Video Day — watch now!

Open the EXCELLENT Youtube to catch last nights Jon Stewart zinger while it’s still up; some of us can’t run Comedy Central stuff easily and this appears to be posted “under the radar” — these two providers have issue with one another.

Then, Joe Biden does a commercial that is worth noting — I like Joe but I don’t want him in the Oval; still, it’s an impressive piece.

Next, Bill Maher … ‘cuz he tickles my fancy.

Last piece here, good news about Friend Keith, for those of us who don’t get MSNBC.

Jude

America To The Rescue
Jon Stewart, Youtube

Cathedral — Joe Biden
Youtube

What I did on My Summer Vacation
Bill Maher, HuffPo
August 23, 2007

NBC calls up ‘Countdown’
Paul J. Gough, The Hollywood Reporter
Aug 21, 2007

NEW YORK — MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” is getting a wider look on sister network NBC.

Olbermann’s hourlong news show will get its first primetime broadcast network exposure when it leads into a preseason “Sunday Night Football” game this weekend. “Countdown” will air from 7-8 p.m. EST, followed by the Philadelphia Eagles-Pittsburgh Steelers game.

“Countdown” has been a plucky competitor at 8 p.m. to the reigning cable news champion “The O’Reilly Factor” on Fox News Channel. (”O’Reilly” still wins by a walk.) And it’s a star performer on MSNBC’s recent ratings successes, thanks to Olbermann’s buzzworthy commentary and quirky style. Sunday’s show will be live from MSNBC’s studios.

The former ESPN “SportsCenter” anchor will return to his sports roots with a supporting role on this year’s “Sunday Night Football in America” telecasts. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

Add comment August 23rd, 2007

Iraq good, Iran bad, War soon

The buzz still has attack on Iran coming soon, probably in the spring, with Bush’s latest move to declare Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard as official fomenters of terrorism giving him “probable cause” to let loose Hell.

Here’s a collection including ex-CIA Robert Baer, who says the plan has been confirmed by Bushie insiders; other reads here include Ray McGovern and Noam Chomskey.

Last piece is a worthwhile activist/op to try to keep the networks from following FOX News’ lead in banging the war drum — this is worthy of your support, warning off the Kool Aid schleppers that we know how they work and we’ll boycott them if they try it! Check it out.

Jude

Prelude to an Attack on Iran
Robert Baer, Time Magazine
Saturday, Aug. 18, 2007

Reports that the Bush Administration will put Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list can be read in one of two ways: it’s either more bluster or, ominously, a wind-up for a strike on Iran. Officials I talk to in Washington vote for a hit on the IRGC, maybe within the next six months. And they think that as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. An awe and shock campaign, lite, if you will. But frankly they’re guessing; after Iraq the White House trusts no one, especially the bureaucracy.

As with Saddam and his imagined WMD, the Administration’s case against the IRGC is circumstantial. The U.S. military suspects but cannot prove that the IRGC is the main supplier of sophisticated improvised explosive devices to insurgents killing our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most sophisticated version, explosive formed projectiles or shape charges, are capable of penetrating the armor of an Abrams tank, disabling the tank and killing the crew.

A former CIA explosives expert who still works in Iraq told me: “The Iranians are making them. End of story.” His argument is only a state is capable of manufacturing the EFP’s, which involves a complicated annealing process. Incidentally, he also is convinced the IRGC is helping Iraqi Shi’a militias sight in their mortars on the Green Zone. “The way they’re dropping them in, in neat grids, tells me all I need to know that the Shi’a are getting help. And there’s no doubt it’s Iranian, the IRGC’s,” he said.

A second part of the Administration’s case against the IRGC is that the IRGC has had a long, established history of killing Americans, starting with the attack on the Marines in Beirut in 1983. And that’s not to mention it was the IRGC that backed Hizballah in its thirty-four day war against Israel last year. The feeling in the Administration is that we should have taken care of the IRGC a long, long time ago.

Strengthening the Administration’s case for a strike on Iran, there’s a belief among neo-cons that the IRGC is the one obstacle to a democratic and friendly Iran. They believe that if we were to get rid of the IRGC, the clerics would fall, and our thirty-years war with Iran over. It’s another neo-con delusion, but still it informs White House thinking.

And what do we do if just the opposite happens — a strike on Iran unifies Iranians behind the regime? An Administration official told me it’s not even a consideration. “IRGC IED’s are a casus belli for this Administration. There will be an attack on Iran.”

