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Inside Story – Iraqi Oil For Sale

From Al Jazeera June 29, 2009 – 25 minutes

CIA Crucified Prisoner In Abu Ghraib

from Sherwood Ross, June 28, 2009


The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes.

An earlier report, by John Hendren in The Los Angeles Times indicted other torture killings. And Human Rights First says nearly 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Dear Mr. President…


There has been a lot of left-wing teeth-gnashing over the policies of the United States’ fake-progressive president Barack Obama. Left-progressives’ anger with the Obama administration is understandable given the new White House’s actions to (for example):

* Significantly expand the reach and intensity of imperial violence (replete with the mass slaughter of civilians and the related escalation of targeted assassinations) in South Asia.

Link

* Promote a notorious assassin and death-squad leader (Lt. General Stanley A McChrystal – former chief of the military’s special Joint Special Operations Command) to the position of Commander of U.S. Forces in the newly merged “Af-Pak” war theater. [1]

* Sustain the criminal occupation of Iraq beneath rhetoric of withdrawal. [2]

* Increase “defense” (empire) spending, consistent with the following statement in a report issued by the leading Wall Street investment firm Morgan Stanley one day after Obama’s presidential election victory: “As we understand it, Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend.”[3]

* Revive military commissions.

* Continue the practice of renditions.

Link

* Maintain secret prisons for persons “held on a short-term, transitory basis.”

* Continue the unspeakable torture of prisoners by an “extrajudicial terror squad” (Jeremy Scahill’s description of the Pentagon’s sadistic “Immediate Reaction Force” in Cuba) at Guantanamo Bay. [4]

* Advance the policy of “indefinite detention” (potentially permanent incarceration) for Guantanamo prisoners for whom no legally compelling evidence can be marshaled.

* Intimidate England (with a threat to withhold intelligence data on potential terrorist attacks!) into preventing a Guantanamo victim from having his day in court on the Bush administration’s torture practices. [5]

* Sustain the Bush administration’s abrogation of habeas corpus rights in regard to the roughly 600 “enemy combatants” kept at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan (where people rendered out of other countries like Yemen and England can be considered “war [-zone]” prisoners!. [6]

Link

* Advance nauseatingly specious legal and moral arguments (“better to look forward than backward”) to prevent serious federal investigation of the Bush administration’s human rights crimes.

* Sustain George W. Bush’s domestic wiretapping program.

* Invoke the “state secrets” (akin to the divine right of kings) doctrine to prevent disclosure of evidence in response to lawsuits emerging from Bush era rendition and surveillance policies.

* Suppress photographic evidence of U.S. torture practices.

* Justify all this and more in the name of the supposed “global war on terror” that was supposedly launched in legitimate defense against the supposedly unprovoked jetliner attacks of September 11, 2001.

Link

* Disregard qualified progressive defenders of civil liberties and human rights from consideration for appointment to succeed Supreme Justice David H. Souter and to thereby counter the hard right leanings of the court’s conservative majority. [7]

* Send clear signals of intent to roll back and partially privatize Social Security and Medicare benefits.

* Betray campaign pledges to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to insert stronger labor and environmental protections. [7A]

* Betray campaign pledges of serious intent to advance an elementary and overdue labor law reform (the Employee Free Choice Act).

* Force and approve an automobile industry re-structuring that drastically cuts domestic autoworkers’ jobs, wages and benefits while subsidizing General Motors’ further shifting of jobs abroad. [8]

Link

* Advance a tepid, business-friendly health care “reform” that leaves the leading parasitic insurance corporations (major campaign sponsors of his) in power.

* “Methodically erase single-payer advocates from the picture” (Glen Ford) of health care reform despite the fact that a majority of Americans have long favored a single-payer (“Medicare for all”) health insurance system. [9]

* Spend trillions of federal dollars on taxpayer handouts to giant Wall Street firms who spent millions on his campaign and who drove the economy over the cliff. Obama’s Wall Street bailout rejects the elementary bank nationalizations and public financial restructuring that are required to put the nation’s credit system on a sound and socially responsible basis, choosing instead to guarantee the financial, insurance, and real estate industries’ toxic, hyper-inflated assets while keeping existing Wall Street management in place. It amounts to a giant effort to “keep perpetrators afloat” (liberal economist James Gailbraith) through a scheme in which the government takes more than 90 percent of the risk but private investors reap at least half the reward.

