Hi. I'm leaving for a few days, right after Wednesday morning's mailing. Please hold email to me until the following week as I can barely keep up now. Thanks to Portside for these photos. I'll post others as I get them, and you can pass them on. -Ed
Perhaps someone should send the New York Times these photos... http://www.rense.com/general69/phots.htm Photos Of Bush And Abramoff Looks to me like the Times dug around until they found the least offensive one... -Sheila *** The Trust Gap NY Times Lead Editorial: February 12, 2006 We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers - and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less. This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point. DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it. According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel. THE PRISON CAMPS It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do. On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world. According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings. And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists. THE WAR IN IRAQ One of Mr. Bush's biggest "trust me" moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies. But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war. When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before. Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another. *** www.uruknet.info?p=20347 Why Russia betrayed Iran Mike Whitney February 6, 2006 Many people are probably wondering why Russia caved in at the IAEA board meeting and agreed to have Iran sent before the UN Security Council. Russia, of course, is very familiar with Iran's nuclear program (having worked with Iran on its nuclear power plants) and fully realizes that the Mullahs are not developing nuclear weapons. So, why would they go along with the coercive maneuvering of the United States that is so clearly designed to pave the way for war? Obviously, the Russian foreign minister's comment that the referral to the UNSC is "only a warning" doesn't adequately explain why Russia would have placed its ally in such grave danger of a preemptive attack. So why did Russia capitulate? It may be, in the words of the Godfather, that the Bush administration made Putin "a deal he couldn't refuse". Russia's real goal has always been to reclaim its contract-rights to explore and extract oil from the huge West Qurna-2 oil-field. This apparently was part of a previous agreement that Lukoil made with Saddam that was ignored after the invasion by American forces. According to the Boston Globe, Lukoil president Vagit Alekperov met with Iraq's oil minister Ibrahim al-Ulloum to firm up "an understanding" about Russia's $6 billion contract to develop the West Qurna-2 oil field. Was there a quid pro quo between the Bush administration and Putin? Iraq's oil minister is presumably just following Washington's directives in reviving the moribund Russian contract. But it is striking that Bush would surrender such an enormous trophy as one of Iraq's main oil fields just to secure Russia's vote. After all, the administration doesn't give away oil fields to anyone. Why? Does the administration really need a war with Iran so desperately? Yes. Even the control of oil is not nearly as critical to the US as maintaining its continued dominance in the exchange of oil in greenbacks. If Iran is allowed to open its oil bourse (exchange) in March and openly compete with the US's monopoly on trading oil in petrodollars, the central banks across the globe will dump hundreds of billions of dollars overnight, and the American economy will collapse. This is a problem Washington takes very seriously and we can expect to see Democrats and Republicans alike falling in line behind Bush for a war with Iran. The reason the United States is the unchallenged leader of the global economic system is because it has a stranglehold on the oil trade. Even the oil itself, or the price at which it is sold, is of less importance than the means by which it is traded. The nation that controls the currency, determines the rules of the game. It forces other nations to stockpile mountains of its debt-ridden script, while producing oceans of red ink. America's fat-cat bankers, corporatists, and politicos are now living off the profits from sweatshops in the developing world that prop up the ailing dollar so they can purchase oil. Iran's plan to sell its oil in petro-euros threatens to break up this massive extortion-ring and put the greenback nose-to-nose with its global competitor; the euro. The Lukoil transaction should prove to skeptics that Washington will do anything to prevent the opening of Iran's oil exchange, even if it means initiating hostilities against another peaceful nation. Bush is determined to preserve the present economic-system of global-servitude via debt and protect the ongoing supremacy of the greenback. The UN Security Council is just the last step before military operations begin. ******************************************************************** RESEARCH AND INFORMATION NETWORK (RAIN) Director : Abie Dawjee P O Box 26119, Isipingo Beach, Durban, South Africa 4115. tel: 0027 31 9029174. fax: 0027 31 9024523. mobile: 082 352 352 6 e-mail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] ********************************************************************* --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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