NightBlogger

(Bloomberg) —
Vice President Dick Cheney said Russia’s military action in Georgia and assertiveness elsewhere run the risk of confrontation with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance. “Our principles are being tested anew,” Cheney said in prepared remarks today at a global security conference in Cernobbio, Italy. “We must meet those tests with candor and resolve and, above all, with unity. Russia has a choice to make, and we in the trans-Atlantic alliance have responsibilities.”

While Cheney made no specific threats of retaliation, his message to Russia was a blunt reminder of the alliance’s mutual defense accord among the 26-member nations against threat from outside forces. Cheney spoke at a global forum, capping a three- day visit with leaders of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine, U.S. allies in the former Soviet Union. Cheney accused Russia of “bullying others” while using its oil wealth to fuel its own economic progress. “They cannot presume to gather up all the benefits of commerce, consultation and global prestige, while engaging in brute force, threats or other forms of intimidation against sovereign countries.” More

Thu, 09/04/2008 - 13:19 — rich2010
Surge or Purge?

The most complete exposition of a social myth often comes when the myth itself is waning – Robert M. MacIver

As hurricane Gustav petered out from Category 2 to Category 1 status I had the dubious opportunity to view what might be a much larger crisis for not only New Orleans, but the entire US, the Republican National Convention. Viewers were spared the words from on high, as Cheney/Bush canceled their speeches to convince the American public of the efficacy of their own leadership. Their bloody presences were substituted with the visage of Cindy McCain and Laura Bush. The latter’s face appears to be made of some sort of space age plastic, and looked remarkably life-like. The creepiest part of their joint performance was their attempt of make amends for the Katrina disaster by appearing to care about Gustav’s effects on the Gulf coast’s residents.

Katrina was spun to the American public as a natural disaster, but anyone familiar with event knows that it was the biggest engineering failure in the history of the world, save Chernobyl. Both FEMA and the Bush administration were aware of the levee failures for 24 hours before the information was shared with anyone associated with emergency services in Louisiana. The Federal response was delayed by a week while the Bush administration wrested signing authority from Louisiana’s democratic governor Kathleen Blanco in order to issue a sole source contract for cleanup to…you guessed it, Halliburton.

As a result of these Federal “business” decisions, over 1600 American citizens, mostly poor and black died, and US taxpayers were saddled with $100 billion dollars in losses. Their blood was dried on the hands of the Bush Administration and Army Corp of Engineers before the ink was applied to the contract for Halliburton. Luckily no one noticed the blood of the Katrina victims because it blended in so well with that of American soldiers, and Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, and Somali soldiers and citizens. All this blood, shed in just under eight years with nothing to show, save the trials of Osama Bin Laden’s driver.

Now in the waning days of the Cheney/Bush administration, the dream of Pipelinestan is failing on all fronts. In Iraq the vaunted democratic speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has served little more than aid and abet the failing illegal resource wars. The Cheney/Bush policy of pushing through a hydrocarbon law to open up Iraq’s oil deposits to exploitation by Exxon/Chevron/Arco/BP has been defeated last week by an oil services contract awarded by the Iraqi government to China. So much for being greeted as “liberators”. Great Britain occupied Iraq in 1929 with the intent of controlling the oil resources. Their failed efforts resulted in the death of the pound sterling as the world’s reserve currency. Nearly 80 years later it is difficult to make an argument against the US dollar following the downward trajectory of the pound.

Cheney/Bush maintains the myth that 47,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan will stave off the return of the Taliban spawned by the Pakistani ISI, who were spawned by the CIA. They ignore the fact that 300,000 Russian troops were unable to “pacify” the Afghanis. Nor were the British troops during the Opium Wars motivated by the Great Game. Students of history understand that the last person to accomplish this task was Alexander the Great over 2300 years ago. Somewhere Osama Bin Laden is smiling from beyond the grave.

Now Americans faces the visage of John McCain, who is offering up more of the Cheney/Bush smorgasbord of death, destruction and debt spawned by the most incompetent implementation of a foreign policy since the inception of American republic.

