"We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity..
Derrick Jensen
http://www.derrickjensen.org/

WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT: GLOBAL DOMINATION
same strategy, new executors, slightly more seductive rhetoric

Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival'
NYT March 8, 1992
Excerpts from Pentagon Feb. 18 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for Fiscal Years 1994-1999: This Defense Planning guidance addresses the fundamentally new situation created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the internal as well as the external empire, and the discrediting of Communism as an ideology with global pretensions and influence. The new international environment has also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression -- the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in U.S. global leadership. In addition to these two victories, there has been a less visible one, the integration of Germany and Japan into a U.S.-led system of collective security and creation of a democratic "zone of peace."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1D7173AF93BA35750C0A...

Biden Says U.S. Will Pursue Missile Plan Russia Opposes
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/washington/08biden.html?hp
MUNICH — The United States will pursue a missile defense plan that has angered the Kremlin, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Saturday, in a signal that the post-cold-war tensions that have flared recently between Washington and Moscow could continue into the new Obama administration. Mr. Biden did not say whether the administration would move forward with a plan to place the system in Eastern Europe, which had been the core of recent tensions. He also offered conciliatory words, saying, “It is time to press the reset button, and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia.”...

The highly anticipated speech, seen as the first major outline of the new administration’s relations with the world, came just days after Kyrgyzstan’s president announced a decision to close a United States base there that is crucial to the war in Afghanistan, which Mr. Obama has made his biggest foreign policy priority. The announcement was made in Moscow, and many American officials concluded that the Russians had pressured Kyrgyzstan as part of their campaign to reassert control over former Soviet republics.... any chance for a rapprochement between the United States and Russia at this conference all but evaporated, foreign policy experts said, after the announcement on the Kyrgyz base. Mr. Obama plans to send as many as 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan over the next two years; shaky overland supply routes through Pakistan would make it difficult for the United States to adjust to the loss of the base, in Manas, Kyrgyzstan....

Mr. Biden rejected the notion of a Russian sphere of influence and said Mr. Obama would continue to press NATO to seek “deeper cooperation” with like-minded countries. “We will continue to develop missile defenses to counter a growing Iranian capability, provided the technology is proven and it is cost-effective,”...“For example, the United States will not recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states. We will not — will not — recognize any nation having a sphere of influence. It will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.”... "As America renews our emphasis on diplomacy, development, democracy and preserving our planet, we will ask our allies to rethink some of their own approaches - including their willingness to use force when all else fails."

Mr. Biden also talked about Iran, suggesting that the administration was both willing to be more conciliatory than Mr. Bush’s, but also was willing to continue his tough policies if necessary. “We are willing to talk to Iran,” Mr. Biden said, in a departure from the Bush administration. But Mr. Biden quickly tacked back to a refrain common during the last years of the Bush presidency, and spoke of offering Iran’s leader a choice: “Continue down your current course and there will be pressure and isolation; abandon the illicit nuclear program and your support for terrorism and there will be meaningful incentives.” ... Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, said ... “the old carrot and stick cliché”— the very strategy that Mr. Biden outlined— “must be discarded.”...

1996 A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
Policy blueprint for incoming Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu prepared by U.S. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000."

“We will not, in any way, negotiate with or recognize Hamas until they renounce violence, recognize Israel and agree to abide by the prior agreements entered into by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan - Rapid Reaction Force to Equal NATO
http://www.daily.pk/world/europe/9419-russia-armenia-belarus-kazakhstan-...
Friday, 06 February 2009
The collective rapid-reaction force to be created by a post-Soviet regional security bloc will be just as good as comparable NATO forces, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) agreed on Wednesday at a summit in Moscow to set up the new force, to be based in Russia.

The Perfect Storm
By Vladimir Putin
I just want to remind you that, just a year ago, American delegates speaking from this rostrum emphasised the US economy's fundamental stability and its cloudless prospects. Today, investment banks, the pride of Wall Street, have virtually ceased to exist. In just 12 months, they have posted losses exceeding the profits they made in the last 25 years. This example alone reflects the real situation better than any criticism. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21896.htm

hilarious hypocrisy
Idling Factories Keep the Kremlin Occupied
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/world/europe/02russia.html?ref=world&p...
The global economic crisis has reached so deeply into Russia that tens of thousands of workers in Ulyanovsk have been told to stay home, in what companies are calling an “administrative vacation” that many fear will turn into an outright dismissal. The troubles are by no means restricted to Ulyanovsk, a city of 625,000 in what has long been the heart of Russia’s automotive industry. They are symptomatic of a broader economic distress that has gripped once thriving provincial centers across Russia in recent weeks, and that could confront the Kremlin with the first major challenge to its authority since Vladimir V. Putin came to power in 2000... The looming question in Ulyanovsk and other regional capitals is whether other workers will follow suit if the economy worsens and they find themselves unemployed. For now, the streets are calm in Ulyanovsk, which is named after its most famous native, Lenin (Ulyanov was his family name). But the longer that assembly lines remain idle around Russia, the more likely that the country will face the kind of protests that have erupted elsewhere... Spurred by revenue from higher prices for oil and other natural resources, a strong economy in recent years sowed expectations among average people that they could aspire to a lifestyle long taken for granted in the West — decent apartments, nice consumer goods and travel abroad. The country, it seemed, had moved past the despair and disarray of the 1990s after Communism’s fall. But the recent collapse in the prices of oil and other commodities has walloped Russia, both financially and psychologically. The stock market has lost most of its value, the ruble has plunged and consumer demand has dropped sharply. Factories dependent on domestic sales have responded by halting production and slashing job rolls.
The federal government amassed $600 billion in reserves in the flush years, but it has been quickly draining that money to prop up the banking system, the ruble and failing industries. Now, $400 billion remains, and the reserve fund continues to shrink...
[a recent poll showed] Mr. Putin, the former president and current prime minister, and President Dmitri A. Medvedev retain broad popularity.... people credited the leadership for the robust economy of recent years, and were willing to give it a chance to contain the crisis. Some of this popularity, she said, stems from the government’s influence over the news media. The state-controlled television news regularly promotes official measures being adopted to address the crisis, while largely ignoring criticism of the authorities and often blaming the United States for the problems.

The Politics Of Bollocks
By John Pilger
Growing up in an Antipodean society proud of its rich variety of expletives, I never heard the word bollocks. It was only on arrival in England that I understood its majesterial power. All classes used it. Judges grunted it; an editor of the Daily Mirror used it as noun, adjective and verb. Certainly, the resonance of a double vowel saw off its closest American contender. It had authority.... There is a lot of bollocks about at the moment.... [the] Bollocks Blue Ribbon... honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.
On 23 January, the Guardian's front page declared, "Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' ". The "wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George Bush's war on terror", said the report, had been ordered by the new president who would be "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition...". The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday". Obama's orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony, "would restore America's moral standing in the world". What moral standing?...

Far from "deconstructing [sic] the war on terror", Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W. Bush's first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama's wars – with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism", 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.

Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network", Obama's executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, "current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role." A semantic sleight of hand is that "long term prisons" are changed to "short term prisons"; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America's numerous "covert actions" will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.

Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America's "secret army" of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama's nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh interrogation", which will be kept secret.

Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush's totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans' library and bookshop records. The man of "change", is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington....

On 28 January, a national Greenpeace advertisement opposing a third runway at London's Heathrow airport summed up the almost willful naivety that has obstructed informed analysis of the Obama administration. "Fortunately," declared Greenpeace beneath a God-like picture of Obama, "the White House has a new occupant, and he has asked us all to roll back the spectre of a warming planet." This was followed by Obama's rhetorical flourish about "putting off unpleasant decisions". In fact, Obama has made no commitment to curtail the America's infamous responsibility for the causes of global warming. As with Bush and most modern era presidents, it is oil, not stemming carbon emissions, that informs the new administration. Obama's national security adviser, General Jim Jones, a former NATO supreme commander, made his name planning US military control over the exploitation of oil and gas reserves from the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea to the Gulf of Guinea in Africa.

Sharing the Bollocks Runner-up Prize is the Observer, which on 25 January published a major news report headlined, "How Obama set the tone for a new US revolution". This was reminiscent of the Observer almost a dozen years ago when liberalism's other great white hope, Tony Blair, came to power. "Goodbye Xenophobia" was the Observer's post-election front page in 1997 and "The Foreign Office says Hello World, remember us". The government, said the breathless text, would push for "new worldwide rules on human rights and the environment" and implement "tough new limits" on arms sales. The opposite happened. Last year, Britain was the biggest arms dealer in the world; currently it is second only to the United States.

In the Blair mould, the Obama White House "sprang into action" with its "radical plans". The new president's first phone call was to that Palestinian quisling, the unelected and deeply unpopular Mohammed Abbas. There was a "hot pace" and a "new era", in which a notorious name from an ancien regime, Richard Holbrooke, was dispatched to Pakistan. In 1978, Holbrooke betrayed a promise to normalise relations with the Vietnamese on the eve of a vicious embargo that ruined the lives of countless Vietnamese children. Under Obama, the "sense of a new era abroad", declared the Observer, "was reinforced by the confirmation of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state". Clinton has threatened to "entirely obliterate Iran" on behalf of Israel.

What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power assembled under cover of America's first "post-racial president". Apart from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel, having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with impunity. On 10 February, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to put Binyamin Netanyahu into power. Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who has made clear his intention of attacking Iran. In the Wall Street Journal on 24 January, he described Iran as the "terrorist mother base" and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities". On 31 January, unaware he was being filmed, Israel's ambassador in Australia described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" - dress rehearsal - for an attack on Iran.

For Netanyahu, the reassuring news is that Obama's administration is the most Zionist in living memory – a truth that has struggled to be told from beneath the soggy layers of Obama-love. Not a single member of Obama's team demurred from Obama's support for Israel's barbaric actions in Gaza. Obama himself likened the safety of his two young daughters with that of Israeli children while making not a single reference to the thousands of Palestinian children killed with American weapons - a violation of both international and US law. He did, however, demand that the people of Gaza be denied "smuggled" small arms with which to defend themselves against the world's fourth largest military power. And he paid tribute to the Arab dictatorships, such as Egypt, which are bribed by the US Treasury to help the US and Israel enforce policies described by the United Nations Rapporteur, Richard Falk, a Jew, as "genocidal".

