‘This rampant, arrogant, and care-less US militarism has nowhere been more evident than here in South Korea, especially in the village of Daechuri, near Pyong-taek City. The loathing for George Bush, America, Americans, irresponsible capitalism, corporatism, imperialism and militarism is a planetary phenomenon, but apart from what the US is doing to the wretched countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, I have never been more ashamed of the US government than when I visited the village of Daechuri with 17 other American peace and social-justice activists and a campesino from Colombia.

from the Centre for American Progress …..

Stay the Course v.2.0.  

The blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group (ISG) headed by James Baker and Lee Hamilton will meet today in Washington to discuss the first draft of its review of Iraq policy. According to the New York Times, the current draft does not include a proposal for the phased withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. It is the latest sign that U.S. policy in Iraq is unlikely to undergo a significant shift despite the midterm election results, which were viewed as a decisive national rebuke of the Iraq war. NBC News correspondent Norah O'Donnell noted yesterday that the Pentagon is "already developing an alternative" review of Iraq policy "to give the President an out if he doesn't like the recommendations" of the ISG. According to media reports, that review is likely to recommend a "stay-the-course-plus" strategy, combining a temporary increase of 20,000-30,000 troops with a long-term effort to train and advise Iraqi forces. Also, the White House this weekend repeated its "insistence that Iraq was not in a civil war," days after one of the worst spasms of sectarian violence since the war began, intensifying the bloodshed that scholars say "already puts Iraq in the top ranks of the civil wars of the last half-century." Just before the recent elections, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that the White House would go "full speed ahead" with its current Iraq policy regardless of the election results. "We've got the basic strategy right," Cheney said. He was not bluffing.

from the Sydney morning herald …..

‘This is the cell where David Hicks lives - where the lights are never off and the window, a slit of frosted glass, never opens.

The other photo shows the barren, bookless room at Guantanamo Bay that the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, calls a library.

‘It is now commonplace for people like me, who supported the war, to say that we "did the right thing" but that it had mysteriously "turned out wrong". This is intellectually vacuous. It is like saying British strategy for July 1, 1916 was perfect, but let down by faulty execution. The thing was a disaster from the moment we invaded, and it wasn't poor old Rumsfeld's fault for failing to send in enough troops, or failing to do more "planning" for the post-war. No quantity of troops could have prevented this catastrophe; and the dreadful thing is that I think Saddam knew it.

‘Some of Britain's biggest food brands, including McDonald's, Nestlé and Kellogg's, are using "underhand tactics" on the internet to directly target children with their unhealthy products, according to a report.

Stung by moves to restrict traditional methods of selling junk food to children, such as TV advertising, the consumer group Which says companies are often turning to the less heavily policed internet.

‘On the day before Thanksgiving, President George W. Bush officially pardoned two turkeys, guaranteeing that they would be allowed to live out their days in safety and security, unharmed even by FBI, CIA or the Department of Homeland Security. In America today, turkeys have more rights than U.S. citizens do.

I wonder how many Americans thought of alleged terrorist Jose Padilla this Thanksgiving Day. Padilla, arrested at O’Hare Airport in Chicago in May of 2002, still has not been tried in late November, 2006. Speedy trial? Oh, that is so-o-o-o 20^th Century, so pre-9/11!

‘Despite mountains of evidence that the Bush Administration’s misguided and mismanaged operations in Iraq are contributing to the spread of Islamist extremism in that country and around the world, the president and some like-minded conservatives still argue that any change in strategy is tantamount to a victory for the terrorists.

In fact, the only real winners in the Bush administration’s stay the course strategy in Iraq are America’s top public enemies: terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zarwahiri, who are apparently both still alive and well more than five years after 9/11.

‘Almost 40 per cent of land used by Israel for its settlements in the occupied West Bank is the private property of Palestinians, the Israeli organisation Peace Now said yesterday on the basis of leaked official maps and other data.

