1. Another bad Obama hire, who 10 years ago failed to get confirmation to be head of the CIA:
“For the head of the CIA, it’s being speculated he is seriously considering his close adviser Anthony Lake.
According to the New York Times, “His (Lakes) failed nomination in 1997 to become C.I.A. director became bogged down
…
Lake held a meeting on Dec. 8, 1995 at the White House with radical Muslim activist and open supporter of Hamas, Abdulrahman Alamoudi. Alamoudi also met with former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.
Alamoudi ran the American Muslim Council for several years, which was a lobbying group founded by a high ranking member of the less than reputable Muslim Brotherhood. Alamoudi also worked for the Defense Department until 1998 scouting candidates for Muslim chaplains for the military.
Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) would comment that “it is remarkable that people who have known connections to terrorism are the only people to approve these chaplains.”
That is an interesting statement coming from Kyl, considering he met with an alleged financier of the Sept. 11 attacks on that morning on Capitol Hill.
As the attacks were unfolding, Kyl was having breakfast with the then-head of the ISI (Pakistan’s Intelligence Service) General Mahmood Ahmed, who has been accused of ordering $100,000 to hijacker Mohamed Atta.
…
Is the threat of terrorism real? Yes, but we should also take a hard look at our government officials and domestic organizations who have connections to many so-called terrorists and financiers.
I’d also recommend anyone interested to check out the documentary “The Power of Nightmares,” which documents how the United States government has used terrorism and the fear of attack to scare the population into submission.
I wonder how President Obama will handle the so called “war on terror.” Will he repeal the horrendous excuse for legislation that is the Patriot Act? Not just close Gitmo, but take a look at everything the Bush Administration has done in the name of terrorism. According to The Wall Street Journal, “President-elect Barack Obama is unlikely to radically overhaul controversial Bush administration intelligence policies, advisers say, an approach that is almost certain to create tension within the Democratic Party.” Obama was elected on the “change” mantra, how could he possibly change everything that came to be in the post-9/11 era, if he won’t take a look at the details surrounding the day that created it.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18605
2. Go Jerry:
“Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) took one of the first steps in holding the Bush Administration accountable when he introduced House Resolution 1531 on Thursday.
The official title of HR 1531, which was introduced to the House Judiciary Committee, is “Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the President of the United States should not issue pardons to senior members of his administration during the final 90 days of his term of office.”
The resolution notes, “President George W. Bush may have committed crimes involving the mistreatment of detainees, the extraordinary rendition of individuals to countries known to engage in torture, illegal surveillance of United States citizens, unlawful leaks of classified information, obstruction of justice, political interference with the conduct of the Justice Department, and other illegal acts,” and that, “Bush has been urged to grant preemptive pardons to senior administration officials who might face criminal prosecution for actions taken in the course of their official duties.”
…
Hitler also passed a bill to exempt the Nazis criminals of their crimes but it did not stop the Nuremburg Military Tribunals doing their job.
That’s right. Bush can do whatever the heck he wants to pardon himself and his fellow criminals, but that will never insulate him from prosecution by an international court. I hope Bush, Cheney, Meyers, Rove, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Zelikow, et al…. live to see the day when they are indicted and prosecuted.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18602
3. A very clear explanation of what happened to JFK:
“In his 1968 interview with Perry Adams, Mort Sahl explains the urgency of bringing to justice the conspirators behind the public execution of JFK. After reviewing the evidence, Sahl had made the decision to assist New Orleans DA Jim Garrison in his investigation. As a consequence of his vocal support for Garrison, Sahl–whose face made the cover of (CIA’s) Time Magazine in 1960–was blacklisted and his successful mainstream career as an entertainer came to an end overnight.
Sahl’s words and his sacrifice will not be lost on the generation of activists working to expose the truth of 9/11 and other shattering acts of state terrorism.
…
that certain people had to take President Kennedy’s life in order to control ours. In other words, as Richard Starnes of the New York World-Telegram said, the shots in Dallas were the opening shots of World War III. There’s been a great change in this country since Kennedy.
