Col. Gen Leonid Ivashov, president of the Academy of Geopolitical Studies, told a news conference at RIA Novosti, "We are close to a serious conflict - U.S. and NATO preparations on a strategic scale are ongoing. In the operation the West conducted on Georgian soil against Russia - South Ossetians were the victims or hostages of it - we can see a rehearsal for an attack on Iran. There is a great deal of "new features" that today are being fine tuned in the theater of military operations."
On April 11, 12, 13, and 14, 2003, the United States Army and United States Marine Corps disgraced themselves and the country they represent in Baghdad, Iraq's capital city. Having invaded Iraq and accepted the status of a military occupying power, they sat in their tanks and Humvees, watching as unarmed civilians looted the Iraqi National Museum and burned down the Iraqi National Library and Archives as well as the Library of Korans of the Ministry of Religious Endowments. Their behavior was in violation of their orders, international law, and the civilized values of the United States. Far from apologizing for these atrocities or attempting to make amends, the United States government has in the past five years added insult to injury.
Donald Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense and the official responsible for the actions of the troops, repeatedly attempted to trivialize what had occurred with inane public statements like "democracy is messy" and "stuff happens."
On December 2, 2004, President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, to General Tommy Franks, the overall military commander in Iraq at that time, for his meritorious service to the country. (He gave the same award to L. Paul Bremer III, the highest ranking civilian official in Iraq, and to George Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, which had provided false information about Saddam Hussein and Iraq to Congress and the people.)
In the five years since the initial looting and pillaging of the Iraqi capital, thieves have stolen at least 32,000 items from some 12,000 archaeological sites across Iraq with no interference whatsoever from the occupying power. No funds have been appropriated by the American or Iraqi governments to protect the most valuable and vulnerable historical sites on Earth, even though experience has shown that just a daily helicopter overflight usually scares off looters. In 2006, the World Monuments Fund took the unprecedented step of putting the entire country of Iraq on its list of the most endangered sites. All of this occurred on George W. Bush's watch and impugned any moral authority he might have claimed.
The United States government seems never to have understood that, when it began the occupation of Iraq on March 19, 2003, it became legally responsible for what happened to the country's cultural inheritance. After all, the only legal justification for its presence in Iraq is U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 of May 22, 2003. Both the United States and the United Kingdom voted for this resolution in which they formally acknowledged their status and obligations as occupying powers in Iraq. Among those obligations, specified in the Preamble to the resolution, was: "The need for respect for the archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious heritage of Iraq, and for the continued protection of archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious sites, museums, libraries, and monuments." Every politically sentient observer on Earth is aware of the Bush administration's contempt for international law and its routine scofflaw behavior since it came to power, but this clause remains an ironclad obligation that will stand up in an international or a domestic U.S. court. On this issue, the United States is an outlaw, waiting to be brought to justice.
In 1258 AD the Mongols descended on Baghdad and pillaged its magnificent libraries. A well-known adage states that the Tigris River ran black from the ink of the countless texts the Mongols trashed, while the streets ran red with the blood of the city's slaughtered inhabitants. The world has never forgotten that medieval act of barbarism, just as it will never forget what the U.S. military unleashed on the defenseless city in 2003 and in subsequent years. There is simply no excuse for what has happened in Baghdad at the hands of the Americans. Chalmers Johnson, August, 2008
I am here to summarize the findings from our three-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7.I've snipped a reference to a map showing the location of WTC 1. I've also snipped other references to visual aids and some more-or-less tangential material, so we can concentrate on Shyam Sunder's explanation of what happened to WTC 7.
The collapse of WTC 7 has been a source of extensive speculation. No planes hit the building. There was damage to the building from the collapse of World Trade Center Tower 1, which was about 370 feet to the south. [...] But despite damage that severed seven exterior columns, Building 7 remained standing.
The debris from Tower 1 [...] started fires on at least 10 floors of the building. The fires burned out of control on six of these ten floors for about seven hours.It certainly would be. And the difficulty sprang from two sources.
The city water main had been cut by the collapse of the two WTC Towers, so the sprinklers in Building 7 did not function for much of the bottom half of the building. Nevertheless, other tall office buildings have burned for as long or longer in similar fires without collapsing—when sprinklers either did not exist or were not functional.
So we knew from the beginning of our study that understanding what happened to Building 7 on 9-11 would be difficult.
It did not fit any textbook description that you could readily point to and say, yes, that’s why the building failed.... except that it did. It fit a textbook description perfectly. But that description was not admissible.
In August of 2002—exactly six years ago today, with authority and funding from Congress, NIST started its building and fire safety investigation of all three World Trade Center building collapses. The study of Towers 1 and 2 was extremely complex, and as a result, we had to place our study of WTC 7 on hold. In September of 2005, with the study of the towers complete, we began the study of Building 7’s collapse in earnest.That's probably true. But it's clear that they had some powerful preconceived notions about what didn't happen!
