...In his 1974 book, "The Permanent War Economy," he composed a long list of military trade-offs. The money spent on one Huey helicopter, he said, could buy 66 low-priced homes, while a recent $69 million reduction in child-nutrition programs represented the cost of two DE-1052 destroyer escorts. He added, "To eliminate hunger in America = $4-5 billion = C-5A aircraft program."
Ralph Nader on Seymour Melman:-
Before he passed away this month, Seymour Melman had completed a concise book manuscript titled, "Wars, Ltd.: The Rise and Fall of America's Permanent War Economy". He was having trouble finding a good publisher, when I spoke with him earlier this summer.
But he will leave a legacy of wisdom, insight, humanity, consistency, and diligence. In a society whose rulers and corporatists seal the people off from such magnificent minds and inundate them with trivia, distraction and the hot air artists daily bellowing their lucrative ignorance, sagacious Americans like Seymour Melman will not receive the attention the citizenry deserves unless we the people, who own the public airwaves, begin to control and use our own media rights
For more information, visit www.citizenworks.org

There was a bipartisan consensus on last Sunday's televised political talk-shows that the US Senate will confirm, with relative ease, Mr. Bush's appointment of Alberto R. Gonzales as the next Attorney General ("AG").  However, if our Senators retain any respect for universal human rights and the rule of constitutional and international law, they will vigorously oppose Mr. Gonzales' appointment as our new AG. [1] [2]  Furthermore, it's imperative that our Senators, both left and right, defeat this unwise appointment for the following five reasons. 

Evan Peters election analysis makes many excellent points. But it does not cover election fraud which many articles in this website indicate did happen. I think election fraud colours the whole picture. It means Bush and the Republicans committed major crimes in order to steal the US Presidency - again. It also means that most people in the rest of the world have misjudged the American people, a majority of whom did not vote for Bush. They were not been fooled by Bush and the US media. Kerry did win and I think the rest of the world should recognise that and do what we can to help Americans reclaim their country. Read some of these articles and tell me if you think I'm wrong.

The cold war is over, but the much heralded "peace dividend" failed to materialise. The US has over 700 overseas military bases. The number is expanding as it's plans for global domination continue to be implemented. Henoko Bay is one more step.
In place of the communist enemy, the US is using the "terrorist" threat, and making more terrorists every day as it devastates Iraq. The so-called "terrorist threat" and 9/11 attack conspiracy did not exist in Iraq. The real Washington conspirators knew this before they created a litany of lies to justify launching their phoney genocidal war against the non-existent threat from Iraq.

-- A number of Okinawan, Japanese and American groups have filed a lawsuit - Dugong v. Rumsfeld - in San Francisco's Federal District Court against the U.S. Department of Defense in order to stop the construction of the new base. For more information on the lawsuit and the environmental issues at stake in the construction of the air base, see: http://actionnetwork.org/campaign/dugong_aa
. . . .Those at the encampment vow to continue their struggle until they halt the base construction. Local women in their 80s say they will give their lives to stop the project.

George Monbiot, in speech to environmental journalists, gave a superlatively good analysis of media suppression of the truth and distortion of the material they do present. It explains why Bush did so well. Monbiot also illuminated the environmental crises and how they increasingly threaten life on earth, and why the media give it such limited or distorted coverage.

......... So let us picture a journalist who is interested in the environment, and who works for a newspaper run by a rich man with rich friends. Let's say she wants to write about climate change, and that she knows that much of it results from the carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power stations. Straight away she runs into a problem: the power stations are owned and run by members of the rich men's trade union. She has several options.......

I struggled for some time with the title of this article. I might also have called it “Way Worse Than ‘I Told You So’” after having written for months, even years, that the charade we have just witnessed, called an election, would be a repeat performance of the coup d'etat of 2000. Was this election stolen? Unquestionably. The list of likely illegal acts in this election is no less than mindnumbing. But if you wish to read them, they can be found at: http://www.accuracy.org/new.htm

MoD still publicly claims DU weapons are safe. However the UK army has issued a card to soldiers saying it can cause ill-health.
“A UN subcommission has ruled that the use of DU breaches the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention. DU has also been blamed for the effect of Gulf War syndrome among some 200,000 US troops.” About 29,000 UK troops could also be contaminated.

