AS THE WORLD SQUIRMS

Pose your query or comment to ‘Ms. Dewey’ in normal, conversational sentences (typed). The more you interact with ‘Ms. Dewey’ the more useful she becomes.

(Sound on and hit F11 on your keyboard for full-screen display)

“People should not be afraid of their government.

Governments should be afraid of their people.”

Tuesday: 108 Iraqis Killed, 38 Injured

US Air Strike on Sadr City Kills 5, Including Mother and Infant

Record Number Die in Iraq During November

News & Comment

Bushies push NSA wiretap extravaganza

By Thomas C. Green (Dublin, Ireland)

COMMENT: The Register – London

11.20.06

(Excerpt)

True freedom is protecting Americans by letting the NSA monitor their email and phone calls by the millions without a warrant, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales explained to Air Force Academy cadets in a speech last week.

It's a mistake to regard such Gestapo tactics as compromising freedom, he told the young officers in training. "This [antagonistic] view is shortsighted. Its definition of freedom - one utterly divorced from civic responsibility - is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people".

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

U.S. is now most unfriendly country to visitors, survey says

"Between 2000 and 2006, the number of overseas visitors, excluding those from Mexico and Canada, has declined by 17 percent," said Geoff Freeman, executive director of the Discover America Partnership, "and business travel in that period has dropped 10 percent."

Reuters

11.20.06

(Excerpt)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The survey showed that the United States was ranked "the worst" in terms of visas and immigration procedures by twice the percentage of travelers as the next destination regarded as unfriendly -- the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent.

More than half of the travelers surveyed said U.S. immigration officials were rude and two-thirds said they feared they would be detained on arriving in the United States for a simple mistake in their paperwork or for saying the wrong thing to an immigration official.

The survey was taken between October 25 and November 9 against the backdrop of growing concern in parts of the U.S. business community over a steady decline in the number of foreigners visiting the United States.

Dana Summers

Cameron (Cam) Cardow, Canada, The Ottawa Citizen,

Truth Time With Laura - Mr. Fish

Misplaced Nostalgia

Before We Get Too Giddy Over Bush Senior’s Foreign Policy Redux

by Sheldon Richman

Future of Freedom Foundation

11.17.06

We can leave aside Bush the Elder’s little adventures in Panama and Somalia, although his ouster of Panama president Manuel Noriega of Panama, formerly a staunch U.S. ally, bears some resemblance to the treatment Iraq’s Saddam Hussein got at the hands of Bush’s son. American presidents don’t like ally-dictators to go off the reservation.

Even if we confine our attention to Iraq alone we might temper our optimism about the apparent new influence around the White House. Throughout the Reagan and Bush 41 years, Saddam Hussein was a key Middle East ally of the U.S. government. Years earlier other U.S. administrations had helped the Ba’athist party and then Saddam himself to come to power. When the United States lost the shah of Iran as its regional strongman and the Ayatollah Khomeini became America’s new nemesis, Saddam’s stock rose mightily. The Reagan administration supported Iraq in its war against Iran and furnished it with the makings of chemical weapons. Rumsfeld was the go-between.

Saddam was not just an ally of convenience. He was also seen as a stabilizing factor, even in relation to the Israel-Palestine conflict. This was the neocon view at that time. In their 1987 New Republic article, “Back Iraq,” Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie wrote that “the fall of the existing regime in Iraq would enormously enhance Iranian influence, endanger the supply of oil, threaten pro-American regimes throughout the area, and upset the Arab-Israeli balance.” (How prescient!) They also wrote that economic aid to Iraq “would assert U.S. confidence in Iraq’s political viability.” To the argument that a triumphant Saddam would be bad for American interests, they said, “But the Iranian revolution and seven years of bloody and inconclusive warfare have changed Iraq’s view of its Arab neighbors, the United States, and even Israel.... Its leaders no longer consider the Palestinian issue their problem. [Its] allies have forced a degree of moderation on Iraq.... Iraq is now the de facto protector of the regional status quo.” (My, how views had changed by 2001.)

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 (possibly with a green light from the U.S. ambassador), Bush 41’s inclination was to stay out. Unfortunately, his mind was changed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, who never quite understood that small government at home can’t coexist with big government abroad. Bush continued the practice of going to war without a congressional declaration. The allegedly historic war debate that took place in Congress actually occurred after U.S. and coalition forces were in place and the ultimatum to Saddam had been issued. In other words, it was a bogus debate.