It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth. "In the time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act." www.johnpilger.com http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21912.htm

The role of the CIA's controversial prisoner-transfer program may expand, intelligence experts say.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21882.htm

US president allows short-term CIA sites
Officials say temporary facilities around the world can be used for number of reasons
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\01\29\story_29-1-2009_pg7_3
LAHORE: Amid praise for US President Barack Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, the Washington Times reported a loophole in the president’s executive order closing Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ‘black sites’ – a little-noticed exception allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad. According to the executive order, “The terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ in section 4(a) of this order do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”
Ken Gude at the Centre for American Progress said the temporary facilities operated by the CIA should not be confused with the Bush administration’s ‘black sites’.
[digest: and we 'should not be confused' about a 'clean break' from u.s. global bipartisan agenda: see CNAS, CAP's 'foreign policy' sister org, at
http://www.cnas.org and also documents at bottom of this page]

Panetta Open to Tougher Methods in Some C.I.A. Interrogation:
Leon E. Panetta, the White House pick to lead the Central Intelligence Agency left open the possibility the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the menu that President Obama authorized under new rules issued last month. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/us/politics/06cia.html?_r=1&partner=rs...

u.s.psywar propaganda pretext for more aggressive police state measures
CIA warns Barack Obama that British terrorists are the biggest threat to the US
American spy chiefs have told the President that the CIA has launched a vast spying operation in the UK to prevent a repeat of the 9/11 attacks being launched from Britain.
They believe that a British-born Pakistani extremist entering the US under the visa waiver programme is the most likely source of another terrorist spectacular on American soil.
A British intelligence source revealed that a staggering four out of 10 CIA operations designed to thwart direct attacks on the US are now conducted against targets in Britain.
And a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama told The Sunday Telegraph that the CIA has stepped up its efforts in the last month after the Mumbai massacre laid bare the threat from Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the attacks, which has an extensive web of supporters in the UK....

The CIA has already spent 18 months developing a network of agents in Britain to combat al-Qaeda, unprecedented in size within the borders of such a close ally, according to intelligence sources in both London and Washington. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who has advised Mr Obama, told The Sunday Telegraph: "The British Pakistani community is recognised as probably al-Qaeda's best mechanism for launching an attack against North America. "The American security establishment believes that danger continues and there's very intimate cooperation between our security services to monitor that." Mr Riedel, who served three presidents as a Middle East expert on the White House National Security Council, added: "President Obama's national security team are well aware that this is a serious threat."
The British official said: "The Americans run their own assets in the Pakistani community; they get their own intelligence. There's close cooperation with MI5 but they don't tell us the names of all their sources. "Around 40 per cent of CIA activity on homeland threats is now in the UK. This is quite unprecedented." ...

Sensitivities over the intelligence arrangement formed a key part of briefings given to Mr Obama, since they are central to what is often called "the most special part of the special relationship" and could complicate his dealings with Gordon Brown. Tensions in transatlantic intelligence relations which were laid bare last week during the High Court battle over Binyam Mohamed, the British resident held in Guanatanamo Bay. British judges wanted to publish details of the torture administered to Mr Mohamed, an Ethiopian national, in US custody. But key paragraphs were blacked out after American officials threatened it could damage intelligence sharing between the two countries. ..

On February 5, Channel 4 News documented the contents of confidential letters from the US State Department to the UK Foreign Office. One of the letters was dated August 21, 2008, and read, "The public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence information-gathering arrangements between our two countries". A further letter sent a week later said, "Ordering the disclosure of the US intelligence information now would have only the marginal effects of serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence sharing relationship, and thus the national security of the United Kingdom"...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/4...

Britain: Foreign Office colludes with US to cover-up torture of Binyam Mohamed
By Robert Stevens
February 07, 2009 "WSWS" -- A High Court ruling by two British judges regarding the torture of a Guantánamo detainee has unleashed a major political crisis.The judges have stated that they have been pressured by the United States into concealing evidence that should be made available in any country governed by the rule of law. This took the form of threats to withdraw security cooperation, instigated under the Bush administration and continued under Barak Obama's presidency.
Binyam Mohamed, 30, is currently in Guantánamo Bay but is reportedly being prepared for a return to the UK. He states that he was tortured by US agents in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004, and that Britain's security agencies were complicit.
Mohamed, an Ethiopian national resident in the UK for seven years, was arrested in Pakistan as he was about to board a flight to Britain in April 2002. Mohamed said that he had gone to Afghanistan to attempt to escape from and deal with a drug problem. He was accused by the United States of travelling to Afghanistan in May 2001 and attending "terror training camps"...

He became a victim of the US government's notorious policy of "extraordinary rendition" and was forcibly transferred from one country to another on three occasions, without reference to a court of law. He was questioned in Pakistan and subjected to torture there and in Morocco and Afghanistan. In Morocco he was subjected to prolonged torture for a period of 18 months. The American Civil Liberties Union website reports that "his interrogators routinely beat him, sometimes to the point of losing consciousness, and he suffered multiple broken bones. During one incident, Mohamed was cut 20 to 30 times on his genitals. On another occasion, a hot stinging liquid was poured into open wounds on his penis as he was being cut. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death. He was forced to listen to loud music day and night, placed in a room with open sewage for a month at a time and drugged repeatedly".

The Bagram Theater Internment Facility is a US detention facility located at an air base in Afghanistan. At Bagram, Mohamed was forced to write a 20-page statement that detailed his relationship with alleged terrorist Jose Padilla. Included in the document were details of how he and Padilla went to Afghanistan together, and how they planned to go to the United States to detonate a "dirty bomb". Mohamed has always maintained that these "confessions" were extracted on the basis of torture.

He was taken from Bagram on September 19, 2004, and moved to Guantánamo, where he has spent more than four years. Mohamed was charged under President Bush's military order and was told he would face trial by a military commission. In November 2005 he was charged with conspiracy on the basis of his confessions. Mohamedmade a statement denouncing the commission as illegitimate. Following a ruling by the US Supreme Court that the president lacked the constitutional authority to create military commissions, proceedings against Mohamed were halted. He could have faced the death penalty.

Mohamed's lawyer had said that all a trial by military commission would produce "is evidence not of terrorism, but of torture.... I have seen not one shred of evidence against him that was not tortured out of him. We know the British talked to Binyam [Mohamed] in Pakistan, told him he was to be rendered and gave information to the US that was used in his torture in Morocco".
Last July his lawyers filed a petition in a UK court declaring that the Foreign Office should be compelled to turn over the evidence of his abuse. In August the High Court concluded that the British security services had facilitated the original interrogation of Mohamed in Pakistan and that he was seen by British agents whilst in detention. The court established that British security service provided information about Mohamed and interrogation questions having full knowledge of the conditions of his detention and treatment....

The court stated that much of the case against Mohamed was believed to have been based on confessions made in Bagram between May and September 2004, and in Guantánamo Bay before November 2004. Judges ruled that the Foreign Office should disclose this material as "not only necessary but essential for his defence".
In August 2007, Foreign Secretary Miliband requested that the US government release Mohamed and four other UK residents at Guantánamo. The US released three of the men, but refused to release Mohamed and Saudi-born Shaker Aamer. In June last year the US military announced they were formally charging Mohamed. These charges were dropped in October.
In the United States, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has brought a case against a subsidiary of the Boeing Company, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the firm of aiding in rendition flights that carried Mohamed and others to torture. The case was dismissed in a San Francisco court last year after the Bush administration asserted its "state secrets privilege". An appeal to this decision is expected to come before the court next week.
Supporters of Mohamed in Britain have demanded that he is moved immediately from the maximum security prison Camp 5 in Guantánamo due to the risk to his mental and physical health. He is said to have smeared faeces over his cell walls and spent days in the cell with his water supply cut off. His lawyer states he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
The case of Binyam Mohamed reveals the extent to which basic democratic and legal norms have been overturned in the name of the "war on terror"... used as a pretext for waging illegal wars abroad and for attacking established constitutional rights at home.
It also demonstrates that while signing the order to close Guantánamo and promising to review the ongoing military trials, the Obama regime intends to preserve the essential elements of the "war on terror", including the suppression of evidence of torture and other nefarious activity. http://informationclearinghouse.info/article21926.htm

Key Bush Gitmo Advisers Still On Job At Pentagon overseeing how the Pentagon deals with terror captives.
http://kdka.com/national/guantanamo.bay.war.2.928013.html

Protection Racket: Obama Gets Tough to Shield Bush Torturers
Chris Floyd
How many times do you have to see it? How many times must it be shoved in your face, crammed down your throat, brought down on your head like a ton of bricks, before you get the picture? When it comes to the lineaments and methods of empire -- war, murder, torture, extortion, and deceit -- there is no difference, none whatsoever, between the hip, cool "progressives" in Team Obama and the gaggle of militarist goons who preceded them. The comely mask of the new regime was torn away -- once again -- in a scandal that exploded in Britain on Wednesday. With unprecedented harsh language, two of Britain's high court judges revealed that both Bush and Obama officials have strong-armed the British government to quash evidence of the torture of a UK resident held captive in the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. The judges said that the Bush-Obama officials threatened to stop sharing intelligence about terrorist threats against Britain unless the Brits played ball and stopped court hearings in the case of Binyam Mohamed...
Read the full article / Leggi l'articolo completo: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=51523

imperialist intel-propaganda thinktank explains...
OBAMA AND TREATMENT OF TERRORIST SUSPECTS
http://www.stratfor.com/?utm_source=TWeekly&utm_campaign=none&utm_medium...
U.S. President Barack Obama signed an executive order Feb. 1 approving the continued use of renditions by the CIA. The order seems to go against Obama’s campaign promises to improve the image of the United States abroad, as renditions under the Bush administration had drawn criticism worldwide, especially from members of the European Union. The executive order does not necessarily mean that renditions and other tactics for dealing with terrorist suspects will proceed unchanged, however....
Sometimes killing a terrorist target is both more efficient and less legally complex than renditions or ruse operations. Tactical strikes, such as the unmanned aerial vehicle-launched missile strikes against suspected al Qaeda targets in Pakistan, both remove a suspected terrorist target and avoid drawn-out legal processes. Like its predecessor, the Obama administration apparently sees striking at al Qaeda targets along the Pakistani-Afghan border as acceptable within the scope of the ongoing war in Afghanistan, despite Pakistani protests. The latest such U.S. strike came Jan. 23, just three days after Obama took office.[...]

