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Inaugural Inanity
Becky Akers
Ten thousand National Guardsmen, 7,500 active-duty soldiers, 25,000 cops from "99 federal, state and local law-enforcement agencies." A city "honeycombed" with "communication command centers" spying on supposedly free Americans with 5,265 surveillance cameras. And, as if we aren’t already up to our eyeballs in goons, an entire brigade of the US Army on call. The cost for this hyperbolic hysteria? Hundreds of millions at a time when many taxpayers can’t scrape together the next month’s mortgage. All for an inauguration that has attracted no "specific threats."
"Critics" contend that this is overkill. Go figure.
The piranhas swarming the security food-chain beg to differ. After all, they aren’t squandering their own money to guard against every conceivable threat, whether it’s a discarded cigarette igniting Obama’s hot air or the Almighty hurling a meteorite at DC’s massed mountebanks. Michael Chertoff, large intestine at the Department of Homeland Security, pompously assured CNN, "We are literally going to be watching this every minute between now and the conclusion of events on the 20th." Having turned Washington into an armed camp, this twit added, "You don't want to make this like an armed camp because it spoils the event itself."
The Humiliation of America
Paul Craig Roberts
"Early Friday morning the secretary of state was considering bringing the cease-fire resolution to a UNSC vote and we didn’t want her to vote for it." Olmert said. "I said ‘get President Bush on the phone.’ They tried and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said ‘I’m not interested, I need to speak to him now.’ He got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call."[PM: Rice left embarrassed in UN vote, By Yaakov Lappin , Jerusalem Post, January 12, 2009]
"Let me see if I understand this," wrote a friend in response to news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert ordered President Bush from the podium where he was giving a speech to receive Israel’s instructions about how the United States had to vote on the UN resolution. "On September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit--and he went on reading. Now, Olmert calls about a UN resolution when Bush is giving a speech and Bush leaves the stage to take the call. There exists no greater example of a master-servant relationship."
The U.S. Economy is being Marched to the Gallows
Andrew Hughes
The upcoming Financial Stimulus package courtesy of the new Economic dream team has left numerous economists and analysts quaking in their boots. We are seeing predictions of hyperinflation, the destruction of the dollar, the flight of U.S. creditors, the prospect of widespread civil unrest and a descent in to a Greater Depression. Small business owners have stood up and discredited the tax incentives that were meant to convince them to ignore market reality and open the door to new employees. The measures that supposedly address the enormous foreclosure problem seem to change from day to day and only work to the advantage of the banks. Obama and Bush have just signed off on an additional $20 Billion in cash and $118 Billion in asset guarantees for Bank of America which already received $25 Billion last year and is now choking on Merrill Lynch's losses. The President Elect and his new Stimulus Czars are not paying attention and are proceeding to continue the same destructive formula adopted by Paulson.
Qahtani and the case against torture
Mary Shaw
When I've argued in the past against the use of torture, it has typically been from an ethical and human rights perspective. Torture is inhumane and morally wrong.
Those are still very valid reasons to oppose the use of torture by anyone, including U.S. agents who deal with suspected terrorists. We're supposed to be above that kind of brutality.
And, from a practical perspective, intelligence experts generally agree that torture simply does not work. It is not a reliable way of producing actionable intelligence. Under torture, a detainee will likely say whatever he thinks his interrogator wants to hear, just to make the pain stop. And so he will confess to things he never did, or provide incorrect names or other data. Ask John McCain, who, when asked under torture in Vietnam to provide his captors with the names of the members of his flight squadron, instead rattled off the names of the Green Bay Packers' offensive line, "knowing that providing them false information was sufficient to suspend the abuse."
America is a Jewish Colony: Olmert reveals all.
Bob Finch
On monday january 12, 2009, the leader of the jews-only state in palestine ehud olmert revealed to a jewish audience in ashkelon that he had insisted george bush should tell condoleeza rice to vote against a united nations’ resolution calling for a ceasefire to the jews’ attack on gaza. Olmert did not inadvertently humiliate the president of the united states of america; the secretary of state, condoleeza rice; congress; and the american people, by divulging this information. On the contrary. He was boasting about his power to humiliate the president and thus the american people.
The global Jewish Empire: a global Zionist conspiracy.
There are a handful of commentators in the western world who have been compiling the evidence that america, the world’s greatest democracy and military hyper-power, has been taken over by a jewish elite which acts on behalf of the jews-only state in palestine. America’s ruling jewish elite’s most well known operatives are the jewish lobby and the jewish neocons. These israel-firsters have been corrupting the bush regime into implementing policies which promote the interests of the racist state even though they have become increasing catastrophic, economically, militarily, politically, and morally, for america and the american people. After al qaeda’s attacks on new york and the pentagon, zionists imported the jews’ decades-old war against terrorism into america and ever since the bush regime has been implementing this disastrous zionist doctrine.
