You cannot avoid it any longer. You cannot pretend it did not happen. You cannot wish it away. It's real. The President of the United States lied to start a war. Under American system of laws, only Congress has... Full text
Politics: Castro quits as Cuba's president Posted on Tuesday, February 19, 2008 @ Eastern Standard Time by msm
?Dodgy dossier? draft reveals war lies It?s bad enough that Tony Blair took us into a war apparently on the basis of a document written by a foreign office press officer.
But what?s worse is that the infamous claim that Saddam Hussein could launch chemical weapons within 45 minutes was not in the draft document.
It was written in the margin by someone else in Whitehall and appears in the final dossier ? backing up the claim that the dossier was ?sexed up? to justify the war.
"I think they said, 'If we can't get this guy out of the U.N., let's disappear him from the Internet,'" Lee said. I have stopped using Google, not because of this particular case of censorship but because too many of my searches on Google fail for the message, "We're sorry... ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. "
The identical searches always work on Yahoo, so that is becoming my favorite search engine.
Shoot-down of dead satellite could happen tomorrow Press secretary Geoff Morrell said Tuesday that senior military officers, including the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, are evaluating the situation and will advise Defense Secretary Robert Gates when is the best time to carry it out.
The plan is to fire a missile from a Pacific-based ship that would release a "kenetic kill vehicle," ? a nonexplosive device ? on a path that would enable it to collide with the satellite, destroying the spacecraft and its components by force of impact alone. It is looking more and more that this has become a public demonstration that the US military is capable of knocking other countries' satellites out of the sky.
Gazprom to develop two or three South Pars blocks in Iran Russia?s gas giant Gazprom has agreed the terms on which it will be developing ?two or three? blocks of the South Pars field in Iran, and also on the participation of its daughter company, Gazpromneft, in an oil project in Iran, Gazprom press office said on Tuesday upon the end of Tuesday?s visit to Teheran by the company?s delegation under Gazprom CEO, Alexei Miller. Russia is not going to want any interruption of its business dealings (particularly regarding oil) with Iran.
Any Israeli and/or US tactician might want to consider; if there is a pre-emptive attack on Iran, just what will Russia do?
Does any sane person in Washington or Tel Aviv really want to go to war with Russia?
Israel: We Are Ready For Iran, Syria, Hezbollah As the Israel Foreign Ministry protests to the UN repeated statements by Iran to "wipe Israel off the map" security analysts in Israel say that the Jewish democratic nation is more than ready for any aggression by Iran, Hezbollah and Syria. Translation: look for some kind of false flag operation, courtesy of Israel, to trip off the next war in the Middle East.
And remember: Bush has promised to support Israel militarily, no matter whether or not it starts a confilct.
Despite intense pressure from the United States and warnings that the dispute could lead to an irreparable split in the trans-Atlantic alliance, Mrs Merkel said that her government would not reconsider the terms of the mandate under which German soldiers are stationed in the country. It looks as though the dissolution of NATO may well come about soon, courtesy of the campaign in Afghanistan.
We are going to see a "coalition of the willing" morph into the "coalition of the non-existent", and the US may well be left alone here.
Taliban defeat will take years: US general Major General David Rodriguez, head of the US-led coalition force, said the US military would stay in the country "as long as they are needed." Translation: we're never leaving.
Ambulances in Gaza unable to run due to fuel shortage Ambulances in the Gaza Strip ran out of fuel on Monday due to the reduction of fuel shipment from Israel to Gaza. The ambulance and emergency service in the Palestinian Health Ministry organized a 'sit-in' for the ambulance drivers in protest against the Israeli decision to further reduce fuel deliveries. Even more Gazan Palestinian deaths without Israel even having to pull a trigger.
Soldiers sue over nerve gas guinea pigs A GROUP of former Israeli army recruits are suing the government for compensation after it allegedly made them unwitting guinea pigs by testing them for nerve gas antidotes, a newspaper reported. I seem to remember something like this happening in a European country in the last century. Now let's see.
Oh yeah, I remember: Nazi Germany!
Turkey ready for ground operations in Iraq to fight PKK The Turkish army was preparing for a comprehensive ground operation into northern Iraq against the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party (PKK) in the coming spring, local Today's Zaman daily reported on Monday. And the US has utterly no choice but to let Turkey invade Iraq, because American troops can barely contain Baghdad.
