Iran attack - crisis is upon us

"A number of experts have concluded that despite the Bush administration’s desire to attack Iran, the aggression would be too rash and the consequences too dire even for the irrational Bush administration.

"Military experts point out that at a time when generals are calling for more troops for Afghanistan and Iraq, it would be ill-advised for Bush to add Iran to the war theater. Experts note that Iran is well armed with missiles capable of attacking US ships and oil facilities throughout the Middle East and that Iran can direct its Shiite allies in Iraq to assault US troops there and set in motion terrorist actions throughout the Middle East.

"Diplomatic experts point out that the US is isolated in its desire for war with Iran and has no ally except Israel, thus validating Muslim claims that the US is Israel’s instrument against Muslims in the Middle East. Experts note that military aggression is a war crime and that US violations of international law isolate the US and destroy the soft power on which US leadership has been based. An attack on Iran could be the last straw for Muslims chaffing under the rule of US puppet governments in Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

"Economic experts point out that the impact on the price of oil would be severe and the economic consequences detrimental. With the US housing bubble deflating, now is not the time for an oil shock.

"It is difficult to take exception to this expert analysis. Nevertheless, the Bush administration continues to send war signals. Credible news organizations have reported that US naval attack groups have been given 'prepare to deploy orders' that would put them on station off Iran by October 21.

"How can Bush administration war plans be reconciled with expert opinion that the consequences would be too dire for the US?

"Perhaps the answer is that what appears as irrationality to experts is rationality to neoconservatives. Neocons seek maximum chaos and instability in the Middle East in order to justify long-term US occupation of the region. Following this line of thought, neocons would regard the loss of a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf as a way to solidify public support for the war. US public anger at the Iranians could even result in US public support for a military draft in order to win 'the war on terror.' ..."
Information Clearinghouse

Tagged: usa, war, peace, war+on+terror, iran

Joan Didion on Dick Cheney

[I read Joan Didion's article and found her writing style almost too turgid and convoluted to read. But I grabbed what I think are some excellent titbits from this scathing diatribe against Dick Cheney - PW]:

It was the Vice President who maintained that passage of Senator John McCain's legislation banning inhumane treatment of detainees would cost "thousands of lives." It was the Vice President's office, in the person of David S. Addington, that supervised the 2002 "torture memos," advising the President that the Geneva Conventions need not apply. And, after Admiral Stansfield Turner, director of the CIA between 1977 and 1981, referred to Cheney as "vice president for torture," it was the Vice President's office that issued this characteristically nonresponsive statement: "Our country is at war and our government has an obligation to protect the American people from a brutal enemy that has declared war upon us." ...

The very survival of the executive species, then, was seen by Cheney and his people as dependent on its brute ability to claim absolute power and resist all attempts to share it. Given this imperative, the steps to our current situation had a leaden inevitability: if the executive branch needed a war to justify its claim to absolute power, then Iraq, Rumsfeld would be remembered to have said on September 12, 2001, had the targets. If the executive branch needed a story point to sell its war, then the Vice President would resurrect the aluminum tubes that not even the US Department of Energy believed to be meant for a centrifuge: "It's now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire...the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge." The Vice President would dismiss Joseph Wilson's report that he had found no yellowcake in Niger: "Did his wife send him on a junket?" ...

The Vice President would override as irrelevant the facts that Hans Blix and his UN monitoring team were prepared to resume such inspections and in fact did resume them, conducting seven hundred inspections of five hundred sites, finding nothing but stopping only when the war intervened. "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," he would declare in the same speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. ...

If the case for war lacked a link between September 11 and Iraq, the Vice President would repeatedly cite the meeting that neither American nor Czech intelligence believed had taken place between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague: "It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attacks," he would say on NBC in December 2001. "We discovered...the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague," he would say on NBC in March 2002. "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center," he would say on NBC in September 2002. "The senator has got his facts wrong," he would then say while debating Senator John Edwards during the 2004 campaign. "I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." ...