Israel’s Domestic Political Game Raises the Danger of a U.S.-Iran War

By Tony Karon

11.21.06

(Excerpt)

Even if the Democrats could be relied on to hold the line against insane military adventurism against Iran — and, frankly, listening to their leading lights I have my doubts — that’s unlikely to make any difference to the question of whether or not Iran is attacked. That’s because nobody even among the hawks is talking about a full-blown ground invasion; they’re talking about a series of air strikes that will supposedly destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. And you only have to go back to President Clinton’s 1998 cruise missile strikes on an aspirin factory in Sudan and a patch of dust Afghanistan to remember that the first Americans hear about such attacks will be after the fact.

By then, of course, it will be too late. U.S. intel and even the Israelis know that the best such strikes can hope to achieve would be to delay Iran’s nuclear program by a year or two. But it will also prompt a chain of events throughout the Middle East that will plunge the region into a war that leaves U.S. influence — and Israel’s prospects of survival — diminished. The Iranians will hit back, of course, in Iraq, and elsewhere. And the U.S. will be compelled to hit back, creating the pattern for a long war of bloody attrition.

One reason it won’t be debated publicly because it’s based on a fallacy promoted by a calculated campaign of hysteria by Israel’s leadership. Iran, right now, has no nuclear weapons program that anyone knows of — the Israelis however have opted to paint the very idea of uranium enrichment in Iran, quite legal under the NPT, into the first stanza of a new Holocaust. Israel’s demand that Iran be stopped, by force if necessary, from establishing the nuclear fuel cycle allowed under the NPT is untenable, I’ve argued elsewhere — the idea that any nation in the Middle East that creates the infrastructural capability to challenge Israel’s nuclear monopoly in the region (creates the infrastructure that would allow this choice rather than actually pursue weapons) must face military sanctions is absurd and unsustainable. The only way to resolve this problem is to normalize relations in the region to create a basis for stability. But that’s not the way the Israeli or U.S. leadership sees it, which is why we’re heading for confrontation despite the U.S. election results.

Netanyahu and the End Times

Ziodämmerung

By Dave Himmelstein

Counterpunch.org

November 20, 2006

(Excerpt)

Vintage Zionist bravado was uncorked by Benjamin Netanyahu during his closed-door meeting last month with American contributors to an Israeli military recruitment program targeting ultra-religious Jews. The American-educated former Israeli Prime Minister, now hardline opposition leader and magnet for the right, has called for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Iran. Netanyahu was the original recipient of the neo-con expansionist "clean break" blueprint in the nineties, which was eventually recycled back in the U.S. as the Program for a New American Century.

While appreciative of anticipated largesse, Netanyahu told the visiting heavy hitters that their vessel was sinking. With intermarriage and assimilation swamping the good ship Diaspora, there is "no future" for Jews living outside Israel. Journalists immediately took embarrassing note that the last Israeli politician to give public voice (in 2000) to that hoary backroom chestnut was President Moshe Katsav, currently accused of rape.

While survival is a thematic staple in Jewish organizational discourse, there's a certain comic-opera quality to anointing Israel as guarantor of Jewish identity and well-being at a time when the state is sliding into quasi-pariah status on the international stage. But Israeli triumphalism cannot be laughed away. With an estimated 200+ nuclear weapons at its disposal, this graustark-on-steroids could threaten to unleash chaos if it felt unacceptably squeezed, the worst-case scenario involving the suicidal "Masada option."

Report: Jewish Settlements Built on Palestinian Property

By Scott Wilson

Washington Post Foreign Service

11.21.06

(Excerpt)

JERUSALEM, Nov. 21-- An Israeli advocacy group has found that 39 percent of the land used by Jewish settlements in the West Bank is private Palestinian property, and contends that construction there violates international and Israeli law guaranteeing the protection of property rights in the occupied territories.

In a critical report released here Tuesday, the Settlement Watch project of Peace Now also disclosed that much of the land that Israeli officials have said would remain part of the Jewish state under any final peace agreement is private Palestinian property.

That includes some of the large settlement blocs inside the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinian population in the West Bank. The report states that 86 percent of Maale Adumim on Jerusalem's eastern edge sits on private Palestinian land. A little more than 35 percent of the settlement of Ariel, which cuts deep into the northern West Bank, is also on private property.

Israel's government has long maintained that the settlements, developed in large part with public money, sit on untitled property known as "state land" or on property of unclear legal status. Israeli courts have also ruled that unauthorized outposts erected on private Palestinian property must be razed, although those orders are rarely carried out.

Stay the Course…

Rainer Hachfeld, Berlin, Germany, Neues Deutschland

Time for your Vietnam history lesson, George

Vietnam and Iraq have an identical message, for all their differences. One country offers a story of hope, the other - for now - of hopelessness. But the moguls of Hanoi and the morgues of Baghdad tell the same narrative of misbegotten war. So much blood running down the gutters of history, all shed for nothing.

