we interupt our regularly scheduled novel excerpt - because there is just too much pure fuckery going on ---when will they try bush's ass and his entire cabinet for treason and war crimes ?
DU expert Leuren Moret to address Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference on depleted uranium (DU) http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2081.shtml
Jun 14, 2007, 00:34
VANCOUVER – Leuren Moret, expert witness at the 2004 Tokyo International Tribunal for War Crimes in Afghanistan and former Environmental Commissioner of the City of Berkeley, Calif., will speak publicly for the first time in Canada, and address the Vancouver 9/11 Truth Conference on June 22-24, 2007, on the serious public health risk to Canada and the world posed by the use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons by the U.S. military forces in Iraq, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. Israel dropped over 4,000 DU bunker-buster bombs on Lebanon in July 2006.
In April, 2007, Leuren Moret exposed the U.S. military's illegal use of depleted uranium (DU) weapons in target practice in Hawaii, in violation of U.S. military regulations. The elevated radiation readings she recorded were carried by ABC-TV news in Hawaii on April 29 & 30, 2007.
DU and 9/11
Leuren Moret reported similar elevated radiation readings downwind from the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. Two days after 9/11, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) confirmed that the crash site rubble was radioactive and that it was probably depleted uranium (DU) contaminating the Pentagon crash site rubble. The entry and exit holes through the Pentagon crash site were the signature of a kinetic energy penetrator, such as a Cruise missile, and the term "punch-out hole" was written by crash site investigators over the exit hole. This is a military term used for kinetic energy penetrators. Major Doug Rokke, former Director of the Gulf War I DU Cleanup Team, reported that an email from the Pentagon 30 minutes after impact confirmed a Cruise missile hit the Pentagon on 9/11.
Recently vast Uranium deposits have been reported in Khazakhstan and Afghanistan. Khazakhstan is expected to out-produce Canada in Uranium production within 12 years. This exposes the economic interests behind the events of 9/11, specifically the unjustified military attack by the U.S. on Afghanistan using 9/11 as a pretext.
Alskari shrine again
Nabil's BlogJune 13, 2007
Here comes the reinforcement for the first sectarian wave started back in Fab. 2006.
Today, I woke up on the sound of American soldiers breaking their way into the shops located infront of my house and destroying them on the excuse of checking for guns and explosives. A friend of mine who is one of the shop owners and lives just behind his shop, he said that when the Americans came to the area and started destroying the doors of the shops as they were locked, he said that he went out and told him that he had the key and there's no reason for them to break the door of the shop, the American soldier answerd him exactly with these four words "shut the fuck up".
Anyway, after talking to my friend and seeing how damaged his shop was by those mercenaries. I received the news about Alaskari shrine. At first they said that two mortar shells fell close to the shrine without damaging it, then I heard that 2 bombs were planted near the towers of the shrine and destroyed the towers.
I actually didn't care about it at first, because Abu Hanifa shrine in Adhamyia gets bombed almost every month and no one mention anything about it in the news, also Abd Alqadir Shrine was attacked about a month ago and it didn't have that kind of reaction from politicians, then I was so surprised to see the reactions in the media, the huge deprecation from politicians about what happened. It was like Sunni shrines are okay to be bombed, but shiite once are not.
Anyway, the thing is that the shrine is besieged by Americans and that no one from the citizens are allowed to reach it, or even to reach 1Km near it, so how the hell did that shrine get bombed by Alqa`eda or other terrorists?
Rumor has it, that yesterday a unit of police was sent to Samarra, and that they are the ones behind the attack.
Anyway, My opinion is that I'm 100% sure that the Iraqi government is behind that attack.
By the way, only 30 minutes after the shrine was attacked and it was in the news, Alrubai Mousque in Alrubai street was burned by Alsadr militia and several people were kidnapped from Alghazalyia.
