Blums Anti Empire Report for Sept

Hand-in-hand with his threat warnings, Bush keeps telling us how his War on Terror has made us so much safer, bragging that there hasn't been a terrorist attack in the United States in the five years since the one of September 11, 2001. Marvelous. There wasn't a terrorist attack in the United States in the five years before that day either. But thanks to the War on Terror -- particularly the bombing, invasion, occupation, and torture of Afghanistan and Iraq -- numerous new anti-American terrorists have been created since that historic day. The latest confirmation of this, if any more were needed, is the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that "the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and ... the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks."[1]

Since the first strike on Afghanistan in October 2001 there have been literally scores of terrorist attacks against American institutions and individuals in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, more than a dozen in Pakistan alone: military, diplomatic, civilian, Christian, and other targets associated with the United States, including the October 2002 bombings of two nightclubs in Bali, Indonesia, which killed more than 200 people, almost all of them Americans and citizens of their Australian and British war allies; the following year brought the heavy bombing of the US-managed Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, the site of diplomatic receptions and 4th of July celebrations held by the American Embassy; and other horrendous attacks on US war allies in recent years in Madrid, London, and elsewhere.

A US State Department report of 2004 on worldwide terrorist attacks -- "Patterns of Global Terrorism" -- showed that the year 2003 had more "significant terrorist incidents" than at any time since the department began issuing statistics in 1985, even though the figures did not include attacks on US troops by insurgents in Iraq, which the Bush administration explicitly labels as "terrorist".[2] When their report for 2004 showed an even higher number of incidents, the State Department announced that it was going to stop publishing the annual statistics.[3]
cont..

The Pope's Evil Legend

From Counterpunch:

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church have undergone many changes.

Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306--exactly 1700 years ago--encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.

The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One of the Emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope's castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his excommunication.

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", in the context of the "Clash of Civilizations".
cont...

Jonathan Cook: How Israel is Engineering the "Clash of Civilizations"

From Counterpunch:

The trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month to the preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into anti-Semitism in the UK can be traced back to intensive lobbying by the Israeli government that began more than four years ago, in early 2002.

At that time, as Ariel Sharon was shredding the tattered remains of the Oslo accords by reinvading West Bank towns handed over to the Palestinian Authority in his destructive rampage known as Operation Defensive Shield, he drafted the Israeli media into the fray. Local newspapers began endlessly highlighting concerns about the rise of a "new anti-Semitism", a theme that was rapidly and enthusiastically taken up by the muscular Zionist lobby in the US.

It was not the first time, of course, that Israel had called on American loyalists to help it out of trouble. In Beyond Chutzpah, Norman Finkelstein documents the advent of claims about a new anti-Semitism to Israel's lacklustre performance in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. On that occasion, it was hoped, the charge of anti-Semitism could be deployed against critics to reduce pressure on Israel to return Sinai to Egypt and negotiate with the Palestinians.

Israel alerted the world to another wave of anti-Semitism in the early 1980s, just as it came under unprecedented criticism for its invasion and occupation of Lebanon. What distinguished the new anti-Semitism from traditional anti-Jewish racism of the kind that led to Germany's death camps, said its promoters, was that this time it embraced the progressive left rather than the far right.
cont..

Tell us something we don't know!

Anyone with any common sense could have guessed that the world is not a safer place after the heinous invasion of Iraq. Since all the other excuses for going to war, WMDs etc, have evaporated, Bush and Co recently has been using the 'world is a safer place'™ reason to justify the illegal invasion. Now that has been thoroughly debunked it will be interesting to see how Bush and Co will try to justify 'staying the course'™..

From the NY Times:

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

Cont..

Pilger: No News Is Slow News

In a nutshell: Resistance to the US/UK/Israel is 'slow news'. Whilst their propaganda is 'regular news'

From Information Clearing House:

When I began working as a journalist, there was something called "slow news". We would refer to "slow news days" when "nothing happened" – apart from, that is, triumphs and tragedies in faraway places where most of humanity lived. These were rarely reported, or the tragedies were dismissed as acts of nature, regardless of evidence to the contrary. The news value of whole societies was measured by their relationship with "us" in the west and their degree of compliance with, or hostility to, our authority. If they didn't measure up, they were slow news.