CLAIMS by the Ministry of Defence that depleted uranium (DU) is not a risk to life have been undermined by a Sunday Herald investigation that found the British army is telling soldiers in Iraq that it can cause ill-health.
The revelation has outraged the military, scientists and politicians. Studies have shown DU leads to cancers, birth defects, memory loss, damage to the immune system and neuro-psychotic disorders. But the MoD has claimed since the first Gulf war that “DU does not pose a risk to health or the environment”.
However, military sources have passed an MoD card to the Sunday Herald which is being handed to troops on active service in Iraq. It reads: “You have been deployed to a theatre where depleted uranium (DU) munitions have been used. DU is a weakly radioactive heavy metal which has the potential to cause ill-health. You may have been exposed to dust containing DU during your deployment.

One of the US Army's top procurement officers yesterday called the Bush administration's grant of multibillion-dollar contracts to oil services giant Halliburton "the worst case of contracting abuse she has ever seen".      Belfast Telegraph
See also FBI Investigates Halliburton's No-Bid Contracts

"In August 2004, the United States Congress unanimously adopted a resolution labeling the situation in Darfur as genocide. On September 9, American Secretary of State Colin Powell in turn declared before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, "[that] genocide has taken place and may still be continuing in Darfur". These declarations echoed attempts to compare events in Darfur with Rwanda in 1994. Observers almost immediately claimed that the American "genocide" declaration had more to do with the US elections than the reality of events in Darfur."
Today a report by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland published in the Lancet estimates (conservatively) 100,000 Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the (primarily) USA and the UK. Most of these are civilians, women and children.

The Pentagon is collecting figures on local casualties in Iraq, contrary to its public claims, but the results are classified, according to one of the authors of an independent study which reported last week that the war has killed at least 100,000 Iraqis.
"Despite the claim of the head of US Central Command at the time, General Tommy Franks, that 'We don't do body counts', the US military does collect casualty figures in Iraq," said Professor Richard Garfield, an expert on the effects of conflict on civilians. "But since 1991, when Colin Powell was head of the joint chiefs of staff, the figures have been kept secret."

The first scientific study of the human cost of the Iraq war suggests that at least 100,000 Iraqis have lost their lives since their country was invaded in March 2003.
More than half of those who died were women and children killed in air strikes, researchers say. Previous estimates have put the Iraqi death toll at around 10,000 - ten times the 1,000 members of the British, American and multi-national forces who have died so far. But the study, published in The Lancet, suggested that Iraqi casualties could be as much as 100 times the coalition losses. It was also savagely critical of the failure by coalition forces to count Iraqi casualties.

..... These forces are not based on lunatic religious beliefs, but rationally-based on the profits, power and prestige that draw people into the 'military - industrial - political - academic - corporate - media' complex. This is a hugely powerful force. Although it is rationally-based, it is blind to the trends and disastrous consequences of it's own behaviour or how it is used to implement the lunatic religious agenda.

We are moving toward a key fiery moment, and one that carries within it the potential for conflagration. 
As I see them, the key issues are:  Little Men and Power at All Cost
You will add you own realisations here, but the two \'little men\' of the moment are Bush and Putin. 
Small physically and with very different personalities, they have highly significant features in common:
-  They rule using fear

Inquiry to determine whether pentagon improperly awarded bids.
The FBI has begun investigating whether the Pentagon improperly awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton Co., seeking an interview with a top Army contracting officer and collecting documents from several government offices.
. . . . While the Corps was authorized to spend up to $7 billion for the oil restoration work, the actual cost so far has been $2.5 billion. Halliburton is still working on the oil facilities, but it is now operating under a new, competitively awarded contract.

Mike Ruppert, is the author of this article which was delivered to San francisco's prestigious Commonwealth Club on August 31, 2004. He has just published a book "Crossing The Rubicon" in which he presents more details of his 9/11 charges and also on the world's 'Peak Oil' consumption.
Ruppert convincingly establishes that the Bush Administration planned and authorised the 9/11 attacks.

