Central Asian Oil - renewing major US-Russian rivalry?
A dreamer would see harmony between Russia, the United States and China in a sensible exploitation of Central Asia's massive oil and gas and minerals. Unfortunately, the cold reality is that there is simply too much at stake for each country for this ever to happen.

The doomsday scenario was laid out by Gen. Tommy Franks, the recently retired head of CentCom, in of all places the December edition of Cigar Aficionado magazine.
"What is the worst thing that can happen in our country?" Franks asked rhetorically. "Two steps. The first step would be a nexus between weapons of mass destruction . . . and terrorism." The second step would be "the western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we've seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy."     St. Petersburg Times

What did Bush know about the al Qaeda threat and when did he know it?
It's fortunate for George W. Bush he has a mess on his hands in Iraq; otherwise, he might have to worry about a significant cover-up coming undone.

Protesters to Bush: How Dare You?

This article by Michael Tennant, "Better Late Than Never" has an excellent brief record of the US Govt's use of lies to fool or frighten the US public into supporting US wars since 1898. It is only with media cooperation that this technique can work again
and again.

Fifty years ago on August 19, 1953, the Americans, with the help of the British, overthrew one of the few democratic governments in the Middle East. The Central Intelligence Agency carried out a coup against premier Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran and brought the Shah, who was in exile at the time, back to power. The success of this subversion emboldened the US for the coming decades to carry out similar actions in Guatemala, Chile, Cuba, Vietnam, and many other countries in the world (The Bay of Pigs fiasco in Cuba and the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile that led to the ascendance of Augusto Pinochet to power are just two examples).

Al-Jazeera made the decision to pull two “anti-US” cartoons from its website last month under US pressure.

The US is determined to suppress the independent Arab media

The exercise cost $300m. And the number of weapons found? 0
Five months after the end of the war in Iraq, a CIA adviser has admitted that his 1,200-strong team of inspectors has discovered none of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

on the Senate floor, he said, "The tragedy is that our troops are paying with their lives because the administration failed to prepare a plan to win the peace."

Palestinian, intellectual, and fighter, Edward Said rails against Arafat and Sharon to his dying breath.

George Bush told lies and they died. First, your government lied to ensure Bush's re-election.
Who votes against a president in time of war? And even better, you get oil with the winning election.

There are far better and safer energy options available now.
It is time to leave nuclear energy behind as a failed dream of the last century. We can and must replace the false propaganda of "atoms for peace" with an "energy for peace" program that can make the well-being of the present generation compatible with the protection of the security and environment of future generations.

Someone asked me why I didn’t write anything yesterday mentioning September 11. I’ll be perfectly honest- I had forgotten about it until around 2 pm.
I woke up to no electricity, washed up and went into the kitchen to help out with breakfast.

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination.
Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too.

 Last May, President Bush made his now-famous -- and outrageously false -- statement to a Polish television station: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories.... But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."

Topic: Commander-In-Thief Bush Must Step Down
George W. Bush told us that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together. They weren't. He repeatedly implied that Iraq had had something to do with 9/11. It hadn't. He claimed to have proof that Saddam Hussein possessed banned weapons of mass destruction. He didn't. As our allies watched in horror and disgust, Bush conned us into a one-sided war of aggression that killed and maimed thousands of innocent people, destroyed billions of dollars in Iraqi infrastructure, cost tens of billions of dollars, cost the lives of American soldiers, and transformed our international image as the world's shining beacon of freedom into that of a marauding police state. Presidents Nixon and Clinton rightly faced impeachment for comparatively trivial offenses; if we hope to restore our nation's honor, George W. Bush too must face a president's gravest political sanction.

George Bush is the first unelected President of the United States, installed by a right-wing Supreme Court in a kind of judicial coup d'etat. He is the first to actively subvert one of the pillars of American democracy: the separation of church and state. There are now daily prayer meetings and Bible study groups in every branch of the government, and religious organisations are being given funds to take over educational and welfare programs that have always been the domain of the state.

BRITAIN ran a covert 'dirty tricks' operation designed specifically to produce misleading intelligence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction to give the UK a justifiable excuse to wage war on Iraq.

