Sorrow in the Shadows

May 6th, 2008

I’m a Dean Koontz fan and he quotes, in each of his novels, little snippits of prose/poetry from The Book of Counted Sorrows [for years, his readers hunted this book; turns out it is still in his head, awaiting completion.] Well, I’m counting sorrows today … and I had to dig around to find them, since chaos in general has us too spun up to focus too specifically.

Here are our topics:

The Burmese cyclone … where the Myanmar government reported death and disappearance to the tune of 13,000 … then raised it to 25,000 — but NGO’s and the like estimating a number more in the 50,000 range. Getting aid into this region is as problematic as getting reporters into Tibet … and for all the same reasons — and Laura Bush didn’t help.

Our returning soldiers, a staggering percentage of whom suffer PTSD, are being projected to commit suicide in startling numbers — over a million have been deployed in these last years; and little is being done to address their mental health issues. I’ve included a request for cast-off cell phones for soldiers, worth our consideration for those that much of the nation has forgotten.

World hunger has become epidemic and frightening — government policies, ours and others, have created a whirlwind complicated by global warming and wars. There a link to a giving opportunity included, even moderate amounts are welcomed. If you feel as though you’re already tightening your belt and can’t participate, remember — you get what you give.

I’ve also included articles about our current sabre rattling with Iran [if we had more in the national coffers, you KNOW we'd already have hit them.] This is indeed a sorrow and an assault on good sense and civil behavior. After that a couple of startling New World Order type snippits resonant with the old question — will Bush actually GO when he’s replaced? Iran continues to figure into that question, as does the military expectation. Dubby’s newly positioned Admiral Mullen is worried about changing presidents mid-stream … and the last bit, about who loses in spades during an epidemic, is what we would expect from the Bushies.

Finally, a few words about the campaign, with today the big day in NC and IN … I hope their weather’s better than mine. Voting will be tough enough, since:

1.1 Million Purged from Indiana Voter Registration Rolls

ID law could depress black turnout in IN

Hil has a slight edge in IN and a handicap in NC, although the Pub’s are smirking that the “fix is in” there for the redoubtable Ms. Clinton. [Oops - Mrs.] I read an article today where she said she’d come from behind in Indiana … odd, that was never my impression [and too close to DubSpeak to suit me ... you know, the rube's can't remember from one day to another.] But that’s the standard dumbing-down of expectations; Olbermann had something to say about her constantly moving the goal posts, video here.

And I’ve got to say that Hillary constantly surprises me — not in a good way, sadly — but surprise she does. She vowed to smash OPEC the other day — I guess she DOES have an S on her chest … as well as testicles, too often mentioned lately, seems to me. We’ve HAD balls for 7 years — I’d prefer brains now … not to mention that the twisting of logic that requires us to look for male qualities in a female candidate just seems sad. And I quiver when she throws folks under the bus … like Krugman, who has shaped up as quite a vocal supporter in these last weeks. [I'd bet he was surprised too!] Righty pundit David Brooks outlined that in this snip about the ‘gas wars:”

Stephanopoulos asked her to name a single economist who thinks a tax-holiday plan would work, and the daughter of Wellesley and Yale took the chance to shove the geeks into their lockers: “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.”

When Stephanopoulos pointed out that Paul Krugman, a Times columnist, has raised doubts about the plan, Clinton lumped Krugman in with the Bush administration and said she wasn’t going to listen to the people responsible for the last seven years.

Ultimately, I think nothing will be decided today and this time I’m going to do my best to avoid the news shows that give me momentary updates and PunditSpeak … we’ll find out soon enough if we’re gonna to pick a president we wanna have a beer with.

So, from our own Book of Counted Sorrows — what, and who, needs our prayers and support … of the day.

Jude

Aid workers fear Burma cyclone deaths will top 50,000
Kenneth Denby, in Rangoon
May 6, 2008

Foreign aid workers in Burma have concluded that as many as 50,000 people died in Saturday’s cyclone, and two to three million are homeless, in a disaster whose scale invites comparison with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The official death count after Cyclone Nargis is 15,000, and the Thai Foreign Minister says he has been told that 30,000 people are missing. But due to the incompleteness of the information from the stricken Irrawaddy delta, UN and charity workers in the city of Rangoon privately believe that the number will eventually be several times higher.