Obama's New Rules: Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture
If you're lying on the slab still breathing, with your torturer hanging over you, you don't much care if he is an American or a mere United States - sponsored trainee. When President Obama declared flatly this week that "the United States will not torture" many people wrongly believed that he'd shut the practice down, when in fact he'd merely repositioned it. Obama's Executive Order bans some -- not all -- US officials from t orturing but it does not ban any of them, himself included, from sponsoring torture overseas. Indeed, his policy change affects only a slight percentage of US-culpable tortures and could be completely consistent with an increase in US-backed torture worldwide...
http://www.uruknet.de/?p=51233

Citing U.S., British Court Blocks Data on Suspect
A British court said it was unable to release information about a British terrorism suspect who says he was tortured in American custody, because of what the court called a threat from the United States....The court expressed dismay that a democracy “governed by the rule of law” would seek to suppress evidence “relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/world/europe/05london.html?th&emc=th

ON TOP OF 24/7 MAINSTREAM 'NEWS'
Pentagon Spends $4.7 billion On Propaganda:
the Pentagon is steadily and dramatically increasing what it calls "the human terrain" of world public opinion... raising concerns of spreading propaganda at home
http://www.2news.tv/news/national/39162862.html [for actual picture of "Information Warfare" see http://www.burbankdigest.com/node/69]

conventional u.s.-israeli state terrorism
US Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Operations Doctrine FM 3-05.201
(Wikileaks) 27 Jan 2009 https://secure.wikileaks.org/leak/us-fm3-05-201.pdf:
Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Operations is current US military doctrine on use of indigenous or surrogate forces to overthrow foreign governments, use of sabotage, 'black ops', subversion, intelligence, extra-territorial abductions and similar activities, including abductions ("The United States reserves the right to engage in nonconsensual abductions for three specific reasons...").

no 'clean breaks' with such state terror ops.
The Pentagon P20G Plan to Provoke Terrorist Attacks
According to a classified document prepared for Rumsfeld by his Defense Science Board, the new organization-the "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)"--will carry out secret missions designed to "stimulate reactions" among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to "counterattack" by U.S. forces... One way to invigorate U.S. intelligence would be to "Develop an entirely new capability to proactively, preemptively evoke responses from adversary/terrorist groups," according to the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory group.Such an approach would "improve [intelligence] information collection by stimulating reactions" from the target.... "highly specialized people with unique technical and intelligence skills such as information operations, PSYOP, network attack, covert activities, SIGINT, HUMINT, SOF, influence warfare/deception operations" could constitute a new, elite "Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG)," reporting to the National Security Council... The proposal is the latest sign of a new assertiveness by the Defense Department in intelligence matters, an indication the cutting edge of intelligence reform is not found in Congress but behind closed doors in the Pentagon. http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsbbrief.ppt

Bill Will Establish 'National Emergency Centers' On Military Installation
FEMA Camps Mandated in H.R. 645 22 Jan 2009
A Bill to direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to establish national emergency centers on military installations. SECTION 1. This Acmay be cited as the 'National Emergency Centers Establishment Act'.
SECTION 2. ESTABLISHMENT OF NATIONAL EMERGENCY CENTERS. (a) In
General - In accordance with the requirements of this Act, the
Secretary of Homeland Security shall establish not fewer than 6
national emergency centers on military installations... (b) Purpose
of National Emergency Centers... (3) to provide centralized locations
to improve the coordination of preparedness, response, and recovery
efforts of government, private, and not-for-profit entities and
faith-based organizations; and (4) to meet other appropriate needs,
as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security. [Start reading.]

Supreme Court affirms police right to stop-and-frisk searches
U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously to overturn an Arizona Court of Appeals opinion limiting the power of police to conduct physical searches of citizens during routine encounters.

James Bamford: The Spy Factory
Video - Includes Transcript
"it (NSA) also has turned its giant ear inward, listening in without warrant on thousands of American citizens, many on a government secret watch list, more than half-a-million names long."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21902.htm

queer terrorists
Police Listed Gay Rights Group Among Terrorists
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/annapolis/2009/01/equality_md_6pdf_equa...
Equality Maryland, the state's largest gay rights group, was among the peaceful protest groups to be classified as terrorists in a Maryland State Police database.The group was designated a "security threat" by the Homeland Security and Intelligence Division, which also kept dossiers on dozens of activists and at least a dozen groups....

STOP THE SUICIDAL STUPIDITY
The $8.5 TRILLION 'bailouts' so far are merely openers in the war against us, manipulation the crisis to strengthen major capitalists, screwing global 'main street' to death, in order to advance the same u.s. global hegemony agenda. WHY DO WE OBEDIENTLY, STUPIDLY ALLOW THE RULING THUGS TO BLEED US OF DIGNITY, HOPE AND A FUTURE? WHY SAVE THE MFs RESPONSIBLE FOR DESTRUCTION EVERYWHERE -- TO REPLAY THE SAME VICIOUS CYCLE? WE MUST WAKE UP TO REALITY: OBAMA IS NOT THE SOLUTION, HE IS THE FRIENDLY FACED IMPERIALIST EXECUTOR OF THIS WAR AGAINST US AND THE WORLDS' PEOPLES -- WHOSE RESISTANCE IS OUR ONLY HOPE.

Markets Up Sharply Despite [SIC] Report
It was the market's second day of advances in the face of news showing the economy falling deeper into recession.
As signs of Main Street’s suffering increased on Friday, Wall Street soared. A new government report showing that the United States economy had shed 598,000 jobs in January did not even break the stride of the financial markets. With financial shares leading the way, stocks rose across all sectors and investors watched for signs of action on a huge economic stimulus package and waited for the government to detail its latest plans to heal the banking system... Congress appears to be making progress toward passing an economic stimulus package, and the Senate was expected to vote on the measure on Friday. And Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is expected to announce details next week on a plan to help relieve banks of billions in troubled assets weighing down their balance sheets...“We’re seeing money flow into areas entailing more risk. There’s fear out there, but I think it’s increasingly being mitigated by the sense that there’s money to be made.”http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/business/07markets.html?8au&emc=au

'Too big To fail': bailout hoax
01 FEBRUARY 2009
http://www.daily.pk/world/americas.html
How schemes to rescue Wall Street gamblers are prolonging this recession
Auction-off Insolvent Banks’ Assets, Not Owner-Occupied Homes
Using the “too big to fail” scare tactic, the U.S. government has kept a number of terminally ill Wall Street gamblers on an expensive life-support system estimated to cost taxpayers $8.5 trillion [1]. In light of the fact that (according to IRS Data Book) there were 138 million taxpayers in 2007, this figure represents a burden of $61,594.20 per tax payer. Or, to put it differently, it represents a burden of $28,333.33 per man, woman and child for the entire US population.

Obama CIA choice nets $700,000 from rescued banks
Christine Seib in New York
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/banking_...
President Barack Obama's nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was paid more than $700,000 last year by businesses including struggling US banks bailed out by billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. The revelations about Leon Panetta's finances highlight the difficulty the new administration faces finding experienced advisers that do not violate the President's ban on hiring lobbyists. It is also another embarrassment for President Obama after two Cabinet nominees, Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer, withdrew this week because of disclosures that they had failed to pay federal taxes.... http://informationclearinghouse.info/article21914.htm

Casey Research, Vermont analyzed the costs of the government bailouts... and concluded the total is $8.5 trillion, more than the cost of all US wars, the Louisiana Purchase, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan and the NASA Space Program combined. According to CRS, the Congressional Research Service, all major US wars (including... the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the invasion of Panama, the Kosovo War and numerous other small conflicts), cost a total of $7.5 trillion in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars. http://www.inteldaily.com/news/139/ARTICLE/9485/2009-01-30.html http://www.rockcreekfreepress.com/

OBAMA'S JOB: WIN 'PEACEFUL' SUPPORT FOR U.S. POLITICAL-ECONOMIC-MILITARY WARS TO SAVE U.S. GLOBAL HEGEMONY
FAKE “OBASMS” ABOUND WHILE U.S. PRESIDENT 'TRIES TO STIMULATE THE ECONOMY'
MNN. Feb. 5, 2009. U.S. President Obama says he’s going to stimulate the Americans’ economy to stop its dive to oblivion. They’re looking to him for “obasms” because they don’t know how to save summer’s abundance to get them through the winter...The ground under the feet of emperor Obama is shaking. If he wants to get more money to the people, he should get rid of this meat grinding slaughterhouse. These plunderers who were sent to Turtle Island by the European elite came here to kill us off so they could steal everything that wasn’t nailed down. 115 million of us were killed off. The elite who run these systems have to change or adapt to the new reality, and not just by getting rid of their babysitter, cleaning lady, chauffer or maid. The conditions they have created are critical everywhere. The mobs are getting hysterical. People are resisting and reacting worldwide. ... The thieves have been putting up our land and resources, without our knowledge or permission, as collateral on another parasite, the stock exchange. We never surrendered our land or resources to anyone. This form of raising money from the public is fraud. This toilet paper system of currency went along until we Indigenous people started to resist. We are the caretakers, trustees, protectors and defenders of the earth. Our responsibility is to help achieve balance within the natural world. Our duty is to stop the depletion of our resources which is killing everything and everybody. We, the stewards of mother earth, have spoken. Karakwine & Staff, MNN Mohawk Nation News www.mohawknationnews.com katenies20@yahoo.com

Obama’s calculated 'anger' over Wall Street bonuses
Tom Eley
On Thursday, President Obama publicly criticized Wall Street bankers who awarded themselves more than $18 billion in annual bonuses even as their banks collapsed, driving the US and world economy into the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Obama called the bonuses, which came to light in a Wednesday New York Times article, "shameful." Though there was a sharp decline in the bonuses from the last three years, when year-end bonuses ranged between $28 billion and $37 billion, this year's haul was still the sixth-largest on record. Obama's remarks were a carefully calculated and scripted affair...: http://www.uruknet.de/?p=51416

'Plenty of wiggle room' in new limits on executive pay
AP
NEW YORK -- The squeeze on big paydays for executives of bailed-out banks will probably leave Wall Street plenty of wiggle room.
Consultants on executive pay say the caps imposed by President Barack Obama on Wednesday will probably apply only to a few executives -- not star traders, brokers and salespeople who routinely earn whopping pay packages. Others note that Wall Street typically finds ways to exploit loopholes and figure this time will be no different.

Obama caps executive pay tied to bailout money
The compensation cap covers distressed companies seeking special bailouts but would not apply retroactively to those that already have received them... consultants on executive pay say the cap will apply only to a few executives -- not big-time traders, brokers and salespeople who routinely earn whopping pay packages. And there are sure to be efforts to exploit loopholes as the new rules start to take hold. Had the salary cap been in place when the $700 billion bailout program began, it probably would have applied only to executives at five companies that have received so-called exceptional help: Chrysler LLC, General Motors Corp., American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. Going forward, the compensation cap also would apply to other banks that receive more broadly available aid -- but they could get around it by disclosing their plans and involving shareholders in the decision. Some 360 companies have received such aid. The cap does not apply to them retroactively, either. By taking on executive pay and other corporate spending -- including lofty severance packages -- Obama sought to get his White House back on track with an issue that resonates with the public....
The new treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner -- confirmed last week despite his own tax problems -- said the raft of new policies is intended to restore the public's trust. "There is a deep sense across this country that those who were not responsible for this crisis are bearing a greater burden than those who were," he said announcing the details with Obama.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/398721_executivepay05.html

Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake as the Obama administration prepares its strategy to rescue the nation's banks again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/business/economy/02value.html?th&emc=t...

