ch.annel2-i.s-n.ow-a.ngry

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Satellite images taken at night show heavily Sunni Arab neighborhoods of Baghdad began emptying before a U.S. troop surge in 2007, graphic evidence of ethnic cleansing that preceded a drop in violence, according to a report published on Friday.

The images support the view of international refugee organizations and Iraq experts that a major population shift was a key factor in the decline in sectarian violence, particularly in the Iraqi capital, the epicenter of the bloodletting in which hundreds of thousands were killed.

Minority Sunni Arabs were driven out of many neighborhoods by Shi’ite militants enraged by the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006. The bombing, blamed on the Sunni militant group al Qaeda, sparked a wave of sectarian violence.

Please disregard further blathering about how the surge is working as it is disingenuine.  

Suskind reports that in 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. The CIA allegedly forged a letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. It was backdated July 1, 2001 and stated 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was trained for his mission in Iraq.

Ron Suskind interviewed Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Dearlove said Britain received intelligence in the beginning of 2003 about Iraq’s lack of WMDs, but the Bush administration buried the information. Dearlove told Suskind, “The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough.”

Lets all join hands and wish that the House Judiciary Committee investigation actually goes somewhere and isn’t stalled by Republicans claiming ‘partisan politics’ - notice how they always do this when there is criminal wrongdoing involving Republicans, but when John Edwards cheats on his wife, it’s front page news everywhere.

Just yesterday Reuters ran this story:

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

Asked if he supported Obama’s ideas more than those of John McCain, Republican presidential hopeful, Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for.

Today, they are running a story about the Iraqi government’s refutation of these quotes:

The German magazine said on Saturday that Maliki supported Obama’s proposal that U.S. troops should leave Iraq within 16 months. The interview was released on Saturday.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes,” Der Spiegel quoted Maliki as saying.

Dabbagh said statements by Maliki or any other member of the government should not be seen as support for any U.S. presidential candidate.

Only, this story is misleading, because the Iraqi government is refuting a claim that Maliki never made.  I draw you attention to the second quote above where Der Speigel is paraphrased “Maliki said he did not want to recommend who people should vote for,” which is basically what the Iraqi government is now saying, but claiming they’re refuting Der Spiegel by agreeing with them? Maybe they mistranslated the article from German to whatever crazy moon language the Iraqis speak? Go read both stories, and see if you can figure out what exactly they’re refuting.

Further on in the second article, they get down to the brass tacks, and show why they are really publishing this ‘refutation:”

Bush has long opposed setting a timetable for withdrawal, and the White House said the time horizon agreed by the two leaders was not as specific as a time frame pushed by Democrats and could be adjusted based on conditions on the ground.

SEN. CARL LEVIN: On October 2, 2002, a week after John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel, visited Gitmo, a second senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, went to Guantanamo, attended a meeting of Gitmo staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from Gitmo, who a couple of weeks earlier had attended that training given at Fort Bragg by instructors by the SERE school.

While the training—excuse me, while the memo remains classified, minutes from the meeting where it was discussed are not. Those minutes clearly show that the focus of the discussion was aggressive techniques for use against detainees.When the Gitmo chief of staff suggested at the meeting that Gitmo “can’t do sleep deprivation,” Lieutenant Colonel Beaver, Gitmo’s senior lawyer, responded, “Yes, we can—with approval.” Lieutenant Beaver added that Gitmo, quote, “may need to curb the harsher operations while the International Committee of the Red Cross is around.”

Mr. Fredman, the senior CIA lawyer, suggested that it’s, quote, “very effective to identify detainee phobias and to use them” and described for the group the so-called “wet towel” technique, which we know as waterboarding. Mr. Fredman said, quote, “It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function,” close-quote.

And Mr. Fredman presented the following disturbing perspective of our legal obligations under our anti-torture laws, saying, quote, “It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

“If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” How on earth did we get to the point where a senior US government lawyer would say that whether or not an interrogation technique is torture is, quote, “subject to perception” and that if, quote, “the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong”? The Gitmo senior JAG officer Lieutenant Colonel Beaver’s response was: “We will need documentation to protect us.”

Once again the DemocracyNow!  bitches have scooped Western Civilization’s media on this subject.

On another note I like to harp about, Barak Hussein Obama Yomamadroid has done something weird (an my spellcheck only likes the Hussein part of his name. hmm.) with his presidential campaign - observe:

…by showing that he could raise large sums from small donors — 47 percent of the $263 million Mr. Obama received has come in amounts of $200 or less — Mr. Obama has made the argument that he has achieved online what the public finance system has been unable to do. And he has been freed from the necessity of spending countless hours fund-raising.

…the use of the Internet to raise campaign money at least plays into the spirit of campaign finance reform, some analysts said, and possibly does more to rein in the influence of big donors and special interests than 30 years of restrictions imposed by federal law.

If you look at the graphic on that NYT article, you’ll see that if you put the bar at $500 donation the percent jumps to 55%. McCain on the other hand only has 31% donating $500 or less - which candidate is more likely to support YOU, majority America who has less than $200 to spare for anything right now? Of course, back on DemNow!, you’ll find Nader talking trash on Obama AND McCain - and unlike both of them, he doesn’t take a penny of corporate or PAC money.  Obama is so crazy-sauce popular, he could probably dump all the PAC and Corp money and still win for President - however, that would be a bad idea - look where it gets Nader. I’m not saying it’s not honorable and the actual right thing to do, however he should do it after he wins office. Think about this for a second - sure, that’s a lot of money he wouldn’t have to campaign with, but those PACs and Corps currently supporting or at least hedging their bets with some support for Obama in hopes for future kindness might take the return of the money as a signal that he will be ‘against’ him and take that money to McCain or otherwise turn it against Obama. What would really be great is taking the Corp/PAC sums and giving them to African aids charities or support for orphan Iraqi children etc.

Nader is probably the only candidate I’ve heard in any of my readings both mentioning and quoting the US Constitution [and isn’t that a word fraught with meanings]:

Doesn’t the Constitution start with “We the people”? 

Nader criticizes Obama yet praises two possible VP picks for the Obaminator.

Barack Obama really now has to be examined very carefully. He has worn out the word “change.” We now want to know what change is involved. And it’s quite clear that he is a corporate candidate from A to Z. In his voting record, he voted against reform of the Mining Act of 1872, which gives away our hard rock minerals. He voted for a terrible class-action restriction law that the corporations wanted him to vote for. He, in many ways, has disappointed people who had greater hopes for him. He’s voted for reauthorizing the PATRIOT Act. He refuses to even discuss—he’s vigorously against impeachment of Bush and Cheney. He won’t even support his colleague Senator Russ Feingold motion to censure the Bush administration for systemic repeated illegal wiretaps. He—you know, he’s letting the corporate-dominated city of Washington, the corporations who actually rule us now in Washington, determine his agenda. And that does not augur well.

AMY GOODMAN: What do think of Chuck Hagel as a vice-presidential running mate—yes, the Republican senator—for Barack Obama, one of the names that’s being bandied about?

RALPH NADER: Well, he thinks for himself. And that’s about the best you can expect of a politician these days. Senator Jim Webb, Senator Chuck Hagel, they think for themselves. They’re not robotic minds. They’re not completely monetized minds. And they’re Vietnam veterans. So, in today’s politics, that puts them forward.

Nader is also the only one talking sense on Iran that I’ve seen.

Iran has not invaded anybody in 250 years. Yet it’s obviously frightened. It’s surrounded by the US military west, south, east. It’s been labeled “Axis of Evil” by Bush, who invaded Iraq after he labeled them “Axis of Evil.” We have Special Forces, according to Sy Hersh, that go in and out of Iran. What are they going to do? They talk very belligerently nationally, but they’re really scared. I mean, we supported Saddam Hussein, logistically and with materiel, in invading Iran, which took a half a million Iranian lives. They remember the shooting down of their civilian airliner years ago.

I guess if your choice is still Giant Douche or Shit Sandwich, you might as well reach for a cookie even if you fail. Good stuff. After reading his positions, I’ll vote Nader.

American Pte Lynndie England, jailed after she was photographed alongside Abu Ghraib prisoners in humiliating and stressful positions, claimed the images had been set up by a psy-ops unit to spread fear among inmates - a charge strenuously denied by the United States military.

First I had heard of this.  And I can’t doubt it that much, either. Hell, it may have been both - they might have tortured them for fun, and taken the pictures to scare the other inmates - we wont know in this decade. Oh Bee Bee Cee, do go on:

But early in the conflict, the US Psychological Operations Company acknowledged that they had pioneered a bizarre methods of interrogation such as exposing unco-operative prisoners for extended periods of time to full-blast music from rock group Metallica or childrens’ TV programmes like Barney the Dinosaur.

‘Sounds crazy’

Writer Jon Ronson revealed the often darkly comic nature of American psy-ops in his book The Men Who Stare At Goats.

But he warns that such techniques are no joke.

“The’ve had scientists working on a hologram of Allah, which they could project over a city,” he says. “And then Allah says, ‘America isn’t bad.’

“It sounds crazy, but somebody in psy-ops will have determined that Barney the Dinosaur is an effective instrument of torture.”

Only, they’ll fuck up the translation and say “America be bombed” or something else suitably Engrabic. (That’s Engrish for English-Arabic mistranslation. Hey, it was either that or Arablish, and that sounds like some dollar store Chapstick ripoff)

The evidence is very clear that while young American soldiers, who never even had a chance to live out their dreams, were being blown to pieces by roadside bombs in Iraq, George Bush was having fun and living life, enjoying life to the very fullest. I’m talking about running, bicycling, joking with friends, slapping backs, dancing and swiveling his hips like Elvis to blaring music, eating his hot dogs and blueberry pies, almost always seeming to be in the very best of good spirits.

But throughout this hell on earth that George Bush created, the evidence is very, very clear that with over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children and babies and 4,000 American soldiers dying horrible violent deaths and hundreds of thousands of their survivors crying out hysterically and having no way to cope with the unspeakable horror of it all and having nightmares over what happened, George Bush—the evidence is very, very clear—smiled through it all. In fact, you look at a photograph of Bush and six or seven other people—they’re all smiling—who has the biggest smile on his face? George Bush.

Well, in my book, The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, I set forth an airtight legal case against George Bush that proves beyond all reasonable doubt that George Bush took this nation to war under false pretenses, on a lie, in Iraq, and therefore, under the law, he is guilty of murder for the deaths of over 4,000 young American soldiers in Iraq fighting his war, not your war or my war or America’s war, but his war.

Read it. Buy the book. Borrow the book. Download the book. Educate yourself, arm yourself with knowlegde.

Keith Hennessey, a top economic-policy adviser to President Bush, says “gut-level public opinion” backs the White House.

Funny that they pay attention public opinion in these matters, but not in matters of Iraq nor Afghanistan.

These senators, well-known war skeptics, could find allies in lawmakers who support Bush’s current Iraq policies. In hearings last week, Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., asked Defense Secretary Robert Gates whether Baghdad should start paying some U.S. combat costs, and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., raised the possibility that an anticipated Iraqi budget surplus this year could be used to help Afghanistan, whose $700 million in annual revenue represents a small fraction of Iraq’s $46.8 billion budget.

So we want Iraq… to pay for Afghanistan now? Because we… invaded them, and now… they… owe?.. us for it? Does this mean if Afghanistan had oil and had not only been making money from selling poppies that we would be asking them to help us pay for Iraq, or maybe help us fund a build-up to invading Iran? How about paying us to leave? Why are we saying what they should be doing anyway? They have a democratically elected government now. Much like Iran and Israel they should be left alone.

In that instant, Specialist King became one of 4,000 service members and Defense Department civilians to die in the Iraq war — a milestone that was reached late Sunday, five years since the war began in March 2003.

4000 x death benefits = $$$

Not to mention the 30 or 40 thousand wounded or maimed that our beloved .gov doesn’t keep track of, plus the thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops that will suffer PTSD or other mental illness as a result of this. I’m thinking that $3 trillion price-tag for this conflict will be a luck number. Lucky, I mean, if that’s the extent of it.

coordinated bombings blamed on al Qaeda…

the bombing was the work of al Qaeda in Iraq and that it knew the cell leader who was responsible.

rebel against Sunni Islamist al Qaeda…

So, wait, who are they again?

 On Monday, two blasts in central and eastern Baghdad killed 19 people despite tightened security for the visit of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But I thought everything was quiet during Ahmadinejad’s visit, at least according to the articles from the other day.

Oh well, have some history of the violence in Islam that al Qaeda crib their notes from.