Robert Baer, a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, is TIME.com’s intelligence columnist and the author of See No Evil and, most recently, the novel Blow the House Down

Bolton: I ‘Absolutely’ Hope The U.S. Will Attack Iran In The Next ‘Six Months’
ThinkProgress
8/22/07

Yesterday, Raw Story pointed out that former CIA operative Bob Baer told Fox News that the Bush administration will likely attack Iran in the coming months. “Iran policy is on close hold, but the feeling is we will hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard corps sometime next six months or so,” said Baer.

Today, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton appeared on Fox News and responded. He said that while he couldn’t confirm Baer’s statements, he “absolutely” hoped they were true:

HEMMER: One final step here, too, that I want to take with you. You told one of our producers earlier today that you don’t know if it’s true — and you’ve made that clear in our interview here, that you don’t know what the odds are or are not against that — but you hope it’s true. Why do you hope it’s true?

BOLTON: Absolutely. I hope Iran understands that we are very serious, that we are determined they are not going to get a nuclear weapon capability, and unless they change the strategic decision they’ve been pursuing for close to 20 years, that that’s something they better factor into their calculations.

[Open link to] Watch it:

Bolton’s calls for strikes against Iran mirror those of other neocons, such as Bill Kristol and Michael Rubin, who also pushed for the Iraq invasion. Bolton’s claim that “Iran is interfering in Iraq and is posing a direct threat to our troops” is not a reason to strike the country. In reality, both Gen. Peter Pace and the National Intelligence Estimate have confirmed that Iran is “not likely” to be a major driver of violence in Iraq.

HEMMER: The Bush administration reportedly deciding to designate Iran’s Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

So, what does that mean, huh? Well, according to the former CIA operative Bob Baer, it means the U.S. could be gearing up to launch some sort of military strike on Iran. Bob Baer was here yesterday morning. Listen:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FORMER CIA OPERATIVE BOB BAER: Iran policy is on close hold, but the feeling is we will hit the Islamic Revolutionary Guard corps sometime next six months or so.

HEMMER: With such an — that would start another war. Is the administration up for this, Bob?

BAER: Well, it’s not exactly it’s a war. It’s what the administration is convinced of, is that the Iranians are interfering in Iraq and the rest of the Gulf.
(END VIDEO CLIP)

HEMMER: Well, that certainly got our attention. So we asked John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., for his take on that today.

Sir, good morning. Welcome back.

BOLTON: Good morning. Glad to be here.

HEMMER: Bob Baer says within six months his sources inform him that there will be a strike on Iran. Do you agree with that?

BOLTON: Well, I don’t think one can tell one way or the other. I don’t think there’s any doubt, based on the information we have, that Iran is interfering in Iraq and is posing a direct threat to our troops.

So I think if President Bush as commander in chief believes that information is accurate, he is fully entitled to take defensive measures, which could include going after the Revolutionary Guards inside Iran. […]

HEMMER: One final step here, too, that I want to take with you. You told one of our producers earlier today that you don’t know if it’s true — and you’ve made that clear in our interview here, that you don’t know what the odds are or are not against that — but you hope it’s true. Why do you hope it’s true?

BOLTON: Absolutely. I hope Iran understands that we are very serious, that we are determined they are not going to get a nuclear weapon capability, and unless they change the strategic decision they’ve been pursuing for close to 20 years, that that’s something they better factor into their calculations.

Bush League War Drums Beating Louder on Iran
Ray McGovern, BuzzFlash
08/22/2007

It is as though I’m back as an analyst at the CIA, trying to estimate the chances of an attack on Iran. The putative attacker, though, happens to be our own president.

It is precisely the kind of work we analysts used to do. And, while it is still a bit jarring to be turning our analytical tools on the U.S. leadership, it is by no means entirely new. For, of necessity, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have been doing that for almost six years now — ever since 9/11, when “everything changed.”

Of necessity? Yes, because, with very few exceptions, American journalists put their jobs at grave risk if they expose things such as fraudulent wars.

The craft of CIA analysis was designed to be an all-source operation, meaning that we analysts were responsible — and held accountable — for assimilating information from all sources and coming to judgments on what it all meant. We used data of various kinds, from the most sophisticated technical collection platforms, to spies, to not the least — open media.

Here I must reveal a trade secret and risk puncturing the mystique of intelligence analysis. Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained — as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained — by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.

