| 12th August 2006 03:19 PM |
|
|
| Starbuck |
this thread won't last the weekend. |
| 12th August 2006 03:21 PM |
|
|
| pdog |
Are you threatening a deletion? |
| 12th August 2006 03:28 PM |
|
|
| sirmoonie |
I hear the liberal media and Hollywood are anti-Israel. I hear it was always that way, just no one ever knew until it was decided that is the way it is, like xx post retro-biffto and such. |
| 12th August 2006 04:13 PM |
|
|
| Starbuck |
spielberg especially. he hates the jews. |
| 12th August 2006 05:00 PM |
|
|
| Zulu Fun Mix |
News from Fijiland:
*The New Yorker*
7 August 2006
UNSAFE AT ANY PRICE
By James Surowiecki
A couple of weeks ago, the Senate Appropriations Committee did something unusual: it actually said no to the Defense Department, trimming next year¡¦s requested defense budget by a small amount. In practice, the cuts will likely be quashed by Congress; as Representative Christopher Shays said, nearly a year into the war on terror, ¡§We¡¦re at war, and I¡¦m saying I¡¦m not going to look military personnel in the eye and say I voted against their budget.¡¨ That¡¦s understandable, but it helps explain why we have a defense budget that is over half a trillion dollars, forty per cent higher than it was in 2001. More than half the federal government¡¦s discretionary spending goes to the military, and, while a sizable chunk goes toward the fight against terrorism and the Iraq war, too much has nothing to do with the demands of a post-9/11 world.
Over the past five years, we¡¦ve heard a lot about the rise of what Donald Rumsfeld likes to call ¡§asymmetric warfare,¡¨ and about the need to equip our military to fight ¡§nontraditional¡¨ enemies. But a look at the defense budget shows that we¡¦re building a new military while still paying for the old one. Money is going into Special Operations and intelligence, but far more is being spent on high-tech weapons systems designed to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist¡Xeighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter. Advocates insist that we need to be able to contest any ¡§near peer¡¨ rival. But the U.S. has no near-peers¡Xor, indeed, any distant peers, as we now spend more on defense than the rest of the world put together.
Not only are we buying stuff we don¡¦t need; we¡¦re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine. The Future Combat System, for instance¡Xdesigned to remake the battlefield with robot vehicles and networked communications systems¡Xbegan as a ninety-billion-dollar project, then became a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar project, and, a recent Pentagon estimate suggests, will eventually cost three hundred billion dollars. Such inefficiency is seldom punished¡Xthe Pentagon often hands out bonuses even when companies fail to meet their targets¡Xand is tolerated by regulators. Although government agencies have been required to produce an annual audit of their operations since the late nineties, the Defense Department¡¦s operations are so confused that it has never been able to produce a successful audit. A few years ago, the Pentagon¡¦s own Inspector General found that more than a trillion dollars in spending simply couldn¡¦t be explained.
Of course, people have been decrying Pentagon waste and inefficiency for decades. But things have got significantly worse over the past five years, because Congress and the Bush Administration have thrown so much money at the Defense Department so fast. Studies of corporate behavior show that when companies are flush with cash they are more likely to make acquisitions that reduce their over-all value. The defense industry today, in fact, is much like Silicon Valley in the late nineties¡Xwhen you give lots of money to an industry with no audits and no supervision, people lose discipline. They spend on bad ideas, gild every surface, and cheat. Is it really a surprise that billions of dollars meant for private contractors in Iraq seems to have been stolen?
The Defense Department is only asking for what it thinks it needs. But what it thinks it needs is determined in part by what it thinks it can get. A useful, if homely, analogy might be found in an experiment a group of social scientists did in an apartment building. One day, they left out a bowl of M&M¡¦s for people to take, with a small scoop beside it. When, the next day, they left a much larger scoop, people took two-thirds more M&M¡¦s. People could have taken just as many M&M¡¦s on the first day; they just would have had to take more scoops. They took more the second day because the larger scoop sent a message that that was what they were supposed to do. Congress and the President have, in effect, handed the Pentagon the mother of all scoops.
The fiscal consequences of this are obviously dismal, but, even worse, there¡¦s a strong possibility that giving the military a blank check is actually making us less safe. To begin with, although the defense budget is immense, it¡¦s not infinite. And often in recent times expensive weapons projects have been given priority over mundane improvements that would help the military here and now. Earlier this year, for instance, the Senate cut funding for night-vision goggles for soldiers, while adding money to buy three new V-22 Ospreys, a plane that Dick Cheney himself tried to get rid of when he was Secretary of Defense. Similarly, we might have been able to afford appropriate body armor for the troops, and plates for the Hummers in Baghdad, if we were building only one new model of multi-billion-dollar jet fighter, instead of two.
Even more strikingly, while we pour money into all these new projects we¡¦re underfunding crucial homeland-security programs. In the past few months, Congress has eliminated six hundred and fifty million dollars for port security. Funding for New York City¡¦s security projects was cut forty per cent. And we cut nearly a hundred million from the requested budget for preventing the use of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Those cuts were considered necessary for budgetary reasons, yet the price of all of them together was less than a third of what it will cost to build a single destroyer. That ship will offer us not a whit of protection in the war on terror. But we can be sure it will keep the seas safe from the Soviet Navy.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060807ta_talk_surowiecki |
| 12th August 2006 05:41 PM |
|
|
| Starbuck |
zulu!
tell us the truth...are you really randi rhoades??? |
| 12th August 2006 05:50 PM |
|
|
| not bound to please |
quote:
Starbuck wrote:
zulu!
tell us the truth...are you really randi rhoades???
bucky - you need to drink more. |
| 12th August 2006 07:55 PM |
|
|
| glencar |
Dis dread dying... |
| 12th August 2006 08:36 PM |
|
|
| glencar |
Here are some anti-Zionists/anti-Americans: http://www.zombietime.com/hall_of_shame/ |
| 13th August 2006 02:10 AM |
|
|
| Starbuck |
 |
| 13th August 2006 12:56 PM |
|
|
| not bound to please |
quote:
Starbuck wrote:
bump - thank me later... |
| 14th August 2006 01:36 AM |
|
|
| not bound to please |
Another reason to hate Israel:
http://chicago.craigslist.org/nch/zip/193827369.html |
| 15th August 2006 08:49 AM |
|
|
| Chuck |
August 14, 2006
Craig Murray
http://www.craigmurray.co.uk/archives/2006/08/the_uk_terror_p.html
The UK Terror plot: what's really going on? I have been reading very carefully through all the Sunday newspapers to try and analyse the truth from all the scores of pages claiming to detail the so-called bomb plot. Unlike the great herd of so-called security experts doing the media analysis, I have the advantage of having had the very highest security clearances myself, having done a huge amount of professional intelligence analysis, and having been inside the spin machine.
So this, I believe, is the true story.
None of the alleged terrorists had made a bomb. None had bought a plane ticket. Many did not even have passports, which given the efficiency of the UK Passport Agency would mean they couldn't be a plane bomber for quite some time.
In the absence of bombs and airline tickets, and in many cases passports, it could be pretty difficult to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt that individuals intended to go through with suicide bombings, whatever rash stuff they may have bragged in internet chat rooms.
What is more, many of those arrested had been under surveillance for over a year - like thousands of other British Muslims. And not just Muslims. Like me. Nothing from that surveillance had indicated the need for early arrests.
Then an interrogation in Pakistan revealed the details of this amazing plot to blow up multiple planes - which, rather extraordinarily, had not turned up in a year of surveillance. Of course, the interrogators of the Pakistani dictator have their ways of making people sing like canaries. As I witnessed in Uzbekistan, you can get the most extraordinary information this way. Trouble is it always tends to give the interrogators all they might want, and more, in a desperate effort to stop or avert torture. What it doesn't give is the truth.
The gentleman being "interrogated" had fled the UK after being wanted for questioning over the murder of his uncle some years ago. That might be felt to cast some doubt on his reliability. It might also be felt that factors other than political ones might be at play within these relationships. Much is also being made of large transfers of money outside the formal economy. Not in fact too unusual in the British Muslim community, but if this activity is criminal, there are many possibilities that have nothing to do with terrorism.
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered.