The Vice President would not then or later tolerate any suggestion that the story he was building might rest on cooked evidence. In a single speech at the American Enterprise Institute in November 2005 he used the following adjectives to describe those members of Congress who had raised such a question: "corrupt," "shameless," "dishonest," "reprehensible," "irresponsible," "insidious," and "utterly false." ...

His votes in the House during 1988, the last year he served there, gave him an American Conservative Union rating of 100. ...

"I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between 'commercial' interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world," he said at the Cato Institute in 1998, during the period he was CEO of Halliburton, after he had pursued one war against Iraq and before he would pursue the second. He was arguing against the imposition by the United States of unilateral economic sanctions on such countries as Libya and Iran, two countries, although he did not mention this, in which Halliburton subsidiaries had been doing business. Nor did he mention, when he said in the same speech that he thought multilateral sanctions "appropriate" in the case of Iraq, that Iraq was a third country in which a Halliburton subsidiary would by the year's end be doing business. ...

Since November 1, 2001, under this administration's Executive Order 13233, which limits access to all presidential and vice-presidential papers, Cheney has been the first vice-president in American history entitled to executive privilege, a claim to co-presidency reinforced in March 2003 by Executive Order 13292, giving him the same power to classify information as the president has.

He runs an office so disinclined to communicate that it routinely refuses to disclose who works there, even for updates to the Federal Directory, which lists names and contact addresses for government officials. ...

In February 2001, Joe Allbaugh, whose previous experience was running the governor's office for Bush in Texas, became head of FEMA, where he hired Michael D. ("Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job") Brown. In December 2002, Allbaugh announced that he was resigning from FEMA, leaving Brown in charge while he himself founded New Bridge Strategies, LLC, "a unique company," according to its Web site, "that was created specifically with the aim of assisting clients to evaluate and take advantage of business opportunities in the Middle East following the conclusion of the US-led war in Iraq."

This was the US-led war in Iraq that had not then yet begun ...

Private firms in Iraq have done more than build bases and bridges and prisons. They have done more than handle meals and laundry and transportation. They train Iraqi forces. They manage security. They interrogate prisoners. Contract interrogators from two firms, CACI International (according to its Web site "a world leader in providing timely solutions to the intelligence community") and Titan ("a leading provider of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions, and services for National Security"), were accused of abuses at Abu Ghraib, where almost half of all interrogators and analysts were CACI employees. They operate free of oversight. They distance the process of interrogation from the citizens in whose name, or in whose "defense," or to ensure whose "security," the interrogation is being conducted. They offer "timely solutions."...

In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq ...

(See also Phillip Adams, 'Coalition of the Stupid'.)

Tagged: cheney, usa, bush, torture, iraq

Deja vu on Iran?

"Here we go again. The clichés come frighteningly easy when one ponders the recent efforts of the hawks to gin up the case for military confrontation with Iran. The playbook is familiar: Pump up the threat, use the media as a conveyor and watch public opinion swing toward war.

A campaign of this sort has been under way for weeks. In late August the staff of the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee released a report on Iran that depicted it as a pressing strategic danger. Iran 'probably' has a biological weapons program and 'likely' has a chemical weapons research and development program, it said ..."
The Nation

Tagged: usa, iran, war, peace

Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial

"Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

"In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have 'misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence'.

"The scientists also strongly criticise the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as 'inaccurate and misleading'.

"In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.

"These include the International Policy Network, a thinktank with its HQ in London, and the George C Marshall Institute, which is based in Washington DC. In 2004, the institute jointly published a report with the UK group the Scientific Alliance which claimed that global temperature rises were not related to rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere ..."
Guardian

British Science Group Says Exxon Misrepresents Climate Issues
Climate-change storm hits Exxon
Exxon rapped over climate change report
Exxon misleads on climate change -UK Royal Society
Houston Chronicle :: Carbon Positive :: all 81 news articles »

Related: California sues car firms on climate

Global warming news at Daily Planet News

Tagged: climate+change, global+warming, oil, environment, disinfo, disinformation

Pressures mount on Bush to bomb Iran

"President George W Bush is coming under enormous pressure from Israel - and from Israel's neoconservative friends inside and outside the US administration - to harden still further his stance toward Iran. They want the American president to commit himself to bombing Iran if it does not give up its program of uranium enrichment - and to issue a clear ultimatum to Tehran that he is prepared to do so. They argue that mere rhetoric - such as Bush's recent diatribe, in which he compared Iran to al-Qaeda - is not enough, and might even be counter-productive, as it might encourage the Iranians to think that America's bark is worse than its bite.