Reporting From Informants

The above is in no way intended to minimize the value of intelligence collection by CIA case officers recruiting and running clandestine agents. For, though small in percentage of the whole nine yards available to be analyzed, information from such sources can often make a crucial contribution.

Consider, for example, the daring recruitment in mid-2002 of Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, who was successfully “turned” into working for the CIA and quickly established his credibility. Sabri told us there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

My former colleagues, perhaps a bit naively, were quite sure this would come as a welcome relief to President George W. Bush and his advisers. Instead, they were told that the White House had no further interest in reporting from Sabri; rather, that the issue was not really WMD, it was “regime change.” (Don’t feel embarrassed if you did not know this; although it is publicly available, our corporate-owned, war profiteering media has largely suppressed this key story.)

One former colleague, operations officer-par-excellence Robert Baer, now reports (in this week’s Time) that, according to his sources, the Bush/Cheney administration is winding up for a strike on Iran; that the Administration’s plan to put Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the terrorism list points in the direction of such a strike; and that the delusional “neo-conservative” thinking that still guides White House policy concludes that such an attack would lead to the fall of the clerics and the rise of a more friendly Iran.

Hold on, it gets even worse: Baer’s sources tell him that administration officials are thinking “as long as we have bombers and missiles in the air, we will hit Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Rove and Snow: Going Wobbly?

Our VIPS colleague Phil Geraldi, writing in The American Conservative, earlier noted that in the past, Karl Rove served as a counterweight to Vice President Dick Cheney, and may have tried to put the brakes on Cheney’s death wish to expand the Middle East quagmire to Iran. And former Pentagon officer, retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most devoted neo-cons just before the attack on Iraq, has put into words (on LewRockwell.com) the speculation several of us have been indulging in with respect to Rove’s departure.

In short, it seems possible that Rove, who is no one’s dummy and would not want to be required to “spin” an unnecessary war on Iran, may have lost the battle with Cheney over the merits of a military strike on Iran, and only then decided — or was urged — to spend more time with his family. As for Administration spokesperson Tony Snow, it seems equally possible that, before deciding he had to leave the White House to make more money, he concluded that his stomach could not withstand the challenge of conjuring up yet another Snow job to explain why Bush/Cheney needed to attack Iran. There is recent precedent for this kind of thing.

We now know that it was because former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld went wobbly on the Iraq war — as can be seen in his Nov. 6, 2006 memo to the president — that Rumsfeld was canned. (That was the day BEFORE the election.) In that memo, Rumsfeld called for a “major adjustment” in war policy. And so, Robert Gates, who had been waiting in the wings, was called to Crawford, given the test for malleability, hired, and dispatched by the president immediately to Iraq to weigh in heavily with the most senior U.S. generals (Abizaid and Casey). They had been saying, quite openly, Please, please; no more troops; a surge would simply give the Iraqis still more time and opportunity to diddle us while American troops continue to die. So much for the president always listening to his senior military commanders. And the bug of reality was infecting even Rumsfeld.

In his memo to the president, Rumsfeld suggested that U.S. generals “withdraw U.S. forces from vulnerable positions-cities, patrolling, etc.,” and move troops to Kuwait to serve as a Quick Reaction Force. Bush, of course, chose to do just the opposite.

Our domesticated press has not yet been able to put two and two together on this story, so it has been left to investigative reporters such as Robert Parry to do so. In his Aug. 17 essay, “Rumsfeld’s Mysterious Resignation,” Parry closes with this:

“The touchy secret about Rumsfeld’s departure seems to have been that Bush didn’t want the American people to know that one of the chief Iraq War architects had turned against the idea of an open-ended military commitment — and that Bush had found himself with no choice but to oust Rumsfeld for his loss of faith in the neoconservative cause.”

Granted, it is speculative that similar factors, this time with respect to war planning for Iran, were at work in the decisions on the departure of Rove and Snow. Someone ought to ask them.

Surgical Strikes First?

With the propaganda buildup we have seen so far on Iran, what seems most likely, at least initially, is an attack on Revolutionary Guard training facilities inside Iran. That can be done with cruise missiles. With some 20 targets already identified by anti-Iranian groups, there are enough assets already in place to do that job. But the “while-we’re-at-it” neo-con logic referred to above may well be applied after, or even in conjunction with, that kind of limited cruise missile attack.

Cheerleading in the Domesticated Media

Yes, it is happening again.

The lead editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post regurgitates the allegations that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq”; that it is “waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.”

Designating Iran a “specially designated global terrorist” organization, says the Post, “seems to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq.”