Be sceptical. Be very, very sceptical.
|
| 15th August 2006 10:33 AM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
 |
| 15th August 2006 10:37 AM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
Is Starbuck Lebanese?
 |
| 15th August 2006 10:53 AM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
The mystery of "Green Helmet Guy"...funny
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/
 |
| 15th August 2006 10:58 AM |
|
|
| Starbuck |
actually, feej, i am german.
i am also not chuck. |
| 15th August 2006 11:06 AM |
|
|
| Chuck |
What the hell is a "Hezbollah stronghold?"
By Junaid Alam
Every time the NYTimes splashes a photo of ruined apartment blocs, mountains of concrete rubble, dust and filth in the air, it's accompanied by the cheery descriptor, "Hezbollah stronghold." What is the precise meaning of this phrase? Is it a kind of stamp of approval for the bombardment? Is there an implicit message: "Hey guys, check out the wasted infrastructure - oh but don't worry too much, you see it was a Hezbollah stronghold (wink, nudge)?"
The term "stronghold" evokes images of a castle or fortress containing an armed garrison. In fact, that's the primary dictionary definition. So the undeniable implication is that these vast stretches of housing were all owned and inhabited by Hezbollah fighters and their weaponry. Needless to say, that is impossible. No army, official or otherwise, occupies and concentrates itself in an entire suburb. And 2,000 fighters take up such a massive area. Given that Hezbollah is part of the political and social fabric of Lebanon, it is obvious to anyone that they live among the the Shiite population.
So the true meaning of the phrase "Hezbollah stronghold" is "any place where Shiite Muslims reside in an urban setting." This is most revealing. If al-Qaeda blasted the outlying areas of Houston or Kansas or Charleston, smashing houses and gardens and playgrounds all around, how would the paper caption the occurence? "Militant forces targeted this Republican stronghold?" How were the September 11 attacks described when the attackers hit buildings housing a CIA office? "Hijackers hit CIA stronghold?"
As evidenced, the usage of the term is pure propaganda. It invites the viewer to adopt a tainted view of the people living here; to stick a mental "warning: do not sympathize" sign on the civilians who are being collectively punished and attacked via destruction of their residences and property; and to forget that this is civilian infrastructure where families live.
|
| 15th August 2006 11:13 AM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
quote:
Starbuck wrote:
actually, feej, i am german.
i am also not chuck.
Your type are rare in your neck of the woods...carry it like you're Hasselhof...carry it like you're The Hof
|
| 15th August 2006 11:20 AM |
|
|
| Zulu Fun Mix |
Feej, if you could put your gay porn away for a few minutes and read what Chuck is posting you might learn something.
|
| 15th August 2006 11:31 AM |
|
|
| Chuck |
The politics of the latest terror scare
By Barry Grey
15 August 2006
WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/terr-a15.shtml
Five days after UK authorities arrested 24 British-born Muslims and announced that they and their American counterparts had thwarted a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights from London to the US, neither the British nor the American government has produced any facts to substantiate their dire claims.
No details of the supposed plot have been provided, and no hard evidence that would justify the arrest of so many people or the imposition of chilling security measures that had wreaked havoc at airports in the US and Britain.
In the meantime, commercial flights are being turned around in mid-flight, and wild claims of new plots are hitting the newsstands. The latest was the arrest of three Palestinian-Americans who were hauled into jail in Michigan after they purchased some 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart store. Local police discovered that one of them had a digital camera with an image of the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. This was sufficient to charge them with conspiring, using cell phones as detonators, to attack the bridge.
This implausible “plot” was punctured on Monday when the FBI issued a statement that none of the three were connected to any known terrorist groups, that buying cell phones was not a crime, and that the Mackinac Bridge was in no danger. Family members explained that the three bought and sold cell phones to make a living. The incident was, however, indicative of the atmosphere of hysteria that is being encouraged by the Bush administration. (As of this writing, moreover, the three suspects remain in jail).
Unless and until hard facts are presented, the entire airline terror plot must be viewed with the gravest suspicion.
On NBC TV’s “Today” program Monday morning, Lisa Myers, reporting from London, said British authorities were complaining that they had less evidence than they wanted against the alleged plotters because the Bush administration insisted that the timing of the arrests be brought forward by a week. The British, according to Myers, had planned to wait until the supposed conspirators carried out a “dry run” of their plot.