Andrew Kirkwood, country director of the British charity Save The Children told The Times: “I’d characterise it as unprecedented in the history of Myanmar and on an order of magnitude with the effect of the tsunami on individual countries. It might well be more dead than the tsunami caused in Sri Lanka.

“We are looking at 50,000 dead and millions homeless. The power is off, most people don’t have water. They are relying on wells, and getting it out of the Inle Lake which is not clean. There is a risk of disease - if people are living together in close proximity then an outbreak of diarrhoea is just a matter of time.”

The death toll in Sri Lanka on Boxing Day 2004 was 31,000, second only to the 131,000 who died on the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Eleven countries were affected.

Four days after the Burma cyclone, which struck the flat agricultural area south of Rangoon, there is wretchedly little hard information about the victims.

Seven townships have been designated as “priority one” disaster areas, because between 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings have been destroyed. “Anything less than 60 per cent destroyed is not being counted as a priority at this stage by the government, which gives some indication of the scale of the problem,” said Mr Kirkwood.

According to the Burmese Government’s figures at least 10,000 people have died in the town of Bogalay alone.

Foreign aid agencies have reported scenes of devastation, with corpses still littering the rice fields and desperate survivors without food or clean drinking water. They are either without shelter or crammed into whatever buildings remain standing.

Burma’s junta refused foreign aid after the 2004 tsunami, in which between 60 and 600 of its citizens are reported to have died, but this time the sheer scale of the slowly emerging disaster seems to have forced it to change its mind. “We will welcome help . . . from other countries because our people are in difficulty,” said Nyah Win, the Burmese Foreign Minister, in a rare television appearance.

Cyclone Nargis ripped across Burma’s agricultural heartland with violent winds that reached speeds of 120mph (193km/h), destroying buildings and fields, toppling trees and washing away roads in the vital rice-growing area of the Irrawaddy delta.

It flattened shanty towns and downed power and phone lines in the sprawling port city of Rangoon, Burma’s former capital and home to 5 million people.

It flattened shanty towns and downed power and phone lines in the sprawling port city of Rangoon, Burma’s former capital and home to five million people.

The price of staple foods such as rice, eggs, cabbages have doubled and even quadrupled in some areas.

Bernard Delpuech, a European Union aid official in Rangoon, said that the junta has sent three ships carrying food to the delta region, which is the rice production centre for Burma’s 53 million people. Nearly half the population live in the five disaster-hit states.

UN agencies have handed out what supplies they had from stockpiles in Burma, and are preparing to fly in further emergency food, shelter and medicines to prevent epidemics and starvation inflicting a second disaster.

Today private frustration was growing among aid organisations, however, that although the junta has publicly invited assistance, bureaucracy is impeding the granting of visas to allow foreign workers into the country. As delays drag on, living conditions for the victims is getting worse.

“The power is off, most people don’t have water. They are relying on wells, and getting it out of the Inle Lake which is not clean. There is a risk of disease - if people are living together in close proximity then an outbreak of diarrhoea is just a matter of time,” said Mr Kirkwood.

The generals – who have traditionally regarded overseas aid workers as spies – have turned down an offer from the US State Department of $250,000 (£125,000) in help and a disaster assistance team, suggesting that it remains selective about whom it accepts. The move prompted a rebuke from President Bush.

“The military junta must allow our disaster assessment teams into the country,” Mr Bush told reporters, adding he was prepared to make US naval assets available for search and rescue.

The generals lifted the state of emergency today in three of the five worst-affected states, and also in parts of Rangoon and Irrawaddy, and announced that there was no immediate food crisis in Burma.

“I think there was some damage to rice stored by private merchants and growers, but we have enough surplus for domestic sufficiency,” said Brigadier General Kyaw Hsan, the Burmese Information Minister, at a press conference in Rangoon.