Banks Overpaid Billions
When Washington was buying pieces of banks last year, it may have overpaid, by as much as 30 percent [SIC]. A regulator overseeing the government’s $700 billion bailout testified Thursday that the Treasury Department paid $254 billion for $176 billion of assets — a shortfall of $76 billion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/business/economy/06tarp.html?hp

Despite soaring unemployment, the number of people receiving cash assistance remains at or near the lowest in more than 40 years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/us/02welfare.html?th&emc=th

VIDEO: Jobless rate is a full l0 percent higher than the government is reporting according to http://www.shadowstats.com/
http://www.c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-A-14748

Complaints on rise of nursing homes forcing out residents
Vanessa Ho, Seattle PI, 2/7/9
As health care costs rise and Medicaid rates lag behind, nursing and boarding homes are forcing out sick, elderly and frail residents in what advocates say is a growing trend. No official data exist on eviction counts, but discharge complaints have climbed to record highs.The Washington Long-Term Care Ombudsman program handled more than 700 such complaints last year, nearly a 50 percent increase over the year before. Nationally, discharge-related complaints have more than doubled in a decade -- to 12,000 in 2007, according to the U.S. Administration on Aging... "When (homes) can find an opportunity to discharge the person, they will. The problem is especially hard with nursing homes, where else are they going to go? It's the end of the line."
The results are often tragic. Homes can legally evict a resident who fails to pay, becomes dangerous or has needs a home can't meet. Boarding homes can evict Medicaid residents by slashing public-assistance beds...federal law bars nursing homes from kicking out residents solely because of Medicaid....but advocates say many homes find ways to bend the laws. They mislead families to lure in residents, and use the broad "can't meet needs" reason to force out difficult or expensive residents. One of the most common types of eviction is when homes send a resident to the hospital and refuse to take him back, in a practice that resident advocates call "dumping.""We have a lot of experiences with nursing homes who load somebody up in an ambulance on a Friday night. ... They do it on a Friday, I think, because advocates go home," said Vicki Elting, the regional ombudsman in King County. By Monday morning, hospitals are struggling with a discharged patient with nowhere to go... dumping rarely occurs to private-pay people, but to Medicaid residents

cover-up show hearings
At Madoff Hearing, Lawmakers Lay Into S.E.C.
Harry Markopolos, a private fraud investigator from Boston, detailed persistent but futile efforts to spur the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Bernard L. Madoff, going back to 1999. Mr. Madoff was arrested in December and charged with running a giant Ponzi scheme — the very accusation Mr. Markopolos said he made repeatedly to S.E.C. employees in Boston and New York to no avail. Lawmakers spent the rest of the hearing in a heated dialogue with senior S.E.C. staff members...suggesting the agency was the problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/business/05madoff.html?ref=us

JPMorgan Exited Madoff-Linked Funds Last Fall
JPMorgan Chase says that its potential losses related to Bernard L. Madoff, the man accused of engineering an immense global Ponzi scheme, are “pretty close to zero.” But what some angry European investors want to know is when the bank cut its exposure to Mr. Madoff — and why. As early as 2006, the bank had started offering investors a way to leverage their bets on the future performance of two hedge funds that invested with Mr. Madoff. To protect itself from the resulting risk, the bank put $250 million of its own money into those funds. But the bank suddenly began pulling its millions out of those funds in early autumn, months before Mr. Madoff was arrested, according to accounts from Europe and New York that were subsequently confirmed by the bank. The bank did not notify investors of its move ...it protected itself but left them holding notes that the bank itself now says are probably worthless....
If the bank had withdrawn almost $250 million directly from Mr. Madoff’s firm, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the bank would be subject to federal bankruptcy rules that give the court-appointed trustee leeway to recover money paid out over the previous year and use it to repay creditors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/business/29madoff.html?th&emc=th

New Plan to Help Banks Sell Bad Assets
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/07/business/economy/07bailout.html?_r=1&t...
WASHINGTON — After weeks of internal debate, the Obama administration has settled on a plan to inject billions of dollars in fresh capital into banks and entice investors to purchase their most troubled assets. The new financial industry rescue plan, to be outlined in broad terms on Monday in a speech by the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, will not require banks to increase their lending. That is despite criticism that institutions that already received money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, either hoarded it or used the funds to acquire other banks.
The incentives to investors could be in the form of commitments to absorb some of the losses from any assets they purchase, should their values continue to decline. The goal is to relieve the banks of their worst assets so that private investors might then provide more capital.
Officials hope that that part of the plan is not labeled a “bad bank” administered by the government, although they expect that some might call it that.
No matter what it is called, the government would assume some of the risk of declining assets at the heart of the economic crisis. But by relying on a combination of private investors and government guarantees, the administration hopes to reduce its exposure to losses and avoid the problem of having to place a value on assets that the institutions have been unable to sell....
A central element of the plan would be a major expansion of a lending facility begun in November by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York when it was headed by Mr. Geithner. The program, which was initially financed by $200 billion in Fed money and $20 billion in seed capital from the $700 billion bailout fund, lent money to investors to buy securities backed by student, auto and credit card loans, as well as loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration....as the White House has put forward a stimulus package of about $800 billion, there is recognition that Congress will very likely balk now at another request for bailout money.But lawmakers said they expected the administration to seek more money for the rescue program later this year...
Lawmakers said they were told that Mr. Geithner would not spell out the details of much of the program next week, including how the government would use more than $50 billion from that program to help homeowners facing foreclosure....
Although critics have blamed the administration of George W. Bush for mismanaging the TARP fund by not pressing the banks receiving assistance to increase their lending, the new round of capital injections is not expected to come with government demands that the institutions provide more loans...

Obama’s Crusade to Save the Banksters
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
The quickening spiral of economic decline finds Black America utterly without political or psychological defenses — damn near helpless, and pitifully so. Although it is common to hear Blacks half-joke that "white folks" waited until the system was in meltdown to hand over the White House keys to a "brother", it is Barack Obama who has pulled off history’s biggest trick on African Americans. Obama caused Black America to drop its primary defense — a deep and abiding suspicion of the intentions of Power — at precisely the historical juncture when suspicion is most needed. As Constitutional power flowed into Obama’s person on January 20, African Americans in their forty millions willed themselves to believe they had "overcome", when, in reality, they had been overcome by the delusion that the new president did not represent the Power that was never to be trusted, always to be resisted.... Barack Obama who has pulled off history’s biggest trick on African Americans. Obama caused Black America to drop its primary defense — a deep and abiding suspicion of the intentions of Power — at precisely the historical juncture when suspicion is most needed. As Constitutional power flowed into Obama’s person on January 20, African Americans in their forty millions willed themselves to believe they had "overcome", when, in reality, they had been overcome by the delusion that the new president did not represent the Power that was never to be trusted, always to be resisted. No, he was a walking, talking treasure to be protected by the group as a whole, the repository of ancient Black hopes and the living proof of change.

Most literate Black people are familiar with Frederick Douglass’s maxim, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." But Black Obamites cannot conceive of making demands on "their" president, whom many believe is literally a God-send. Who would even think to make demands of an emissary from Jesus? Religion, that vaunted "rock" of Black society, once again knocks us senseless.
Shorn of defenses and politically neutered, Blacks become befuddled spectators to Obama’s version of economic "recovery" — a desperate effort to resurrect from near-death the investment bankster class that ultimately made like Richard Pryor and, driven by its accumulated contradictions, set itself on fire. Obama must also fulfill his obligations to American Empire, which sustained through threat and force of arms the artificial, unjust U.S. global advantages that allowed the Wall Street banksters to believe they could forever feast on the world’s sweat and resources while producing nothing themselves.
Between the multi-trillion dollar pincers of an addicted military and the limitless cost of detoxifying a universe of derivative, fictional assets, the real economy and those that depend on it will be squeezed beyond endurance....
Those wishful souls that convinced themselves Obama would become the vessel in which to pour progressive ideas and programs in time of economic crisis, did not give him credit for having notions of his own — ideas that would sacrifice the people for the benefit of the banksters. Obama pursues his bankster rescue crusade in plain sight, yet white "progressive" supporters insist he’s up to something else, and Black Obamites avow he’s doing the work of God.
Not quite. More like the work of Goldman Sachs, in hopes it will rise again.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.comThis e-mail address is protected from spam bots, JavaScript needed to view it .

The man President Obama nominated to become the No. 2 manager at the Pentagon isn't the first person for that job to come from the defense industry. But Mr. Obama's own executive order on ethics has now become a stumbling block as the White House seeks to push the former lobbyist through confirmation.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0204/p02s01-usgn.html

'BANNED' LOBBYISTS
Recently, reviewing lobbying disclosure reports, the Washington Times discovered "that 18 of the top 20 recipients of federal bailout money spent a combined $12.2 million lobbying the White House, the Treasury Department, Congress, and federal agencies during the last quarter of 2008." Citibank alone, according to the New York Times, fielded "an army of Washington lobbyists," plunking down $1.77 million in lobbying fees just in the fourth quarter of last year.
And it isn't only sinking financial institutions begging for federal dollars that have bolstered their Washington lobbying corps. So have the biggest U.S. armaments companies -- "drastically," according to reporter August Cole of the Wall Street Journal. In 2008, he found, Northrop Grumman almost doubled its lobbying budget to $20.6 million (from $10.9 million the previous year); Boeing upped its budget from $10.6 million to $16.6 million in the same period; and Lockheed-Martin, the company that received the most contracts from the Pentagon last year, hiked its lobbying efforts by a whopping 54% in 2008. ... http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21897.htm
By Tom Engelhardt February 03, 2009 "Tom Dispatch"

RACIST POLITICAL WAR ON IMMIGRANTS -- ALSO A MAJOR INDUSTRY
...Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering. Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.

The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration...In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested...Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry... part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom...

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported. “I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.” ...
Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse. After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.... hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest. Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago... city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”... The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work... The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were... the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them. “Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants. He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing...
Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain...
despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death... Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana....
The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, now sweeping up... foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls.... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27detain.html?pagewanted=all
A Growing Detention NetworkInteractive Map showing facilities where people detained on suspicion of immigration violations are held.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/12/26/us/1227_DETAIN.html?ref=us

obama silently complicit on this horrendous racist oppression
Arpaio’s America
editorial
It has come to this: In Phoenix on Wednesday, more than 200 men in shackles and prison stripes were marched under armed guard past a gantlet of TV cameras to a tent prison encircled by an electric fence. They were inmates being sent to await deportation in a new immigrant detention camp minutes from the center of America’s fifth-largest city.
The judge, jury and exhibitioner of this degrading spectacle was the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, the publicity-obsessed star of a Fox reality show and the self-appointed scourge of illegal immigrants. Though he frequently and proudly insists that he answers to no one, except at election time, the sheriff is not an isolated rogue. As a participant in the federal policing program called 287(g), he is an official partner of the United States government in its warped crackdown on illegal immigration....
Border Patrol agents in California accused supervisors of setting arrest quotas for undocumented immigrants, and a recent Migration Policy Institute study showed that a much-touted campaign of raids against criminal fugitives...netted mostly the maids and laborers who are no reasonable person’s idea of a national threat.
The burden of action is particularly high on Ms. Napolitano, who as Arizona’s governor handled Sheriff Arpaio with a gingerly caution that looked to some of his critics and victims as calculated ... Ms. Napolitano, known as a serious and moderate voice on immigration, recently directed her agency to review its enforcement efforts, including looking at ways to expand the 287(g) program. Sheriff Arpaio is a powerful argument for doing just the opposite.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/opinion/06fri2.html?th&emc=th