Gaza: Another Mess Made in U.S.
by Tony Karon
Coming, as he does, from Fox News, Tony Snow is obviously a deeply cynical fellow, but this takes some beating: Asked to comment Wednesday on the bloodbath in Gaza, he answered: “Ultimately, the Palestinians are going to have to sort out their politics and figure out which pathway they want to pursue — the pathway toward two states living peaceably side-by-side, or whether this sort of chaos is going to become a problem.”
Everyone following the conflict in Gaza knows full well that the reason for the violence is not that Palestinians have not “sorted out their politics” — they’ve made their political preferences abundantly clear in democratic elections, and later in a power-sharing agreement brokered by the Saudis. The problem is that the U.S. and the corrupt and self-serving warlords of Fatah did not accept either the election result or the unity government, and have conspired actively ever since to reverse both by all available means, including starving the Palestinian economy of funds, refusing to hand over power over the Palestinian Authority to the elected government, and arming and training Fatah loyalists to militarily restore their party’s power. Unfortunately, after three days of some of the most savage fighting ever seen in Gaza, that strategy now lies in tatters. Fatah is, quite simply, no longer a credible fighting force in Gaza, where it has long been in decline as a credible political force.
But Snow’s cynicism is hardly unexpected. Back in January, I wrote:
In the coming weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will cluck regretfully about the violence unfolding in the Palestinian territories as if the chaos in Gaza has as little to do with her as, say, the bizarrely warm winter weather in New York. And much of the U.S. media will concur by covering that violence as if it is part of some inevitable showdown in the preternaturally violent politics of the Palestinians. But any honest assessment will not fail to recognize that the increasingly violent conflict between Hamas and Fatah is not only a by-product of Secretary Rice’s economic siege of the Palestinians; it is the intended consequence of her savage war on the Palestinian people – a campaign of retribution and collective punishment for their audacity to elect leaders other than those deemed appropriate to U.S. agendas. Moreover, the fact that the conflict is now coming to a head is a product of Rice’s micromanagement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s political strategy – against his own better instincts.
Rice’s siege strategy was premised on the belief that the economic torture of the entire Palestinian population would either force the Hamas government to chant the catechism of recognizing Israel-renouncing violence-abiding by previous agreements (again, Israeli leaders have to giggle at that one!) — or else, preferably, force the Palestinian electorate to recant the heresy of choosing Hamas as its government in the first place. Frustrated by the failure of this collective punishment to produce the desired results — and mindful of the need to quickly reorder Palestinian politics in order to satisfy the urgent need of the increasingly marginal Arab autocracies that Washington seeks to mobilize against Iran — she has stepped things up a notch, cajoling the hapless Abbas to take steps to toppled a government democratically elected only 11 months ago and beefing up the forces of the Fatah warlords dedicated to taking down Hamas in order to restore their own power of patronage.
At about the same time, Conflict Forum reported on the aggressive campaign by White House Middle East policy chief Elliot Abrams to provoke a coup by Fatah against Hamas. The U.S. policy was to prevent a Palestinian unity government from forming, and once it was formed, the policy became to topple it. And Robert Malley and Henry Siegman warned that the White House policy failed to reckon with the fact that Fatah had been defeated politically, and would not be able to restore its leadership of the Palestinians through a putsch. Even if his forces could be boosted, they warned, “(they) will remain a far less motivated one (than Hamas), seen by many as doing America’s and Israel’s bidding. In such a contest, success is far from assured, as we should know from Iraq, Lebanon and, indeed, Palestine itself.”
Last month, when the first round of fighting between Fatah and Hamas began, I noted that its key protagonist on the Fatah side was not President Abbas, but the warlord Mohammed Dahlan. I noted:
Dahlan’s ambitions clearly coincided with plans drawn up by White House Middle East policy chief, Elliot Abrams — a veteran of the Reagan Administration’s Central American dirty wars — to arm and train Fatah loyalists to prepare them to topple the Hamas government. If Mahmoud Abbas has been reluctant to embrace the confrontational policy promoted by the White House, Dahlan has no such qualms. And given that Abbas has no political base of his own, he is dependent entirely on Washington and Dahlan.