The United Nations World Food Programme fears that the cyclone and flooding in two major rice growing areas could also affect food supply in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

The generals confirmed that a controversial referendum on Burma’s new constitution, part of its “roadmap to democracy”, will go ahead on May 10, although they conceded that it would have to be delayed by two weeks in Rangoon and Irrawaddy states until May 24.

he ruling provoked an outcry from opposition politicians, who say that all the country’s efforts should be focused on getting aid to the suffering, rather than delivering ballot boxes and conducting an election.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the imprisoned Burmese opposition leader, has urged followers to boycott the referendum, saying that the draft constitution leaves power still in the hands of the military.

The junta has moved even further into the shadows in the last six months due to widespread outrage at its bloody crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September.

The US and EU states have imposed economic sanctions. In the past, humanitarian aid programmes have also been limited because of fears that they would benefit the generals. ++

Sanders reported from Khartoum and Wilkinson from Rome. Special correspondent M. Karim Faiez in Kabul, Noha El-Hennawy of The Times’ Cairo Bureau and special correspondent Alex Renderos in Taltapanca contributed to this report.

Soldier suicides could trump war tolls: US health official
Raw Story
Monday May 5, 2008

Suicides and “psychological mortality” among US soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan could exceed battlefield deaths if their mental scars are left untreated, the head of the US Institute of Mental Health warned Monday.

Of the 1.6 million US soldiers who have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18-20 percent — or around 300,000 — show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or both, said Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health.

An estimated 70 percent of those at-risk soldiers do not seek help from the Department of Defense or the Veterans Administration, he told a news conference launching the American Psychiatric Association’s 161st annual meeting here.

If “one just does the math”, then allowing PTSD or depression to go untreated in such numbers could result in “suicides and psychological mortality trumping combat deaths” in Iraq and Afghanistan, Insel warned.

More than 4,000 US soldiers have died in Iraq since the US invasion of 2003, and more than 400 in Afghanistan since the US led attacks there in 2001, of which some 290 were killed in action and the rest in on-combat deaths.

“It’s predicted that most soldiers — 70 percent — will not seek treatment through the DoD or VA,” Insel said at the meeting, at which the psychological impact of war is expected to top the agenda over the next four days.

Left untreated, PTSD and depression can lead to substance abuse, alcoholism or other life-threatening behaviors.

“It’s a gathering storm for the civilian and public health care sectors,” Insel said.

He urged public-sector mental health caregivers to recognize the symptoms of psychological troubles resulting from deployment to a war zone and be ready to provide adequate care for both soldiers and their families.

Other items on the agenda at the meeting, set to be attended by some 19,000 psychiatrists and mental health practitioners from around the world, include violence in schools, the psychology of extremism, and more light-hearted topics such as how music affects mood. ++

New phone? Donate your old one!
Cell Phones For Soldiers

Americans will replace an estimated 130 million cell phones this year. A 12-year-old and 13-year-old brother-and-sister pair from Massachusetts started an organization called Cell Phones For Soldiers for troops who were incurring huge cell phone charges to communicate with their families overseas. The organization has teamed up with AT&T, which gives free minutes to soldiers and also sends them cell phones and calling cards so that they can talk for free. You can mail in your phones from anywhere in the country. You can print a free prepaid postage label at the link: http://www.cellphonesforsoldiers.com/

U.N. food aid costlier as need soars
The U.N.’s World Food Program is struggling as costs of food and fuel skyrocket while the numbers of people needing help surge across the globe. Millions are in danger.
Edmund Sanders and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
April 1, 2008

KHARTOUM, SUDAN — For 15 years, he’s been a “grocer” for Africa’s destitute. But he’s never seen anything like this.

Pascal Joannes’ job is to find grains, beans and oils to fill a food basket for Sudan’s neediest people, from Darfur refugees to schoolchildren in the barren south.

Lately Joannes has spent less time shopping and more time poring over commodity price lists, usually in disbelief.

“White beans at $1,160,” the white-haired Belgian, 52, cries in despair over the price of a metric ton. “Complete madness! I bought them two years ago in Ethiopia for $235.”

Joannes is head of procurement in Sudan for the World Food Program, the United Nations agency in charge of alleviating world hunger.

Meteoric food and fuel prices, a slumping dollar, the demand for biofuels and a string of poor harvests have combined to abruptly multiply WFP’s operating costs, even as needs increase. In other words, if the number of needy people stayed constant, it would take much more money to feed them. But the number of people needing help is surging dramatically. It is what WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran calls “a perfect storm” hitting the world’s hungry.