As an alternative to Obama’s alleged lack of experience McCain has selected Sarah Palin, mother of five, including a pregnant 17 year old (now that’s pro-life) for his V.P. Palin who hired a lobbyist while mayor of Wasilla to garner Federal earmarks is now apparently anti-earmarks. She supported the bridge to nowhere, before declaring her opposition to it. She has also run a 527 group to raise money for disgraced Senator Ted Stevens. She also has something in common with her fellow Alaska Republicans Ted Stevens and Doug Young, as she is under investigation by the Alaska legislature for the firing of the Alaska’s top public safety officer over his refusal to fire a state trooper, who is the ex-husband of her sister. Latest word is that a private attorney has been hired to defend against her charges of abusing the powers of the office of the governor. More

Paul Craig Roberts
OpEdNews
The success of the Bush Regime’s propaganda, lies, and deception with gullible and inattentive Americans since 9/11 has made it difficult for intelligent, aware people to be optimistic about the future of the United States. For almost 8 years the US media has served as Ministry of Propaganda for a war criminal regime. Americans incapable of thinking for themselves, reading between the lines, or accessing foreign media on the Internet have been brainwashed.

As the Nazi propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, said, it is easy to deceive a people. You just tell them they have been attacked and wave the flag.

It certainly worked with Americans.

The gullibility and unconcern of the American people has had many victims. There are 1.25 million dead Iraqis. There are 4 million displaced Iraqis. No one knows how many are maimed and orphaned.

Iraq is in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed by American bombs, missiles, and helicopter gunships.

We do not know the death toll in Afghanistan, but even the American puppet regime protests the repeated killings of women and children by US and NATO troops.

We don’t know what the death toll would be in Iran if Darth Cheney and the neocons succeed in their plot with Israel to bomb Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons.

What we do know is that all this murder and destruction has no justification and is evil. It is the work of evil men who have no qualms about lying and deceiving in order to kill innocent people to achieve their undeclared agenda.

That such evil people have control over the United States government and media damns the American public for eternity.

America will never recover from the shame and dishonor heaped upon her by the neoconned Bush Regime.

The success of the neocon propaganda has been so great that the opposition party has not lifted a finger to rein in the Bush Regime’s criminal actions. Even Obama, who promises “change” is too intimidated by the neocon’s success in brainwashing the American population to do what his supporters hoped he would do and lead us out of the shame in which the neoconned Bush Regime has imprisoned us.

This about sums up the pessimistic state in which I existed prior to the go-ahead given by the Bush Regime to its puppet in Georgia to ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of Russians in order to defuse the separatist movement. The American media, aka, the Ministry of Lies and Deceit, again accommodated the criminal Bush Regime and proclaimed “Russian invasion” to cover up the ethnic cleansing of Russians in South Ossetia by the Georgian military assault.

Only this time, the rest of the world didn’t buy it. The many years of lies–9/11, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, al Qaeda connections, yellowcake, anthrax attack, Iranian nukes, “the United States doesn’t torture,” the bombings of weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games, Abu Ghraib, renditions, Guantanamo, various fabricated “terrorist plots,” the determined assault on civil liberties–have taken their toll on American credibility. No one outside America any longer believes the US media or the US government.

The rest of the world reported the facts–an assault on Russian civilians by American and Israeli trained and equipped Georgian troops.

The Bush Regime, overcome by hubris, expected Russia to accept this act of American hegemony. But the Russians did not, and the Georgian military was sent fleeing for its life.

The neoconned Republican response to the Russian failure to follow the script and to be intimidated by the “unipower” was so imbecilic that it shattered the brainwashing to which Americans had succumbed.

McCain declared: “In the 21st century nations don’t invade other nations.” Imagine the laughs Jon Stewart will get out of this on the Daily Show. In the early years of the 21st century the United States has already invaded two countries and has been beating the drums for attacking a third. President Bush, the chief invader of the 21st century, echoed McCain’s claim that nations don’t invade other nations. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7556857.stm

This dissonant claim shocked even brainwashed Americans, as readers’ emails reveal. If in the 21st century countries don’t invade other countries, what is Bush doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what are the naval armadas and propaganda arrayed against Iran about?

Have two of the worst warmongers of modern times–Bush and McCain–called off the US/Israeli attack on Iran? If McCain is elected president, is he going to pull US troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan as “nations don’t invade other nations,” or is President Bush going to beat him to it?

We all know the answer.

The two stooges are astonished that the Americans have taught hegemony to Russians, who were previously operating, naively perhaps, on the basis of good will.

Suddenly the Western Europeans have realized that being allied with the United States is like holding a tiger by the tail. No European country wants to be hurled into war with Russia. Germany, France, and Italy must be thanking God they blocked Georgia’s membership in NATO.

The Ukraine, where a sick nationalism has taken hold funded by the neocon National Endowment for Democracy, will be the next conflict between American pretensions and Russia. Russia is being taught by the neocons that freeing the constituent parts of its empire has not resulted in their independence but in their absorption into the American Empire.

