From Cheney Sees 'Shameless' Revisionism on War
... Mr. Cheney did not mention that the administration had access to far more extensive intelligence than Congress did, like the highly classified daily briefing provided for the president by the Central Intelligence Agency. ...

From a different drummer, Our Hitler: Goebbels' 1943 Speech on Hitler's Birthday:
... It is clear why Anglo-Saxon agitators spread their lies and slanders about the Führer and his work. They realize that his programs and aims are reaching the whole world, even their own nations. A nation has no greater possession than such a powerful, timeless personality who casts his spell on both friend and foe.  ...

Meanwhile, in a busted country, Another day in Baghdad A&E:
...Yarmouk, one of Baghdad's biggest hospitals, was built in the late 1970s when the oil-rich Iraqi government launched a five-year school, factory and hospital-building programme. That ambitious undertaking left Iraq with a modern and respected health-care system. But three wars and two decades later, it is in a shambles... ... "Our day starts busy," he says. "The first attacks happen in the morning, and patients start arriving by 7.15am. By 8am all these beds are full."
The first victims tend to be from insurgent attacks. The insurgents like to let off their car bombs and small explosives, and to carry out their assassinations, while it's still early. The idea is to catch officials and policemen either as they change shifts or while they are driving to work. Many of the victims, however, tend to be passers-by on their way to work in the early-morning rush hour.
"Around 10am, things calm down and we have a break until one in the afternoon when the biggest wave of car bombs and explosions often happens," says Ta'ie. "By that time most of the patients have to lie on the floor. And then nothing until 9pm, when sectarian assassinations flare up, mixed with a couple of drunken fights." ...

When we last left them, our heroes, Bush Wayne and his trusted companion, Dick Grayson-Cheney, were heading east to Iran to hunt for weapons of mass destruction, free the Iranian people from the axis of evil and bring American-style democracy to all the good people of the Middle East. 

 

But tired and weary from fighting their divinely inspired wars for truth, justice, freedom and the American way, the boys took a detour and headed back to their ranch in Crawford, Texas, for a well-deserved break from their international crime-fighting spree.

  

Now fresh and well-rested after their year-long vacation, our valiant crusaders—oil executives by day, freedom fighters by night—return to the world stage once again as: 

 

Batman and Robin: The Caped Crusaders in a Comic Book War 

                                                                         

... Last seen driving north to an undisclosed location in Washington, DC, our caped crusaders stopped along the Interstate to fill up the Batmobile.

  

Banana Republicans 

 

by Kirk Anderson

‘In an Associated Press interview, former Powell chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson also said President Bush was "too aloof, too distant from the details" of post-war planning. Underlings exploited Bush's detachment and made poor decisions, Wilkerson said. 

 

Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. He said Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because "otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard."’ 

 

Ex - Powell Aide Criticizes Bush on Iraq 

 

Elsewhere on the reservation ….  

 

‘European Union Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini threatened sanctions for any EU nation found to have allowed secret CIA prison camps to operate on their soil. 

 

"Should the accusations be accurate, I would be forced to draw serious consequences," Frattini said at a security conference in Berlin. 

 

He said that any EU country found to have harboured one of the reported prison camps could have their voting rights in the Council of Ministers, the body which groups the 25 EU heads of government, suspended. 

 

Frattini said the operation of such camps on EU soil would violate the bloc's rules governing freedom and human rights.’ 

 

EU Threatens Sanctions For States Operating Secret CIA Camps

Great animation on Al Jazeera (go to web site and see) :
CHRISTMAS COMPETITION- 26/11/2005
Shujaat

Costello's ugliness isn't being improved by his flagrant and pathetic attempts to cover his tracks in the Gerard scandal. But, perhaps he is just following orders. It is Howard's Crawford buddy who is in deep strife, and needing all the help he can muster, it's very useful to have Peter drag his problems out over a week or two. Less space available to expose a lunatic spouting "nothing less than complete victory".

It's good to know about National security whistle-blowers call for boycott of hearing

...The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition was founded by Ms. Edmonds in August of 2004. Edmonds is a former FBI agent who was fired in 2002 after she came forward with stories of wrongdoing and incompetence in the agency. Other members of the coalition include Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent who tried to tell superiors about Zacarias Moussaoui taking flight lessons that didn't include training on how to land the plane, and Daniel Ellsberg, founder of the Truth Telling Project and the individual who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in the '70s ...