UNJUST INCARCERATION: CENTRAL TO GENOCIDE AGAINST THE BLACK NATION
Science Found Wanting in Nation’s Crime Labs
Forensic evidence is often the product of shoddy scientific practices that should be upgraded, a report found... Forensics, which developed within law enforcement institutions — and have been mythologized on television shows from “Quincy, M.E.” to “CSI: Miami” — suffers from a lack of independence, the report found... In an effort to mitigate law enforcement opposition to the report, which has already delayed its publication, the draft focuses on scientific shortcomings and policy changes that could improve forensics. It is largely silent on strictly legal issues to avoid overstepping its bounds... Donald Kennedy, a Stanford scientist who helped select the report’s authors, said federal law enforcement agencies resented “intervention” of mainstream science — especially the National Academy — in the courts. He said the National Institute of Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, tried to derail the forensic study by refusing to finance it and demanding to review the findings before publication.... Mr. Shelby also accused the National Institute of Justice of trying to infiltrate the forensic study panel with lobbyists for private DNA analysis companies, who were seeking to limit the research to DNA studies...
Peter J. Neufeld, a co-director of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit group that uses DNA evidence to exonerate the wrongfully convicted, presented to the academy a study of trial transcripts of 137 convictions that were overturned by DNA evidence and found that 60 percent included false or misleading statements regarding blood, hair, bite mark, shoe print, soil, fiber and fingerprint analyses... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/us/05forensics.html?ref=us

celebrate and propagate--Manuel Garcia said:
February 12 is Darwin Day, the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary (actually 22 Nov) of the publication of The Origin Of Species. Hundreds of events are planned around the world. Good day for an Atheists Parade (can you imagine?, like an alternative Rose Bowl Parade!).
There is a Grandeur in This View of Life
Darwin's Living Legacy
By MANUEL GARCIA, Jr.
This February 12th is the bicentennial birthday of one of the greatest minds in history. This man's inquisitive nature, generous spirit, strong character and hatred of slavery led him to ideas that jolted the society of his times, led to protracted conflict, and caused a seismic shift in how civilized society thought of human beings and life itself.
Darwin Day 2009 is a celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin Of Species. Darwin Day in any year is always a celebration of the many triumphs of the human mind over backwardness, ignorance and superstition. Many Darwin Day events are planned around the world.... Life is evolution, it is a continuum of variation in harmony with the history of the geo-physical environment. Natural selection produces the good of adaptation without requiring an assumed Malthusian Omnipotentate whose "intelligent design" requires mass die-offs by starvation, and such individual agonies as that of a caterpillar paralyzed by an ichneumon wasp as live food for its eggs. What is most admirable about Darwin was that his objections to the Malthusian Omnipotentate are both intellectual -- scientific and logical -- and also compassionate. Why believe in a cruel god?...

Mind and Freedom
The unknown and the unknowable are united anthropomorphically in the human imagination, and called God. As we evolve, God recedes. Our projections of fear, desire and anxiety onto the opacity of the unknown are reflected back to us as the mirages God, heaven and hell. These phantasms fade as we learn more about the nature we are a part of, by using our brains for rational and scientific thought. This enlarges our experience of freedom and our human potential. Darwin's comment on religion stunting the mental development of children is chilling ("...the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps as inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed..."). Indeed, religious fundamentalism is a mental illness, and a great deal of religious training is mass child abuse. All gods are human inventions, and their societies of mind-limiting veneration are cults. Church is cult politics. Because all religions are cults of mass participation, the Hitler Youth and the Stalin Cult were religions. As long as we have temporal potentates on this planet there will be efforts to deify them, and to expand their cults into religions that seek to devour their rivals. This is the "clash of civilizations" debilitating the Judeo-Christian West and eroding the Islamic East. These psycho-viral infections of collective consciousness evolve resistantly over the course of human history, and we can only hope they all soon fall extinct before the evolution of the human mind.
http://www.counterpunch.org/garcia02062009.html

CEMENTING STATE & RELIGION
Obama Calls for Expansion of Bush Faith Program
In an appearance before the National Prayer Breakfast, a few hours before he was set to sign an executive order in the Oval Office to create the newly-revamped faith-based office created in the Bush administration. The executive order will call for a legal review of the office, aides said, before the president decides whether religious groups receiving federal money for social services can hire only those who share their faith. The Bush administration said yes. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama said no.... Mr. Obama has signaled his intention to expand upon – and, in some cases, adjust – the faith-based practices from the Bush administration. The office will not only oversee the distribution of grants to religious and community groups, but will also look for other ways to involve those groups in working on pressing social problems.... http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/05/obama-calls-for-expansion-...

Barack Obama announces new Office of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships
Agence France-Presse February 06, 2009
...The new Office of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships is expected to advise the new president on domestic and foreign policy issues and to forge links with faith-based organisations overseas... Mr Obama was set to sign an executive order in the Oval Office formally forming the advisory council later today.... Critics complained that former president George W. Bush improperly entwined the federal government with his own deeply held religious faith, threatening the separation of church and state enshrined in the constitution. Mr Bush's office of faith-based initiatives was set up to help religious and community groups carry out social projects with federal government funds....
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,25015510-401,00.html?from=public_rs...

distinction without difference: finance capital rules in u.s. dominated late-stage 'globalized' era of capitalism -- aka imperialism
The results of the two surveys showed a rising doubt about the world’s economic system, a fact that troubled many of those who gathered here. Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, said in a session, on “the values behind market capitalism,” he had run into an old friend who told him: “See, I told you. Capitalism is going to end.” Mr. Blair said that was wrong. “The free enterprise system has not failed,” he said. “The financial system has failed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/31/business/economy/31charts.html?8au&emc...

"SWAT police, armed with riot control weapons, automatic rifles, armored for a terrorist response storm family food cooperative in Ohio."
Agents from the State of Ohio Department of Agriculture with the S.W.A.T. team did not give any explanation to the family other than a warrant, did not provide them a phone call, did not charge the family with anything as they burst into their private home. But what they did do was make a big mess, taking over ten thousand dollars of merchandise with them, reported the IVN Bureau Chief...."http://homesteadingthebackforty.blogspot.com/2008/12/manna-storehouse-raid-is-this-true.html

national police state stimulus
Stimulus Plan Has $1 Billion to Hire More Local Police
President Obama's current proposal would pay their full salaries...The stimulus package also includes about $2.6 billion for other law enforcement needs
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/us/politics/06cops.html?th&emc=th

AF Gen.Victor Renuart, Pentagon homeland security commander, says the collection of biometric data U.S. military uses to combat insurgents [SIC] in Iraq ---- is needed here in U.S. http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/biometrics-need.html

u.s. preparations: obama pacification program plus fascist infrastructure and Northcom deployments in the 'homeland'
European Governments are trembling. Revolt is in the air.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/jan/31/global-recession-europe-p...
...France's trade-unions call on workers to strike all over the country. France paralysed by a wave of strike action, the boulevards of Paris resembling a debris-strewn battlefield. The Hungarian currency sinks to its lowest level ever against the euro, as the unemployment figure rises. Greek farmers block the road into Bulgaria in protest at low prices for their produce. New figures from the biggest bank in the Baltic show that the three post-Soviet states there face the biggest recessions in Europe.... a snapshot of a single day – yesterday – in a Europe sinking into the bleakest of times. But while the outlook may be dark in the big wealthy democracies of western Europe, it is in the young, poor, vulnerable states of central and eastern Europe that the trauma of crash, slump and meltdown looks graver. Exactly 20 years ago... they ditched communism to put their faith in a capitalism now in crisis and by which they feel betrayed. The result has been the biggest protests across the former communist bloc since the days of people power....

OBAMA HIRED TO KEEP THE PEACE FOR IMPERIALISM
The Whole World Is Rioting as the Economic Crisis Worsens -- Why Aren't We?:
The Telegraph (UK) warned last month that protests over governments' handling of the crisis "are widespread and gathering pace," and "may spark a new revolution":
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/124836

OWNING THE WORLD & OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON OUR PATRIOTIC POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, MILITARY SUPPORT

IRAQ
surprise
CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, supported by Defence Secretary Robert Gates, tried to convince President Barack Obama that he had to back down from his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq within 18 months at an Oval Office meeting Jan. 21.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21884.htm

'disillusioned' by u.s. domination- by- nation-destruction, puppet govt., rigged military-locked-down elections 'democracy'
Low turnout in Iraq's election reflects a disillusioned nation
McClatchy Newspapers
Voter turnout in Iraq's provincial elections was the lowest in the nation's short history as a new democracy despite relative calm across the nation. Only about 7.5 million of more than 14 million registered voters went to the polls. Interviews suggest that the low voter turnout also is an indication of Iraqi disenchantment with a democracy that, so far, has brought them very little...

as the digest has reported, the 'anti-american' Sadr is a u.s. agent
Reports of a Sadr/Maliki deal
There are now at least two reports, independent of one another, about a deal between Maliki and the Sadrists involving an alliance in one or more provincial councils.. January 30, the Sadrist-affiliated newssite Nahrainnet said "a high-level person in the Council of Ministers" told them Prime Minister Maliki decided to issue an order for the release of a number of high-ranking Sadrists, from Bucca prison in Basra, and that this was to be carried out within 24 hours "unless the Americans had objections for security or political reasons"... political sources in Najaf spoke about "an agreement in principle between "Nation of Laws" [Maliki] and "Independent Liberation" [Sadrist] for an alliance in the coming provincial council. http://arablinks.blogspot.com/2009/02/reports-of-sadrmaliki-local-counci...

imperialist sovereignty rules
The State Department has a contract for "worldwide personal protective services" with three firms: Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy. If Blackwater is no longer allowed to operate in Iraq, a lawyer steeped in the field tells Danger Room, there's no legal reason why the other two firms can't scoop up Blackwater's employees. "State simply issues a new task order to DynCorp or Triple Canopy, who turn around and hire some or all of Blackwater's employees," he says. Which could prove to be more than a little problematic. More than any other private military firm in Iraq, Blackwater had a reputation for recklessness and violence...the drunken Blackwater contractor, who killed a bodyguard of Iraq's vice president on Christmas Eve, 2007....or the car full of people a Blackwater detail ran off the road, in September 2006. Or the Nisour Square shooting that left 17 dead, in September 2007.... why would the State Department do such a thing?... "Blackwater is the State Department's Frankenstein of diplomatic security," Licensed to Kill author Robert Young Pelton tells Danger Room. http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/01/blackwater-bann.html

"ISRAEL"
in case you missed this...
Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israeli State
By Joshua Holland
...Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich. This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds....
If Judaism is a religion, rather than "a people" descended from a dispersed nation, then it brings into question the central justification for the state of Israel remaining a "Jewish state."
And that brings us to Zand's second assertion. He argues that the story of the Jewish nation -- the transformation of the Jewish people from a group with a shared cultural identity and religious faith into a vanquished "people" -- was a relatively recent invention, hatched in the 19th century by Zionist scholars and advanced by the Israeli academic establishment. It was, argues Zand, an intellectual conspiracy of sorts. Segev says, "It's all fiction and myth that served as an excuse for the establishment of the State of Israel."...
That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the US this year by Verso.[...]http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21904.htm

Netanyahu: Gaza offensive stopped too soon
JERUSALEM (AP) — The front-runner for Israel's election next week said Israel's offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza last month did not go far enough....He also called for removing Hamas from power, calling it an "extremist fanatic regime backed by the extremist fanatic government of Iran."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hcX49mNGhMPjANq3C-wSH8...