…
We have determined that elements of the Central Intelligence Agency planned the execution and killed the President. Lee Oswald attended those meetings planning it. He was the only non-CIA man at the meeting. And he worked for the FBI. We then find that an FBI code clerk has a message come through, a twx, through the southern regional offices of the FBI, warning five days ahead that the President will be assassinated and we still later find Oswald saying, “I was a patsy,” in the Dallas Police Station. The “elements” are in the Central Intelligence Agency. They don’t want to lose their power. And they don’t want to fall. It has become government by hoodlum. And I don’t blame them. If I were them, I wouldn’t want to fall either. I would pull out all the stops as well, as they have. On the other hand, while I know that neo-Nazis would want to kill a man like John Kennedy, I don’t understand why liberals would want to protect them from prosecution.
…
Once the neo-fascists became bold enough to slay the President on the street, they showed their hand. They showed how arrogant they had become. Now it’s a question of symptom. That crime was a national symptom. If we can turn our back on that, we will pay a terrible price. [And these chickens came home to roost on 9/11.]
…
He means that the first thing the government did when the President was killed was to ratify his death and to appoint a group of honorable men to initial a fraudulent report. [Exactly like 9/11.] To eventually say there is no fourth bullet, even though there’s a fourth bullet hole. The man was shot at from three sides, but there was only one side. In other words, the government decrees it is so.
…
When he said that the CIA had gone to such great lengths to protect the people charged in this case, and to keep witnesses from being extradited, and to smear Garrison, we didn’t know how far they would go. But, it is evident now that if they will kill a President, they will go to any lengths not to be toppled. And they are so imbedded in the society that the Presidents are almost transients. The only President that ever went up against them was Kennedy. And we see what happened to him for his pains.
…
I know the pressure on those of us who have spoken up in this case. The minute I made a decision for America and decided to park everything else and go ahead, I suddenly was unemployable, and by an awful lot of people you’d call liberal. I want to make it very clear. The people on the right are not large enough to be an army, but they have an army of indifferent men, men indifferent to terror. The road to fascism is paved with liberal bricks. While our job to give the young people time enough to become radicals, the job of the liberals is to castrate them before they can get to the radical side, before they can save America, in effect.”
http://www.911blogger.com/node/18598
4. “the U.S. intelligence community concluded, in that famous National Intelligence Estimate a year ago, that Iran had halted its secret weapons program
…
it’s clear that Iran isn’t going to build a bomb next week, or next year, or even the year after, and that Obama will have lots and lots of time to deal with this problem in a leisurely manner. So relax.
Umm, Israelis? That means you, too.
…
Israeli hawks are still bloviating about how ready they are to attack Iran:
Former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, widely rumored to be weighing a run for Knesset on Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud list, said Monday that the military option for an attack on Iran still exists.
He’s wrong. It doesn’t exist. First, Israel doesn’t have the capability to attack Iran effectively. Second, they can’t get there without flying over the air space of U.S. allies and over Iraq, where they’d fly over 150,000 U.S. troops. And third, the political consequences of an Israeli attack would be devastating to Israel’s standing overseas. (Example: India. Right now, nearly half of Israel’s military sales abroad go to India, and India is trying to build good ties with Iran to gain access to its oil and gas, including through a pipeline across Pakistan. How would India react to an Israeli attack on Iran?)
Once in office, Obama needs to send an envoy to Jerusalem with a simple message for the Israelis: when it comes to Iran, sit down and shut up.”
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/385122/that_iranian_bomb_relax?rel=hpbox
5. “Obama would do well to learn the lessons of his predecessors and avoid the reflexive inclination to prove his strength by attacking Pakistan. The need for a young and inexperienced new president to avoid appearing weak resulted in John F. Kennedy’s disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and consequent Cuban Missile Crisis. These acts were performed for no strategic reason and nearly caused the world’s nuclear incineration.
…
Thus, Obama should avoid knee jerk US military responses that have become all too common and counterproductive and instead adopt a smarter policy of restraint.”
http://www.antiwar.com/eland/?articleid=13800
6. “In true Bush form, the administration has decided it is not going to let our elected officials actually see the draft security Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that lays out the conditions under which some 140,000 U.S troops and tens of thousands of American contractors can operate in Iraq beginning Jan.1. The agreement — contrary to the rosy picture offered by the press earlier this week — is still a source of grave tension in Iraq, evidenced by the brawl that shut down parliament yesterday.
Coming out of an election stupor in which many Americans were erroneously convinced that The Surge had transformed Iraq into a kind of benign third world landscape awash in wreckage but nonetheless “moving forward,” a lot of people won’t know or perhaps care, about the SOFA.