Few of these assumptions have changed. To sustain them, millions of people remain invisible, and expendable. On 11 September 2001, while the world lamented the deaths of almost 3,000 people in the United States, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation reported that more than 36,000 children had died from the effects of extreme poverty. They were very slow news.
Let's take a few recent examples and compare each with the regular news as seen on the BBC and elsewhere. Keep in mind that Palestinians are chronically slow news and that Israelis are regular news.

Regular news: Charles Clarke, a spokesman for Tony Blair, "revives the battle of Downing Street" and calls Gordon Brown "stupid, stupid" and a "control freak". He disapproves of the way Brown smiles. This is given saturation coverage.

Slow news: "A genocide is taking place in Gaza," warns Ilan Pappe, one of Israel's leading historians. "This morning... another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded. This is the morning reap; before the end of the day many more will be massacred."

The Moral Bankruptcy of Israel's Founding Idea : The Coming Collapse of Zionism

From Counterpunch:

By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
Former CIA Analyst

Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?

Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?

Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?

Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.

Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.

John Pilger: Return Of People Power

Nice to read an article which is has a positive outlook for a change. It's all too easy these days to get depressed when you turn on the news or open a newspaper and get bombarded about the seemingly constant wars, scaremongering about terrorism and corrupt business leaders and politicians.

No doubt the Internet has had huge impact on spreading truth. Never before has it been so easy to get a message across without it being filtered by the corporate media giants. Although the Internet is now under attack in the US with a new communications bill which if it is passed could be the first step towards strangling independent voices. Pray it does not happen!

From Zmag:

In researching a new film, I have been watching documentary archive from the 1980s, the era of Ronald Reagan and his "secret war" against Central America. What is striking is the relentless lying. A department of lying was set up under Reagan with the coy name, "office of public diplomacy". Its purpose was to dispense "white" and "black" propaganda - lies - and to smear journalists who told the truth. Almost everything Reagan himself said on the subject was false. Time and again, he warned Americans of an "imminent threat" from the tiny impoverished nations that occupy the isthmus between the two continents of the western hemisphere. "Central America is too close and its strategic stakes are too high for us to ignore the danger of governments seizing power with military ties to the Soviet Union," he said. Nicaragua was "a Soviet base" and "communism is about to take over the Caribbean". The United States, said the president, "is engaged in a war on terrorism, a war for freedom".

How familiar it all sounds. Merely replace Soviet Union and communism with al-Qaeda, and you are up to date. And it was all a fantasy. The Soviet Union had no bases in or designs on Central America; on the contrary, the Soviets were adamant in turning down appeals for their aid. The comic strips of "missile storage depots" that American officials presented to the United Nations were precursors to the lies told by Colin Powell in his infamous promotion of Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction at the Security Council in 2003.

Whereas Powell's lies paved the way for the invasion of Iraq and the violent death of at least 100,000 people, Reagan's lies disguised his onslaught on Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. By the end of his two terms, 300,000 people were dead. In Guatemala, his proxies - armed and tutored in torture by the CIA - were described by the UN as perpetrators of genocide.

There is one major difference today. That is the level of awareness among people everywhere of the true purpose of Bush and Blair's "war on terror" and the scale and diversity of the popular resistance to it. In Reagan's day, the notion that presidents and prime ministers lied as deliberate, calculated acts was considered exotic; Nixon's Watergate lies were said to be shocking because presidents did not lie outright.

Drugs are bad, m'kay?

Given the recent media coverage of the legalisation issue due to the Merchants Quay drug centre hosting Jerry Cameron, an FBI trained former US chief of police and current head of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), I think it's only fair to comment on how both for and against legalisiation camps are both in someway missing the mark.

Now me shock some by saying I believe there is no such thing as a 'drugs problem' in society, the issue really is why do people have to turn to drugs? Therefore drug abuse should be dealt with as a health and welfare issue and not a criminal issue. Funneling the money wasted on fighting the war against drugs towards building better community care for the disaffected would go a lot further than throwing it on some fight that can never be won.