"The 9/11 attacks were the result of deliberate planning and orchestrated efforts by identifiable leaders within the U.S. Government, and the energy and financial sectors, to see a Pearl Harbor-like attack which would provide the American Empire with a pretext for war, invasion and the sequential confiscation of oil and natural gas reserves, or the key transportation routes through which they pass. 9-11 was a premeditated murder and in my book, and here tonight, I will name some of the suspects who committed the crime. In my book I will show you overwhelming evidence of their guilt, which I would be proud and confident to place either before a district attorney or a jury."

Iraq is probably already lost, says former military-policy planner Mike Turner.
But there are still some smart strategies for Kerry to adopt.
One of the great mysteries of this election is the inability of John Kerry to challenge George W. Bush on his national-security credentials and to hold his administration accountable for its monumental failure in Iraq. These two issues remain the soft underbelly of the Bush campaign. That the Kerry campaign hasn't effectively exploited them is disheartening. That he's allowed Bush to actually spin them into strengths is mind-boggling. Since the American people seem to be buying the GOP's reality-TV version of events in Iraq, let's take a hard look at the military realities.

With less than 50 days to the US polls and a 10-point lead over John Kerry, George W Bush’s re-election as President looks a breeze. Despite his dodgy past, he has successfully sold himself as a ‘hero’ War President and defender of traditional US values. How did he do it? Bush’s people have run riot over Kerry’s record, so what about the President’s?

09/10/04 "Asia Times" -- Three years after September 11, President George W Bush's crusade is a failure. "War on terror" is a meaningless myth: you can't combat a supple attack machine like al-Qaeda with shock and awe. What should have been a long, meticulous police operation was turned by Bush - instigated by his foreign policy adviser, God - into an illegal, preemptive attack on a nation that had nothing to do with terror.

In the case of World War II the Germans were controlled by a dictatorship and fed hate and fear propaganda, (see Hermann Goering's quotes below) to get them to go to war against what they were told were threatening enemies. They became the real threatening enemies to everyone so it was just and necessary for the West to oppose them with war. I think Twain's quote applies to the Nazis, but not to those defending themselves against the Nazis.

Chavez Could Teach US Leaders a Thing or Two About Winning Votes
I knew that the administration of Hugo Chavez had won my heart when I met Olivia Delfino in one of the poor barrios in Caracas. As I was touring the neighborhood with an international delegation here to monitor this Sunday's referendum on Chavez, Olivia came out of her tiny house and grabbed my arm. "Tell the people of your country that we love Hugo Chavez," she insisted. She went on to tell me how her life had changed since he came to power. After living in the barrio for 40 years, she now had a formal title to her home. With that, she was able to get a bank loan to fix the roof so it wouldn't leak in the rain. Thanks to the Cuban dentists and a program called "Rescatando la sonrisa" - recovering the smile - for the first time in her life she was able to get her teeth fixed. And her daughter is in a job training program to become a nurse's assistant.

The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees.
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn't hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, "but not this time." There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the "Orwellian language" flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son's misadventure in Iraq.
See also Bush's Erratic Behavior Worries White House Aides

Last Clear Chance To Chase Down Electronic-Voting Before Its Security-Flaws Bring Down Our Electoral System

Bush, Blair and Howard nuclear gambled with our world, when they "willfully made war and promoted international dissension". Their completely phoney war on Iraq, justified by lies, was followed with a series of war crimes, including more lies, bombing, looting, killing, imprisoning and torturing. It was, and still is, camouflaged by a PR-Psywar campaign, reported by a cowed and co-operative mass media. As recommended by historian H. G. Wells, these "politicians" will be "in the dock" at:

So what's actually happening to Iraq's women? American journalist Lila Rajiva's 7-27-04 OW essay reports that the USA's government-media complex has been steadfastly refusing to investigate beyond the tip of the evidentiary iceberg, or it would have discovered these two barely-submerged facts: (1) that the rape and abduction of Iraqi women has, in fact, skyrocketed in "postwar" Iraq; and (2) that Iraqi women prisoners are, in fact, being raped, abused, and tortured inside the USA's military prisons.