…Dahlan was just about the only thing that the U.S. had going for it in terms of resisting the move towards a unity government. Although his fretting and sulking in Mecca couldn’t prevent the deal, the U.S. appears to have helped him fight back afterwards by ensuring that he was appointed national security adviser, a move calculated to provoke Hamas, whose leaders tend to view Dahlan as little more than a torturer and a de facto enforcer for Israel.
But Dahlan appears to have made his move when it came to integrating the Palestinian Authority security forces (currently dominated by Fatah) by drawing in Hamas fighters and subjecting the forces to the control of a politically neutral interior minister. Dahlan simply refused, and set off the current confrontations by ordering his men out onto the street last weekend without any authorization from the government of which he is supposedly a part.
…it’s plain that Dahlan, like Pinochet a quarter century, would not move onto a path of confrontation with an elected government unless he believed he had the sanction of powerful forces abroad to do so. If does move to turn the current street battle into a frontal assault on the unity government, chances are it will be because he got a green light from somewhere — and certainly not from Mahmoud Abbas.
But the confrontation under way has assumed a momentum of its own, and it may now be beyond the capability of the Palestinian leadership as a whole to contain it. If that proves true, the petulance that has substituted for policy in the Bush Administration’s response to the 2006 Palestinian election will have succeeded in turning Gaza into Mogadishu. But it may be too much to expect the Administration capable of anything different — after all, they’re still busy turning Mogadishu into Mogadishu all over again.
This analysis was echoed by Haaretz’s Danny Rubinstein, who writes:
“The recent events we have been witnessing in Gaza are actually the disbanding of Palestinian rule. The primary reason for the break-up is the fact that Fatah, headed by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, has refused to fully share the PA’s mechanism of power with its rival Hamas - in spite of Hamas’ decisive victory in the January 2006 general elections.
“Fatah was forced to overrule the Palestinian voters because the entire world demanded it do so. The United States, the European nations, most of the Arab leaders and, of course, the State of Israel, warned Fatah not to share power with Hamas.
“And so, after the Israeli pullout, instead of becoming a model for Palestinian self-rule, Gaza turned into the exact opposite. Matters have come to the point where Hamas operatives attempted all through Monday and Tuesday to take by force what they believe they rightfully deserve. “
Indeed, in this month of observing the anniversary of the 1967 war, Hamas appears to have taken a leaf from Israel’s playbook in that conflict. Instead of standing by and letting Dahlan set the terms of the conflict, slowly raising the temperature of the confrontation in keeping with the capabilities of his forces, Hamas went to war this time to destroy Fatah’s capability to fight in Gaza. Having trounced Fatah on the polls, it now moved to trounce them on the streets in a well-orchestrated military campaign that scattered and neutralized Dahlan’s forces. Many of them surrendered or simply melted away; some 40 officers of the U.S.-trained presidential guard were last seen blowing a hole into the Israeli wall around Gaza through which they fled to Egypt, where there commander, Dahlan, happened to be anyway.
The rout has been complete in Gaza, forcing Abbas to accept Hamas’s terms for a new truce. Gaza, as Abbas aides have said bluntly, “is lost.” Another spectacular Middle East debacle for the Bush Administration’s trophy cabinet. Hundreds of Palestinians have died and thousands more have had their lives ruined by the brutal arrogant folly of Rice, Abrams and company. Hamas is in power because the Palestinian people wanted it there, and no amount of economic strangulation or proxy warfare has altered that fact. It didn’t have to go this way; this was the route that Washington chose, believing it would prevail.
The administration’s response when Hamas was elected in January 2006 echoed Brecht’s mocking of the East German leadership in 1948: “The people have lost confidence in the party? Well, then, why not dissolve the people and elect another?” It was widely warned that Hamas was an intractable reality, that the U.S. should engage with rather than try to ignore or eliminate. I wrote in February of last year,
The administration that proclaims its mission as spreading democracy now seeks to punish the Palestinians for using their votes to get rid of a corrupt and decrepit regime (that happens to be headed by a U.S. ally). Shades, here, of Kissinger’s rationale for the coup in Chile: “We can’t stand by and let a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The Bush people are so tragically out of touch with the reality on the ground that they spent the weeks before the election funding desperate last-minute projects by local Fatah candidates in the hope of saving their hides. The effect was probably just the opposite: Hamas was only too pleased to point out that these were America’s candidates, knowing that in Palestinian eyes that’s a kiss of death.