That British officials are privately expressing concerns about a lack of evidence raises serious questions as to whether there are clear and convincing facts that those arrested had anything to do with the alleged plot, or that such a conspiracy existed.
Myers’ revelation reinforces previous reports that the British government had objected to claims by US officials that the alleged plot was linked to Al Qaeda. These developments suggest that far from thwarting a nefarious plot on the eve of its implementation, the British government came under pressure from Washington to participate in a massive provocation, and that once more it knuckled under to US demands.
The lack of facts has not prevented the mainstream media, especially in the US, from uncritically accepting the official claims and embellishing them with commentaries by “terrorist experts” about Al Qaeda connections, home-grown terrorist cells and similar hypotheses, all of which are calculated to create a climate of fear and intimidation.
Nevertheless, buried in the reams of newspaper articles and hours of television commentary are bits and pieces of information that cast further doubt on the substantiality of the official claims. Thus Monday’s USA Today, in an article headlined “Fearing Wider US Plot, Investigators Raced Clock,” noted the following: “There was also no immediate evidence that any of the suspects had purchased tickets for future flights, although British authorities have indicated some of the suspects had allegedly reviewed flight schedules and were honing in on specific flights.”
Yet British and American officials stated at the time of the arrests last week that the airline attack was “imminent.”
To make the entire affair more suspect, the NBC news program Monday evening reported that British authorities had discovered “new evidence” that led them to alter their approach to their ongoing investigation. What was this “new evidence?” And how could it significantly alter an investigation that had supposedly thwarted an imminent attack? These questions were not even raised.
Despite the lack of factual substantiation, official threat levels have been raised and so-called security measures have been introduced that have created chaos in the air transport system and subjected the American and British people to police-military methods that violate their privacy and infringe on their democratic rights.
Twenty-three British citizens remain in jail, under conditions, according to their lawyers, that make a mockery of due process and democratic rights. They have been denied contact with family members, have had virtually no contact with legal counsel, and are being subjected to abusive treatment, including confinement in freezing cells. They have been charged with no crimes, and, under recently passed British anti-terror laws, can be held without charge for up to 28 days.
The names and photos of most of the prisoners have been splashed across newspapers and their assets have been seized by the British Treasury, proving that the presumption of innocence is a dead letter in both Britain and the US.
These are the type of conditions that police agencies employ to terrorize suspects and extract damaging statements or confessions that are then cited to “prove” state allegations and prosecute defendants.
One thing is clear: the supposed plot has been seized on for transparently political purposes of a deeply reactionary character.
On Monday, British Home Minister John Reid announced that the official threat level in Britain had been lowered from “critical” to “severe,” even as he suggested that there were many terrorist cells operating in Britain and revived the Labour government’s call for an extension of preventive detention to 90 days.
The day before, the US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, made the rounds of Sunday talk shows and called for changes in US laws to make government spying even more pervasive and allow for preventive detention along British lines.
Why was the Bush administration so insistent that the alleged plot be exposed last Thursday? The answer has nothing to do with security considerations. It has, rather, to do with the machinations of the clique of political gangsters—Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, among others—who run the US government.
With their favorite Democrat, the rabidly pro-war senator and former vice presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman, losing the Democratic primary in Connecticut to a political upstart running as an opponent of the Iraq war, Ned Lamont, it was urgent that this expression of mass antiwar and anti-Bush sentiment be shoved off the front pages and supplanted by a new round of fear-mongering and hysteria.
Likewise the revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and the torture of US prisoners at Guantánamo.
Even as Cheney was in discussions with the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair over the impending terror scare, he held a rare press briefing to denounce the vote for Lamont as a boon to Al Qaeda. This bit of witch-hunting was then taken up by Lieberman himself, who slandered opposition to the Iraq war and to himself as tantamount to support for terrorism.
There undeniably is a conspiracy. It is a plot to use terrorist threats, real or imagined, to terrorize the American people, intimidate them, disorient them, and accustom them to accept the militarization of every aspect of their lives and the destruction of their democratic rights. The center of this conspiracy is the American government itself.