Israel threatens to kill Hamas leader:
Housing and Construction Minister Ze'ev Boim said Wednesday that the next step in operations against Hamas, the democratically-elected ruler of the Gaza Strip, must be aimed at assassinating Prime Minister Ismail Haniya. http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=84613&sectionid=351020202

AFRICA

What's needed is an African anti-imperialist analysis for the 21st century
A Message to the African Political Scientist (excerpt)
04 February 2009
by Benjamin Woods
...Young Africans in America require exposure to genuine Black political scientists, the kind that will "articulate an African worldview that is distinct from their colonizers." What's needed is "an African anti-imperialist analysis for the 21st century" in order to rebuild the African Freedom Movement. Barack Obama's foreign policy is "a continuation of western imperialism." Blind faith Obama-ism is a destructive force. "The acceptance of the colonizers worldview impedes Africans ability to think and act independently."...

Obama stated that one of his greatest inspirations is Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is difficult to believe, as a lawyer, he did not know that in the 1930's when Africans were being lynched at a rate of every other day, FDR said and did virtually nothing. It is imperative that African political scientists not succumb to the blind faith Obama-ism that is prevalent among a large number of Africans but, instead, examine his cabinet appointments and foreign and domestic policy.

Obama's foreign policy is a continuation of western imperialism. He supports the Department of Defense's new Africa command (AFRICOM). Fifty-three African states (excluding Liberia) have stated they do not want AFRICOM based in their countries. They view AFRICOM as an attempt by the U.S. empire to re-colonize the African continent in order to control its mineral resources, particularly oil.

In addition, Obama supports the redeployment of up to 30,000 troops to the war in Afghanistan. A year after the invasion of Afghanistan the newly U.S.-installed president signed a deal to build an oil pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Many Afghans and Pakistani people believe the real reason for the war is, not the so-called War on Terror, but to protect the new oil pipeline. Finally, Obama condemned the attacks on Mumbai, India in December but was silent when in a span of three weeks the Zionist regime that occupies Palestine killed over 1,300 Palestinians and injured over 5,000. This is because Obama has made more promises to the Zionist regime than the land of his father, Kenya, a neo-colonial state.

His domestic policy maintains the same colonial relationship between the U.S. empire and Africans in the U.S. During the course of his campaign Obama did not mention, let alone speak of abolishing, the modern system which has millions of African men and women enslaved. Moreover, when Africans like Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, and Adolph Grimes were unjustly murdered by the police he was virtually silent. And as Martin Luther King Jr. stated, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."

Lastly, in December of 2007 Obama voted to give telecommunications companies immunity that illegally provided customers information to the U.S. government. This is extremely relevant to Africans in America who were victims of illegal surveillance during the Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro).

"We must begin to dialogue with what Cedric Robinson calls the ‘Black Radical Tradition.'"
The author understands that the masses of Africans are feeling a great euphoria from the election of Barack Obama, but we must remain vigilant. This path being critical of Obama is not popular but those of us who think it correct must follow it. As African political scientists, we must begin to dialogue with what Cedric Robinson calls the "Black Radical Tradition" which begins in the maroon communities of the 16th and 17th century and continues today. As Mack Jones asserted, African "political scientists bear the responsibility of clearly and brutally unraveling the devious ways in which the American political system serves to exploit the many for the benefit of the few."

Two organizations that can continue this tradition are the National Conference of Black Political Scientists and the National Council for Black Studies. Both organizations emerged from the movement in the 1960's and 1970's therefore can offer a unique perspective on these issues. They could begin by writing organizational position papers on issues such as AFRICOM and Zionist aggression. Also, they could establish relationships with progressive and revolutionary African organizations. If African political scientists play their role correctly, they can be integral in the struggle for national liberation and self-determination.

Benjamin Woods is a Phd student in the Political Science department at Howard University and a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. He can be contacted at benjaminwoods1@yahoo.com This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view...

The Imperial Obama is Frustrated on Zimbabwe
Black Agenda Report, 04 February 200
ObamaRiceThe Obama administration was eager "to show its fangs against Mugabe in Africa" and seethed when its offensive against Zimbabwe's government was blunted by a power-sharing agreement. US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice is still out for Mugabe's head. The U.S.-funded Voice of America last week reported Washington's continued implacable opposition to Mugabe's remaining in office, even with the opposition sharing power. By Tuesday, February 3, Obama's people were more subdued but still seething, vowing that "Mugabe is not getting a reprieve from President Obama." A reprieve! What does that mean? Does Barack Obama carry around a hit list of world leaders, like George Bush did?...
Susan Rice is, in short, Barack Obama's "hawk" in Africa, bloodthirsty as Condoleezza Rice at her ugliest. The Obama administration's eagerness to show its fangs against Mugabe in Africa in its first weeks in office, while the new president was flashing smiles, charm and reassurances to the rest of the planet, is evidence of Susan Rice's malicious influence. President Obama will soon begin to justify U.S. military intervention on broad "humanitarian" grounds - a cynical game of words to mask the same crimes as George Bush's so-called "democratic" interventions. ... http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...

BAR Radio Commentaries from Glen Ford
BAR features three radio commentaries per week for use by broadcast and Internet radio (schedule them as you please), or simply for our audience's listening convenience. To subscribe to the Black Agenda Radio commentary podcast, click here. The podcast delivers four commentaries per week, daily on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, with an encore commentary on Thursday. Or you can listen to them using the flash player on this page. http://www.blackagendareport.com/

Susan Rice is Bad News for Africa
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...
If you believe that Barack Obama will pursue a policy in the Horn of Africa that is substantially different than that of George Bush, you are in for a deep disappointment. Only weeks after Ethiopia's U.S.-instigated invasion of Somalia almost two years ago, Susan Rice, Obama's choice for Ambassador to the United Nations, endorsed the aggression - an atrocity that has resulted in the displacement of 1.5 million Somalis and impending starvation of 3.5 million more. Rice is a proponent of so-called "humanitarian military intervention" - but supports a U.S. Somalia policy that created "Africa's worst humanitarian crisis," according to the United Nations. There is every reason to believe she will counsel the next president to continue George Bush's policies in the Horn of Africa...
On Darfur, Rice is more bellicose than Bush. She sees no contradiction in calling for military action against Sudan, supposedly to end a "humanitarian crisis" in Darfur, while simultaneously backing a savage U.S.-Ethiopian assault that causes an even larger humanitarian calamity in Somalia.... Darfur is a military/political convenience for "real-politic" operatives like Susan Rice. As Bruce Dixon wrote in his November 2007 BAR article, "If stopping genocide in Africa really was on the agenda, why the focus on Sudan with 200,000 to 400,000 dead rather than Congo with five million dead?" (See "Ten Reasons Why ‘Save Darfur' is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa.")
"Her sole concern is projection of U.S. power by any means - or pretext - that is available."

AFGHANISTAN
anti-Iraq war obama congratulated u.s. occupied Iraq on its latest u.s. 'secured' lock-down election 'step toward stability', e.g. for u.s. domination
Over 1.5 Million Killed, 4.5 Million Displaced, 1-2 Million Widowed, 5 Million Orphaned, a magnificent secular nation turned into a
made-in-usa nightmare of 'sectarian strife' and destroyed

The Taliban Warns Obama: Get out of Afghanistan
David Montero, Christian Science Monitor
As President Barack Obama steps into the White House and into history, the Taliban have a message for him: Leave Afghanistan. "The insurgent Taliban said Wednesday that US President Barack Obama should learn from the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan and pull his troops out of the country to allow Afghans to decide their own fate," reports The News, a popular English-language daily in Pakistan... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=51241

Aides Say Obama’s Afghan Aims Elevate War
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/politics/28policy.html?_r=1&th&emc=...
WASHINGTON — President Obama intends to adopt a tougher line toward Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, as part of a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday....Mr. Karzai is now seen as a potential impediment to American goals in Afghanistan... Among those pressing for Mr. Karzai to do more... are Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Richard C. Holbrooke, Mr. Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan....the Obama administration would work with provincial leaders as an alternative to the central government, and leave economic development and nation-building increasingly to European allies, so that American forces could focus on the fight against Taliban insurgents. [SIC] ...Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who served under Mr. Bush and is staying on under Mr. Obama, told Congress there was not enough “time, patience or money” to pursue overly ambitious goals in Afghanistan, and he called the war there “our greatest military challenge.”... Mr. Gates has openly criticized the United States’ NATO allies for not fulfilling their promises.... Europeans would be asked to pick up more of the work on reconstruction, police training and cooperation with the Afghan government. They also said much of the international effort might shift to helping local governments and institutions, and away from the government in Kabul.... under the redefined Afghan strategy, it would be vital for NATO allies to “provide more civilian support.” In particular, he said, the allies should be more responsible for building civil society institutions in Afghanistan, a task that had been falling to American forces. He also demanded that allies “step up to the plate” and defray costs of expanding the Afghan Army, an emerging power center, whose leaders could emerge as rivals to Mr. Karzai...
Mr. Biden traveled to Afghanistan last week in his role as the departing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He met with Mr. Karzai and warned him that the Obama administration would expect more of him than Mr. Bush did... An election is scheduled to be held no later than the fall, under Afghanistan’s Constitution. Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan-American who is a former United States ambassador to the United Nations and is viewed as a possible challenger to Mr. Karzai, warned that the Obama administration must tread carefully as it recalibrated its Afghanistan policy. “If it looks like we’re abandoning the central government and focusing just on the local areas, we will run afoul of Afghan politics,” Mr. Khalilzad said. “Some will regard it as an effort to break up the Afghan state, which would be regarded as hostile policy.”...

Vice President Biden warns of an “uptick” in casualties, as US military raid kills Afghanistan civilians
Patrick O’Connor
...US Vice President Joe Biden yesterday appeared on CBS's "Meet the Press" and warned that the war in Afghanistan would soon intensify. "... There will be an uptick, because as the commander in Afghanistan said, 'Joe, we will get this done but we're going to be engaging the enemy that much more'." Biden's remarks again demonstrate the chasm between the new administration's intentions and the sentiments of the millions of ordinary people who voted for the Democrats in the hope that ousting the Republicans would put an end to Bush's agenda of war and militarism. Having promised "change", President Obama is pursuing the same central strategic goal of US imperialism which underpinned the former Bush administration's so-called war on terror—the control of the vast energy resources in the Middle East and Central Asia and the shutting out of rival powers from the region... http://www.uruknet.de/?p=51248

A U.S.-funded program to train and arm tribal members in Afghanistan's most dangerous regions has begun
http://www.examiner.com/a-1825775~US_funded_program_to_arm_Afghan_groups...

