials aligned with Vice President Dick Cheney to portray Iran as supporting Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaeda, to defeat the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

An article in the Guardian published May 22 quoted an anonymous U.S. official as predicting an “Iranian-orchestrated summer offensive in Iraq, linking al-Qaeda and Sunni insurgents to Tehran’s Shia militia allies” and as referring to the alleged “Iran-al-Qaeda linkup” as “very sinister.”

That article and subsequent reports on CNN May 30, in the Washington Post June 3 and on ABC news June 6 all included an assertion by an unnamed U.S. official or a “senior coalition official” that Iran is following a deliberate policy of supplying the Taliban’s campaign against U.S., British, and other NATO forces.

In the most dramatic version of the story, ABC reported “NATO officials” as saying they had “caught Iran red-handed, shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives, and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces.”

Far from showing that Iran had been “caught red-handed,” however, the report quoted from an analysis that cited only the interception in Afghanistan of a total of four vehicles coming from Iran with arms and munitions of Iranian origin. The report failed to refer to any evidence of Iranian government involvement.

Both Gates and McNeill denied flatly last week that there is any evidence linking Iranian authorities to those arms. Gates told a press conference on June 4, “We do not have any information about whether the government of Iran is supporting this, is behind it, or whether it’s smuggling, or exactly what is behind it.” Gates said that “some” of the arms in question might be going to Afghan drug smugglers.

The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McNeill, implied that the arms trafficking from Iran is being carried out by private interests. “[W]hen you say weapons being provided by Iran, that would suggest there is some more formal entity involved in getting these weapons here,” he told Jim Loney of Reuters June 5. “That’s not my view at all.”

Gates and McNeill are obviously aware of the link between arms entering Afghanistan from Iran and the flow of heroin from Afghanistan into Iran. It is well known that Afghan drug lords who command huge amounts of money have been able to penetrate the long and porous border with ease. They have undoubtedly been involved in buying arms in Iran with their drug proceeds for both themselves and the Taliban, which protects their drug routes. Smuggling is relatively easy because of the money available for bribery of border guards.

Another factor helping to explain the influx of arms from Iran, as noted by former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan Rustam Shah Momand in an interview on Pakistan’s GEO television April 19, is that the Taliban now controls areas on the Iranian border for the first time. Momand said the Taliban, which is awash in money from the heroin exports to Iran, buys small quantities of weapons in Iran and smuggles them back into Afghanistan.

But the Iranian government itself is not involved in the trade in arms, Momand insisted.

The combination of anonymous statements by administration officials and the dismissal of the charge by the commander in the field contrasts sharply with the Bush administration’s claims that Iran was sending armor-piercing IEDs to Shi’ite militias in Iraq last January and February. Those accusations, which were never backed up with specific evidence, were made publicly by Bush himself, the State Department, and the U.S. military command in Baghdad.”

While the USS Chafee is shelling the Somali coast, reports of more civilian deaths at the hands of NATO forces in Afghanistan are surfacing, and US Marine Major General Richard Huck has testified that all his superiors, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr. knew about the massacre in Haditha within hours of it happening - General Sir Michael Rose, the UK’s former Army Commander, has called for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, stating that he believes that there is no way the war can be won…

“There is no way we are going to win the war and (we should) withdraw and accept defeat because we are going to lose on a more important level if we don’t,” he said.

Though the coalition could not simply “cut and run,” Rose said announcing a withdrawal date would help to dampen down the violence between Sunni, Shia and Kurdish factions.

“Give them a date and it is amazing how people and political parties will stop fighting each other and start working towards a peaceful transfer of power,” he said.

Rose was speaking at the annual Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts in Hay-on-Wye, on the Welsh border with England.

The retired general who has written a book on the American War of Independence, made comparisons with the 1775-1783 conflict between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies.

He said: “How was it a small and extremely determined body of insurgents, thieves and deserters could inflict such a strategic and potentially disastrous defeat on the most powerful nation in the world?

“The answer will be familiar to anybody who is looking at what is happening in Iraq today.”