This is to be, in so far as Cheney and company have a say in the matter, the atmosphere in which the November elections are held.
What is the political context in which this latest terror scare takes place? Iraq has descended into civil war under the jackboot of American military occupation, Afghanistan is spiraling out of control, the US-Israeli war in Lebanon has ended in political failure, new opinion polls show Bush’s approval ratings once against sinking to record levels and antiwar sentiment rising to new heights.
An article in Monday’s Washington Post noted that Republican incumbents in the Northeast fear they could be wiped out in the November elections as a result of popular hatred for Bush and the war.
The answer of the Cheney-Rove conspirators is to engineer a new wave of panic and hysteria in an attempt to once again stampede voters behind Bush’s “war on terrorism.” They did the same in 2004, when in the run-up to the election the government suddenly announced a plot to attack major financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, New Jersey—a plot that came to nothing. And there was, at a convenient point in the election calendar, the sudden reemergence of Osama bin Laden with a taped message reminding the American people that he was determined to wipe them out.
The fascist-minded denizens of American’s secret government rely on the cowardice and complicity of the Democratic Party and the services of an utterly servile and corrupt media, which is itself heavily populated by outright agents of US intelligence agencies. Not a single mainstream newspaper or media outlet has challenged the claims of the government regarding the alleged airline terror plot.
What about the 24th alleged conspirator, who was quietly released by the British authorities from jail last week? Who is he? Why was he released? Was he perhaps the MI5 intelligence agent who reportedly infiltrated the group of alleged plotters? These questions are not even asked, let alone answered.
Why does the media take the government leaders in the US and Britain at their word? They all dragged their people into a war on the basis of lies. Bush stood before Congress, the Supreme Court and the American people in his 2003 State of the Union Address and lied about Iraq’s supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger. The US secretary of state went before the United Nations and delivered an extended brief for war that was packed with lies. Cheney is a serial prevaricator.
As for Tony Blair, he not only lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he secretly sanctioned a shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the police murder of an innocent worker, Jean Charles de Menezes, in the aftermath of last year’s London train bombings.
The most important lesson that must be drawn from the current terror scare is just how far advanced the police state conspiracies are in the United States, and just how criminal are the methods of those who run the country.
|
| 15th August 2006 11:33 AM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
quote:
Zulu Fun Mix wrote:
Feej, if you could put your gay porn away for a few minutes and read what Chuck is posting you might learn something.
Oh hey playa...going to Chicago? |
| 15th August 2006 11:42 AM |
|
|
| mojoman |
quote:
Chuck wrote:
The politics of the latest terror scare
By Barry Grey
15 August 2006
WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/aug2006/terr-a15.shtml
Five days after UK authorities arrested 24 British-born Muslims and announced that they and their American counterparts had thwarted a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic flights from London to the US, neither the British nor the American government has produced any facts to substantiate their dire claims.
No details of the supposed plot have been provided, and no hard evidence that would justify the arrest of so many people or the imposition of chilling security measures that had wreaked havoc at airports in the US and Britain.
In the meantime, commercial flights are being turned around in mid-flight, and wild claims of new plots are hitting the newsstands. The latest was the arrest of three Palestinian-Americans who were hauled into jail in Michigan after they purchased some 80 cell phones from a Wal-Mart store. Local police discovered that one of them had a digital camera with an image of the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. This was sufficient to charge them with conspiring, using cell phones as detonators, to attack the bridge.
This implausible “plot” was punctured on Monday when the FBI issued a statement that none of the three were connected to any known terrorist groups, that buying cell phones was not a crime, and that the Mackinac Bridge was in no danger. Family members explained that the three bought and sold cell phones to make a living. The incident was, however, indicative of the atmosphere of hysteria that is being encouraged by the Bush administration. (As of this writing, moreover, the three suspects remain in jail).
Unless and until hard facts are presented, the entire airline terror plot must be viewed with the gravest suspicion.
On NBC TV’s “Today” program Monday morning, Lisa Myers, reporting from London, said British authorities were complaining that they had less evidence than they wanted against the alleged plotters because the Bush administration insisted that the timing of the arrests be brought forward by a week. The British, according to Myers, had planned to wait until the supposed conspirators carried out a “dry run” of their plot.