"Hard-liners in Israel and the United States believe that only military action, or the credible threat of it, will now prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, with all that this would mean in terms of Israel's security and the balance of power in the strategically vital Middle East.

"Fears that Bush might succumb to this Israeli and neoconservative pressure is beginning to cause serious alarm in Moscow, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome and other world capitals where, as if to urge caution on Washington, political leaders are increasingly speaking out in favor of dialogue with Tehran and against the use of military force.

The quickening international debate over Iran's nuclear activities comes at a difficult time for Israel, where Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting for his political life and for that of his ruling Kadima-Labor coalition.

"The Iran problem is causing particular concern because it raises fundamental questions about the continued validity of the security doctrine Israel has forged over the past half century. A central plank of this doctrine is that, to be safe, Israel must dominate the region militarily and be stronger than any possible Arab or Muslim coalition.

"The doctrine received a severe knock from Israel's inconclusive war in Lebanon, which demonstrated the country's vulnerability to Hizbullah's missiles and to the challenge of 'asymmetric' guerrilla warfare. Israelis - especially those living in the more exposed north of the country where up to a million people took refuge in shelters - were shocked to discover that the war was being waged on Israel's home territory. All previous wars had been waged on Arab territory alone, and this had become something of an axiom for the Israeli military ...

"For Washington's neoconservatives, the battle to shape US policy toward Iran is a crucial test of their dwindling influence. They played a decisive role in persuading the US to make war on Iraq. They clamored for the destruction of the Hamas government in the Palestinian territories. They gave fervent support to Israel's war on Hizbullah, relentlessly portrayed as a 'terrorist movement' and as the armed outpost of Iran.

"But the neoconservatives have lost ground in Washington. The war in Iraq has turned into a strategic catastrophe, with another disaster looming in Afghanistan. Anti-Americanism in the Arab and Muslim worlds is at record levels. Leading neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby have left the administration. For the remaining neoconservatives - and their standard-bearer, William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, losing the argument over Iran could be a terminal blow.

"Their ultimate nightmare is that the United States may have to come to rely on Iran to help stabilize the dangerously chaotic situation in both Afghanistan and Iran. The visit to Tehran this week of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is, from their point of view, a ghastly pointer in that direction."
Daily Star

Tagged: usa, israel, iran, neo-cons

Historian likens TV networks to cannibals

"ELEANOR HALL: A Channel 7 team dispatched to the Indonesian province of Papua to film a story about cannibalism has just been deported from Jakarta and flown to Singapore.

"But as the Nine and Seven networks argue about who saw the cannibal story first and how the Seven crew came to be detained by Indonesian authorities, outside the industry the debate is again about TV current affairs values.

"Chris Ballard, an anthropologist with the ANU, has described Channel Seven's quest to save a six-year-old Papuan boy from cannibalism as farcical, and akin to going to Baghdad only to do a story on Paris Hilton.

"Alison Caldwell prepared this report ...

"CHRIS BALLARD: It's something akin to wandering around Baghdad asking about Paris Hilton.

"ALISON CALDWELL: That's Dr Chris Ballard, a historian with the Australia National University in Canberra. An anthropologist, he's visited Papua several times over the past decade. Dr Ballard says there's no evidence of cannibalism in Papua in recent years.

"CHRIS BALLARD: There aren't as far as we know. There have been cannibals in the past in Papua but really that was quite some time ago. I think the sad thing is there are real stories to be had out of Papua, all sorts of conflicts and challenges being posed to the people in Papua and to the Government in Jakarta and really to have these clowns wandering around the landscape on so called missions of mercy, is a tragedy I think for all of us.