It’s as though Dick Cheney and friends are again writing the Post’s editorials. And not only that: arch neo-con James Woolsey told Lou Dobbs on Aug. 14 that the U.S. may have no choice but to bomb Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program. As Woolsey puts it, “I’m afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they could have the bomb.”

Woolsey, self-described “anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” has long been out in front plumbing for wars, like Iraq, that he and other neo-cons myopically see as being in Israel’s, as well as America’s, interest. On the evening of 9/11, Woolsey was already raising with Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings the notion that Iraq was a leading candidate for state sponsorship of the attacks. A day later, Woolsey told journalist James Fallows that, no matter who proved responsible for 9/11, the solution had to include removing Saddam Hussein because he was so likely to be involved the next time (sic).

The latest media hype is also rubbish. And Woolsey knows it. And so do reporters for the Washington Post, who are aware of, but have been forbidden to tell, a highly interesting story about waiting for a key National Intelligence Estimate — as if for Godot.

The NIE That Didn’t Bark

The latest National Intelligence Estimate regarding if and when Iran is likely to have the bomb has been ready since February. It has been sent back four times — no doubt because its conclusions do not support what Cheney and Woolsey are telling the president and, through the domesticated press, telling the rest of us as well.

The conclusion of the most recent published NIE (early 2005) was that Iran probably could not acquire a nuclear weapon until “early to mid-next decade,” a formula memorized and restated by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell at his confirmation hearing in February. One can safely assume that McConnell had been fully briefed on the first “final draft” of the new estimate, which has now been in limbo for half a year. And I would wager that the conclusions of the new estimate resemble those of the NIE of 2005 far too closely to suit Cheney.

It is a scandal that the congressional oversight committees have not been briefed on the conclusions of the new estimate, even though it cannot pass Cheney’s smell test. For it is a safe bet it would give the lie to the claims of Cheney, Woolsey, and other cheerleaders for war with Iran and provide powerful ammunition to those arguing for a more sensible approach to Iran.

But Attacking Iran Would Be Crazy

Despite the administration’s war-like record, many Americans may still cling to the belief that attacking Iran won’t happen because it would be crazy; that Bush is a lame-duck president who wouldn’t dare undertake yet another reckless adventure when the last one went so badly.

But rationality and common sense have not exactly been the strong suit of this administration. Bush has placed himself in a neoconservative bubble that operates with its own false sense of reality. Worse still: as psychiatrist Justin Frank pointed out in the July 27 VIPS memo “Dangers of a Cornered Bush,” updating his book, “Bush on the Couch”:

“We are left with a president who cannot actually govern, because he is incapable of reasoned thought in coping with events outside his control, like those in the Middle East.

“This makes it a monumental challenge — as urgent as it is difficult — not only to get him to stop the carnage in the Middle East, but also to prevent him from undertaking a new, perhaps even more disastrous adventure-like going to war with Iran, in order to embellish the image he so proudly created for himself after 9/11 as the commander in chief of ‘the first war of the 21st century.’”

Scary.

US-Iran Policy Dynamics
Noam Chomskey, ICH
08/22/07

IN CRUDE and brutal societies, the Party Line is publicly proclaimed, and it must be obeyed, or else. What you believe is your own business, of lesser concern. In societies where the state has lost the capacity to control by force, the Party Line is not proclaimed. Rather, it is presupposed, and then vigorous debate is encouraged within the limits imposed by unstated doctrinal orthodoxy.

The crude system leads to natural disbelief. The sophisticated variant gives the impression of openness and freedom, and serves to instill the Party Line as beyond question, even beyond thought, like the air we breathe. In the ever more precarious standoff between Washington and Teheran, one Party Line confronts another. Among the well-known immediate victims are the Iranian-American detainees Parnaz Azima, Haleh Esfandiari, Ali Shakeri and Kian Tajbakhsh. But the whole world is held hostage to the US-Iran conflict, where, after all, the stakes are nuclear.

Unsurprisingly, President Bush’s announcement of a “surge” in Iraq — in reaction to the call of most Americans for steps toward withdrawal, and the even stronger demands of the (irrelevant) Iraqis — was accompanied by ominous leaks about Iranian-based fighters and Iranian-made IEDS in Iraq aimed at disrupting Washington’s mission to gain victory, which is (by definition) noble.

Then followed the predictable debate: The hawks say we have to take violent measures against such outside interference in Iraq. The doves counter that we must make sure the evidence is compelling. The entire debate can proceed without absurdity only on the tacit assumption that we own the world. Therefore interference is limited to those who impede our objectives in a country that we invaded and occupy.