That British officials are privately expressing concerns about a lack of evidence raises serious questions as to whether there are clear and convincing facts that those arrested had anything to do with the alleged plot, or that such a conspiracy existed.
Myers’ revelation reinforces previous reports that the British government had objected to claims by US officials that the alleged plot was linked to Al Qaeda. These developments suggest that far from thwarting a nefarious plot on the eve of its implementation, the British government came under pressure from Washington to participate in a massive provocation, and that once more it knuckled under to US demands.
The lack of facts has not prevented the mainstream media, especially in the US, from uncritically accepting the official claims and embellishing them with commentaries by “terrorist experts” about Al Qaeda connections, home-grown terrorist cells and similar hypotheses, all of which are calculated to create a climate of fear and intimidation.
Nevertheless, buried in the reams of newspaper articles and hours of television commentary are bits and pieces of information that cast further doubt on the substantiality of the official claims. Thus Monday’s USA Today, in an article headlined “Fearing Wider US Plot, Investigators Raced Clock,” noted the following: “There was also no immediate evidence that any of the suspects had purchased tickets for future flights, although British authorities have indicated some of the suspects had allegedly reviewed flight schedules and were honing in on specific flights.”
Yet British and American officials stated at the time of the arrests last week that the airline attack was “imminent.”
To make the entire affair more suspect, the NBC news program Monday evening reported that British authorities had discovered “new evidence” that led them to alter their approach to their ongoing investigation. What was this “new evidence?” And how could it significantly alter an investigation that had supposedly thwarted an imminent attack? These questions were not even raised.
Despite the lack of factual substantiation, official threat levels have been raised and so-called security measures have been introduced that have created chaos in the air transport system and subjected the American and British people to police-military methods that violate their privacy and infringe on their democratic rights.
Twenty-three British citizens remain in jail, under conditions, according to their lawyers, that make a mockery of due process and democratic rights. They have been denied contact with family members, have had virtually no contact with legal counsel, and are being subjected to abusive treatment, including confinement in freezing cells. They have been charged with no crimes, and, under recently passed British anti-terror laws, can be held without charge for up to 28 days.
The names and photos of most of the prisoners have been splashed across newspapers and their assets have been seized by the British Treasury, proving that the presumption of innocence is a dead letter in both Britain and the US.
These are the type of conditions that police agencies employ to terrorize suspects and extract damaging statements or confessions that are then cited to “prove” state allegations and prosecute defendants.
One thing is clear: the supposed plot has been seized on for transparently political purposes of a deeply reactionary character.
On Monday, British Home Minister John Reid announced that the official threat level in Britain had been lowered from “critical” to “severe,” even as he suggested that there were many terrorist cells operating in Britain and revived the Labour government’s call for an extension of preventive detention to 90 days.
The day before, the US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, made the rounds of Sunday talk shows and called for changes in US laws to make government spying even more pervasive and allow for preventive detention along British lines.
Why was the Bush administration so insistent that the alleged plot be exposed last Thursday? The answer has nothing to do with security considerations. It has, rather, to do with the machinations of the clique of political gangsters—Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, among others—who run the US government.
With their favorite Democrat, the rabidly pro-war senator and former vice presidential candidate, Joseph Lieberman, losing the Democratic primary in Connecticut to a political upstart running as an opponent of the Iraq war, Ned Lamont, it was urgent that this expression of mass antiwar and anti-Bush sentiment be shoved off the front pages and supplanted by a new round of fear-mongering and hysteria.
Likewise the revelations of US war crimes in Iraq and the torture of US prisoners at Guantánamo.
Even as Cheney was in discussions with the government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair over the impending terror scare, he held a rare press briefing to denounce the vote for Lamont as a boon to Al Qaeda. This bit of witch-hunting was then taken up by Lieberman himself, who slandered opposition to the Iraq war and to himself as tantamount to support for terrorism.
There undeniably is a conspiracy. It is a plot to use terrorist threats, real or imagined, to terrorize the American people, intimidate them, disorient them, and accustom them to accept the militarization of every aspect of their lives and the destruction of their democratic rights. The center of this conspiracy is the American government itself.