…The Palestinian electorate was able to abandon Fatah for the simple reason that Ariel Sharon, with the backing of the Bush administration, had shown the Palestinians that Fatah was entirely irrelevant to their fate. The New York Times says some U.S. officials wonder whether the election should have been delayed further in order to allow Fatah to gain maximum benefit from Sharon’s Gaza pullout. And to think that these geniuses are paid a salary out of my tax dollars… The only Palestinians to benefit politically from Sharon’s Gaza pullout was Hamas. After all, it was not negotiated with Fatah or Abu Mazen; it was a unilateral action coordinated with Washington, and the Palestinian street deduced that is must therefore have been a victory for the resistance of Hamas and likeminded Fatah elements. Abu Mazen was never going to get the benefit from Gaza no matter how long the election was delayed, but a second delay (remember, they were supposed to be held last summer) would have doomed his party to an even heavier defeat.
The Palestinians simply decided to move on rather than maintain the illusion that Abu Mazen somehow had a diplomatic strategy that would deliver their national goals. Conventional wisdom after 2001 was that the Palestinians, through their intifada, had elected Ariel Sharon to lead Israel. And five years later, it may be argued that Sharon elected Hamas.
…The election of Hamas is not a threat to the peace process; it’s a symptom of the failure of that process. And the Bush administration’s passivity, and its encouragement of Sharon’s unilateralism, contributed in no small part to that failure, and therefore to the victory of Hamas. (I mean, has everyone really forgotten the warnings of years ago from the Fatah moderates and the Israeli doves that failure to reach a deal with Fatah would leave Israel to have to deal with Hamas? It really was that obvious.) For the decade of Oslo, West Bank Palestinians had stood by and watched Fatah leaders enriching themselves while the Israelis continued to grab their land and choke off their economic life. Fatah had come to represent Palestinian powerlessness as Sharon bulldozed his way around, remaking the landscape of the West Bank and Gaza to his own specification knowing that the only consequence would be the sound of Saeeb Erekat complaining to Wolf Blitzer. It’s hardly surprising that Hamas managed to cloak itself in the mantle of the redeemer of Palestinian national dignity and subjectivity.
…The U.S. can’t afford to restrict itself to scolding and warning the new Palestinian government. Engagement is vital at this point, and the grownup position – as articulated by the Europeans – is that Hamas must be judged, in the new situation, on its actions rather than on the contents of its slogans, songs and manifestoes. There is, strangely enough, an enhanced prospect for security and stability in the new situation, if it’s smartly managed on all sides. That, of course, is a big if.
As, indeed, it was. Instead, the U.S. talked the Europeans around to reluctantly signing on to their siege strategy until Hamas was ready to symbolically surrender. That didn’t happen. Now, Hamas has made clear that it is an intractable reality, although the fighting has likely greatly increased the balance within the organization in favor of the more confrontational element. And Dahlan turned out to be a Paper Pinochet.
Still, given their spectacular inability to comprehend the reasons for their defeats in the Palestinian territory, I don’t expect the U.S. to begin engaging pragmatically with the reality of Hamas as an indispensable component of the Palestinian leadership. Instead, given the endless capacity for self-delusion of the people running U.S. Middle East policy, I fully expect to see the U.S. rush resources to Egypt where Dahlan can be reunited with his scattered forces in preparation for his next historic role — at the head of a “Bay of Pigs” type invasion of Gaza.
Another Bomb in Beirut: Roll Out the Media Boilerplate
Chris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
Junw 14, 2007
You will hear repeated everywhere in the mainstream media all over the world that another "anti-Syrian" Lebanese leader was killed by a massive car bomb in Beiruit on Wednesday. The Guardian is early out of the blocks with this report:
An anti-Syrian Lebanese MP was assassinated today and nine others killed when a car bomb exploded in Beirut. In one of the deadliest such attacks since the murder of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri,more than two years ago, the MP, Walid Eido was killed as a car bomb detonated as his vehicle drove by, near the seafront in the Lebanese capital.