…
Pathetically, there is a much more open and vigorous debate going on in the Iraqi parliament about the fate of our forces. Perhaps after Jan. 20, when Congress can finally get out from the kids’ table, they can get back to doing the peoples’ business.
…
Wow. So you’re saying that rather than Congress being closely consulted on the specifics of a treaty that – once ratified – becomes the law of our land, the Executive is seeking the advice and consent of military commanders and leaving the details of implementation up to these politicians with no electoral accountability (until they run for office, that is).”
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/11/20/kids-get-your-feet-off-the-sofa/
7. George Washington advised against foreign entanglements in his Farewell Address, so this is awesome!
• The Granny Peace Brigade protests regularly in New York and walked this Plank for Peace to the DNC headquarters in August. Photograph by Eva-Lee Baird, courtesy of the GPB. •
http://thewip.net/contributors/2008/11/the_granny_peace_brigade_campa.html
8. “Churchill made the fatal error in World War II of backing Poland’s hold on Danzig even though Britain could do nothing to defend Poland, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia from Hitler’s attempts to reunite million of Germans stranded in these new nations by the dreadful Versailles Treaty. Britain’s declaration of war on Germany over Poland led to a general European war. After suffering 5.6 million dead, Poland ended up occupied by the Soviet Union.
Buchanan’s heretical view, and mine, is that the Western democracies should have let Hitler expand his Reich eastward until it inevitably went to war with the even more dangerous Soviet Union. Once these despotisms had exhausted themselves, the Western democracies would have been left dominating Europe. The lives of millions of Western civilians and soldiers would have been spared.
In the end, Churchill and US President Franklin were so obsessed with crushing Germany, and so seduced by “Uncle Joe” Stalin, they handed half of Europe to the Soviet Union, a far more murderous and dangerous tyranny by an order of magnitude than Hitler’s Germany. From his Soviet gulag cell, Alexander Solzhenitsyn called Roosevelt and Churchill “stupid.”
…
Buchanan’s book is important because we see some Western leaders making the same grave errors as in the 20th Century and idolizing the arch imperialist, Churchill. The latest example: extension of NATO to Russia’s borders. As in the case of Poland in 1939, the West cannot defend the Baltic, Ukraine or Georgia, and has no vital interests there.
Have we learned nothing from the 20th Century’s apocalyptic wars? As Buchanan says, Churchill’s giveaway of Eastern Europe at Moscow and Yalta was a far graver blunder than Chamberlain’s concessions at Munich in 1938.
Buchanan’s book strips away lingering war propaganda and shows the cynicism, lust for power, and foolishness of the “saintly” Allied war leaders and their “good” war.
As Ben Franklin said, there is no good war, nor bad peace.”
http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis128.html
9. A great explanation of what Libertarianism really is – and what it isn’t:
http://www.reason.com/news/show/129994.html
10. “The existence of CIA, FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents profiling specific minority and religious groups in the United States could undermine contentions by the FBI, the primary federal agency for domestic security, that no programs target upstanding Muslims and Arabs.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11090
11. More on pardons:
“Never before has a president pardoned himself or his subordinates for crimes he authorized. The idea that the pardon power constitutionally includes such pardons ignores a thousand year tradition in which no man can sit in judgment of himself, and the fact that James Madison and George Mason argued that the reason we needed the impeachment power was that a president might some day try to pardon someone for a crime that he himself was involved in. The problem is not preemptive pardons of people not yet tried and convicted. The problem is not blanket pardons of unnamed masses of people. Both of those types of pardons have been issued in the past and have their appropriate place. The problem is the complete elimination of any semblance of the rule of law by pardoning one’s own subordinates for crimes you instructed them to commit.
Yes, of course, there’s something absurd about knowing that a president authorized crimes, not impeaching him, not prosecuting him, not proposing any action with any teeth at all, but formally objecting to the idea of him issuing pardons of his own subordinates for crimes he authorized. But this is where we are. State, local, civil, foreign, and international prosecutions are likely ways of holding Bush, Cheney, and gang accountable, and pardons can’t interfere with them. Pardons can’t interfere with impeachment. But if we allow these pardons, we not only guarantee no federal prosecutions, and not only give Congress an excuse to drop its investigations, but we also establish the precedent that from here on out any president can violate any law and then pardon the crime. This is simply to end the idea of law. We cannot allow that.