CND are incensed at the lies and hypocrisy of the Nuclear Weapons States (NWS) of the G-8 following the summit in Evian. CND full heartedly agree with aims to end the proliferation of nuclear weapons yet are dismayed by the statements and actions of the NWS in particular those from the UK and US governments.

Historian accuses Washington of failing to face the facts
The United States is a "danger to the world" because of its denial that it is a military and economic empire, according to Niall Ferguson, historian and new-found darling of the American right.
Prof Ferguson is author of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, the book whose tie-in TV series controversially concentrated on the liberalising latter days of the British empire. He said that America's refusal to admit to "what it was" meant it risked never learning the lessons of British expansionism.

THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY
SPECIAL FEATURE: INTERVIEW SENATOR BYRD
This week, we kick off a feature of the new MoveOn Bulletin: the Grassroots Interview. In each issue, we'll provide an opportunity for MoveOn members to ask five questions of a prominent political figure. U.S. Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) has graciously agreed to be the first subject. Senator Byrd has been in the news recently for his comments on President Bush's "victory" speech.

Move towards Total Information Control.
Freedom of information in American society is in danger because corporate media needs to maintain access to official sources of news. Consolidation of media has brought the total news sources for most Americans to less than a handful and these news groups have an ever-increasing dependency on pre-arranged content.

Last February, Al-Saadi took Colin Powell to task for his allegations, presented solemnly to the Security Council, concerning persuasive "evidence" of Iraq's WMD. Al-Saadi audaciously, but confidently, claimed that some of the evidence cited was fabricated. And sure enough, it turned out a month later -- and the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed this -- that the "evidence", for example, of Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Niger, indeed involved despicable, crude forgery.

Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks' nightmare scenario--it's their plan.
Ever since the neo-cons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception.

A pre-emptive strike on Iraq would constitute a crime against humanity, write 43 experts on international law and human rights. The initiation of a war against Iraq by the self-styled "coalition of the willing" would be a fundamental violation of international law. International law recognises two bases for the use of force.

.....since this article, exposed that Bush and Blair were cherry-picking their intelligence agencies reports to justify war with Iraq. After the war, many more daming reports have come out that Bush and Blair, not only cooked and altered intelligence to frighten their publics into supporting war, they actually invented lies to further frighten them.

So Journalists should not tell the truth now??
Brushing aside the embarrassing failure of US troops to find the weapons he made the centrepiece of his case for military action, Bush said the invasion thwarted future plots against the United States by “madman” Saddam Hussein. “Saddam Hussein was a gathering threat. He possessed and he used weapons of mass destruction,” he declared here. “I was not about to leave the security of the United States to the desires and hopes of this madman.”

Late last year, a special Mother Jones investigation detailed how, only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story of how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.

by Bill and Kathleen Christon

Most of the vociferously pro-Israeli neo-conservative policymakers in the Bush administration make no effort to hide the fact that at least part of their intention in promoting war against Iraq (and later perhaps against Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and the Palestinians) is to guarantee Israel's security by eliminating its greatest military threats, forging a regional balance of power overwhelmingly in Israel's favor, and in general creating a more friendly atmosphere for Israel in the Middle East. .......Still holds true

Follow links for greater depth.
The official story on Iraq has never made sense. The connection that the Bush administration has tried to draw between Iraq and al-Qaida has always seemed contrived and artificial. In fact, it was hard to believe that smart people in the Bush administration would start a major war based on such flimsy evidence.
The pieces just didn't fit. Something else had to be going on; something was missing.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned the United States for the third time yesterday of the danger of radioactive contamination in Iraq because of looting at nuclear sites and called on the Bush administration to allow his safety and emergency response teams to enter the country.

The latest news, views, and interesting correspondence. Edited by Russell D. Hoffman, Concerned Citizen

Atomic Apocalypse Barely Averted At The Davis-Besse Reactor
Ohio is looking down the barrel of a nuclear apocalypse. Its name is Davis-Besse. Reopening it---as its owner wants to do---can be viewed as nothing more than an act of terrorism.