His eldest son, two bodyguards and six bystanders were also killed in the explosion, which tore open shop fronts and sent debris raining down on the surrounding area. At least 11 other people were wounded, security sources said.
A savage act indeed. But as with so many of the series of assassinations of "anti-Syrian" politicians in Lebanon, the victim, Walid Eido (or 'Idu) was actually a passionate "pro-Syrian" politician throughout most of his career – as was former prime minister Rafik Hariri, whose assassination transformed him from a shady character hip-deep in corruption charges, collusion with Syria and murky Saudi ties into a blessed martyr for pure democracy and unfettered Lebanese sovereignty.
But Lebanese-born As'ad AbuKhalil, the "Angry Arab," who is actually related to Walid Eido by marriage, tells a far different tale of Eido's career – and Hariri's – than you will see in a Western newspaper. Here's some of the background that AbuKhalil provides:
'Idu is not new to Lebanese politics. He was involved in militia politics during the war years…and he lived his life as a staunch Nasserist Arab nationalist until his conversion three years ago. While serving as a judge, he joined the Nasserist Murabitun militia, although it is illegal for judges in Lebanon to join political parties. But he was aware of that. So he used a code name: Rudwan Sa'adah. Rudwan Sa'adah was listed as one of the leaders of the Murabitun militia during the war years. People from that era and that organization believe that he was responsible for some decrees in the realm of militia "justice" during the war years.
As a judge, he had a bad reputation -- a good reputation if you are a defendant who wanted a convenient ruling. He had a reputation for offering verdicts that suited "clients" but for a fee. It was that reputation that got Rafiq Hariri interested in him when Hariri was searching for judges who could help him in the illegal expropriation of property in downtown Beiurt. Hariri put him on his parliamentary list in the 2000 election. During those years, he was one of the closest allies of the Syrian intelligence in Lebanon. One colleague of 'Idu (a member of the Hariri parliamentary bloc) told me that `Idu was known for offering the military salute (and he would click his heels too) whenever he would meet with a Syrian mukhabarat functionary. But 'Idu was good in the quick transformation that many politicians of his ilk made after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri: he went from being one of the most passionate advocates of the Syrian regime, to one of the most passionate advocates against the Syrian regime.
It could well be that Syria is behind the latest bombing – although every such incident, beginning with the Hariri assassination, has only led to a further erosion of Syria's fading influence in Lebanon and a further isolation of Syria's ruling regime. Perhaps that regime, led by the dullard son of a former leader, is stupid enough to keep following a policy of violent aggression that is patently against its own best interests and only does it harm; after all, the American regime, led by the dullard son of a former leader, is stupid enough to do precisely this, on a massive scale, year after year.
But there are many other players in the dirty game of proxy war which foreign powers have long been staging on Lebanese soil; and Lebanon's own domestic politics, rife with unresolved conflicts spawned by years of civil war, is a fertile seedbed of factional violence. Yet the automatic assumption that every political murder in Lebanon is the work of Syria remains the unalterable basis of every mainstream news story on the subject. Once again, AbuKhalil does us yeoman service in showing the true, complex and many-shaded reality that lies behind the boilerplate.
and of course it all effects us :
'Kill Anyone Still Alive': American Special Ops in SomaliaChris Floyd, Empire Burlesque
June 12, 2007
How many people did American forces actually kill when they attacked refugees fleeing from the U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion of Somalia last January? We know from reports by Oxfam, the Guardian, the Associated Press and Reuters that dozens of innocent civilians were slaughtered near the Kenyan border, including villagers and nomadic tribesmen "mistakenly" targeted by American gunships seeking to kill alleged al Qaeda operatives who may or may not have been among the refugees. But a new story in Esquire magazine -- detailing the creation of America's most recent military satrapy, the Africa Command -- provides disturbing information that the post-invasion killing by American operatives in Somalia was far more extensive -- and deliberate -- than previously known.