Now before those against legalisation fall off their chairs let me point out that just legalising every drug and using the tax money to fund better rehab programs etc is not enough. It would be very near sighted to do that without due care.

Currently if a person wants to drive a car, which is a very dangerous piece of machinery as can be seen by the many road deaths every week, they need to procure a licence after getting many lessons and passing an eye test. Therefore should a person wish to purchase a substance which can seriously harm them and others around them they should be required to have a 'drugs licence'. Obviously the granting of which would be dependant upon psychological and physical screening, even for more mundane drugs like cannabis. This would also be a very effective way of limiting and monitoring usage.

As for heroin the current system of methadone treatment solves nothing. Methadone, which many users report, is actually more addictive than heroin and is far more potent.
So for heroin,cocaine and other seriously addictive drugs should people wish to purchase with a licence then they must also attend a drug rehabilitation program until they are no longer addicted. Failure to attend means licence is revoked. There is also the option of using an inhibitor like GABA-transaminase which will negate any effects of the narcotics permanently rendering the ingestion of an opiate by an addict pointless.

The argument for a 'drugs licence' is one I have never heard before but I think it goes someway to addressing the concerns of both the pro and against camps.

And one other thing, we should never tolerate people like MEP Eoin Ryan and Grainne Kenny (the international president of anti-drugs organisation EURAD) for playing politics with peoples health. No doubt Eoin Ryan has to look to be tough on certain issues to his constituents and his party (that state being sued by cancer patients line is just plain ridiculous!) but both of them should be big enough to listen to the pro legalisation argument from experts such as Jerry Cameron and the Merchant Quay.

Corporate Globalization and Middle East Terrorism

From Information Clearing House

The Israeli and American governments have little regard for life, or human freedoms. Both thoroughly propagandize their own people and call themselves democracies. They are known to kidnap, imprison, torture, and assassinate their foes without due process. Both possess nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the world many times over. The world surely remembers that America is the only nation to hold human life in such low regard as to actually deploy the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even with Japan’s eminent surrender at hand.

These governments are guilty of the same war crimes that the Nazi leadership was executed for after World War Two. They have histories of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The blood of innocent people runs warm on their hands, and they continually thirst for more.

Blums Anti Empire Report for Aug

From Dissident Voice:

So now we've (choke) just been (gasp) saved from the simultaneous blowing up of ten airplanes headed toward the United States from the UK. Wow, thank you Brits, thank you Homeland Security. Well done, lads. And thanks for preventing the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago, saving lower Manhattan from a terrorist-unleashed flood, smashing the frightful Canadian "terror plot" with 17 arrested, ditto the three Toledo terrorists, and squashing the Los Angeles al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airliner into a skyscraper.

The Los Angeles plot of 2002 was proudly announced by George W. early this year. It has since been totally discredited. Declared one senior counterterrorism official: "There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage."

And the scare about ricin in the UK, which our own Mr. Cheney used as part of the buildup for the invasion of Iraq, telling an audience on January 10, 2003: "The gravity of the threat we face was underscored in recent days when British police arrested ... suspected terrorists in London and discovered a small quantity of ricin, one of the world's deadliest poisons."

It turned out there was not only no plot, there was no ricin. The Brits discovered almost immediately that the substance wasn't ricin but kept that secret for more than two years.

From what is typical in terrorist scares, it is likely that the individuals arrested in the UK August 10 are guilty of what George Orwell, in 1984, called "thoughtcrimes." That is to say, they haven't actually DONE anything. At most, they've THOUGHT about doing something the government would label "terrorism." Perhaps not even very serious thoughts, perhaps just venting their anger at the exceptionally violent role played by the UK and the US in the Mideast and thinking out loud how nice it would be to throw some of that violence back in the face of Blair and Bush. And then, the fatal moment for them that ruins their lives forever ... their angry words are heard by the wrong person, who reports them to the authorities. (In the Manhattan flood case the formidable, dangerous "terrorists" made mention on an Internet chat room about blowing something up.)

Now we're all terrorists!