"One would think the physicians in the US military would have learned enough from the cautionary history of the Third Reich's ghoulish Dr. Joseph "The Angel Of Death" Mengele and his team of torture-doctors to know that they should
NEVER practice medicine in violation of universal human rights or their Hippocratic Oath. Evidently, they did not."

"Bush is taking powerful drugs to control his depression, erratic behaviour, and paranoia" "Psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, in his book "Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President wrote that Bush was " a paranoid megalomaniac" and "untreated alcoholic" whose mental capacities are seriously diminished" Couple these with Bush's bizarre Christian Fundamentalist religious beliefs, that the often predicted heavenly armageddon is coming with Israel the centre, when believers like Bush will go straight to heaven and the unbelievers (the rest of us) will rot in hell. An induced nuclear armageddon would be a fulfilment of the Biblical prophecy, or so some fundamentalists believe.

Osha Gray Davidson's article in 28/7/04 Rolling Stone, confirms a previous article by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker journalist) about US employees committing many sexual and other tortures of prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including "raping a teenage boy". The Senate and Pentagon investigation into these tortures uncovered by US Maj. Gen. Antoni Taguba in his report, are now decreed as "classified documents. The investigation is stalled, probably because the details, which go to the top of the Bush Administration, would be considered so horrific by the average American, that to reveal them would damage Bush's re-election chances.

The new classified military documents offer a chilling picture of what happened at Abu Ghraib -- including detailed reports that U.S. troops and translators sodomized and raped Iraqi prisoners. The secret files -- 106 "annexes" that the Defense Department withheld from the Taguba report last spring -- include nearly 6,000 pages of internal Army memos and e-mails, reports on prison riots and escapes, and sworn statements by soldiers, officers, private contractors and detainees. The files depict a prison in complete chaos. Prisoners were fed bug-infested food and forced to live in squalid conditions; detainees and U.S. soldiers alike were killed and wounded in nightly mortar attacks; and loyalists of Saddam Hussein served as guards in the facility, apparently smuggling weapons to prisoners inside.

9 June 2004: The reason for the US break-up with Ahmed Chalabi, the Shiite Iraqi politician, could be his leak of Pentagon plans to invade Iran before Christmas 2005, but the American government has not changed its objective, and the attack could happen earlier if president George W. Bush is re-elected, or later if John Kerry is sworn in.

Despite promises of over $1 billion in US funding, hospital patients in Iraq continue to suffer ongoing hardship. Problems plaguing Iraqi hospitals fifteen months into what has been a brutal, bloody occupation range from ongoing medicine and equipment shortages to an overall lack of proper medical infrastructure.
"We are getting less medical supplies now than we were during the sanctions," said Dr. Namin Rashid, the Chief Resident Doctor at Yarmouk Hospital. "Paul Bremer came here and talked a lot at the beginning of the occupation, but nothing has changed," Rashid added, referring to the recently departed civilian administrator of the Coalition Provision Authority.

We have paid a heavy price for the Bush Administration's unnecessary and illegal invasion of Iraq: more than 800 American soldiers dead; more than 4,500 wounded or maimed; and $120 billion wasted on a war and occupation that has sullied our country's image in the world, undercut our moral authority and poisoned Arab and Muslim minds against us for decades to come. We will pay an even heavier price if we "stay the course," as the Administration and many Democrats urge. If, as war supporters claim, our goals in Iraq (now that we've lost the rationale of hunting down weapons of mass destruction) are stability and democracy, we are proceeding in exactly the wrong way. In the eyes of most Iraqis, American forces have long since ceased to be nation-builders and instead are occupying forces that knock down their homes, bomb their mosques and abuse and humiliate their fellow citizens. The occupation, like other occupations throughout history, has generated a growing popular resistance that cannot be defeated militarily. It is time to change course.

What is it going to take to get the people to rise up and demand Congress remove George W. Bush and his whole administration from power on charges of and conviction for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors?

On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

Seems to me that unlimited resource extraction is one reason life on earth is cheap and has contributed to global warming in the first place.

>>> The text below comes from MSNBC's posting here. The Memory Hole has made a FOIA request for this report. For some of the photos that triggered this investigation, see "Photos of Iraqis Being Abused by US Personnel."