We need to work with Congressman Nadler and Senator Feingold to promote awareness of what is wrong with self-pardons. In this way we can prepare the American public for the appropriate response when the pardons come. The appropriate response will be to demand:
1. Immediate impeachment of Bush and Cheney, even if they are out of office.
2. Overturning of the pardons, as Bush’s lawyers told him he could do to Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, which was a far more minor abuse of the pardon power.
3. Legislation banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.
4. A Constitutional Amendment banning self-pardons and pardons of crimes authorized by the president.
5. Prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and their subordinates for their crimes.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11089
12. What to do about torture:
“The range of actions we encourage are:
1) impeaching President George Bush before he leaves office particularly if prior to leaving office he tries to pardon himself and those who have done his bidding in violation of United States law. In the absence of that impeachment and consistent with precedent we should impeach him after he leaves office for crimes committed. Impeachment would ensure that President Bush could not hold any federal office on commission etc. for the rest of his life.
2) impeaching Judge Jay Bybee of the Ninth Circuit. Judge Bybee signed the infamous August 1, 2002 torture memo ascribed also to Professor John Yoo at the University of Berkeley School of Law. It shocks the conscience that a person who enabled torture is permitted to sit on a federal bench.
3) criminally prosecuting high-level civilians in state courts. The legendary Vincent Bugliosi knows how to do it.
4) criminally prosecuting civilian and military leaders in federal and military courts. There are 2700 state prosecutors across the country. American families all over have suffered the loss of a loved one or live with an injured member who served in wars started by President George Bush. Some of these families are willing to assist their state prosecutors in seeking criminal trials. If a sufficient number of these cases are brought forth, a federal prosecutor might initiate a prosecution, notwithstanding Attorney General Mukasey’s unwillingness to faithfully execute our federal laws with regard to criminal prosecution of these leaders.
5) removing from academia former Bush administration officials who created and put in place the torture policies and practices. Ordering and abetting torture has nothing to do with academic freedom.
6) encouraging, to the extent courts allow, “citizen prosecutors” to exercise citizen mandamus and step in to prosecute where their state or federal prosecutors have failed to act. This was attempted recently in Minnesota to permit a citizen arrest of President Bush for murder if he came into St. Paul to attend the Republican Convention.
7) organizing peaceful civil actions that convey to those holding the levers of power in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches that we intend to vindicate United States law and United States international obligations and hold them accountable.
Seeking assistance from foreign and international tribunals to make sure that these perpetrators serve time for their crimes.
It is abundantly clear that President George Bush ordered torture. By dehumanizing others through torture and murder he dehumanizes America and Americans. Criminal prosecution is a viable means to demonstrate the importance for Americans of the most basic rules of US and international law. Let the world know that we are not barbarians.”
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=11092
13. “Paul J. Balles considers the racist, anti-Arab comments made by the father of Rahm Israel Emanuel – President-elect Barack Obama’s chief of staff – and asks why these comments are acceptable to the American public whereas if they had been referring to Jews, African Americans or Hispanics they would have caused uproar.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21298.htm
14. Ralph Nader on the Clinton takeover of the Obama administration:
“The Third Clinton Administration
While the liberal intelligentsia was swooning over Barack Obama during his presidential campaign, I counseled “prepare to be disappointed.” His record as a Illinois state and U.S. Senator, together with the many progressive and long overdue courses of action he opposed during his campaign, rendered such a prediction unfortunate but obvious.
Now this same intelligentsia is beginning to howl over Obama’s transition team and early choices to run his Administration. Having defeated Senator Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primaries, he now is busily installing Bill Clinton’s old guard. Thirty one out of forty seven people that he has named so far for transition or appointments have ties to the Clinton Administration, according to Politico. One Clintonite is quoted in the Washington Post as saying – “This isn’t lightly flavored with Clintons. This is all Clintons, all the time.”
…
The signs are amassing that Barack Obama put a political con job over on the American people. He is now daily buying into the entrenched military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned Americans about in his farewell address.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21297.htm
15. Cheney indictment moves forward:
“A Texas judge has set an arraignment date for Friday for Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. They were indicted this week by a Texas grand jury on state charges accusing them of responsibility for prisoner abuse in a privately run federal jail.
…
One indictment charges Cheney and Gonzales with engaging in organized criminal activity.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21292.htm
hasEML = false;