What are the plans of the increasingly desperate clique that narrowly holds political power in the United States? Reports of threatening, off-the-record statements by staffers for Vice-President Cheney have heightened fears of an expanded war. “You do not want to give additional argument to new crazies who say, ‘Let’s go and bomb Iran,”‘ Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told the BBC last month.

“I wake up every morning and see 100 Iraqis, innocent civilians, are dying.”

US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, as against the “new crazies,” is supposedly pursuing the diplomatic track with Teheran. But the Party Line holds, unchanged. In April, Rice spoke about what she would say if she encountered her Iranian counterpart Manouchehr Mottaki at the international conference on Iraq at Sharm el Sheikh. “What do we need to do? It’s quite obvious,” Rice said. “Stop the flow of arms to foreign fighters; stop the flow of foreign fighters across the borders.” She is referring, of course, to Iranian fighters and arms. US fighters and arms are not “foreign” in Iraq. Or anywhere. The tacit premise underlying her comment, and virtually all public discussion about Iraq (and beyond) is that we own the world.

Do we not have the right to invade and destroy a foreign country? Of course we do. That’s a given. The only question is: Will the surge work? Or some other tactic? Perhaps this catastrophe is costing us too much. And those are the limits of the debates among the presidential candidates, the Congress and the media, with rare exceptions. That’s part of the reason the debates are so inconclusive. The basic issues are not discussable.

Doubtless Teheran merits harsh condemnation, certainly for severe domestic repression and the inflammatory rhetoric of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who has little to do with foreign affairs). It is, however, useful to ask how Washington would act if Iran had invaded and occupied Canada and Mexico, overthrown the governments there, slaughtered scores of thousands of people, deployed major naval forces in the Caribbean and issued credible threats to destroy the United States if it did not immediately terminate its nuclear energy programs (and weapons). Would we watch quietly? After the United States invaded Iraq, “Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy,” said Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld.

Surely no sane person wants Iran (or anyone) to develop nuclear weapons. A reasonable solution to the crisis would permit Iran to develop nuclear energy, in accord with its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but not nuclear weapons. Is that outcome feasible? It would be, under one condition: that the United States and Iran were functioning democratic societies, in which public opinion has a significant impact on public policy, overcoming the huge gulf that now exists on many critical issues, including this one.

That reasonable solution has overwhelming support among Iranians and Americans, who agree quite generally on nuclear issues, according to recent polls by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, at the University of Maryland. The Iranian-American consensus extends to complete elimination of nuclear weapons everywhere (82 per cent of Americans), and if that cannot be achieved, a “nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that would include Islamic countries and Israel (71 per cent of Americans).” To 75 per cent of Americans, it is better to build relations with Iran rather than use threats of force.

These facts suggest a possible way to prevent the current crisis from exploding, perhaps even to World War III, as predicted by British military historian Correlli Barnett. That awesome threat might be averted by pursuing a familiar proposal: democracy promotion — at home, where it is badly needed. Although we cannot carry out the project directly in Iran, we can act to improve the prospects for the courageous reformers and oppositionists who are seeking to achieve just that. They include people like Saeed Hajjarian, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji, and those who as usual remain nameless, among them labour activists.

We can improve the prospects for democracy promotion in Iran by sharply reversing state policy here so that it reflects popular opinion. That would entail withdrawing the threats that are a gift to the Iranian hardliners and are bitterly condemned for that reason by Iranians truly concerned with democracy promotion. We can act to open some space for those who are seeking to overthrow the reactionary and repressive theocracy from within, instead of undermining their efforts by threats and aggressive militarism.

Democracy promotion, while no panacea, would be a useful step towards helping the United States become a “responsible stakeholder” in the international order (to adopt the term used for adversaries), instead of being an object of fear and dislike throughout much of the world. Apart from being a value in itself, a functioning democracy at home holds promise for a simple recognition that we don’t own the world, we share it.

Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival Americas Quest for Global Dominance.

Why is Iran Shelling Iraq?
ANDREW LEE BUTTERS, Time Magazine
Monday, Aug. 20, 2007

By the grisly standards of war-torn Iraq, fighting yesterday in the mountains in the northern part of the country was a mild affair. Iranian artillery shelled villages in the Qandil mountains that are home to various Kurdish militant groups, one of which — the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PEJAK) — is waging a guerilla insurgency against the Iranian government. Though hundreds of villagers fled their homes and two women were wounded, such cross-border violence is becoming a regular feature of life in the north. But yesterday’s attack could also be a prelude to a larger struggle.