From Media Monitors Network:

Meanwhile, reports of material evidence in the UK have been unnervingly threadbare. Only eleven out of the 24 suspects arrested over the alleged airliner bomb plot have been charged, largely it seems on the basis of police findings of “bomb-making equipment and martyrdom videos”. Out of the other thirteen, two have been released without charge. But the “bomb-making equipment” discovery of “chemicals” and “electrical components” is ambiguous at best, especially given that police descriptions of the alleged bomb construction plan is to mix a sports drink with a peroxide-based household gel (the chemicals), and detonate the mixture with an MP3 player or mobile phone (electrical components). If possession of such items makes you a terror suspect in possession of potential bomb-making equipment, then we are all terror suspects. As Craig Murray observes:

“Let me fess up here. I have just checked, and our flat contains nail polish remover, sports drinks, and a variety of household cleaning products. Also MP3 players and mobile phones. So the authorities could announce -- as they have whispered to the media in this case -- that potential ingredients of a liquid bomb, and potential timing devices, have been discovered. It rather lowers the bar doesn’t it?”

Yes -- clearly, it lowers the bar to potentially include millions of perfectly normal British citizens. The police story is also, simply, scientifically absurd, as Murray further notes: “The idea that high explosive can be made quickly in a plane toilet by mixing at room temperature some nail polish remover, bleach, and Red Bull and giving it a quick stir, is nonsense.” Citing US chemistry experts, Washington-based information security journalist Thomas C. Greene similarly concludes that "... the fabled binary liquid explosive -- that is, the sudden mixing of hydrogen peroxide and acetone with sulfuric acid to create a plane-killing explosion, is out of the question... But the Hollywood myth of binary liquid explosives now moves governments and drives public policy. We have reacted to a movie plot."

Pilger: The Real Threat We Face in Britain is Blair

From Dissident Voice:

If the alleged plot to attack airliners flying from London is true -- remember the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq, and to the raid on a "terrorist cell" in east London -- then one person ultimately is to blame, as he was on 7 July last year. They were Blair's bombs then; who doesn't believe that 52 Londoners would be alive today had the Prime Minister refused to join Bush in his piratical attack on Iraq? A parliamentary committee has said as much, as have MI5, the Foreign Office, Chatham House and the polls.

A senior Metropolitan Police officer, Paul Stephenson, claims the Heathrow plot "was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale." The most reliable independent surveys put civilian deaths in Iraq, as a result of the invasion by Bush and Blair, above 100,000. The difference between the Heathrow scare and Iraq is that mass murder on an unimaginable scale has actually happened in Iraq.

Is this the Steorn device?

Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy pictured with what could very well be the over unity energy device.

Is this the Steorn device that will challenge the worlds scientic community? Many are sceptical and believe that the laws of thermodynamics are immutable so therefore this must be a con. But what if it is taping a hitherto unknown source of energy or even taping into the earths magnetic field?

If so then the laws of thermodynamics are not being broken so the device could very well be a source of clean unlimited energy. The patent is online and can be viewed here

As perpetual motion machines cannot, under US law, be patented what they are patenting is a process of steps that leads to perpetual motion. A clever work around.

The company have hired one of the most expensive PR firms in the world and spent over 100k on an ad in the Economist challenging the most qualified and most cynical scientists in the world to prove them wrong. A bold move indeed, definitely one to keep an eye on as this could turn the world in its head!

End of the oil industry??

Tomorrow see's an Irish company launch in their own words:

"a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy.

This means never having to recharge your phone, never having to refuel your car. A world with an infinite supply of clean energy for all."

Who are they and what is it all about? Well watch this video and register at this site

Because of the difficulties they have come across getting the technology publicly validated the gauntlet has been thrown down to the academic community. There is a full page add in tomorrow's Economist requesting anyone from the scientific community to test the technology.

It works with magnets and is an incredibly clever piece of technology that will finally allow us to throw off the burden of oil and all the associated bs that goes with it. Bye bye energy politics, hello freedom.

More info:
Our Technology and the Laws of Physics

Steorn’s technology produces free, clean and constant energy. This provides a significant range of benefits, from the convenience of never having to refuel your car or recharge your mobile phone, to a genuine solution to the need for zero emission energy production. It also provides a secure supply of energy, since the components of the technology are readily available.