The Esquire piece, by Thomas Barnett, is a mostly glowing portrait of the Africa Command, which, we are told, is designed to wed military, diplomatic, and development prowess in a seamless package, a whole new way of projecting American power: "pre-emptive nation-building instead of pre-emptive regime change," or as Barnett describes it at another point, "Iraq done right." Although Barnett's glib, jargony, insider piece -- told entirely from the point of view of U.S. military officials -- does contain bits of critical analysis, it is in no way an expose. The new details he presents on the post-invasion slaughter are thus even more chilling, as they are offered simply as an acceptable, ordinary aspect of this laudable new enterprise.
Barnett reveals that the gunship attacks on refugees were just the first part of the secret U.S. mission that was "Africa Command's" debut on the imperial stage. Soon after the attacks, "Task Force 88, a very secret American special-operations unit," was helicoptered into the strike area. As Barnett puts it: "The 88's job was simple: Kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind."
Some 70,000 people fled their homes in the first wave of the Ethiopian invasion. (More than 400,000 fled the brutal consolidation of the invasion in Mogadishu last spring.) Tens of thousands of these initial refugees headed toward the Kenyan border, where the American gunships struck. When the secret operation was leaked, Bush Administration officials said that American planes were trying to hit three alleged al Qaeda operative who had allegedly been given sanctuary by the Islamic Councils government decapitated by the Ethiopians. But Barnett's insiders told him that the actual plan was to wipe out thousands of "foreign fighters" whom Pentagon officials believed had joined the Islamic Courts forces. "Honestly, nobody had any idea just how many there really were," Barnett was told. "But we wanted to get them all."
Thus the Kenyan border area -- where tens of thousands of civilians were fleeing -- was meant to be "a killing zone," Barnett writes:
America's first AC-130 gunship went wheels-up on January 7 from that secret Ethiopian airstrip. After each strike, anybody left alive was to be wiped out by successive waves of Ethiopian commandos and Task Force 88, operating out of Manda Bay. The plan was to rinse and repeat 'until no more bad guys, as one officer put it.
At this point, Barnett -- or his sources -- turn coy. We know there were multiple gunship strikes; and from Barnett's account, we know that the "88s" did go in at least once after the initial gunship attack to "kill anyone still alive and leave no unidentified bodies behind." But Barnett's story seems to suggest that once active American participation in the war was leaked, the "killing zone" was abandoned at some point. So there is no way of knowing at this point how many survivors of the American attacks were then killed by the "very special secret special-operations unit," or how many "rinse-and-repeat" cycles the "88s" were able to carry out in what Barnett called "a good plan."
Nor do we know just who the "88s" killed. As noted, the vast majority of refugees were civilians, just as the majority of the victims killed by the American gunship raids were civilians. Did the "88s" move in on the nomadic tribesmen decimated by the air attack and "kill everyone still alive"? Or did they restrict themselves to killing any non-Somalis they found among the refugees?
Concerning the latter, evidently it is now a capital crime, worthy of instant death by special ops or air raid or drone-fired missile, for any Muslim of any nationality to visit or take part in an Islamic regime which the U.S. government dislikes -- even if, like Somalia's Islamic Councils government, that regime is not at war with the United States and strenuously denies any connection to al Qaeda. This is borne out by the "good plan" to kill "thousands of foreign fighters" who had, allegedly, come to the aid of the Islamic Courts government (just like the thousands of foreign fighters who joined the American-backed jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan). There was an automatic, unquestioned assumption by the Pentagon that these people were to be wiped out to the last man. This does not seem to jibe very well with "Africa Command's" professed intent to win the hearts and minds of Africa's Muslims and prevent encroachment by extremists there.
But then, none of Bush's "Terror War" policies seem designed to produce their ostensible goal. Indeed, a cynic might be forgiven for suspecting that the formenting of extremism, violence and endless, ever-profitable war was in fact the actual aim of these policies.