Unless enough Americans can overcome their brainwashed state and the rigged Diebold voting machines, turn out the imbecilic Republicans and hold the neoconservatives accountable for their crimes against humanity, a crazed neocon US government will provoke nuclear war with Russia.

The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy.

War in the Caucasus is as much the product of an American imperial drive as local conflicts. It’s likely to be a taste of things to come

Seumas Milne
The outcome of six grim days of bloodshed in the Caucasus has triggered an outpouring of the most nauseating hypocrisy from western politicians and their captive media. As talking heads thundered against Russian imperialism and brutal disproportionality, US vice-president Dick Cheney, faithfully echoed by Gordon Brown and David Miliband, declared that “Russian aggression must not go unanswered”. George Bush denounced Russia for having “invaded a sovereign neighbouring state” and threatening “a democratic government”. Such an action, he insisted, “is unacceptable in the 21st century”. Could these by any chance be the leaders of the same governments that in 2003 invaded and occupied - along with Georgia, as luck would have it - the sovereign state of Iraq on a false pretext at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives? Or even the two governments that blocked a ceasefire in the summer of 2006 as Israel pulverised Lebanon’s infrastructure and killed more than a thousand civilians in retaliation for the capture or killing of five soldiers? More

Thinkprogress.org
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran. In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The “meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’” according to one of Hersh’s sources. More

Rep Baldwin: Impeachment Hearings Necessary

Members of Vice President Cheney’s staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official on the health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said today. In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, former EPA deputy associate administrator Jason K. Burnett said an official from Cheney’s office edited out six pages from the testimony of Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last October. More

Gore Vidal: …Congress has never been more cowardly, nor more corrupt. All Bush has do is to make sure certain amounts of money go in the direction of certain important congressmen and that’s end of any serious investigation. After all, one of the bravest members of Congress is Denis Kucinich who brought the article of impeachment in to the well of the House of Representatives.

Bernard Weiner
The question is not whether Iran will be attacked, but by whom and whether the bombing will commence within the next several months or shortly after the November election. The U.S. for many months has made bellicose noises about thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions with force — complete with a virtual repeat of its pre-war propaganda campaign prior to “shock&awe” against Iraq. Israel is reported to have just carried out a military exercise practicing for an attack on Iran. Iran is letting it be known how destructive and unconventional its retaliation would be if it is bombed. What is going on?

Though one can decry it, at least one can understand why Israel, just a short missile flight from Iran, might want to take “pre-emptive” action against that country were it to possess nuclear-weapons capabilities. But what’s driving the neocons in the White House to push so insistently for an attack on Iran? It seems clear that Cheney and Bush want Iran’s nascent civilian nuclear program taken out now before it could become operational in a military sense five or ten years down the road. If this is true, why would the Administration have wanted to attack Iraq? More

WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials firmly opposed Vice President Dick Cheney’s proposal to strike Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps bases last summer by insisting that the administration make clear decisions about how far the United States would go in escalating the conflict with Iran, according to a former Bush administration official.

J. Scott Carpenter, who was then deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, recalled in an interview that senior Defense Department officials and the Joint Chiefs used the escalation issue as the main argument against the Cheney proposal.

McClatchy newspapers reported last August that Cheney had proposed several weeks earlier “launching airstrikes at suspected training camps in Iran,” citing two officials involved in Iran policy.

According to Carpenter, who is now at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy, a strongly pro-Israel think tank, Pentagon officials argued that no decision should be made about the limited airstrike on Iran without a thorough discussion of the sequence of events that would follow an Iranian retaliation against such an attack. Carpenter said the Defense Department officials insisted that the Bush administration had to make “a policy decision about how far the administration would go — what would happen after the Iranians would go after our folks.” More

The senate report is out and the proof is there. The Bush Administration LIED the USA into war in Iraq. McCain went right along with them.

Bill Van Auken
WSWS
An Israeli press report that US President George W. Bush intends to launch a military attack on Iran before he leaves office at the beginning of next year prompted a heated denial from the White House Tuesday.

The article, which appeared in Tuesday’s Jerusalem Post, cited a report on Israeli Army Radio, quoting Israeli officials who had met with Bush and his delegation during their visit to Israel last week.

“A senior member of the president’s entourage said during a closed meeting that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were of the opinion that military action was called for,” the article quoted an Israel official as saying.