The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. "Someone wounded," the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: "Hit him, hit the truck and him." As the helicopter's gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

...The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" that were inflicted on detainees.

Is the Commander In Chief capable of the Job or does he just not give a damm.
If he is such a great leader, how do the troups dare to act in this way.
How could he not know. He is Bush, he has access to all information.
He should not be in power, running the biggest bullying army in the world.

The official word from the Bush administration is that the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is not “systematic,” according to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This type of torture of indigenous and Third World people, however, is well-documented as a pattern and practice of the U.S. military and the CIA.

In possibly the most stinging rebuke ever to a British government by its foreign policy establishment, 52 former ambassadors and international officials have written to Tony Blair telling him he is damaging UK (and western) interests by backing George W. Bush's misguided policies in the Middle East. It would be comforting to imagine that their comments will be heeded.

On a cold, wet night there's nothing better than coming home to a warm house, making a hot bowl of soup and then, after dinner, curling up under a reading lamp with a good book. But what if there was no gas to make the soup or run the furnace? What if there wasn't any oil to transport the dinner ingredients to you? No sweat, you may be thinking, I'm pretty hardy. If you really believe that, then I challenge you to sit in the dark for 15 minutes. It's no fun.
As that little mind game shows, trying to imagine life after fossil fuels isn't easy. Hydrocarbons are the very lifeblood of modern, industrial society. They are so fundamental to our existence that their role in creating our quality of life often goes unexamined. What our great grandparents would have considered luxuries we think of as necessities. But as even a casual look at history and a quick review of physics reveal, we are living an aberration.

The truth of what's happening in Falluja has to get out.
.......I'm outraged. We're trying to get to a woman who's giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you're shooting at us. How dare you?
How dare you?

I have watched with heavy heart and mounting dread as the ever-precarious battle to bring security to post-war Iraq has taken a desperate turn for the worse in recent days and hours. Along with so many Americans, I have been shaken by the hellish carnage in Fallujah and the violent uprisings in Baghdad and elsewhere. The pictures have been the stuff of nightmares, with bodies charred beyond recognition and dragged through the streets of cheering citizens. And in the face of such daunting images and ominous developments, I have wondered anew at the President's stubborn refusal to admit mistakes or express any misgivings over America's unwarranted intervention in Iraq.

America under George W. Bush has become a rogue nation, an outlaw that shreds treaties and invades other countries on false pretexts, with no provocation. We refuse to come under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, lest we be judged by the same standard that applies to every other nation. We continue to consume far more than our share of the planet's dwindlng resources, and add far more than our share to the planet's carbon dioxide load, which is heating things up at a rapid rate.

Information Clearing House

How much suffering would it take to compensate for the sins of humanity? There are six billion of us now, and our greed and selfishness are rapidly destroying the planet. This is especially true of Americans, as we all know.

Following on the heels of the military invasion of Iraq, another invasion began: a corporate invasion by Halliburton, Bechtel, and other U.S. companies that were awarded millions in “reconstruction” contracts. Nine months into the occupation, Iraqi schools are still in disrepair, electricity is intermittent, and the water is not safe to drink. On February 24, protest the corporations that are making millions in Iraq, and speak out for Iraqi workers’ rights and self-determination.
• Find the war profiteers in your community
• Calendar of February 24 events
So many Americans do see what is happening and they do care
Click here and then go to "Campaigns"

If the military budget doesn't pay for the needs of troops and veterans, who is benefitting from the tremendous increase? Cheney through Halliburton, the Bush family through Carlyle, and other administration insiders through their corporate connections. How corrupt can you get? When will the American taxpayers wake up to this enormous ripoff?

In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.
Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs--to further what many call the Project for the New American Century.

LONDON - A strong case arguing the illegality of the invasion of Iraq will be handed soon to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
The report prepared by eight leading international lawyers and professors of law drawn from four countries makes a strong case against the illegality of the way British and U.S. troops fought the war.

From Inside the Pentagon

• Iraq WMD was not an immediate threat
• Inspections were working
• Intelligence failed and was misrepresented
• Terrorist connection missing
• Post-war WMD search ignored key resources
• War was not the best – or only – option