Coleen Rowley is running for US Congress in 2006. Her slogan is "Always Try". Rowley's attitude and her indomitable strength are summed up in those two words. It's a message for our latent whistleblowers, too. There are insiders who can help to expose the rorts and dirty dealings originating from our governments' offices. Never give up - always try.

It's heartening, and greatly amusing, to read about Arnie's choice of policy chief. Schwarzenegger Names Top Democrat as New Chief of Staff  Not only is Ms Kennedy a female, AND a Democrat, but she is not a heterosexual! How far from the Republican 'base' can he get?

No wonder the rednecks are fuming. Don't travel in open-top vehicles, Arnie, and never, never, drive past a book depository.

Maureen Dowd, whose latest NYTimes piece (Inside Vice's Bunker) is a ripper, cites Rowley here.
... It's fine to have beautiful women on the covers of magazines, but there are many ways to be beautiful, and I worry that America has lost a sense of that. Women used to demand equality; now they just demand Botox. We need more covers like the Time Persons of the Year in 2002, featuring a trio of brave truthtellers — Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on the creeps at Enron; Coleen Rowley, who blew the whistle at the F.B.I. incompetence; and Cynthia Cooper, who blew the whistle on the Worldcom n'er do wells.  ...

At Coleen Rowley for US Congress: Endorsements and Testimonials:
... There was a sense of empowerment to build with every nail in the political platform something good with our hammer of citizen democracy. Coleen Rowley has the qualities of honesty, inspiration, passion, and decency much like that great teacher that reinvigorates my desire to pick up the hammer and again build something good in our democracy. ...

Others (Predictions, Media Patrol 2/10) have pointed out the blank spaces in the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (also in  PDF, 386kb)

It's as though the neocons are clearing a space around Dec 15, the date of the next round of elections in Iraq. From a narrow point of view, it is fine to focus on the purist desires for 'freedom and democracy'. But if the setbacks in Iraq have provoked the harshest of the ideologues to declare a "year zero", and draw a line over the past, then they will be asking for trouble.

Iraq's 'Year Zero'. Pol Pot visits Mesapotamia.
The Limits of Empathy

The document seems to project a notion of a functioning, independent nation being assisted by the US. This is an illusion, with Iraq in a chaotic state of multiple disorders and occupied by unwelcome foreigners.

In the Strategy, Syria is politely advised to cooperate. Iran is barely mentioned, but Iran is key to the solution. (Iran and the US exit strategy in Iraq) Both Iran and Syria, and all the ME countries, not to mention East Asia, have intense interest in Iraq, and it is ridiculous to try to quarantine it from the millenia.

A quick scan of the Strategy shows Syria is referred to, benignly, five times; Iran, only twice; Israel, Palestine, Saudi - zero. Usamah bin Laden is mentioned only four times, in order to provide a couple of extracts from al-Qaida polemic.

The big score goes to the "rejectionists" (13 mentions). The pedigree for this term includes:
Rejectionist Front - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Rejectionist Front, official name Front of the Palestinian Forces Rejecting Solutions of Surrender, was a political coalition formed in 1974 by hardline Palestinian factions. ...

It is stll alive, as in Media applaud Sharon’s break with Likud
... the rejectionist group Hamas ...

From ISN Security Watch - Reformists win Palestinian cabinet reshuffle
... the rejectionist Hamas has made it clear it would not compromise with Israel.

There's a semantic message in there, somewhere.

From U.S. Military Declares Global Strike Capability:
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Strategic Command announced yesterday it had achieved an operational capability for rapidly striking targets around the globe using nuclear or conventional weapons, after last month testing its capacity for nuclear war against a fictional country believed to represent North Korea ...

From Hidden in Plane Sight: US Media Ignores Iraq Air War Plan by Norman Solomon:
... A similar sequence of events is apt to get underway next year, before the November elections determine which party will control the House and Senate through 2008. Caught between the desire to prevent a military defeat in Iraq and the need to shore up Republican prospects at home in the face of an unpopular war, President Bush is very likely to keep escalating the U.S. air war in Iraq while reducing U.S. troop levels there. And he has good reason to hope that the American news media will continue to evade the air war's horrendous consequences for Iraqi people.

Same blindness here, as our trusty media segue into the silly season, of beach fashions, sports galore, plenty of air guitar, as Cheney's fly-boys give those rejectionist Iraqis a taste of high-energy plastic - gift-wrapped for Xmas, of course. 