The technology is in a constant state of development. The company has focused for the past three years on increasing power output and the development of test systems that allow detailed analysis to be performed.

Steorn’s technology appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as ‘energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change form’.

Steorn is making three claims for its technology:

1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.

This represents a significant challenge to our current understanding of the universe and clearly such claims require independent validation from credible third parties. During 2005 Steorn embarked on a process of independent validation and approached a wide selection of academic institutions. The vast majority of these institutions refused to even look at the technology, however several did. Those who were prepared to complete testing have all confirmed our claims; however none will publicly go on record.

In early 2006 Steorn decided to seek validation from the scientific community in a more public forum, and as a result have published the challenge in The Economist. The company is seeking a jury of twelve qualified experimental physicists to define the tests required, the test centres to be used, monitor the analysis and then publish the results.

Steorn has decided to publish its challenge in The Economist because of the breadth of its readership. "We chose it over a purely scientific magazine simply because we want to make the general public aware that this process is about to commence and to generate public support, awareness, interest etc for what we are doing."

Cook: How I Found Myself with the Islamic Fascists

From Dissident Voice:

What if the war on “Islamic fascism” is less about fighting terrorism and more about silencing those who dissent from the West’s endless wars against the Middle East?

How the Irish Could Save the Middle East

From Counterpunch

For just under 837 years, the English and the Irish have warred against one another. Terrible things have been done in those long centuries, and the Irish tell endless stories about them. They know when it began: On Aug. 23, 1170, Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke-"Strongbow" to the Irish-waded ashore with 200 Norman knights and 1,000 men-at-arms near Waterford on Ireland's southeast coast. He took the town in five days, then marched north and smashed an Irish army near Dublin.

Thus began the longest war in European history. For more than 40 generations the Irish seethed at the occupation, rising up time and again to fling themselves in bloody rage at armies they could not hope to defeat.

The Lies Israel Tells Itself (and We Tell on Its Behalf)

By Jonathan Cook

When journalists use the word “apparently,” or another favorite “reportedly,” they are usually distancing themselves from an event or an interpretation in the supposed interests of balance. But I think we should read the “apparently” contained in a statement from the head of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, relating to the killing this week of four unarmed UN monitors by the Israeli army in its other sense.

When Annan says that those four deaths were “apparently deliberate,” I take him to mean that the evidence shows that the killings were deliberate. And who can disagree with him? At least 10 phone calls were made to Israeli commanders over a period of six hours warning that artillery and aerial bombardments were either dangerously close to or hitting the monitors’ building.

The UN post, in Khaim just inside south Lebanon, was clearly marked and well-known to the army, but nonetheless it was hit directly four times in the last hour before an Israeli helicopter fired a precision-guided missile that tore through the roof of an underground shelter, killing the monitors inside. A UN convoy that arrived too late to rescue the peacekeepers was also fired on. From the evidence, it does not get much more deliberate than that.

Fisk: 'How can we stand by and allow this to go on?'

07/31/06 "The Independent" -- -- They wrote the names of the dead children on their plastic shrouds. "Mehdi Hashem, aged seven - Qana," was written in felt pen on the bag in which the little boy's body lay. "Hussein al-Mohamed, aged 12 - Qana',' "Abbas al-Shalhoub, aged one - Qana.'' And when the Lebanese soldier went to pick up Abbas's little body, it bounced on his shoulder as the boy might have done on his father's shoulder on Saturday. In all, there were 56 corpses brought to the Tyre government hospital and other surgeries, and 34 of them were children. When they ran out of plastic bags, they wrapped the small corpses in carpets. Their hair was matted with dust, most had blood running from their noses.

You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity - yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the "pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime. Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbollah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana - as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about "Muslim terror" threatening "western civilisation" - as if the Hizbollah had killed all these poor people.