By Mary Riddell

The Observer – London

11.19.06

(Excerpt)

In a twist of history, America appears to have won the war it lost. So what, exactly, was the devastation for? Why were five million innocent lives wiped out? Orphanages are full of children born deformed by chemical defoliants: 10,0000 people have been blown up by landmines in the years after a war that killed 50,000 American soldiers. And all so that a US President could return, 30 years on, to talk tariffs with a regime that his country vowed and failed to crush. The final irony is that communist rule was empowered, not weakened, by the bloodshed.

Truly, as the President says, there are some lessons for Iraq. Only they are not the pursuit of victory to which he still aspires. Nor are they simple.

Trapped in Iraq

Or, rather, in lies and delusions.

by Jacob G. Hornberger

LewRockwell.com

11.21.06

(Excerpt)

Hanging over the Iraq debacle, however, is that one overriding moral issue that unfortunately all too many Americans have yet to confront: neither the Iraqi people nor their government ever attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. That means that in this conflict, which has killed more than 600,000 Iraqis, the United States is the aggressor nation and Iraq is the defending nation.

Why is that issue so important? Because it involves morality, not pragmatics. Do U.S. troops have the moral right to be killing people, when they are part of a military force that has aggressed against another country? Do they have the moral right to kill people who have done nothing worse than defend their nation from attack or attempt to oust an occupier from their midst? Does simply calling an action “war” excuse an aggressor nation from the moral consequences of killing people in that war?

In other words, does the United States have the moral right to violate the principles against aggressive war, for which it prosecuted Germany at Nuremberg and condemned the Soviet Union in Afghanistan?

By invading and occupying Iraq, Bush and Cheney have put the American people in the uncomfortable position of either supporting their government and its troops or supporting morality. Should a person support the actions of his government and its troops or should he obey the laws of God, when the government has placed its actions in contravention to those laws? What are the moral consequences for each individual faced with that choice?

Olle Johansson, Sweden, Norra Vasterbotten

Blair welcomes Syria FM's visit to Iraq as a sign for peace and progress

AFP

11.21.06

(Excerpt)

In a sign of thawing relations, Blair last month sent his most senior foreign policy advisor to Syria for talks with President Bashar al-Assad and other senior figures.

And speaking Friday to Al-Jazeera's new English-language channel, Blair sent out a fresh appeal to Syria and Iran, urging them to become partners in the search for peace in the Middle East or face isolation on the world stage.

Blair rejected as "completely absurd" suggestions that his readiness to work with Tehran and Damascus amounted to appeasement of two of the stated enemies of the United States.

Monte Wolverton, The Wolvertoon

Who Killed RFK? New BBC Documentary Points to CIA

By Chris Floyd

Atlantic Free Press

11.21.06

(Excerpt)

Robert F. Kennedy would have been 81 today. Tonight, the BBC will air a documentary about his 1968 assassination detailing the strong, credible evidence of a CIA role in the killing. The autopsy and ballistic evidence have long discredited the idea that the usual "lone nut" Sirhan Sirhan was responsible, or solely responsible for the murder. The Guardian has more in this article by the film's director, Shane O'Sullivan: Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?

Again, as we mentioned the other day in a piece about Jim Webb, there is no point in hero-worshipping any politician. RFK spent his career as a ruthless, ball-breaking operative. He began as a happy camper in Joe McCarthy's brutal band of hard-right thugs; and later, as Attorney General (an appointment of mind-boggling, unprecedented nepotism, perhaps the most flagrant conflict-of-interest in American political history, at least until Dick Cheney's wartime pocketing of fat checks from Halliburton), Kennedy shredded civil liberties and constitutional safeguards with a reckless, savage glee that John Ashcroft could only dream of. (Again, Alberto Gonzales, the willing enabler of aggressive war and torture, has probably outstripped RFK in this regard.) He played the same role in his brother's administration that George W. Bush played in his father's: draconian enforcer of loyalty to the family's political fortunes, which trumped any and all other values.

Lebanese Christian leader assassinated

CTV – Canada

11.21.06

(Excerpt)

Prominent Lebanese cabinet minister and Christian leader Pierre Gemayel was assassinated in the capital of Beirut today, reports say. Lebanese media reported that Gemayel, an outspoken critic of Syria, was shot in a street in the Christian suburb of Jdeideh and was rushed to hospital where he later died. Security officials said gunmen opened fire as Gemayel's convoy drove through the neighbourhood.

An extraordinarily prescient TV interview with General Norman Schwarzkopf and Robert Gates - Deputy National Security Advisor to Former President George Bush Sr.

Why Invading Iraq Was A Very Stupid Idea…

(Click on blinking dot above for video)