 

The replicant, Rice (look for the peculiar shine in the eyes), reveals the ghost flights are all about keeping Europe safe, in Rice denies tough tactics in war on terror.

Besides, 'Rendition' does not involve torture, says Rice:
... With her repeated insistence that the US acted in co-operation with its partners and did not violate sovereignty, Ms Rice may have thrown further fuel on the fire. Assuming hundreds of rendition flights have taken place, and CIA-run camps do indeed exist, Ms Rice's remarks imply the host governments or their intelligence services knew about them and turned a blind eye or co-operated.

Rupert's organ, however, reassures Howard's dozy battlers that CIA prisons in Europe 'closed'.

From New wings for top guns:
He said it would change the way wars are waged. "It can hold about a ton of bombs and deliver them autonomously," he said.

Investment opportunity, to ensure an enjoyable retirement.

‘Five days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed the nation that the U.S. government would begin working "the dark side" to defeat its enemies in a new global war. "A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion," Cheney declared on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added, "It's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal."

 

More than four years later, the Bush administration has delivered on Cheney's vow to wage war in the shadows, free from oversight and accountability. Policies for seizing and interrogating suspects - conceived and commanded at the highest levels of the White House - have permitted numerous acts of torture and even murder at the hands of American soldiers and interrogators. 

 

The grim acts unleashed by those policies are no secret today. Cruel and wanton abuses have been exposed at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and other lesser known U.S. military bases and prisons around the world. In November, the Washington Post uncovered a global network of covert CIA prisons known as "black sites," top-secret interrogation facilities reportedly operating in far-flung locations from Eastern Europe to Thailand. Still, many dark details remain unknown.’ 

 

Torture: America Can't Take It Anymore

From the ABC
Nobel Prize winner brands Bush, Blair war criminals
Playwright Harold Pinter has launched a fierce critique of the Iraq War, branding the US President and British Prime Minister war criminals in his lecture as winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.
Pinter has demanded George Bush and Tony Blair be prosecuted under international law in the lecture.
"The invasion of Iraq was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law," he said.

From Gus
When one of the most respected authors in the world blasts Bush and Blair (thus Howard), one feels that all our efforts to let the truth be known out there is not in vain... But it is a hard slog to defeat a gigantic propaganda machine that uses all the tricks inn the book to con people.

Of course there is terrorism, of course there are lunatics out there but no more than for the last 2000 years since Christ was nailed to a cross for dissent... There are 2 million US citizen in prison, 30 per cent of the entire population in that country has seen the inside of a jail... 1000 killed by the "justice System death penalty". Is this the democracy that Johnnee want us to copy? And the US still hides about 20,000 prisoners in rendition camps around the world and in Iraq...

Since I cannot post my cartoons due to technical rigmarole, the one for the day is Condi Rice singing "Freedom-pom-pom" to a dying man in jail.
the sub line is "Sing-along rendition kills prisoners.."
The title "Torture, whatever you call it"

And there is a good chance she'll become the next US president, lying through her teeth and a killer smile...

From Troop Levels in Iraq May Drop, Rumsfeld Says
... Also Thursday, Rumsfeld dismissed news reports that he plans to step down. "Those reports have been flying around since about four months after I assumed my post" in 2001, Rumsfeld said, adding, "I have no plans to retire." Nevertheless, names for a replacement were being thrown around Washington. They included Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who has supported the administration on Iraq - and who had breakfast with Rumsfeld and Pace on Thursday.

From Cabinet reshuffle not on the cards, says PM
Prime Minister John Howard says he is not contemplating a reshuffle of his front bench.

[TK: That was at 7.43.13 Dec 8th. However, in the car, on the way out of the studio, contemplation turned to ... ]

From 'ASIO blows minds with search software' at Financial Review ($2.50):
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has invested millions of dollars in software that searches the internet for information to help it detect terrorists. The software, which has been described by people inside ASIO as "mind blowing", is similar to the programs used by the corporate regulator to detect investment scams. ...

... The Australian Securities and Investments Commission uses an automated surveillance tool to trawl websites for illegal investment schemes. Called ScamSeek, the software contains a linguistic component that can be used to zero in on particular catchphrases and slogans. It can also be set up to search for general expressions used to promote a certain cause.
It can also work out the configuration of these expressions in the particular type of communication that is being sought out, and classify them accordingly. According to the ScamSeek team leader and chairman of language technology at Sydney University, Jon Patrick, the software can be used to sift through any text online. "It could be used to identify sedition," Professor Patrick said.