Israel blocking Gaza kids from joining parents in Ramallah The state told the court the family intends to move to the West Bank and there is no reason to allow them to do that. "The petitioners have no right, either in Israeli law or international law, to move from the Gaza Strip, which is no longer under military control, to the West Bank," the prosecution stated.
Attorney Ido Blum, who represents the minors, said the state was ignoring the doctors' opinions that she must remain under his constant supervision. Another medical opinion said the complicated treatment requires the supervision of an expert doctor who is familiar with the illness and patient. One has to wonder that these policies could have possibly originated from the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who full well know the human price of prejudice.
Olmert says Gaza blockade to continue In response to the rocket fire, Israel has kept Gaza under effective lockdown since last June following the territory's takeover by the Islamist movement Hamas. On January 17 it tightened the blockade before easing it again slightly. One of the items, in the writing of future history of Israel, will be a very thick chapter on the collective punishment utilized against Gazan Palestinian civilians in the 21st century.
That interception drew criticism from senior U.S. military officials, who complained that it had left a cloud of debris that was dangerous to other space traffic. Chinese experts in turn have questioned the Pentagon's explanation that it wanted to down the spy satellite to avoid contamination from hazardous fuel on board.
Castro quits as Cuba's president This morning the Mainstream media is falling all over themselves as to why Cuba is still "The Bad Guys" and why the embargo must be maintained and how the mighty nuclear-armed United States is still threatened by tiny little Cuba (about as silly as nuclear-armed Israel being threatened by Gaza).
So, a bit of history the MSM will probably NOT mention, but which goes farther in explaining this strange bullying by the US.
A long time ago, about the time the second Godfather film is set, Cuba was ruled by Fulgencio Batista, a US puppet ruler, not unlike the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, Augusto Pinochet in Chile, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.
Like those other rulers, there were rumors that Batista had won office in Cuba through CIA-assisted election fraud. Like those other rulers, Batista oppressed and impoverished his own people in order to allow US Corporations operating in Cuba to make more profits. Batista sold Cuba's agricultural produce at below-market prices to PepsiCo, United Fruit, and other US companies. Batista also extended a welcoming hand to the Mafia, which built hotels and casinos in Havana, which was wide open to every vice imaginable. Anything could be had for the price, nothing was illegal.
The CIA was well-entrenched in Cuba. It made a very convenient base to operate out of for operations in South America (see reference to Chile above). It gave the CIA "deniability" to operate out of Cuba rather than directly out of the US.
This was all very cozy for the mafia and the corporations and the CIA. It was not very well for the people of Cuba who, forbidden to sell their produce at fair market prices, languished in poverty.
Had Batista not so abused his own people, Fidel Castro would have likely remained a farmer his entire life. But, Cuba was a living hell for the Cuban people, and Fidel became the focal point for the inevitable revolution.
So, Batista fell, the members of his government fled to Florida, and Castro came to power. The irony is that he approached the United State about establishing relations. But Castro wanted to sell Cuba's agricultural produce for the going global market price. This did not sit well with US Corporations that had grown wealthy on Batista's "discounts." Castro also wanted to curb some of the more extreme activities at the Havana casinos. The Mafia did not like that at all. They had invested heavily in Havana to have a place where they could do and sell things still illegal in Las Vegas. And the CIA wanted their base of operations back.
So the US, urged on by the corporations, the Mafia, the CIA, and Batista's henchmen (now called the Cuban Exiles) took a hard line. They did not want to be friends with Castro, unless Castro were willing to be the new Batista. Knowing that being a new Batista would result in a new revolution, Castro prudently declined the offer.
The US declared an embargo to starve Cuba into getting rid of Castro and allowing the Batista regime to return. This forced Castro to turn to the USSR for trade relations in what was possibly one of the worst foreign policy blunders the US ever made. That Cuba had broken free of its US puppet was bad enough, but that Cuba was now a soviet satellite just 90 miles from the United States was a major embarrassment.