I could go on. It’s not a pretty story. And it’s only going to get worse.

Infuriating as these policy actions (and inactions) and this corporate sponsorship may be to people of the actual Left (a different category than the broad-brush “Left” used in “mainstream” U.S. media), however, serious progressives have no business being surprised or disappointed by Obama’s presidential trajectory. Candidate Obama made his “deeply conservative” [10] corporate-imperial centrism clear to those willing to undertake elementary investigations of his political and ideological record. As Scott Horton noted last March on Antiwar.com, “those who bought into the slogans ‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ last fall should have read the fine print. We were warned.”[11]

Link

There’s another and better (or at least more pleasing) reason, moreover, for radicals to temper their angst over the “betrayals” and other transgressions of the new White House. There is something to be gained on the longer path to radical change from experiencing all this terrible if predictable – and in fact predicted – policy under the nation’s new chief executive.

The dawning Age of Obama is potentially a great “teach-able moment” for left thinkers, communicators, activists who are ready and willing to take up the challenges of productive and progressive demystification and rebellion.

As Obama himself (along with John Edwards) repeatedly noted during the presidential campaign, in a comment that has not fallen from Obama’s lips since he reached the White House, “change doesn’t happen from the top down. Change happens from the bottom up.”

Click the link –> The Dawning Age of Obama as a Potentially Teach-able Moment for The Left

Bounded By A World Of Dreams (open thread)

The Voice




Won’t you take me back to school

I need to learn the golden rule

Won’t you lay it on the line

I need to hear it just one more time

Oh won’t you tell me again

Can you feel it

Won’t you tell me again

Tonight

Each and every heart it seems

Is bounded by a world of dreams

Each and every rising sun

Is greeted by a lonely one

Oh won’t you tell me again

Can you feel it

Oh won’t you tell me again

Tonight

Cause out on the ocean of life my love

There’s so many storms we must rise above

Can you hear the spirit calling

As it’s carried across the waves

You’re already falling

It’s calling you back to face the music

And the song that is coming through

You’re already falling

The one that it’s calling you

Make a promise, take a vow

And trust your feelings, it’s easy now

Understand the voice within

And feel the changes already beginning

Oh won’t you tell me again

Can you feel it

Won’t you tell me again

Tonight

And how many words have I got to say

And how many times will it be this way

With your arms around the future

And your back up against the past

You’re already falling, its calling you

On to face the music

And the song that is coming through

You’re already falling

The one its calling is you

Each and every heart it seems

Is bounded by a world of dreams

Each and every rising sun

Is greeted by a lonely one

Won’t you tell me again

Can you feel it

Oh won’t you tell me again

Tonight

R.I.P. Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson dead at 50 after being rushed to hospital

by Express-Times staff and wire

Thursday June 25, 2009, 6:30 PM

Michael Jackson, one of the world’s most popular entertainers, has died. He was 50.

Jackson apparently suffered from cardiac arrest and was rushed to a Los Angeles hospital this afternoon. Paramedics performed CPR on Jackson in the ambulance but were unable to revive him, according to TMZ.com.

The emergency entrance at the UCLA Medical Center, which is near Jackson’s rented home, was roped off Thursday with police tape.

News trucks were gathered, helicopters flew overhead, and orange cones were laid out to redirect traffic.

Twitter Creator On Iran: ‘I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful’


Creator Jack Dorsey was shocked and saddened this week after learning that his social networking device, Twitter, was being used to disseminate pertinent and timely information during the recent civil unrest in Iran.

“Twitter was intended to be a way for vacant, self-absorbed egotists to share their most banal and idiotic thoughts with anyone pathetic enough to read them,” said a visibly confused Dorsey, claiming that Twitter is at its most powerful when it makes an already attention-starved populace even more needy for constant affirmation.