Scamseek - Australia's largest Language Technology research project

Scamseek could run over the recent remarks made by Rumsfeld and Howard, set to pick up Lies, Bullshit and Flannel.

The thing would explode if it had to ingest Condi Rice's effluent prose.

From Disappearing tricks:
According to his memoirs, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel considered the secret abduction and rendition to Germany of suspected Resistance members - otherwise known as the Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree - to be the worst of all of the orders issued by Adolf Hitler for the Western-occupied territories of the Third Reich during World War II. But the fuehrer thought it would be effective in deterring sabotage, which often claimed innocent civilian lives, as well as those of German soldiers, officers and civilian occupation officials. So he decreed that, with the exception of those cases where guilt could be established beyond a doubt, presumably through torture, anyone arrested on suspicion of "endangering German security" was to be transferred to Germany under "cover of night". "The prisoners are to be transported to Germany secretly ...," according to the directive issued in February 1942 by Keitel, then chief of the German High Command. "These measures will have a deterrent effect because [a] the prisoners will vanish without leaving a trace, [and] [b] no information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate." "Effective intimidation," Keitel, who would be executed for war crimes in 1946, had written in an earlier directive, "can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminal and the population do not know his fate." While the Germans practiced this early form of what Human Rights Watch (HRW) last year called "a quintessential evil practiced by abusive governments", primarily for its presumed value in deterring others from participating in resisting Nazi occupation, Nacht und Nebel was the earliest known 20th century precursor of what the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refers to as "renditions". ...

... While the practice of "disappearances" has since spread around the globe - according to HRW, Iraq and Sri Lanka accounted for the most cases between 1980 and 2003 - it was precisely in the southern cone of Latin America that the technique was successfully internationalized under "Operation Condor". ...

... Thus, just as Condor was based on multinational cooperation in which each member knew what the other was doing on its territory, so the US, at least according to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, has relied on the acquiescence, if not active collaboration, of its allies in the "war on terror". These include Eastern European countries that have reportedly provided secret detention centers, and certain Arab "friends", such as Egypt and Morocco, where torture is common. ...

Nice synergy between Condor and Condi.

‘Civil libertarians say the latest revelations add to their frustration with the Bush administration. "If we are a nation of laws, then the president must be bound by the rule of law," said Lisa Graves, senior counsel at the ACLU in Washington. "This is clearly in violation of FISA and a violation of the Constitution. The president, no matter who he is, does not have the power to decide which laws he will follow."’ 

 

'78 Law Sought to Close Spy Loophole

The Art of War

Inside Iraq's hidden war
As a new 'national unity' government prepares to take power in Baghdad, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad reports from behind the lines of a vicious sectarian conflict rapidly spiralling towards civil war

Saturday May 20, 2006
The Guardian

Some men hold paper tissues under their noses; others wrap their kuffiya ends around their mouths. It is a hot and humid day at the city's main morgue where 20 men stand in a yard, their faces pressed with silent urgency against the bars of a window, next to a white plastic sign that baldly announces the location of "The Refrigerator".
Inside sits the clerk of the morgue, his computer monitor turned towards them. Faces flash on the screen: a man with his face blackened and bruised; another man, older, maybe in his 50s, with a white beard and an orange-sized hole in his forehead; and another on a green stretcher, his arms twisted unnaturally behind him.
Occasionally the silence of Baghdad's daily slideshow of death is broken by an appalled act of recognition, as one of the men mumbles "No god but the one God" or "God is great."
So many bodies arrive at the morgue each day - 40 is not unusual on a "quiet" day - that it is impossible to let relatives in to identify them. Hence the slideshow in the yard outside. The bodies are dumped in sewage plants or irrigation canals, or just in the middle of the street. Many show signs of torture.

read more at the Guardian

----------------------
Gus says:
These people deserved better than Bush masquerading as a "liberator", after having masqueraded as a "I shall prevail against Saddam weapons of mass destruction" moronic president he fiddled with the death of many people to achieve an obviously stupid result that our grocer in residence still supports... We cannot expect anything different from him and Bush and Blair... They made a pact to do crap on a grand scale and stick to their version of events... And these liars still rule — with too many people still believing they are doing a "good job"... Is Australia filled with more bullies than smart and compassionate people? I'm afraid so... Throw the liars out before they do more damage...

