Visit our website: HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------------------------- As many of the rest of you have, I've just watched US President Bush's White House press conference on yesterday's events in New York City and Washington, D.C. Bush and the United States federal government have officially declared war...only it isn't evident against whom. Subsequent reports indicate that Bush will appear before the U.S. Congress to invoke the War Powers Act, passed by the House in the 1970s to limit a president's ability to wage war unilaterally and arbitrarily, but destroyed as an effective mechanism for doing so in April of 1999 when the Clinton Administration, for the first time in US history, was denied authorization to continue a war - against Yugoslavia - in a 213-213 vote in the Congress. Within an hour of that vote a Clinton National Security Council spokesman was on national television shrieking that not only would the bombing not stop, but that it would be intensified. By the US Congress accepting that crude diktat and nevertheless appropriating funding for the continuation of the illegal war, it definitively signalled the end of the US Constitutional role of America's formal representatives to oversee and rein in the chief executive - half a president, half a monarch - in future acts of illegal miitary actions and aggression abroad. It appears that each successive American administration pushes yet further the boundaries of armed adventurism and catastrophe. As all the news commentators assure us, Bush will receive near-unanimous carte blanche authorization to wage war whenever, wherever and against whomever he finds it expedient to do so. The US Congress, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, avowed war hawks and alleged Progressive Caucus members, will grant him whatever he requests: The funds and support to attack any country or countries, even those not even remotely implicated in yesterday's attacks, and the use of whatever weaponry, conventional and otherwise, he should choose to employ. What in fact Mr. Bush will soon be armed with - by that assemblage of professional politicians on the Hill who yesterday evening broke into a spontaneous chorus of God Bless America, right out of the closing scene of the revanchist Hollywood film The Deer Hunter - is an unlimited, permanent blank check to wage la guerre eternal - war without end. The White House, with none of the fictitious foreign policy fissures we've heard so much about, and its diehard loyalists on both sides of the Congressional aisle, have been evoking the specter of Osama bin Laden to rally hateful and revengeful public sentiment and to personify the oft-repeated *evil* that threatens the United States and, to quote the president, "all democratic and freedom-loving people" - no other of whom, it should be noted, seems to be on the alleged hit list of Mr. bin Laden. Furthermore, and ominously, Bush threatens not only to attack - recall this is in his words a state of war - the actual perpetrators of yesterday's attacks (whomever they may be), but "their harbors." Not those who allegedly harbor them, but their harbors. To be consistent, which is to say honest, Bush, as his legion of intelligence operatives could readily tell him, would have to identify who has and still is supporting the villain of this dangerous melodrama, Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden worked hand in glove wth the US Central Intelligence Agency since the early 1980s in establishing his Maktab al-Khidamar network, which raised money and recruited jehadis - the so-called Afghan Arabs, estimated to be some 10,000 strong - to overthrow the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. He was a joint asset of the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, which the Afghan Northern Opposition, Russia and India insist still supports and controls him and his current Al-Qaida operation. The latter is supported by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates...all three loyal US and British clients regimes and recipients of Anglo-American military protection and largesse. So if Bush is looking for harbors to bomb, he knows where they are located. He also knows where they are not. And where and who they are not are the likely targets: Iraq, Syria, Libya and Iran. All four are not only not linked to bin Laden in any conceivable manner, but instead are vocal opponents of him and his activities; are in fact potential victims of the same. An audio voice-over somehow got on an American television network yesterday that said: Bin Laden, who has assisted forces in Somalia, Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo.... The link has never been broken, of course, and the CIA's Frankenstein monster still serves its purposes. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get email alerts & NEW webcam video instant messaging with Yahoo! 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