Obama picks army general to be ambassador to Afghanistan
IHT: The Obama administration picked Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, former top military commander in Afghanistan, to be U.S. ambassador to Kabul, an administration official said Thursday. Tapping a career army officer who will soon retire from the service to fill one of the country's most sensitive diplomatic jobs is highly unusual....

Private Mercenaries move into Afghanistan
Luke Baker, Reuters
http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=51326&s2=30
Private security companies are expanding operations in Afghanistan as the war there heats up, but industry experts say those that made fortunes in Iraq may find business much tougher in the new market. "Afghanistan is never going to be the gold mine that the more naive (security companies) hoped. They hoped it would be another Iraq, but...the consumer is more intelligent now."
"The security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating rapidly and that means more people wanting to buy security," said Andy Bearpark, head of the British Association of Private Security Companies and a former senior official with the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. "But if I were an investor, I'm still not sure I would be looking for a boom in the market," he told Reuters, pointing out that $18.6 billion (13 billion pound) of U.S. taxpayer funds were made available for reconstruction and security in Iraq. While there are contracts to be had in Kabul, they are less lucrative, more spread out and those offering them -- including the Afghan government -- are more aware of potential pit-falls than Iraq was when it dolled out contracts in 2004-05...

ALWAYS ON CALL: u.s. homemade-helpers produce obligatory 'al qaeda' pretext
Yemen and Saudi al-Qaeda arms merge
Al-Qaeda groups in Yemen and Saudi Arabia have announced they are merging their operations, raising fears of new attacks in the region. The organisation said the joint forces would carry out operations across the Arabian peninsula and beyond.
Nasir Wuhaishi was named as the head of the new combined al-Qaeda unit. Wuhaishi's appointment was confirmed by Ayman Al-Zawahiri, the deputy al-Qaeda chief, in a video posted online.... "Weapons, training, crossing points and the launch of operations have all come from Yemen," Abd Alelah-Haidar, a "terrorism" specialist told Al Jazeera. "This country is seen as having strategic significance, not only by al-Qaeda, but also by others. [However,] their operations are not confined to the Arabian peninsula but also include Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Palestine."

Pakistan's Balkanization
By SHAHID R. SIDDIQUI
Lahore, Pakistan
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20840.htm
...Rising militant Islam, serious challenges to American hegemony as world power, shifting of the economic epicenter to Asia and the worsening economic situation at home, all point to another 'New World Order' in the making – wherein America stands to lose much of its power and glory by mid century, if not sooner. Resurgent Russia and a powerful China are forcing it to redefine its strategic global planning, with focus on Eurasia. A paranoid America is willing to pursue all options to prevent its slide from power... They want oil rich territories like Kurdistan, Eastern Arabian Peninsula and Balochistan carved out, unified and controlled by puppet regimes, while splintering other Muslim countries. This would enable the US to secure its oil supplies, micromanage a fragmented Muslim world and choke vital financial resources to Islamic militants. Iraq is already going through the motions....
Of late, Balochistan has been the target in the Indian scheme of Pakistan's further dismemberment. India and the US were disturbed by Gen. Musharraf's new overtures towards China, seeking Chinese strategic economic interests in Balochistan. Motivated by the prospects of Balochistan's development and economic uplift and to checkmate foreign aided secessionist moves in the province, he wanted China to use Gawadar-Sinkiang land corridor for its imports through Gawadar port and transportation of oil refined at a Chinese owned Gawadar based refinery. China also showed interest in joining Pak-Iran gas pipeline project transiting through Balochistan. China's presence in Gawadar would bring it to the Indian Ocean, a sensitive spot both for Indians and Americans – the former seeing this as a threat to its control of the ocean with its blue water navy in the offing and the latter upset with its proximity to the Straits of Hormuz.

These are grounds enough to balkanize Pakistan.
Col. Ralph Peters, supposedly Pentagon's military scholar and former intelligence official, writing in June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal on balkanization of the Middle East (Blood Borders), advocates the incorporation of North West Frontier Province into Afghanistan and creation of a sovereign Free Balochistan, carved out of Baloch areas of Pakistan and Iran. His grounds: ethnic affinity. Pakistani Balochistan is estimated to hold 25.1 trillion cft. of gas and 6 trillion barrels of oil. In his recent article "Drawn and Quartered" Selig Harrison of the Center of International Policy, Washington, DC, concludes that Pakistan's balkanization is imminent owing to the rising nationalist sentiment in the Pashtun belt and growing disillusionment of the Pashtuns, Balochis and Sindhis with Punjab and Pakistan. He believes that ethnic diversity threatens Pakistan's unity, Both Col. Peters and Harrison are essentially singing the same tune and seem to be presenting a doctrine that broadly reflects US foreign policy.

General Aslam Beg, Pakistan's former Army Chief, notes in an article that to pursue certain common interests with regard to Pakistan and the region, India and the US have signed the Strategic Partnership Deal the declared objective of which is "to contain and curb the rising military and economic power of China and the increasing threat of Islamic extremism in the region". Gen. Beg says this deal has led to the creation of a joint espionage network of CIA, Mosad, MI-6, Raw and others in Afghanistan, which is engaged in activities aimed at destabilizing Pakistan, Iran, China, Russia and other Central Asian states. He claims that dissidents from Pakistan are being trained at Sarobi and Kandahar for missions inside NWFP, whereas bases at Lashkargah and Nawah are being used to train dissidents from Balochistan for missions inside that province and also in support of the so called Balochistan Liberation Army.
In this backdrop, recent calls by some Afghan leaders to 'liberate Pakistani Pashtuns', the departure of Gen. Musharraf and the cozy relationship between his successor and Karazai of Kabul who lost no opportunity to malign Pakistan, assume significance. The latest American decision to send drones and troops into Pakistan's territory, despite the declared Pakistan's opposition, to launch aerial and ground attacks on its tribesmen killing innocent women and children, also raise serious concerns. This seems to be an attempt at drawing a wedge between Pakistan and the independent tribes on the Pakistan side of the Pak-Afghan border belt by establishing Pakistan's inability to protect their life and property and promote a secessionist movement....

'ADVICE' FROM MAJOR IMPERIALIST STRATEGISTS - PROPAGANDISTS FLOATED TO PREPARE PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR ESCALATING REGIONAL WAR 'AGAINST AL QAEDA'
For Holbrooke, Situation in Pakistan, Afghanistan Is 'Dim and Dismal'
http://www.cfr.org/publication/18391/for_holbrooke_situation_in_pakistan...
Bruce O. Riedel, an expert on South Asia, who has worked for the CIA, Pentagon, and National Security Council, says getting Pakistan to close down sanctuaries for Taliban militants poses the toughest test for new regional envoy Richard Holbrooke. One of the biggest challenges, if not the biggest challenge we face in Pakistan today, is that the American brand image has been badly eroded. Polling in Pakistan shows that a majority of Pakistanis blame America for the country's internal violence. India comes in second place, and al-Qaeda and the militancy comes in third place. Any time that you are outpolling India as the bad guy in Pakistan, you're in deep, deep trouble....
The American brand image suffered a big setback because of the Gaza war. The war in Gaza with American-made F-16s and American-made Apache helicopters piloted by Israelis dropping bombs on 1.5 million Palestinians was just about the worst backdrop to a transfer of power in the United States that you could hope for. Al-Qaeda called it "Obama's gift to the Palestinians," but the truth is that it was really a gift to al-Qaeda by giving them a great propaganda boost to undermine the image of the United States again on the eve of the transfer of power....
The top priorities, and they are very much linked, is first to reverse the momentum on the ground in Afghanistan. The Taliban have a sense that they're winning, and objectively if you look at the numbers--the number of NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] casualties, the number of bombings--it does look like they are winning. That momentum has to be broken. And then, secondly, and quite critically, the safe haven that the Taliban and al-Qaeda and other jihadists have built in Pakistan has to be closed down. That can only happen with the cooperation of the Pakistani government. And trying to get that cooperation out of the Pakistani government in my judgment will be the single hardest test that Ambassador Holbrooke faces and in fact may be the single hardest foreign policy challenge President Obama faces....
I think seeing this as a regional problem is absolutely correct. All of these things are linked together....Pakistan's concerns in Afghanistan derive in large part from its concerns about India. It can't try to deal with these problems in isolation. But you also have to deal with them with a great degree of subtlety and sophistication, because there are decades-old fears among all the parties about American intentions. The Pakistanis, for example, are convinced that we will use their country for our short-term interest in finding al-Qaeda, and then abandon it, as they feel we abandoned it in the 1980s. The Afghans feel the same way. They feel the United States has fought a war in Afghanistan twice now, and then forgotten about them, and not come through with the follow-through afterward. Restoring the sense of America's credibility and its reliability, and its consistency, is going to be very, very important to persuading them that we're serious this go around.... in terms of giving priority to the issue, and President Obama has made clear he intends to do that.... bringing the resources to bear: more troops, but also more economic assistance; more military assistance for the Afghan military, and the right kind of assistance for the Pakistani military; and then diplomatic assistance. Afghanistan and Pakistan have a border that was drawn in 1893 by Sir Mortimer Durand, the high commissioner for British India. Afghanistan has never accepted that border. Trying to get agreement on the legitimacy and permanency of a border would be an important first step towards trying to get that border secured. After all, if we want Pakistan to provide border security, a good step in the right direction would be an agreement on that border.
Among other things that we can do is increase our economic assistance and try to use the Friends of Pakistan (PDF), a group that was formed at the end of the Bush administration to provide more help. This group would bring together the Chinese, the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates, the European Union, the Japanese, and others who have an interest in a stable Pakistan that gets out of the business of being on both sides of the war on terrorism. That's a mechanism for strengthening the hand of the civilian government in Pakistan. We shouldn't identify ourselves with any individual. We should identify ourselves with the democratic process. We should make it very clear the days of the United States dealing with Pakistani military dictators is over for good..

