Tag: George W. Bush

The story, out of England, is pretty straight-forward, but the implications are stunning; or, they would be stunning, if the repeated crimes and inhumanity of the Bush Administration had not fried whatever synapses allow us to feel stunned.

The Guardian reports:

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

As Seymour Hersh has reported, the Bush Administration has made a deliberate calculation to change the rationale for its warmongering against Iran. They realized that the lie about Iran’s nascent nuclear weapons program wasn’t selling, so they decided to recalibrate and relaunch with a new marketing campaign claiming Iran is a major cause of the violence in Iraq. Of course, there wouldn’t be much violence in Iraq, had Bush not launched an invason, but we’re talking about catapulting propaganda, not reality.

So, the first Iran War rollout wasn’t working, and the Administration decided on another one; because it’s not the facts that matter, it’s the selling of war. So, Iran suddenly became a dangerous influence in Iraq. And some-time general, and full-time political hack, David Petraeus was recently in England, trying to sell the same story– although the Brits aren’t buying it. Apparently, neither are the people who would actually know something about it: the Iraqis.

The New York Times is reporting:

Iraq has agreed to award $1.1 billion in contracts to Iranian and Chinese companies to build a pair of enormous power plants, the Iraqi electricity minister said Tuesday. Word of the project prompted serious concerns among American military officials, who fear that Iranian commercial investments can mask military activities at a time of heightened tension with Iran.

Or maybe those American officials are actually worried that it’s going to be hard to sell a war based on Iranian meddling in Iraq when Iraq itself is inviting Iranian businesses into Iraq to build power plants.

The Iraqi electricity minister, Karim Wahid, said that the Iranian project would be built in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad that is controlled by followers of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr. He added that Iran had also agreed to provide cheap electricity from its own grid to southern Iraq, and to build a large power plant essentially free of charge in an area between the two southern Shiite holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

So, Iran’s going to actually help solve Iraq’s electricity problem. Something at which we’ve not been doing such a good job.

The Chinese will be paid about $940,000,000 for their plant, and the Iranians about $150,000,000 for theirs. Don’t ask where the money’s coming from. The article doesn’t say whether it’s out of the funds we’re giving Iraq, but it would be interesting to trace it. Because we are giving them a lot. And these are expensive projects. So, it does actually seem plausible that our tax dollars will be going to Iran, to help them rebuild Iraq.

And there’s this:

“I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul” -President George W. Bush on Russian President Vladimir Putin

Putin’s soul is fucking with Bush:

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia told a summit of five Caspian Sea nations in Iran today that any use of military force in the Caspian region was unacceptable, and in a declaration the countries agreed that none of them would allow their territories to be used as a base for launching military strikes against any of the others.

“We should not even think of making use of force in this region,” Mr. Putin said. “We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state,” he added.

Mr. Putin’s comments and the declaration come at a time when France and the United States have refused to rule out military action to halt Iran’s nuclear program, which they believe is focused on nuclear weapons. Iran says its program is for peaceful purposes.

The comments were also a strong message that Russia objects to any American military presence in other Caspian Sea states.

Your buddy Vlad is fucking with you George.

The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATT’s long distance network. […]

  The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush.

http://blog.wired.co…

For all of you who revel in the opportunity to celebrate All Hallows Eve by donning a scary costume and frightening the living shit out of your more reactionary friends, I offer the following costume suggestion.

Fly My Pretties!

Hurry though, this costume only has two more uses before it becomes obsolete.

He did it. He absolutely went there. On the op-ed page.

Frank Rich just ran through the unspoken barrier that got Dick Durbin in
such hot water two years ago. He’s made the historical comparison that no one has been allowed to make, for fear of diminishing the scope and scale of an evil that reigned a half-century ago. A comparison that someone in the MSM has needed to make, because we are surely walking down that same road.

(A rehash of a dKos diary from 8/27/2007 in honor of President Al Gore).

Science was the boring class you had to take in school where the teacher droned on and on about stuff you already knew, or didn’t care about.  No, not really, although that is the only thing a lot of people know about science. 

Let’s try a different definition.  Science is the systematic gathering of data and the forming of theories to explain this data.  This is a better definition, but kind of dry.  Science is really all about model building.  (No, not model cars).  The models I’m talking about are mathematical, or systematic models (called theories).

Note :  Don’t use Wikipedia for reference material,  I’ve learned since I wrote this that information from Wikipedia is alway suspect because Anyone can edit it. It can be a useful tool when doing research, but realize that it is not a source you want to reference.

(I was brand new at the time)

More below the fold.

An interesting dimension of the Bush Administration’s attempts to catapult the propaganda about Iran has been reported in a series of separate articles, in the Guardian, the past couple weeks. They’re trying to sell a war to Britain. Thus far, Britain’s not buying.

On September 30, the Guardian reported that John Bolton was in England, doing what John Bolton does: warmonger.

John Bolton, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, told Tory delegates today that efforts by the UK and the EU to negotiate with Iran had failed and that he saw no alternative to a pre-emptive strike on suspected nuclear facilities in the country….

He added that any strike should be followed by an attempt to remove the “source of the problem”, Mr Ahmadinejad.

Because that worked so well in Iraq, let’s try it again: bomb them, then remove their leadership. Because we’re allowed to do such things. Because we’re exceptional.

On Monday, the Guardian reported that some-time general, and increasingly full-time political hack, David Petraeus, was also in England, also to sell a war:

The commander of US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, yesterday sharpened America’s confrontation with Iran, claiming that a leader of its Revolutionary Guard corps was in direct charge of policy in Baghdad.

The charge that Tehran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Hassan Kazemi-Qomi, was a member of the Quds force, a unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, takes US accusations of Iranian meddling in Iraq’s violence to a new level. It strengthens suggestions that Washington is ratcheting up the rhetoric against Tehran in preparation for military strikes against Revolutionary Guard facilities in Iran.

Ratcheting up the rhetoric is right. Whether or not the rhetoric has any relation to the truth is, as always with the Bush Administration and its minions, irrelevant. And the Guardian had already reported that during last Spring’s standoff over the Iranian capture of fifteen British sailors, even Tony Blair’s government turned down Bush Administration offers of aggressive and provocative military patrols in Iranian airspace.

The latest encouraging news came from the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer, last Sunday: