meehawl

So like many people I was puzzled by the news a few weeks ago that the Pentagon had been careful to bypass the armed, mi
litant Mujah
edeen e Khalq mili
tia faction in Iraq and had not launched any air attacks to reduce its strength or positional attacks to kill or capture its troops. This radical terrorist group was often used by Saddam to launch covert attacks against Iran, and it seems that the Pentagon is negotiating with MeK to sponsor business-as-usual attacks against Iran. Apparently, the neocons don’t think they can get political cover for a full-scale attack against Iran and using the Mujahedeen worked out so “well” in Afghanistan so why not? These people never give up.

The Pentagon is considering a massive covert action program to overthrow Iran’s ruling ayatollahs as the only way to stop the country’s nuclear weapons ambitions, senior State Department and Pentagon officials told ABCNEWS. The proposal, which would include covert sponsorship of a group currently deemed terrorist by the U.S. government, is not new, and has not won favor with enough top officials to be acted upon.

Meanwhile, state-sponsored cannabilism and genocide is gathering pace in Congo but I guess all the Coalition Of The Willing guys are busy making the Middle East safe for plutocracy. Apparently only the French seem willing to intervene in an oil-free war zone. I wonder what’s in it for them?

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And they said it couldn’t be done!

Earlier here.

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I noticed this from a November 1999 BBC Interview with then-Governor Bush:

REPORTER: Would Saddam Hussein outlive a second President Bush?
GOVERNOR BUSH: [Laughs] Very good question. Uh, I think the interesting thing — [laughs] — um, uh — Saddam Hussein, uh — really did last longer than anybody envisioned. He did.
REPORTER: Including your father.
GOVERNOR BUSH: Including my father, absolutely right. [...] No one envisioned Saddam, at least at that point in history, no one envisioned him still standing. It’s time to finish the task.

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So the Pentagon has finally located some incontrovertible evidence of WMDs… in Maryland. Apparently the Iraqis aren’t the only ones who can’t explain where their WMDs went, or produce records to locate them…

The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria. The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.

Two years of digging at the U.S. Army’s Fort Detrick in Frederick has unearthed more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste — including vials of live bacteria and nonvirulent anthrax that the military did not know was buried there … Fort Detrick’s cleanup saga shows how, nearly 40 years after the United States ended such programs at home, it still struggles with their lingering dangers. As in the Middle East, poor documentation, the passage of time and the programs’ secrecy have slowed the effort … “You never know what’s there until you start digging,” Ball said. “We’ve generally ruled out finding a nuclear weapon.”

After reading this, what a relief it is, I say, that the Bush Gang has asked that the Pentagon be exempted from basic environmental protection regulations.

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No weapons.

The decision to highlight weapons of mass destruction as the main justification for going to war in Iraq was taken for “bureaucratic reasons”, according to the US deputy defence secretary … Picking weapons of mass destruction was “the one reason everyone could agree on”, he says in the interview.

A dossier compiled by the government on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction was rewritten to make it “sexier” … “The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn’t reliable.”

No bunkers

The Baghdad bunker which the United States said it bombed on the opening night of the Iraq war in a bid to kill Saddam Hussein never existed … “When we came out here, the primary thing they were looking for was an underground facility, or bodies, forensics, and basically, what they saw was giant holes created. No underground facilities, no bodies,” Col. Tim Madere said.

Earlier here.

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They’ve been in charge for a while by now…

The Financial Times suggests that “more extreme Republicans” actually want a fiscal train wreck: “Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door.” … federal taxes are already historically low as a share of G.D.P. Once the new round of cuts takes effect, federal taxes will be lower than their average during the Eisenhower administration. How, then, can the government pay for Medicare and Medicaid � which didn’t exist in the 1950’s � and Social Security, which will become far more expensive as the population ages? (Defense spending has fallen compared with the economy, but not that much, and it’s on the rise again.) The answer is that it can’t … the people now running America aren’t conservatives: they’re radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need.

The US government shelved a report that showed the United States faces future federal budget deficits of more than 44.2 trillion dollars. President George W. Bush’s administration chose to keep the findings — commissioned by then-Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill — out of the 2004 annual budget report … The study, according to the same source, said that sharp tax increases, massive spending cuts or both are unavoidable if the US is to meet benefit promises to future generations. “It estimates that closing the gap would require the equivalent of an immediate and permanent 66 percent across-the-board income tax increase”.

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This is an eye-opening account of what Afghanistan is like today. The nominal US-installed ruler, Karzai, is a prisoner within Kabul, kept alive by massive US military protection, and doesn’t dare leave the capital. Warlords run most of the counry, raising their own taxes, manufacturing heroin to beat the band, and their forces outnumber the “central” government’s armies by orders of magnitude. In the south of the country, the Pashtun ethnic clans resist the central government while the Taliban are busy issuing fatwas with impunity and assassinating aid workers and rival factions. The peacekeeping forces within Afghanistan amount to one-hundreth those allocated to clean up the Balkans mess while the total development aid pledged so far to Afghanistan amounts to $5 billion, an inconsequential sum when placed against the estimated $20 billion required just to restore the country to its pre-1979 levels.

Earlier here.

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A former student at an all-girls Catholic high school claims she was sexually assaulted more than a decade ago by a nun who taught morals and religion and was in charge of recruiting young women into the sisterhood.

Landa Mauriello-Vernon, now living in Rhode Island, says the nun, Sister Linda Cusano, repeatedly forced her into a vacant office in a secluded wing of the school, wrestled her to the floor and threw her body on top of hers, telling her to “submit herself to God,” and “join me in the convent.”

Confrancesco said the woman’s parents sent both of their daughters to the all-girls school to get a ‘’solid education in a safe environment.” They became alarmed when Landa quit the volleyball team and choral group her senior year and began talking about joining the convent

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I read this report that the US bribed one of Iraq’s senior generals to hand over Baghdad with minimal resistance, then faked his death while they put him into some kind of witness protection program. Maybe the Baathists are now living next door to the Wiseguys? Anyway, this agrees with other people’s suspicion’s concerning the invasion endgame.

A senior member of Saddam Hussein’s government handed Baghdad over to U.S. troops in exchange for a pay-off and a safe exit from Iraq … Soufiane al Tikriti, head of the Special Republican Guard in Baghdad, ordered his troops not to defend the capital against attack by U.S. and British forces, and particularly to hold fire against coalition helicopters circling over the city … Tikriti was paid several hundred thousand dollars and, along with 20 family members, was ferried in a U.S. aircraft out of the country on April 8 … the Pentagon sent notice to reporters that Tikriti had been killed as he fled the capital in a white Toyota Sedan.

Earlier here.

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The longer that the interzone-formerly-imagined-as-Iraq exists in a state of postwar chaos and rapine, the more likely it is that simple Darwinism will throw up a generation of strong men who will “restore order”, albeit by dividing the territory into a number of mutually hostile armed zones. It happened in Lebanon, it happened in Afghanistan, and I see no reason why it could not happen in Iraq. In a worst-case scenario for the US, prolonged resistance could create a Vo Nguyen Giap or an Adams, where warlordism and satrapy is transformed into an astonishingly effective, asymmetrical resistance to Great Power dominance. I note this article mentions that the Badr B Boys, amongst others, are raising militia and preparing for a protracted power struggle.

Iraqi security experts and other sources in the capital say that, under the nose of the American forces, Iraq’s nascent political groups are forming armed militias and storing weapons as they prepare for a potential civil war for control of the country. In fact, The New Republic has learned, several Iraqis say even Hezbollah has formed a branch in Baghdad … Since the fall of Saddam, more than 30 different political parties have established themselves in Baghdad, ranging from the Kurdish People’s Front to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a theocratic group under the authority of newly returned Shia leader Mohammed Bakr Al Hakim. This should be a healthy sign. Except that, according to security sources, many of these parties have formed organized armed militias ranging in size from 500 men for Hizb Al Dawa, a leading theocratic Shia group, to more than 2,000 fighters for SCIRI, whose armed wing is called the Badr Brigade … The militias have already begun to roam unchecked throughout Baghdad–except within a security perimeter surrounding the area where the American troops and most foreign journalists stay–and many other parts of the country … Though most of the capital remains highly unsafe, and militias are becoming increasingly prevalent, American officials and journalists do not often see the armed groups because they generally stay within the small area surrounding the U.S. compounds and the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels, an area protected by Abrams tanks and machine-gun-wielding soldiers.

Earlier here and here..

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