The report cited the US official as stating that “the hesitancy of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice” had delayed a decision on military action against Iran. Read more

By Victor Thorn
American Free Press
Click here for more on Deborah Palfrey

Has another name been added to the long list of government-sponsored murders, with possible chief suspects belonging to the Bush-Clinton crime cabal? And, although police Captain Jeffrey P. Young revealed that at least two apparent suicide notes were discovered, suspicions are running high that foul play was involved in Palfrey’s hanging.

For starters, less than 10 percent of all female suicides are by hanging. According to journalist Mick Gregory, “of all female suicides, very few are by hanging. It’s been out of fashion for 100 years.”

What propelled this story into the national headlines was a client list of 10,000 to 15,000 names that included Washington’s political and business elite, including officials from the IMF and World Bank, corporate CEOs, White House and Pentagon employees and lobbyists.

Palfrey’s “little black book” of telephone numbers weighed 46 pounds and had already caused the resignation of Randall L. Tobias, deputy secretary of state to Condoleezza Rice. Others named in these phone logs were Bill Clinton’s former advisor Dick Morris, along with Harlan K. Ullman, the man who came up with “shock and awe.” Read more

Gustav Wynn
What makes intelligent debate impossible is the lack of detail available so far. We’re told the letters were penned a few days before her body was discovered hanged in he mother’s shed, left on a nearby motel stand, though we don’t know when investigators first saw them. Police say relatives confirmed her handwriting, but we know virtually nothing about her physical condition or other clues. Her autopsy was conducted quietly though a final report is due this week after toxicology results.

Palfrey’s note had a number of clichéd expressions used, including “modern day lynching”, referring to her trial and a darkly ironic reference to her subsequent manner of death. Among her known clients were current Louisiana Senator Vitter, and former AIDS Czar Randall Tobias but Dick Cheney’s number, reported earlier was summarily un-reported after a turnaround by ABC News.

ABC anchor Sam Donaldson has also been rumored, along with a law partner of Rudy Giuliani, associates of Jack Abramoff’s and many more Pentagon, DC and corporate insiders on a list of 10,000 calls. More on this story
Click here for more Deborah Palfrey stories

Photo Belltown Messenger

An April 11, 2008, entry made on the Independent Media Center website, posted by Styve, who credits the author as Wayne Madsen report, wrote on the developments of the “Washington Madam” trial at the US District Court in Washington, DC. “The Justice Department’s witnesses,” according to the web entry, “not only showed that prosecutors were compelling testimony from erstwhile hostile witnesses in return for immunity from prosecution but that the identities of the escorts of the defunct Pamela Martin & Associates escort agency were top flight professional women….”

The entry goes on to identify the escorts as: Navy Lieutenant Commander Rebecca Dickinson, 38, a former Annapolis Naval Academy Supply Officer, Dr. Rhona Reiss, 63, who was an escort at age 56, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, holding a doctorate in higher education, and Dr. Brandy Britton, 43, an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore Campus who used the escort name “Alexis;” Brandy Britton was found hanging in her home in January 2007. “It is not known,” the entry goes on, “if the Justice Department prosecutors had pressured Britton into testifying in the Palfrey case before her alleged ’suicide.’ Britton’s work for the agency may have directly [led] into the Annapolis office of Maryland Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich. It was a link that US Attorney for Maryland Tom DiBiagio was following before he was fired by the Justice Department.”

If true, here’s what’s interesting:

Since the beginning of the selective prosecution of Palfrey, common with the Bush Justice Department, it has been revealed that Pamela Martin escorts were highly-prized as assets for both the CIA and companies like Halliburton that were trying to leverage escorts to either obtain information from clients, particularly foreign leaders and businessmen visiting the Washington, DC area.

Halliburton was, according to WMR’ sources, a top client of the Pamela Martin agency, known for its discretion. At the trial on April 10, prosecutor Butler was interested in the type of sex performed by Dickinson on her clients. WMR has, in the past, hinted at the type of sex requested by one top escort agency client but, based on the government’s harassing of escort witnesses, we feel that it is time to present all what we now know. It is no secret that many of the escorts brought whips and handcuffs to trysts with clients. It is also known that Vitter enjoyed escorts changing his diapers after he defecated in them.

Although it appears that Cheney first became aware of Pamela Martin escorts though their work for Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root…what is not known is that Cheney personally contracted in some of their services. In fact, Cheney reportedly was so fond of one that he arranged a political appointment for her in the Department of Agriculture shortly after the 2001 inauguration.

Cheney, according to knowledgeable sources involved in the Palfrey trial, paid at least one escort to straddle a glass top table and defecate on it while Cheney peered at the bowel “evacuation” from underneath.

Read more on this story.
Click here for more on Deborah Palfrey.