From the ABC

Remind Howard who's boss, Sheehan urges

Renew anti-war stance ... peace activist Cindy Sheehan has arrived in Sydney and she wants people to speak out against the conflict in Iraq. Reuters
A prominent American anti-war campaigner is urging Australians to take to the streets in protest against the Iraq war.

Cindy Sheehan, who has campaigned against the war since the death of her son Casey in Iraq in 2004, is visiting Australia to address a peace conference.

She says Prime Minister John Howard had no mandate to involve Australia in the war, which began in 2003.

"I think Australians, they just need to get out on the streets and they need to say, 'John Howard, you work for us'," Mrs Sheehan said.

"'We want our troops withdrawn and we don't want you to support America.'"

Mrs Sheehan has questioned Mr Howard's friendship with US President George W Bush.

"George Bush isn't even popular in America any more so I don't know why any leaders in any countries who claim to govern their countries with the consent of the people they govern would align themselves closer with George Bush," she said.

Mrs Sheehan rose to prominence in the anti-war movement when she staged a month-long protest outside Mr Bush's Texas ranch last year.

"I was pretty visible and well-known in the progressive peace movement in the United States but not known by mainstream Americans or internationally known until I camped out," she said.

Logic questioned
She says her campaign against the war is motivated by a television address Mr Bush gave.

"[When] 14 Marines were killed one day, George Bush went on the TV and said they died for a noble cause ... and he had to complete the mission to honour their sacrifices," Mrs Sheehan said.

"I wanted to know what noble cause and I wanted him to stop using Casey's name to continue and to justify more killing."

Mrs Sheehan denies she is a "a pin-up girl for the loopy left and for global terrorists", as claimed by an Australian newspaper columnist.

"I believe George Bush is the greatest recruiter for Al Qaeda in Al Qaeda's history," she said.

"You don't kill innocent Iraqi people, you don't fight a war on terror with a war of terror and that's what George Bush is doing and that's what [the Australian] Government is doing in support of George Bush.

"To say I'm a tool of the loopy Left, let me tell you almost 70 per cent of Americans agree with me."

She says her views have prompted death threats but she is not intimidated.

"I found on April 4, 2004 that there's worse things than dying," she said.

"One of the worse things is burying your oldest child.

"The death threats, the personal attacks, they don't bother me because if I can save one life by what I'm doing, it'll be worth it."

----------------------
Gus propose YD acknowledged Cindy as a hero... See cartoon at top of this line of blogs...

From Al Jazeera

Bush in Europe, vows respect for rights

Wednesday 21 June 2006, 13:31 Makka Time, 10:31 GMT

George W Bush will pledge to respect human right in the US-led war on terror when he attends a summit with European Union leaders on Wednesday, according to a draft statement.
---------------------

Gus: That's the problem with these guys (...and our guys, clowner and our grocer in chief)... They should not have to vow anything! they should be doing it as matter a course but oh no... they poke a few more good words in the fire for the populace and still carry on the abuses, especially at Guantanamo... Lies, lies, lies...

from Chris Floyd...

I had the honor of talking with Cindy Sheehan tonight, recording an interview for her radio show, which I believe will air on Sunday. She made mention of the "police riot" -- as she aptly phrased it -- in Oakland Tuesday night, as a Democratic administration moved in with gas and other weapons of war to clear the streets of American citizens taking part in the Occupy movement.

Ms. Sheehan also noted the fact that the Occupy movement's terminology about "the 99 percent vs. the 1 percent elite" is not entirely accurate; far too many of the 99 percent are serving as willing tools of the 1 percent -- in the police forces, in the media, even in the general public, where you can always find plenty of people eagerly genuflecting to the high and mighty, even as they and their own families and communities sink deeper into the mire.

The Oakland debacle is a prime example of this, as cops -- putative public servants whose pay scales put them deep into the 99 percent -- waded into the Occupy citizens, breaking heads and driving away the very people trying to stand up for their interests.

The New York Times reports on one victim of these first strike-backs by our panicky overlords. And he is a most telling victim indeed: a military veteran, who had served two tours in the imperial war of aggression in Iraq, then turned against the War Machine and joined that stalwart band of humanity's patriots, the Iraq Veterans Against the War: (See original for links and video.)

see toon and Cindy's story at top...