The agency last month issued an emergency appeal for money to cover a shortfall tallied at more than half a billion dollars and growing. It said it might have to reduce food rations or cut people off altogether.

The most vulnerable are people like those in Sudan, whom Joannes is struggling to feed and who rely heavily, perhaps exclusively, on the aid. But at least as alarming, WFP officials say, is the emerging community of newly needy.

These are the people who once ate three meals a day and could afford nominal healthcare or to send their children to school. They are more likely to live in urban areas and buy most of their food in a market.

They are the urban poor in Afghanistan, where the government has asked for urgent help. They are families in Central America, who have been getting by on remittances from relatives abroad, but who can no longer make ends meet as the price of corn and beans nearly doubles.

“This is largely a new caseload,” John Aylieff, the emergency coordinator for the WFP’s assessment division, said at the agency’s Rome headquarters.

Aylieff and his staff assess the vulnerability of people in 121 countries. About 40 of the nations have been judged to be at risk of serious hunger, or already suffering from it.

The criteria include: how much does the country rely on imported food; how large is the urban population; what is the current rate of inflation, and what portion of their income do families spend on food (in Burundi, for example, it’s 77%; in the U.S. it’s 10%).

In the short term, officials predict food riots and political unrest, as has occurred in recent weeks in Pakistan, Indonesia and Egypt. In Egypt, shortages of government- subsidized bread recently triggered strikes, demonstrations and violence in which seven people died.

In the longer term, overall health worsens and education levels decline.

“Finally they end up selling their productive assets [and] that pretty much means they will remain economically destitute, even when things come back to normal,” said Arif Husain, senior program advisor for the assessment division, who recently moved to the WFP’s Rome headquarters after years in Sudan.

Countries are taking steps to avert widespread hunger. Some, like Egypt and Indonesia, have quickly expanded subsidies; others, like China, have banned exports of precious commodities.

Afghanistan was the first country to request urgent help. President Hamid Karzai in January asked the agency to feed an additional 2.5 million people, most of them urban poor, in addition to the 5 million rural people the agency already feeds.

In Kabul, the Afghan capital, Abdul Fatah and his wife Nooriya raise their five children on her teacher’s salary; he lost his government job a year ago.

“Life is getting harder day by day,” said Fatah, who is 45 but looks far older. “We cannot even buy meat once a month.”

The price of wheat in Afghanistan has risen by more than two-thirds in the last year. Because staples such as rice, oil and beans are also expensive, Fatah and his wife are sometimes unable to buy pens and notebooks for the children to use in school. Unable to afford both food and lamp oil, the household goes to sleep early.

Kabul homemaker Mahmooda Sharif, a mother of three, said that instead of eating meat twice a week, her family can now afford it only twice a month. The cost of food competes with school expenses and medical bills. She has delayed dental visits because she can’t afford them.

A world away in El Salvador, in hills that once yielded abundant harvests of coffee, signs of malnutrition are spreading.

Salvadorans need twice the money to buy the same amount of food they could purchase a year ago, meaning their nutritional sustenance is cut in half, the WFP says.

“My children ask for food, and how can I not feed them? They ask for some eggs, beans, and I give it to them,” said Maria De Las Mercedes Ramirez, a 41-year-old mother of five. “I, as the mother, will eat less.”

The Ramirezes are one of about 70 families living in shacks on a desolate coffee plantation near the town of Taltapanca, abandoned more than a decade ago when coffee prices took a dive. Most of the families are run by mothers; the fathers have left to find work in the Salvadoran capital, or out of the country.

Ramirez lives on about $80 a month that comes from wages her husband sends and the little she can eke from an occasional job pruning coffee plants. What Ramirez spends on corn has shot up more than 50% in the last few months, cooking oil is up 75%, and beans have doubled in price.

Many families rely heavily on schools that give students one meal a day.

“You can see a lot of concern in their faces when they come to pick up their kids,” principal Delsy Amilia Chavez said of the mothers. “And some of the mothers are anemic. They can’t afford to eat beans and aren’t getting the iron they need.”