Contrary to official claims that the land is state-owned and that private property is only seized temporarily for security reasons, the leak shows that privately owned Palestinian land has been repeatedly used to build and expand settlements.

 
‘The global battle against Islamic terrorism will be decided in the harsh desert of southern Afghanistan, Tony Blair yesterday told British troops as he made a flying visit to the country.

The Prime Minister flew into Helmand province in the south, where 3,500 British troops are engaged in a "stability mission" that has seen them facing daily clashes with Taleban fighters - combat of an intensity commanders say the British Army has not experienced since the Second World War.

from the Centre for American Progress …..

Stovepiping Intelligence

‘"Make no mistake, President Bush will need to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities before leaving office," writes Joshua Muravchik, a neoconservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "The global thunder against Bush when he pulls the trigger will be deafening, and it will have many echoes at home." So neoconservatives, Muravchik argued, "need to pave the way intellectually now and be prepared to defend the action when it comes." In that vein, Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said last August, "We could be in a military confrontation with Iran much sooner than people expect." In a startling new article in the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh writes that, despite the recent bluster over Iran's attempts to build a nuclear bomb, a highly classified draft assessment by the CIA found "no conclusive evidence, as yet, of a secret Iranian nuclear-weapons program." According to Hersh, the White House has reacted with hostility to the CIA's report and, as it did with Iraq, is bypassing the agency by collecting and compiling its own intelligence for a possible military strike. On CNN yesterday, Hersh said there is an "internecine fight" going on between the CIA and the White House over the intelligence process, "the same fight, by the way, that we had before Iraq."

‘As we approach the beginning of the end in Iraq there will be much throat clearing and breast-beating before reality replaces denial. For the moment, denial still rules.

In America last week I was shocked at how unaware even anti-war Americans are (like many Britons) of the depth of the predicament in Iraq. They compare it with Vietnam or the Balkans - but it is not the same. It is total anarchy. All sentences beginning, "What we should now do in Iraq ... " are devoid of meaning. We are in no position to do anything. We have no potency; that is the definition of anarchy.’

‘When I saw the Newsweek cover featuring Big Daddy Bush muscling toward the front with a diminished little Dubya skulking in the background, my first thought was: How is Junior going to react to this? Bush II's resentment toward his father is well-known – a resentment no doubt compounded by his lifelong, abject dependence on Daddy's financial and political pull – and I knew that Little Bush would not simply accept this media humiliation and move on.

Because for all his vaunted (and totally mendacious) "unconcern" with opinion polls and popularity ("Ah just do whut muh gut tells me is right"), Little Bush is actually one of the most vain and insecure men ever to sit in the White House; only Nixon can match him in this regard. Why else would he need to have his authority bolstered in such ludicrous ways – such as all those little "Commander-in-Chief" and "President of the United States" tags embossed onto his fancy quasi-military jackets and his running gear and belt-buckles and boots – and probably his toilet paper as well?

‘They say the fountain in London's Trafalgar Square turned the color of blood on Armistice Day last weekend, as Britons in the hundreds of thousands trudged out in the November gloom to commemorate the end of the First World War, and lament the dead in all the wars thereafter.

But the turning of the water was no miracle, no divine judgment on the leader whose fateful partnership with George W. Bush is producing - week after week, month after month, year after year - fresh cause for future mourning. The color came from the thousands of fake poppies tossed into the fountain in what The Observer called "a spontaneous act of remembrance": an offering of the ubiquitous charity emblems worn by most of the population in the week leading up to the memorials.

 
‘As the red wheel of Operation Iraqi FUBAR* continues to roll, spewing hundreds of corpses in its wake, it becomes clearer by the hour that there is only one way for America to end this stomach-churning nightmare it has created: get out.

That's it. The occupying armies – including Bush's 20,000 corporate mercenaries – should leave now. They should never have been sent in the first place on this ghoul's errand: a war of aggression, a mission of murder and plunder – the perversion of every enlightened value of the civilization that the Coalition's "Christian leaders" purport to defend.