"It's a complete non-story and it cues into something that's been happening recently, which is the development of adventure tourism and if you like adventure journalism. There are companies that now offer manufactured first-contact experiences in West Papua where rich tourists go in and are made to believe that they're the very first white people to have encountered particular groups.

"And I think this the kind of journalism we're seeing coming out of this particular media war but the only endangered species I can see in this is Channel Seven's ratings.

"ALISON CALDWELL: The heads of Channel Seven's and Channel Nine's news and current affairs say that it's incumbent on them as human beings to get in there and save this boy.

"CHRIS BALLARD: I mean I think it's laughable, it really is. The real cannibals in this are the commercial networks who are trying to consume each other's audiences and each other's market share and I have no time for spurious claims about mercy missions."
The World Today

Tagged: papua, television, corporations, journalism

NSA Bill performs a Patriot Act

"A bill radically redefining and expanding the government's ability to eavesdrop and search the houses of U.S. citizens without court approval passed a key Senate committee Wednesday, and may be voted on by the full Senate as early as next week.

"By a 10-8 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved SB2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (.pdf), which was co-written by committee's chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in concert with the White House.

"The committee also passed two other surveillance measures, including one from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), one of the few senators to be briefed on the National Security Agency program. Feinstein's bill, which Specter co-sponsored before submitting another bill, rebuffs the administration's legal arguments and all but declares the warrantless wiretapping illegal.

"In contrast, Specter's bill concedes the government's right to wiretap Americans without warrants, and allows the U.S. Attorney General to authorize, on his own, dragnet surveillance of Americans so long as the stated purpose of the surveillance is to monitor suspected terrorists or spies ..."
Wired News

Tagged: civil+rights, privacy, usa, liberty

The Joint Strike Fighter

By Christopher Scanlon

"A few weeks ago I-along with academics from a number of other Australian universities-received an email invitation to a briefing session run by the Department of Defence. The purpose of the briefing was to get researchers to think about how their research might contribute to Australia's involvement in the Joint Strike Fighter Program.

"The Joint Strike Fighter Program, or JSF, is a US-led initiative involving nine allied countries, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, Turkey, Denmark and Norway to develop a new generation strike fighter called the F-35 Lightning II.

"Costing in excess of 250 billion US dollars, the JSF is the world's largest defence project. Australia has committed to acquiring 100 of the aircraft at a cost of around $12-15 billion Australian dollars.

"Israel and Singapore are also involved in the project as 'Security Co-operation Participants', which, according to a press release from Lockheed Martin-the prime contractor behind the F-35-means that they 'are entitled to delivery priorities, certain program information and country-specific technical studies for the F-35' ...

"While I'm not a pacifist and I think it's unrealistic to suppose that we can get by without technologically advanced forms of defence, the involvement of university researchers in this project raises a number of concerns.

"In particular, the F-35 is being developed far beyond what could considered the legitimate defence needs of the country. The JSF website boasts that the new fighter will 'reach new heights of lethality' which it explains is the ability to carry out 'Air-to-ground precision strikes in all weather ... [and] air-to-air combat engagements'.

"It will also be able to carry what are euphemistically called 'smart bombs', Sidewinder missiles, the UK Storm Shadow, and a large array of other weapons. In other words, the F-35 will be able to do much more than intercept aircraft and missiles ...

"Perhaps it's time for us to expand the remit of ethics committees to encompass broader moral questions, such as the involvement in the development of strike fighters."
Perspective (has audio)

Annan denounces Israel use of cluster bombs

"UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on Thursday denounced Israel's use of cluster bombs during its massive month-long offensive on neighbouring Lebanon ...

"He said the UN mine action coordination Centre had assessed 'nearly 85 per cent of bombed areas in south Lebanon' and identified '359 separate cluster bomb strike locations that are contaminated with as many 1,00,000 unexploded bomblets.'

"'What's shocking and I would say completely immoral is that 90 per cent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict when we knew there would be a resolution, when we knew there would be an end,' he said."
Source

Tagged: israel, lebanon, army, military