We conducted our study with no preconceived notions about what happened.
We gathered evidence, we analyzed that evidence, we constructed computer models grounded in principles of physics and using detailed data on every aspect of the building’s construction, detailed information on its contents, videos and photos of the event, and witness accounts.All this evidence would have been carefully selected, to be sure.
President Medvedev of Russia yesterday promised a “shattering blow” against any foreign power that moved against Russian citizens.
“If someone thinks they can kill our citizens, kill soldiers and officers fulfilling the role of peacekeepers, we will never allow this,” Mr. Medvedev told a group of Second World War veterans in Kursk. “Anyone who tries to do this will receive a shattering blow.”
| Lost when they came home By Jerry Mazza Online Journal Associate Editor | Email this article Printer friendly page |
While the Bush administration is busy once again antagonizing Superpower Russia and inciting Georgia�s attack on South Ossetia, let us turn to some of the administration�s less flashy claims to fame: the shocking suicide rates of soldiers returning from Iraq, more than twice the number of US civilian suicides. The figure in 2005 alone ran at the rate of 120 suicides a week, according to CBS News, which described this tragedy as a Suicide Epidemic Among veterans.
The age group most severely affected is the 20- to 24-year-olds, a tender age in any locale, when a young man is wetting his feet in the tides of life let alone war. For those young men exposed to the violence of Iraq and the demands that were made on them (which too often seemed totally immoral), their suicides run at twice the rate of non-veteran suicides, between 22.9 and 31.9 percent per 100,000 as opposed to 8.3 percent per 100,000 of non-vet deaths.
Like the decent boys they were, they fulfilled their duties, obviously at an unbearable price. They returned with horrific memories of what they saw and had to do and with demons that just could not be shaken. In fact, they shied away from veterans organizations, believing the afflictions they had developed were unshakable.
One young man hanged himself with a double-looped rubber garden hose in the family garage. Another shot himself on Thanksgiving Day. Still another jumped off a bridge. All were in the prime of their lives. The stories in the linked study are heartbreaking, the video that accompanied it gone, removed, replaced by an ad for the United States Postal Service (rethinkyourshipping.com) and an ExxonMobile ad that boasts, �Taking on the world�s toughest energy challenge.� Right, we know all about that.
In a blog response, a reader begged that returning soldiers should be met immediately upon return by veterans� organizations and scheduled for psychological care. But it seems, once the Army has gotten its share of killing out of a soldier, it cannot extend itself to immediate help for these kids.
They are left to languish with the haunting nightmares. This is more than callous and unjust. It is still another disgrace for an administration suffering from dementia. Scarier is that the current Republican candidate, John McCain, who plans to continue these wars �for a hundred years� if necessary. It seems he learned nothing from his own bad dreams of
The McCain nightmare
As Wayne Madsen reported, the Navy recently released McCain�s military record after a FOIA request from the AP. Particularly bizarre were McCain�s antics on board the USS Forrestal in 1967. McCain was personally responsible for the deadliest fire in the history of the US Navy. That catastrophe, with 27 dead and over 100 wounded, leaves McCain�s record as a POW in
Madsen�s report also appeared in the June 8 Rock Creek Free Press. It said �McCain and the Forrestal�s Captain John K. Beling were warned about the danger of using M-65 1000-lb bombs manufactured in 1935 . . . deemed too dangerous to use during WW II and, later, on B-52 bombers.
�The fire from the Zuni missile misfire resulted in the heavy 1000 pound bombs being knocked loose from the pylons of McCain�s A-4 aircraft, which were only designed to hold 500-pound bombs. The unstable bombs had a 60-second �cook-off� threshold in a fire situation and this warning was known to both Beling and McCain prior to the disaster . . .
�McCain �wet-started� his A-4E to shake up the guy in the plane behind his . . . �Wet-starts,� done either deliberately or accidentally, shoot a large flame from the tail of the aircraft. McCain�s �wet-start� apparently �cooked-off� and launched the Zuni rocket from the rear F-4 that touched off the explosions and massive fire. The F-4 pilot was reportedly killed in that horror. . . .�
Yet, McCain�s father, Admiral John McCain, Jr., who was commander-in-chief of the US Naval Forces Europe (CINCUSNAVEUR), was tied up covering up details of the deadly, pre-meditated June 8, 1967, attack on the USS Liberty by the Israeli Air Force. The combined deaths that the father and son McCain were responsible for came to 168, with 234 injured.
So what is learned?
Given this sobering tale, what would we expect for returning and even active soldiers from a McCain presidency? What has the �100-year warrior, wet-starter� learned from his experience? And I might ask the same question of draft-dodging George Bush and Dick Cheney. They did not dodge the draft out of principle, either an anti-war or pacifist stance. They simply desired not to serve. Yet, these are the commanders in chief of our soldiers.