And in Qana, of all places. For only 10 years ago, this was the scene of another Israeli massacre, the slaughter of 106 Lebanese refugees by an Israeli artillery battery as they sheltered in a UN base in the town. More than half of those 106 were children. Israel later said it had no live-time pilotless photo-reconnaissance aircraft over the scene of that killing - a statement that turned out to be untrue when The Independent discovered videotape showing just such an aircraft over the burning camp. It is as if Qana - whose inhabitants claim that this was the village in which Jesus turned water into wine - has been damned by the world, doomed forever to receive tragedy.

Congratulations to the Pit Stop Ploughshares

In what is a great signal that US use of Shannon Airport as a pitstop for logistical support in the occupation of Iraq should not be tolerated, today a jury acquitted the Pit stop Ploughshares of criminally damaging a US war plane at Shannon Airport in 2003.

In 2003 they entered Shannon Airport and and non-violently disarmed a U.S. navy war plane.

Statement:

The jury is the conscience of the community chosen randomly from Irish society. The conscience of the community has spoken. The government has no popular mandate in providing the civilian Shannon airport to service the US war machine in it's illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In 1996 in Liverpool the Jury acquittal of the four 'ploughshares' women contributed to the end of arms exports to the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia and the independence of East Timor.

The decision of this jury should be a message to London, Washington DC and the Dail that Ireland wants no part in waging war on the people of Iraq. Refuelling of US warplanes at Shannon Airport should cease immediately.

Ciaron, Damien, Karen, Deirdre, Nuin

Kidnapped by Israel:The British Media and The Invasion Of Gaza

It seems that as usual there is a lot more to the story than what the main stream media would like us to know. Looks like Israel kick started the whole thing by kidnapping two Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook does a very interesting piece (snippet and link below) dissecting the media response. I am currently trying to dig out a link to the article he mentions in the Observer but if anyone is aware of it or comes across it please email it to me.


Few readers of a British newspaper would have noticed the story. In the Observer of 25 June, it merited a mere paragraph hidden in the “World in brief” section, revealing that the previous day a team of Israeli commandos had entered the Gaza Strip to “detain” two Palestinians Israel claims are members of Hamas.

The significance of the mission was alluded to in a final phrase describing this as “the first arrest raid in the territory since Israel pulled out of the area a year ago”. More precisely, it was the first time the Israeli army had re-entered the Gaza Strip, directly violating Palestinian control of the territory, since it supposedly left in August last year.

As the Observer landed on doorsteps around the UK, however, another daring mission was being launched in Gaza that would attract far more attention from the British media – and prompt far more concern.

Shortly before dawn, armed Palestinians slipped past Israeli military defences to launch an attack on an army post close by Gaza called Kerem Shalom. They sneaked through a half-mile underground tunnel dug under an Israeli-built electronic fence that surrounds the Strip and threw grenades at a tank, killing two soldiers inside. Seizing another, wounded soldier the gunmen then disappeared back into Gaza.

Whereas the Israeli “arrest raid” had passed with barely a murmur, the Palestinian attack a day later received very different coverage. The BBC’s correspondent in Gaza, Alan Johnstone, started the ball rolling later the same day in broadcasts in which he referred to the Palestinian attack as “a major escalation in cross-border tensions”. (BBC World news, 10am GMT, 25 June 2006)

Do you think the Lebanese children got the message from the Israeli children?

(see posts below)

More sickening pictures from Israel

AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner

Israeli girls write messages on a shell at a heavy artillery position near Kiryat Shmona, in northern Israel, next to the Lebanese border, Monday, July 17, 2006.

And people wonder why the world is so messed up!

AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner

Israeli children writing messages to Lebanese children.

And they will grow up with hatred in their hearts. As will the Lebanese children.

Neither have any chance of reconciliation as long as their parents continue to fill them with hate.

Surely the meaning of life is to make your child a better person than you are? But what we see here is parents teaching their children to hate more and more, that is exactly why the world is so messed up and is not getting any better!

The Genovese Syndrom

What is occurring in Gaza today is nothing short of a crime against humanity—unless, that is, you believe that the suffering of one Israeli soldier outweighs the suffering being imposed on 1.5 million innocent Palestinian men , women and children.