Op-Ed Contributor
Afghan Supplies, Russian Demands
By GEORGE FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/04/opinion/04georgefriedman.html?th&emc=t...
...In addition to our guaranteeing that NATO will not expand further, the Russians seem to want the United States to promise that NATO forces will not be based in the Baltic countries, and that the United States will not try to dominate Central Asia. In other words, Russia wants the United States to pledge that it will respect the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union. They will probably want this guarantee to be very public, as a signal to the region — and the Europeans — of Russian dominance. This is one guarantee that Mr. Obama will not want to give.
There is also no certainty that countries in the Russian sphere of influence, like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, would agree to let the United States use these routes without Russian permission. Mr. Obama could use some European help. Unfortunately, that’s not likely to come soon. Many Europeans, particularly Germans, rely on Russia’s natural gas. In January, the Russians cut natural gas shipments to Ukraine. As much of the Russian natural gas that goes to Europe runs through Ukraine, the cutoff affected European supplies — in the middle of winter. Europeans can’t really afford to irritate the Russians, and it’s hard to imagine that the Germans will confront them over supply routes to Afghanistan. Pakistan, unfortunately, is hardly a reliable partner either. So how can Mr. Obama reconcile the two goals of strengthening the American presence in Afghanistan while curbing Russian expansionism? The answer is to rely less on troops, and more on covert operations like the C.I.A. Covert operators are far more useful for the actual war that we are fighting (and they can carry their supplies on their backs)...
What we need in Afghanistan is intelligence, and special operations forces and air power that can take advantage of that intelligence. Fighting terrorists requires identifying and destroying small, dispersed targets. We would need far fewer forces for such a mission than the number that are now deployed. They would make us much less dependent on supply deliveries, which would help solve our Russian problem.
Winding down the conventional war while increasing the covert one will demand a cultural change in Washington. The Obama administration seems to prefer the conventional route of putting more troops on the ground. That would be a feasible strategy if supply lines to Afghanistan were secure. The loss of that bridge yesterday demonstrates very clearly that they are not. George Friedman is the chief executive of Stratfor, a global intelligence company, and the author of “The Next 100 Years.”

[the world faces from u.s....]
Emerging Threats
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE
Obama's two principal foreign policy initiatives -- a win in Afghanistan ... and a final peace treaty between Israel and a Palestinian state -- are will-o'-the-wisp..
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21894.htm
Appointed editor in chief for The Washington Times on March 20, 1985. He is currently editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International and Transnational Threats Director for The Center for Strategic and International Studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnaud_de_Borchgrave
CSIS Transnational Threats Director
http://www.csis.org/component/option,com_csis_experts/task,view/id,154/
ASSOCIATED RESEARCH FOCUS:
Middle East & North Africa
International Security
Terrorism & Transnational Threats
ASSOCIATED PROGRAMS:
Director of National Intelligence Private Sector Engagement Initiative
Open Source, Trusted Information Network for Counterterrorism
Private Sector Advisory Group
Transnational Threats Project
EXPERTISE:
U.S. foreign policy; current political trends in Europe, Asia, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Africa; cyberspace; terrorism; global organized crime

Obama declared u.s won't tolerate terror and slaughter for political gain ... by those resisting u.s. state terror, genocide and war for domination
Two studies http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78 show number of dead Iraqis to be between 1.2-1.4 million, and the number
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html
of those displaced to be nearly five million, or one in six Iraqis.

CHINA

CFR REPORT REVEALS U.S. "NATIONAL SECURITY", e.g. GLOBAL DOMINANCE, AS ENCODED IN STILL OPERATIONAL POLICY: CHINA & RUSSIA ARE, ACCORDINGLY, THE MAJOR U.S. 'THREATS'
Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival'
NYT March 8, 1992
Following are excerpts from the Pentagon's Feb. 18 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999: This Defense Planning guidance addresses the fundamentally new situation which has been created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the internal as well as the external empire, and the discrediting of Communism as an ideology with global pretensions and influence. The new international environment has also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression -- the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in U.S. global leadership. In addition to these two victories, there has been a less visible one, the integration of Germany and Japan into a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic "zone of peace."
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1D7173AF93BA35750C0A...

from CFR REPORT
... The U.S. Defense Department's 2008 report on China's military power says "much uncertainty surrounds China's future course, in particular in the area of its expanding military power and how that power might be used." But experts say China is still decades away from challenging U.S. military's preeminence...
In its November 2008 report to Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission noted that cyberspace is a critical vulnerability of the U.S. government and economy. The report warns: "China is aggressively pursuing cyber warfare capabilities that may provide it with an asymmetric advantage against the United States. In a conflict situation, this advantage would reduce current U.S. conventional military dominance."...
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, in a statement to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2009, said the areas of greatest concern are cyber- and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, submarines, and ballistic missiles. "Modernization in these areas could threaten America's primary means of projecting power and helping allies in the Pacific: our bases, air and sea assets, and the networks that support them," he said...
How U.S. defense planners will respond to China's military buildup going forward is also dependent on the ongoing debate over the biggest threats to U.S. national security in the twenty-first century. Writing in the latest Foreign Affairs, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates says the country now faces both conventional adversaries and irregular conflicts from insurgents and non-state actors, and it should "seek a better balance in the portfolio of capabilities it has--the types of units fielded, the weapons bought, the training done." However, in a situation of finite Department of Defense resources, some analysts argue that "striking the correct planning balance" (PDF) between operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war on terror, and China's military modernization will be a key defense planning challenge. http://www.cfr.org/publication/18459/chinas_military_power.html

LATIN AMERICA

'anti-american' refusal to "surrender" natural resources...bordering on 'terrorism'...and u.s. intervention
Bolivia: Untapped Bounty Meets Nationalism
Bolivia will not easily surrender its massive reserve of lithium, the mineral needed to power electric vehicles... in the government of President Evo Morales, an ardent critic of the United States who has already nationalized Bolivia’s oil and natural gas industries.... indigenous groups here in the remote salt desert where the mineral lies are pushing for a share in the eventual bounty.
“We know that Bolivia can become the Saudi Arabia of lithium,” said Francisco Quisbert, 64, the leader of Frutcas, a group of salt gatherers and quinoa farmers on the edge of Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat. “We are poor, but we are not stupid peasants. The lithium may be Bolivia’s, but it is also our property.” The new Constitution that Mr. Morales managed to get handily passed by voters last month bolstered such claims. One provision could give Indians control over the natural resources in their territory, strengthening their ability to win concessions from the authorities and private companies, or even block mining projects. .. “There are salt lakes in Chile and Argentina, and a promising lithium deposit in Tibet, but the prize is clearly in Bolivia,” Oji Baba, an executive in Mitsubishi’s Base Metals Unit, said in La Paz. “If we want to be a force in the next wave of automobiles and the batteries that power them, then we must be here.”
Mitsubishi is not alone in planning to produce cars using lithium-ion batteries. Ailing automakers in the United States are pinning their hopes on lithium. One of them is General Motors, which next year plans to roll out its Volt, a car using a lithium-ion battery along with a gas engine. Nissan, Ford and BMW, among other carmakers, have similar projects.

With governments, including the Obama administration, seeking to increase fuel efficiency and reduce their dependence on imported oil, private companies are focusing their attention on this desolate corner of the Andes, where Quechua-speaking Indians subsist on the remains of an ancient inland sea by bartering the salt they carry out on llama caravans.

The United States Geological Survey says 5.4 million tons of lithium could potentially be extracted in Bolivia, compared with 3 million in Chile, 1.1 million in China and just 410,000 in the United States. Independent geologists estimate that Bolivia might have even more lithium at Uyuni and its other salt deserts, though high altitudes and the quality of the reserves could make access to the mineral difficult. While estimates vary widely, some geologists say electric-car manufacturers could draw on Bolivia’s lithium reserves for decades to come.
But amid such potential, foreigners seeking to tap Bolivia’s lithium reserves must navigate the policies of Mr. Morales, 49, who has clashed repeatedly with American, European and even South American investors. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03lithium.html?th&emc=t...

JAPAN
Protests as US warship docks in Nagasaki:
TOKYO (AFP) - A US warship docked Thursday in Nagasaki to the protests of residents and a boycott by local leaders who said the visit was in poor taste in a city obliterated by a US atomic bomb. The USS Blue Ridge, which is stationed in Yokosuka near Tokyo, sailed to Nagasaki with a stated goal of promoting friendship between Japan and the United States. Hundreds of residents including atomic bomb survivors chanted, "We are opposed to the port call!" as the 19,600-ton vessel arrived in the southwestern city. "We don't want to see the US flag flying at this port and this feeling will not change until the United States takes a policy towards the elimination of nuclear weapons," Osamu Yoshitomi, an official at Nagasaki city, told AFP. Nagasaki's mayor and regional governor both refused to take part in the welcome ceremony after unsuccessfully asking Japanese and US authorities to cancel the visit. The United States stations more than 40,000 troops in Japan under a post-World War II alliance. Under a 1960 agreement, local authorities do not have the right to refuse US warships' port calls. It was the seventh visit by a US military vessel to the city of Nagasaki. The US Navy also maintains a major base in the nearby city of Sasebo, part of Nagasaki prefecture. Nagasaki Mayor Tomohisa Taue regretted the timing of the visit, saying that atomic bomb survivors had been optimistic that newly installed US President Barack Obama would move towards nuclear abolition....
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/090205/usa/japan_us_military_weapons_nucl...

========

obama, their last desperate hope...
DOCUMENTS BIPARTISAN CAPITALIST GLOBAL AGENDA FOR U.S. HEGEMONY & ISRAEL'S ROLE

Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival'
http://www.princeton.edu/~ppn/docfiles/pentagon_1992.html
NYT March 8, 1992
Following are excerpts from the Pentagon's Feb. 18 draft of the Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999: This Defense Planning guidance addresses the fundamentally new situation which has been created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the internal as well as the external empire, and the discrediting of Communism as an ideology with global pretensions and influence. The new international environment has also been shaped by the victory of the United States and its coalition allies over Iraqi aggression -- the first post-cold-war conflict and a defining event in U.S. global leadership. In addition to these two victories, there has been a less visible one, the integration of Germany and Japan into a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of a democratic "zone of peace."

1996 A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm
A policy blueprint for incoming Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu prepared by The U.S. Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies’ "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000."

1997: THE GRAND CHESSBOARD: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives
Zbigniew Brzezinski
www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/zbig.html

1997 A geostrategy for Eurasia, by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Foreign Affairs,76:5, September/October 1997 Council on Foreign Relations Inc.
http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html

1997 US Army War College: "WE HAVE ENTERED AN AGE OF CONSTANT CONFLICT'
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm

U.S. ARMY PSYCHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS MANUAL
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-05-30.pdf
Field Manual FM3-05.30, April 2005. Obtained by Secrecy News. ‘A U.S. Army manual on psychological operations elaborates upon the role of PSYOP in military activities.
"The employment of any element of national power, particularly the military element, has always had a psychological dimension. Foreign perceptions of U.S. military capabilities are fundamental to strategic deterrence. The effectiveness of deterrence hinges on U.S. ability to influence the perceptions of others."
"The purpose of PSYOP is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to U.S. national objectives ... When properly employed, PSYOP can save lives of friendly and adversary forces by reducing the adversaries' will to fight. By lowering adversary morale and reducing their efficiency, PSYOP can also discourage aggressive actions and create dissidence and disaffection within their ranks, ultimately inducing surrender."

Constant Conflict
From Parameters, Army War College, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14. RALPH PETERS [see below]***

"We, the winners, are a minority...
We live in an age of multiple truths. He who warns of the "clash of civilizations" is incontestably right...

One of the defining bifurcations of the future will be the conflict between information [propaganda] masters and information [propaganda] victims...

"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
We are building an information-based military to do that killing...
The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline..." http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm

from the same highly regarded imperialist thug...

*** Ralph Peters “Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look”
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899
... As for those who refuse to “think the unthinkable,” declaring that boundaries must not change and that’s that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even now...
Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works....