Iraqi Kurdish media are reporting that the Iranian military is massing at the main border crossing into northern Iraq, possibly for an incursion against PEJAK. Clashes between PEJAK and the Iranians have been increasing steadily, and Iraqi Kurdish officials say that about 40 Iranian soldiers were killed on Saturday.

Whether or not the Iranians attack, the timing of the buildup is ominous. Last week, the United States announced that it may list Iran’s Revolutionary Guard — a branch of the country’s military — as a terrorist organization for supplying explosives to Shi’ite militias in Iraq for use against American soldiers. The statement was part of a growing White House campaign aimed at either intimidating the Iranian regime, or at building a case for an American strike against Iran. In that light, yesterday’s shelling is a reminder that Iran has the ability to confront the U.S. not just on the streets of Baghdad but also in the one part Iraq so safe that there are hardly any American soldiers: Iraqi Kurdistan.

But Iraq’s Kurdish region — the country’s only success story — is looking increasingly beleaguered. Besides the Iranian army, the Turkish army is also massed at their border with northern Iraq, threatening an invasion if Iraq’s Kurds don’t do something about another Kurdish radical group, the PKK, which is fighting its own insurgency against the Turkish state. The ruling Kurdish parties of northern Iraq say there is little they can do about these radical groups. Not only are the PKK and PEJAK hardened guerilla fighters in formidable terrain, but the Iraqi Kurds’ own security forces are stretched pretty thin keeping their territory safe from Arab terrorists in the rest of the country. That threat is as real as ever. The official death toll from last week’s suicide attacks against several towns near Iraqi Kurdistan has risen to over 400 and continues to climb.

Iraq’s Kurdish leaders have long been trying to steer a course between their patrons in Washington and their powerful neighbors in Tehran. Though they have America to thank for freeing them from the genocidal grip of Saddam’s regime, many Iraqi Kurdish political parties took refuge in Iran during those grim years. This spring, Kurds protested vigorously when American soldiers captured several Iranian agents posing as diplomats in the Kurdish regional capital of Arbil. An Iranian incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan would be a poor way of saying thanks.

But these days Iraq’s Kurds aren’t feeling the love from anyone. Last week, America’s ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker said he didn’t think that it would be possible to hold a referendum on the status of Kirkuk this year. Iraqi Kurds consider the oil-rich city of Kirkuk — which is currently under control of the central government of Baghdad — to be the “Jerusalem” of Kurdistan, stolen from them by a Ba’athist ethnic-cleansing campaign in the 1980s. The Kurds have made the return of Kirkuk a central precondition to their participation in a federal Iraq, and will regard any delay as a betrayal. But then again, they are used to betrayal. As the saying goes, the Kurds — a small ethnic group living in the shadows of great empires — have never had any true friends but the mountains.

Fox does unto Iran as it Did unto Iraq

[activist/op]

Rupert Murdoch wants to kill your 18 year-olds in a fruitless war with Iran. Robert Greenwald’s video shows how Faux Cable News is running the same scam on Iran that it ran on Iraq, with side by side footage so you can see the Goebbels techniques at work. Liberals don’t like anything that smacks of censorship, but I really think our body public won’t be safe from this nefarious media conspiracy until we mount an effective campaign of advertiser boycott against the corporations who underwrite this fascist horse manure.

Tell the networks not to follow FOX down the road to war

Sign the Open Letter

Dear ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN,

“My station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at FOX News.”

That is CNN’s Christiane Amanpour explaining why the major television networks failed to accurately inform the public in the lead-up to the Iraq war, choosing instead to follow FOX’s lead.

Now, FOX is beating the drums for war with Iran. Robert Greenwald’s short film, “FOX Attacks: Iran”, outlines the evidence from the station’s own broadcasts, comparing their reporting before the Iraq war with what they are saying now about Iran.

You have a sacred responsibility to the American people to provide accurate and reliable information so we can best make the decisions which affect our lives. We urge you to accurately and thoroughly report all sides of this important story.

Please do not blindly follow FOX down the road to another war.

Sincerely,

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. 100 utstarcom ringtones freeaudiovox ringtone 8200ringtones 8700g usbaccrington garagesalltel ringtone motorola v265ringtones free 02 x2ringtone 120tdistrict 220 barrington community unit school Map

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