Yesterday saw the deaths of 114 Iraqis, 3 GI’s, with some 87 Iraqis wounded besides. As it was for US forces, last month was also extremely costly for Iraqis (more so than their occupiers, of course). Texas’ Star-Telegram has more.

G8 Protest Turns Violent, Again

Leave it to a handful of extremists to tarnish the largely peaceful protest being held at the anti-globalization summit in Rostock, Germany. Because as we’re all aware, lighting cars on fire and peeling up paving stones to hurl at the police is a sure fire way to get things accomplished.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has announced that he will relinquish his position on the 27th of June.

For me, Blair is a man for which I have mixed feelings. When he first became Prime Minister he brought with him an exhilarating air of change. He was, and is, unlike his counterpart in Washington, a passionate and emotive speaker, one that, in some ways, wears his heart on his sleeve and is not afraid to speak candidly.

But one wonders where that trait fled to in 2002 and 2003.

There is evidence to suggest that Blair’s government attempted to work behind the scenes prior to the invasion of Iraq to promote alternative options to unilateralist preemption, but that once he had hitched his cart to Bush’s horse he was, for lack of a better term, screwed. Unfortunately, I believe that his role in supporting the US invasion of Iraq will forever taint the accomplishments of his government, which is an unfortunate thing.

The National Security Archive recently released details of a Pentagon program designed in the run up to the war in Iraq to “ensure control over major Iraqi media while providing an Iraqi ‘face’ for it’s efforts”. Jim Lobe provides analysis…

“In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon planned to create a “Rapid Reaction Media Team” (RRMT) designed to ensure control over major Iraqi media while providing an Iraqi “face” for its efforts, according to a “white paper” obtained by the independent National Security Archive (NSA) which released it Tuesday.

The partially redacted, three-page document was accompanied by a longer power point presentation that included a proposed six-month, $51 million budget for the RRMT operation, apparently the first phase in a one-to-two-year “strategic information campaign.”

Among other items, the budget called for the hiring of two U.S. “media consultants” who were to be paid $140,000 each for six months’ work. A further $800,000 were to be paid for six Iraqi “media consultants” over the same period.

Both the paper and the slide presentation were prepared by two Pentagon offices – Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which, among other things, specialize in psychological warfare, and the Office of Special Plans under then-undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith – in mid-January, 2003, two months before the invasion, according to NSA analyst Joyce Battle.

“The RRMT concept focuses on USG-UK pre-and post hostilities efforts to develop programming, train talent, and rapidly deploy a team of U.S./UK media experts with a team of ‘hand selected’ Iraqi media experts to communicate immediately with the Iraqi public opinion upon liberation of Iraq,” according to the paper.

The “hand-picked” Iraqi experts, according to the paper, would provide planning and program guidance for the U.S. experts and help “select and train the Iraqi broadcasters and publishers (’the face’) for the USG/coalition sponsored information effort.” USG is an abbreviation for U.S. government.

“It will be as if, after another day of deadly agit-prop, the North Korean people turned off their TVs at night, and turned them on in the morning to find the rich fare of South Korean TV spread before them as their very own,” the paper enthused, adding that “a reconstituted free Iraqi domestic media can serve as a model in the Middle East where so much Arab hate-media are themselves equivalent to weapons of mass destruction.”

Whether the plan was implemented as described in the paper is not clear, although the NSA Tuesday also released an audit by the Pentagon’s Inspector-General regarding two dozen, mostly non-competitive contracts totalling $122.5 million awarded by the Defense Department to three defense contractors that carried out media-related activities in Iraq after the invasion.

The contractors included the Rendon Group and Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) which received a $25 million contract to create an Iraqi Media Network whose aims appear to be roughly consistent with those laid out in the white paper, but which largely fell apart after about six months as a result of alleged incompetence and infighting.”

It seems that the Vice President’s recent visit to Baghdad was, as one might expect, fruitless, though that didn’t stop him from spinning the realities of the war.

According to an article in today’s Washington Post, there are indications that President Bush’s ‘troop surge’ could realistically last into 2008.

Lastly, according to The Blotter, the US Military has ‘apologized’ for the Marine rampage in Afghanistan that killed 19 civilians and wounded 50 others. Check out Luis Martinez’s entry for more details.