Bringing this back to those soldiers whom we are losing at home, what improvement in dealing with the alarming veteran suicide rate could we expect from these leaders? Very little I suspect. Yet the Bush administration continues to ask more and more of our fighting men and women, that is until the wheels fall completely off them and they�re left in a scrap pile. If that seems cruel to say, so too is it cruel to read those statistics and the comments of the families of the lost.
What�s more, beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush bellicosity threatens to attack Iran, this time with the help of Israel, which also had in hand in the training of Georgian soldiers, and sold massive amounts of arms to Georgia, as well. The usual suspects keep turning up hither and yon, the new nexus of nuttiness, the US, the UK, and Israel. Iran, of course, is being accused of developing its nuclear power for weapons of mass destruction (where have I heard that before?) while Israel�s 200 nuclear warheads are for what?
In addition, it has been reported by top Internet writers, like Madsen, Larry Chin, Mike Whitney, Karl Schwarz, Paul Craig Roberts and others, that the US and Israel had been stoking the Georgian leader to commit this stupid attack on South Ossetia. This has occurred just as the CIA has continued to stoke the flames 0f the Chechnyan �insurgency� to the northeast in Russia for years now. The ops are to create havoc and instability.
Therefore, you could easily end up with a NATO or American army facing down a Russian army in the bye and bye. And the bodies will keep coming home, dead or to die, charged by men who never faced a battlefield in their lives. And even the one that did, McCain, did more damage than good. Yet it is the sons and daughters of
Looking back to Vietnam
Finally, what these lost-at-home suicides bring to mind are those Buddhist monks of Vietnam who set themselves aflame to protest the conflagration around them. These are images that linger forever on the eye�s mind. Those monks� sacrifices are oddly reminiscent of our American suicides, giving their lives to awaken the conscience and anger of a sleeping befuddled Congress and citizenry, which ironically largely supports McCain on defense.
In my heart, I think those lost boys committed their last heroic act, horrific as it might seem, in trying to wake their country up to what is going on. The question is do we get the message, whether from a burning monk of 40 years ago or from a dangling corpse of a young man today, tossed aside like an old tire by the war makers safely ensconced in their bunkers in hell.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in Gothamist
Thursday, Aug 14, 2008
Watch your back, Dick Cheney! Actor Ed Asner, former Dallas Cowboy Mark Stepnoski, and formerly famous hip hop group Arrested Development are leading a petition drive to get a referendum on New York City’s November ballot that would establish a new 9/11 investigation. If the group, called 911 Truth, can collect 30,000 signatures before September 4th, the City Council will be required to consider the measure, which calls for an investigative panel with subpoena authority.
Former Senator Mike Gravel (who would join the panel along with former senator Lincoln Chafee, Asner and 9/11 widow Lorie Van Auken) tells NY Mag that “the original commission didn’t get to the bottom of anything. We need to investigate from scratch.” Among the “Top 40” reasons the group gives to doubt the official story of 9/11, from their website:
Word by word translation:
Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from).
Is this cause for a nuclear winter? Are there any sane minds in the military that can stop this insanity?
THE SPEECH AND CONTEXT:
While the false "wiped off the map" extract has been repeated infinitely without verification, Ahmadinejad's actual speech itself has been almost entirely ignored. Given the importance placed on the "map" comment, it would be sensible to present his words in their full context to get a fuller understanding of his position. In fact, by looking at the entire speech, there is a clear, logical trajectory leading up to his call for a "world without Zionism". One may disagree with his reasoning, but critical appraisals are infeasible without first knowing what that reasoning is.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad declares that Zionism is the West's apparatus of political oppression against Muslims. He says the "Zionist regime" was imposed on the Islamic world as a strategic bridgehead to ensure domination of the region and its assets. Palestine, he insists, is the frontline of the Islamic world's struggle with American hegemony, and its fate will have repercussions for the entire Middle East.
Ahmadinejad acknowledges that the removal of America's powerful grip on the region via the Zionists may seem unimaginable to some, but reminds the audience that, as Khomeini predicted, other seemingly invincible empires have disappeared and now only exist in history books. He then proceeds to list three such regimes that have collapsed, crumbled or vanished, all within the last 30 years:
(1) The Shah of Iran- the U.S. installed monarch
(2) The Soviet Union
(3) Iran's former arch-enemy, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein
In the first and third examples, Ahmadinejad prefaces their mention with Khomeini's own words foretelling that individual regime's demise. He concludes by referring to Khomeini's unfulfilled wish: "The Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time. This statement is very wise". This is the passage that has been isolated, twisted and distorted so famously. By measure of comparison, Ahmadinejad would seem to be calling for regime change, not war.
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