Blum: Why Bush's Iraq is Worse Than Saddam's

National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR's Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as "a moderate" and as a person trying to lead his Shiite followers into practicing peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into exile. Jenkins asked him: "What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?" The cleric replied that he'd "rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way it is now."

Ireland Challenged To Build On Success

Interesting article in todays Washington Post about Irelands economic success. One very interesting point it raised which I was unaware of is the fact that owners of two of the largest real estate firms decided to sell out in the last two weeks.

Surely an indicator that the bubble,whilst not quite at bursting point, is not so bubbly anymore.

The irony of the Irish economic miracle is surely not lost on the countries of Western Europe that poured billions of dollars into their poor, struggling neighbor to help integrate it into the much wealthier European Union.

In one respect it was a tremendous success, creating the continent's fastest-growing and most productive economy.

But in another, Ireland's success represents a profound embarrassment for the European establishment. In terms of the markets for its products and the source of its investment capital, Ireland is much more heavily oriented toward the United States -- and euro holdout England -- than it is to the countries of Western Europe. With its low tax rates and flexible labor markets, its economic model and business culture are "more Boston than Berlin," as the saying goes here. And although Ireland's booming economy now attracts tens of thousands of ambitious young immigrants each year, the vast majority come from the fast-growing states of Eastern Europe rather than high-unemployment states of Western Europe.

US caught transporting prisoners through Irish airspace

And it took a civilian airport cleaner in Shannon airport to reveal that they are not telling the truth!

So they do move prisoners through Irish airspace without seeking permission! This only makes it more likely that they have used Shannon as a stop over during rendition flights. Add this to that the fact that they move depleted uranium ammo through Shannon, again in contravention of their agreement with the Irish government, this makes Bertie and co look all the more complicit in war crimes.

And the upshot of it all: Our brave Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, who has time and time again said we must trust the assurances from the US summoned the US ambassador to Iveagh house for a spanking.

Chances of our guys putting their foot down and insisting on boarding each flight?? Nada,zip,zilch...
let the whitewash begin...

If the late Charlie Haughey was Taoiseach now I'd say he would have the balls to insist on checking the flights. As corrupt as he was he did seem to have a back bone, something Bertie may like to dig up once he's buried!

Bush’s cornpone sophistry

If, like myself, you have been wondering lately how Bush manages to keep a 30% support base, even with all the scandals, then this article breaks it down nicely. Well worth a read:

James Moore and Wayne Slater introduce the first chapter of their book about Karl Rove, Bush’s Brain, with the following quotation from the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato [1]: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

It’s a powerful way to start a book about possibly the most effective and infamous political deceiver that has ever lived. For Plato understood well the problems such deceivers cause democracies.

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave?

Do bears shit in the wood? Is the Pope Catholic? Are Fianna Fail and the PD's going to get their come-uppance at the next election?

Of course Haditha is just the tip of the iceberg. These things go on, I'd say, every day in Iraq.

The shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq

Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave? The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America's army of the slums go further?

By Robert Fisk

I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."

John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Charlie Glass, and Seymour Hersh on the failure of the world’s press

The late journalist Edward R. Murrow might well have been rolling in his grave on April 21. That’s because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a lecture that day in Washington, DC to journalists at the Department of State’s official Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists.

For the Bush administration to use the memory of a person who stood up to government propaganda is ironic to say the least. Secretary Rice told the assembled journalists that “without a free press to report on the activities of government, to ask questions of officials, to be a place where citizens can express themselves, democracy simply couldn’t work.”

If we knew more about Ireland, we might never have invaded Iraq

Monbiot telling it like it is again:

That they have not seen his film is no impediment. That it has won the Palme d'Or at Cannes only quickens their desire for reprisals. Ken Loach has been placed in preventive detention and is having his fingernails pulled out.

In the Times, Tim Luckhurst compares him - unfavourably - to Leni Riefenstahl. His new film is a "poisonously anti-British corruption of the history of the war of Irish independence ... The Wind That Shakes the Barley is not just wrong. It infantilises its subject matter and reawakens ancient feuds." I checked with the production company. The film has not yet been released. They can find no record that Luckhurst has attended a screening - and last night he refused to discuss the matter.