“When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means-such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime-I couldn’t believe they’d ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless.”

Dorsey said he is already working on a new website that will be so mind-numbingly useless that Iranians will not even be able to figure out how to operate it.

From here.

Joan Baez – To The People Of Iran

To the People of Iran:

In you the world sees the power of nonviolence. We hear it in the roar of your silence and see it in your eyes as you sit down peacefully in the face of terror. We are moved by your courage and inspired by your sacrifices.

I am fortunate to be alive to witness this movement. I send you my prayers, love, and support.

–Joan Baez

UPDATED w/video: Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Plame’s Lawsuit Against Cheney, Rove

Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Plame’s Lawsuit Against Cheney, Rove

by Jason Leopold, June 23, 2009

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear a civil lawsuit filed by Valerie Plame Wilson and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, against Bush administration officials who were responsible for leaking her covert CIA status to the media and attacking her husband for accusing the White House of twisting prewar Iraq intelligence.

The Supreme Court’s rejection effectively brings the three-year-old case to a close. The Wilson’s had sued Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Cheney’s ex-chief of staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for violating their civil rights. Libby was convicted on four of five counts and was sentenced to 30 months in prison. President George W. Bush later commuted the sentence, sparing Libby jail time.

“The Wilsons and their counsel are disappointed by the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the case, but more significantly, this is a setback for our democracy,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics [CREW] in Washington, an attorney representing the Wilsons. “This decision means that government officials can abuse their power for political purposes without fear of repercussion. Private citizens like the Wilsons, who see their careers destroyed and their lives placed in jeopardy by administration officials seeking to score political points and silence opposition, have no recourse.”

US Political Idiocy About Iran

Just poking my head out for a quick survey of the Monday morning landscape.

The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

— Hunter S. Thompson

A couple of short ‘quote’ for discussion items from an AFP article via RawStory this morning about Iran and US Politicians ‘suggestions’:

The showdown in Tehran was the top topic on weekend television talk shows in the United States, with Republicans criticizing Obama for timidity in the face of the most serious upheaval in Iran since its 1979 Islamic revolution.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said officials responsible for US clandestine operations had given assurances this week that they had not interfered in the Iranian elections or the ensuing protests.

“I don’t think our intelligence candidly is that good,” she said in an interview with CNN.

“I think it’s a very difficult country in which to collect intelligence right now. So I think our ability to get in there and change the course of human events is very low, to be very candid with you,” Feinstein said.

Iranian leaders blamed meddling by the United States and Britain for a week of post-election unrest that has put its country’s clerical leadership to an unprecedented test.

Feinsteins thinking is that the measure of having good intelligence capability  is the ability to “get in there and change the course of human events“?

What’s wrong with this picture?

Green Song

Doobie Brothers – Takin’ It To The Streets

Bill Maher: ‘Democrats are the new Republicans’

Bill Maher’s ‘New Rules’ June 19, Via RawStory:

In his weekly monologue, New Rules, Bill Maher weighs in on everything from Iran to Twitter, but his primary target Friday night was the Democratic party, which he says has become the new GOP.

Each time President Obama tries to take on a progressive cause, Maher charged that there was “a major political party standing in his way: the Democrats.

But the solution is not a third political party, according to the self-described libertarian pundit: “We don’t need a third party. We have a center right party, and a crazy party. Democrats have moved to the right, and the right has moved into a mental hospital.”

Maher scoffs at the notion that Obama is a socialist: “He’s not even a liberal.”

Hammering in his point, Maher asks, “Shouldn’t there be one party that unambiguously supports cutting military spending? Straight up in favor of gun control, gay marriage, higher taxes on the rich, universal healthcare, legalizing pot, and steep, direct taxing of polluters?”

“These aren’t radical ideas,” Maher stresses, “The majority of Americans are either already for them, or would be if they were properly argued and defended; and what we need is an actual progressive party to represent the millions of Americans who aren’t being served by the Democrats.”

“Because bottom line,” he concludes “Democrats are the new Republicans.”

Iran Police Open Fire On Crowds Defying Protest Ban

From BBC Persian/Iran:

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