This is to be, in so far as Cheney and company have a say in the matter, the atmosphere in which the November elections are held.
What is the political context in which this latest terror scare takes place? Iraq has descended into civil war under the jackboot of American military occupation, Afghanistan is spiraling out of control, the US-Israeli war in Lebanon has ended in political failure, new opinion polls show Bush’s approval ratings once against sinking to record levels and antiwar sentiment rising to new heights.
An article in Monday’s Washington Post noted that Republican incumbents in the Northeast fear they could be wiped out in the November elections as a result of popular hatred for Bush and the war.
The answer of the Cheney-Rove conspirators is to engineer a new wave of panic and hysteria in an attempt to once again stampede voters behind Bush’s “war on terrorism.” They did the same in 2004, when in the run-up to the election the government suddenly announced a plot to attack major financial institutions in New York, Washington and Newark, New Jersey—a plot that came to nothing. And there was, at a convenient point in the election calendar, the sudden reemergence of Osama bin Laden with a taped message reminding the American people that he was determined to wipe them out.
The fascist-minded denizens of American’s secret government rely on the cowardice and complicity of the Democratic Party and the services of an utterly servile and corrupt media, which is itself heavily populated by outright agents of US intelligence agencies. Not a single mainstream newspaper or media outlet has challenged the claims of the government regarding the alleged airline terror plot.
What about the 24th alleged conspirator, who was quietly released by the British authorities from jail last week? Who is he? Why was he released? Was he perhaps the MI5 intelligence agent who reportedly infiltrated the group of alleged plotters? These questions are not even asked, let alone answered.
Why does the media take the government leaders in the US and Britain at their word? They all dragged their people into a war on the basis of lies. Bush stood before Congress, the Supreme Court and the American people in his 2003 State of the Union Address and lied about Iraq’s supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger. The US secretary of state went before the United Nations and delivered an extended brief for war that was packed with lies. Cheney is a serial prevaricator.
As for Tony Blair, he not only lied about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, he secretly sanctioned a shoot-to-kill policy that resulted in the police murder of an innocent worker, Jean Charles de Menezes, in the aftermath of last year’s London train bombings.
The most important lesson that must be drawn from the current terror scare is just how far advanced the police state conspiracies are in the United States, and just how criminal are the methods of those who run the country.
why does the author hate america? |
| 15th August 2006 11:45 AM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
quote:
mojoman wrote:
why does the author hate america?
Journalism is dead...people like this guy and Chuck killed it |
| 15th August 2006 11:50 AM |
|
|
| mojoman |
quote:
Fiji Joe wrote:
Journalism is dead...people like this guy and Chuck killed it
journalism? you jest sir!!! it looks like a page from the politburo playbook!!! |
| 15th August 2006 11:50 AM |
|
|
| telecaster |
quote:
Zulu Fun Mix wrote:
Feej, if you could put your gay porn away for a few minutes and read what Chuck is posting you might learn something.
Please tell Chuck he ruins his ankle high credibility when he cuts n pastes crap from someones personal blogsite
|
| 15th August 2006 11:53 AM |
|
|
| Zulu Fun Mix |
quote:
telecaster wrote:
Please tell Chuck he ruins his ankle high credibility when he cuts n pastes crap from someones personal blogsite
You mean you LIKE gay porn??
|
| 15th August 2006 11:58 AM |
|
|
| sirmoonie |
Unfortunately, given the RO audience, its only the gay porn that can get this thread to 500. Call it a necessary evil. |
| 15th August 2006 12:06 PM |
|
|
| Fiji Joe |
quote:
Zulu Fun Mix wrote:
You mean you LIKE gay porn??
This is the lamest alter ego ever...it even ranks behind Bizarro JB
"Tee Hee"
Mr. Gazza...tear down this goat
[Edited by Fiji Joe] |
| 15th August 2006 12:12 PM |
|
|
| Zulu Fun Mix |
quote:
Fiji Joe wrote:
This is the lamest alter ego ever...it even ranks behind Bizarro JB
And you've got to be the stupidest detective imaginable. How many different people have you accused poor Zulu of being by now? No wonder you believe all that right-wing mass media shit!
|
|