U.S. military industrial complex benefits from presence of Israel
Interview by: Kourosh Ziabari
The carnage in Gaza and the attacks with white phosphorus weapons will eventually isolate the Zionist regime in the international arena.
In an exclusive interview, American journalist Hannah Mermelstein condemned the Israeli atrocities and called for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza to allow humanitarian assistance to enter the Strip.
She is the co-founder and co-director of Birthright Unplugged Association, which takes mostly Jewish North American people into the West Bank to meet with Palestinian people and to equip them for returning to their own communities and work for justice; moreover, it takes Palestinian children from refugee camps to Al-Quds, the sea, and the villages their grandparents fled in 1948, and supports them to document their experiences and create photography exhibitions to share it with their communities and with the world.
Israel's Hands Around Our Throat Are Showing
Peter Chamberlin
In the closing days of the Bush disaster Israel is moving to consolidate gains it has made over the past eight years toward its ultimate goals of "Greater Israel" and the Zionist-dominated new world order. The urgency of the hour for Israel can be seen in the open display of Jewish/Israeli political muscle-flexing in Washington. The normally invisible Israeli hand around America's throat has been clearly visible lately, as America moved to take four specific actions on Israel's behalf which will probably prove to be harmful to America's interests, forcing a major expansion of the war on terror.
Planet of Lost Souls
Mickey Z.
“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”
- Matthew 16:26
I wasn’t supposed to be born. After my mother gave birth to my sister, the doctors told her she’d never have another child. They couldn’t say exactly why (later, she was diagnosed with endometriosis) but they were pretty damn certain…the way doctors tend to be pretty damn certain. Wisely, my mother ignored such white coat condescension and less than two years later, yours truly arrived on the scene. Mom called me her “miracle baby” and I think this played a role in the amazingly close relationship we always had.
In the U2 song “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,” Bono warbles: “That’s all right, we’re the same soul.” This simple line have given me the poetic license to imagine that my mother defied the medical odds by choosing to “share her soul” (so to speak) with me. This selfless act is what made it possible for me to be born and for us to have been such good friends.
Fears Raised over Use of Chemical Weapons
MIFTAH
Israel’s assault on Gaza entered its third week today, January 17, as the death toll reached a staggering 1,200 dead. Amongst the dead, 410 were children, while some 5,300 Palestinians have been wounded. The Israeli death toll remains at 13, ten of whom were soldiers.
More fears were raised this week regarding Israel’s use of chemical weapons in Gaza. As of now, Israel has neither confirmed nor denied it is using phosphorus shells. However, on January 13, the Palestinian Network of Non Governmental Organizations (PNGO) demanded an urgent international investigation into allegations that Israel used internationally prohibited weapons against Palestinians in Gaza. Based on the reports of Palestinian and foreign doctors working in Gaza hospitals, PNGO has concluded that new Israeli weapons are causing burns that can reach to the bones of the victims. PNGO also said that another type of unidentified weapon fires smoke and noxious gases that cause breathing difficulties, particularly in children. Just days later, on January 15, Chris Gunness, an UNRWA official in Gaza, claimed that Israeli jets had fired unknown chemical weapons on an UNRWA compound in Gaza. Three Palestinians were injured. At the time, about 700 displaced Palestinians were inside the building when it was targeted by Israel's air force. Gunness explained, “[The chemical compound] looks like phosphorus, it smells like phosphorus and it burns like phosphorus.” The UN building continued to burn into the late afternoon. “I don’t know why they [Israel] would do this,” Gunness continued. “We had guarantees.”
"Twenty years of a life erased"
Eva Bartlett
Where a family's home once stood.
Seven minutes
When I'd met the extended Abed Rabu family, before the ground invasion began, they had just had their house bombed by an F-16. Their area has been occupied by Israeli tanks and soldiers since the ground invasion began. Medical workers cannot reach the injured there, and those who have managed to escape testify to imprisonment in their houses, abuse, point-blank shooting (to death), and a number of dead not yet known. It's an area Israel views as strategic, lying just hundreds of meters from the eastern border to Israel, a key entry point for invading troops. Past invasions have meant entire families and neighbors being locked into a room of a house for a day or days. Supposition among journalists and those with two cents here is that Israel's intense bombardment of, and destruction of houses in, the area is to both decimate any resistance and to create an alternate "road" for tanks and troops to roll in on, meaning houses in their path are leveled to the ground.
That day, Abu Mahmoud Abed Rabu had related the events of his house demolition. "A person called me saying he was a spokesperson for the Israeli army and that we had seven minutes to leave the house before it was bombed. I begged for 10, told him seven wasn't enough to collect possessions and get our children out safely. He said seven," Abed Rabu explained. His family made it out in time, avoiding the death sentence that has been given so many here, without warning.
He said he'd just stood away from the house and watched as it was bombed, watched 20 years of his life be erased, with everything inside it. "I'm just a working man, not Fatah, not Hamas. Just a man. Why did they bomb my house?" he asked. "There were four families in here, at least 25 children," he added.
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