US Corporations started backing candidates who promised to restore Cuba to its former subservient condition. United Fruit was one of Richard Nixon's largest backers, and Nixon, while vice-President under Eisenhower, started the preparations to try to invade Cuba, assuming that he would complete the plan as President after Eisenhower. Of course, John F. Kennedy beat Nixon in the 1960 election, but the plan went forward anyway. The CIA covertly armed and trained the "Cuban Brigade" made up of former Batista government thugs, then lied to John F. Kennedy by telling him that the Cuban people would rush right down to join an invasion to crush Castro and return Cuba to a Batista-style regime. So, Kennedy approved the invasion plan, yet another foreign policy blunder. (As a side note, a Texas oil company owner by the name of George Herbert Waker Bush was involved with the CIA at that time, recruited by legendary CIA operative Felix Rodriguez. Bush supplied three ships for the operation, named the Barbara, the Houston, and the Zapata, named for his wife, his home town, and his oil company.)
The invasion force landed at the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban people rushed right down to the landing zone and proceeded to stomp the invading force into the sand, sending a clear message to the world that the people of Cuba preferred communist rule by Castro to anything the US had to offer. JFK, incensed that the CIA had lied to him, terminated the operation and fired Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.
In the end, the United States had to violate its own embargo and ship $5 million worth of badly needed medical supplies to Cuba to secure the release of the captured CIA invasion force.
As a result of the attempted invasion, the USSR sent nuclear missiles to Cuba, both to prevent another invasion and to counter the US missiles that threatened the USSR from Turkey.
The world avoided a nuclear war only when Khrushchev removed the missiles from Cuba, with the explicit understanding that if the US attacked Cuba ever again, the USSR would immediately launch a nuclear strike at the United States. This was a mirror of Kennedy's own doctrine in which he had proclaimed that an attack on any nation in the Americas would be construed as an attack on the US itself.
So, the US, despite positive spin, the reality is that the history of Cuba is the story of one major policy screwup after another, which ended with the US embarrassed before the world. The CIA, the mafia, the Cuban Exiles, and the corporations all have long memories and they know how to hold a grudge. They also know that normal relations with Cuba will allow the story of Cuba's history to be told from Cuba's point of view, and that is something they cannot allow.
So, as Fidel steps down, expect a non-stop Cuba-bashing to dominate the mainstream media news. Pay no attention to what really happened in Cuba. Just know that drinking Cuban rum or smoking a Cuban cigar is a crime punishable in the United States, because Cuba refused to sell that run or those cigars at prices the United States dictated.
Ultimately, it was the US and its puppet Batista that created Castro, and the story is one more black eye in the history of the United States.
World split on Kosovo issue The Russian parliament warned that countries that recognised Kosovo "will be fully responsible for the inevitable heightening of existing territorial conflicts and the appearance of new ones." This is a real problem with countries which have various "breakaway autonomous zones" which want to be independent: the recognition of Kosovo as an independent country precisely sets the stage and precedent for this.
Lebanon braces itself for possible Hezbollah attack on Israel Tensions are growing in Lebanon over the possibility of renewed fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Bracing itself for the likelihood of Hezbollah retaliation for the assassination of terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyah in Damascus last week, Israel on Monday deployed Patriot air defense missiles near Haifa. Suuuuuuuuuuure.....................!
Sources: Israel deploys Patriot missiles, fearing Hezbollah strike Israel has deployed a battery of U.S.-made Patriot air defense missiles near the northern port city of Haifa as part of precautions against a possible attack by Hezbollah in response to the assassination last week of the group's top commander Imad Mughniyah, Israeli security officials said Monday. It's no secret that Israel is spoiling for some kind of military confrontation against its perceived "existential threats"; the only questions are, when, and against whom.
Israel reaches a new low for an already unbelievably barbaric nation ?We have completely a free hand to respond, to reach out and to attack everyone (who has) any kind of responsibility on behalf of Hamas,? Olmert told Jewish-American leaders in Jerusalem. ?That applies to everyone, first and foremost Hamas.? You know, the guys who actually WON the Palestinian elections.
Officials: Gaza op will bring int'l troops Israel is considering a large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip during which it would present an ultimatum to the international community for the deployment of a multinational force as the only condition under which it would withdraw, defense officials have told The Jerusalem Post. If there is a major incursion, look for Israel to be in Gaza forever.
The politicians don't want an exist strategy: they want a justification to never leave.
More than one-third of settlements built on private Palestinian land More than one-third of Israel's 122 West Bank settlements were built on land confiscated from private Palestinian owners on security grounds, including some erected after the Israeli Supreme Court outlawed such seizures three decades ago, the Haaretz newspaper reported on Monday.