The school meals are provided by the WFP, but the agency is transferring the program to the government and reports that some schools have been unable to continue them.

Carlo Scaramella, the WFP country director in El Salvador, said hurricanes and drought last year added an additional 160,000 people to the 100,000 that the agency was already feeding. One million are at risk, he said.

In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered army-owned bakeries that produce 1.2 million loaves a day to pour more bread onto the general market.

The government also allocated almost $1 billion to bread subsidies for 2008. It subsidizes 210 million loaves of flat round bread a day, the main item on most Egyptians’ daily menu. As commodity prices soared, subsidized bread became precious, and fights broke out in queues at bakeries and stores.

The price of unsubsidized bread has gone up 10 times, and rice doubled in a single week, said Farag Wahba Ahmed, an official with Egypt’s Chamber of Commerce.

In Sudan, where the WFP oversees the largest emergency food operation in the world, aid officials are drafting contingency plans for coping with a smaller supply. In Darfur, especially, they must tread carefully.

“There’s no way we can come in and say, ‘We have no more food,’ ” Joannes said. “It would create riots.”

Darfur, the beleaguered region in western Sudan, accounts for three-fourths of the WFP’s operation here, which in total distributes 632,000 metric tons of food valued at $700 million to 5.6 million people (more than in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia combined).

The WFP has sought to lower costs by turning to regional markets to buy food. Buying from local farmers helps the budget since it eliminates shipping costs. But because the WFP is such a big buyer, it has to be careful not to distort the market.

A 30% increase in costs in Sudan in the last four months is blamed chiefly on rising prices for locally produced sorghum. The WFP is already absorbing 6% of the national production and fears that buying more would destabilize the market.

Joannes boasts that he found a good deal recently on a mix of lentils from Ethiopia, buying them for only $700 a metric ton, far less than the going rate for white beans. But bargains are hard to find.

Back in Rome, Nicole Menage, head of the food procurement service, receives daily, sometimes hourly, reports on rising prices and falling reserves. It’s like a mammoth board game, with multiple moving pieces.

She and her associates last year managed to find in China 12,000 tons of maize needed urgently in nearby North Korea. Then, suddenly, China slapped on an export ban and the agency ended up finding the maize in Tanzania.

“The only tool we have is to stretch the net as far as possible,” she said. ++

World Food Program through the UN
Fill The Cup to feed hungry children

Former UN weapons inspector says attack on Iran ‘virtual guarantee’
John Byrne, Raw Story
Monday May 5, 2008

US denies again on Monday

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who was among the original experts to question Bush Administration claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, now says he believes an attack on Iran is a “virtual guarantee.”

“We take a look at the military buildup, we take a look at the rhetoric, we take a look at the diplomatic posturing, and I would say that it’s a virtual guarantee that there will be a limited aerial strike against Iran in the not-so-near future—or not-so-distant future, that focuses on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command,” Ritter said last week in a little-noted interview with Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now. “And if this situation spins further out of control, you would see these aerial strikes expanding to include Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and some significant command and control targets.”

The Pentagon denied the claim again Monday.

“I actually am very hopeful that we don’t get into a position where we have to get into a conflict,” Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Israel’s Channel Ten television when asked if he might recommend that U.S. forces strike Iranian nuclear facilities preemptively.

“It would be a very significant challenge for the United States right now to get into a third conflict in that part of the world,” Mullen added, referring to the Bush administration’s long-running military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ritter, who led the UN mission to inspect Iraqi weapons from 1991 to 1998, also questions Administration claims that Syria was developing a nuclear weapon in concert with North Korea. RAW STORY has written in detail regarding concerns from intelligence officers, who say that satellite photographs of the alleged site offer no formal proof, and officials are internally skeptical of such claims.

“We have to be concerned about the evidence,” Ritter said. “We have interior photographs and exterior shots and nothing that links the two. And so, on the surface, I would say that if you’re bringing this evidence to a court of law—it’s a strange dimension, the rule of law, when we speak of American foreign policy lately—you would have trouble having anybody say yes, this is definitive evidence that links the allegations to this specific site in question.”

“And this notion that the reactor was on the verge of becoming operational, again, is absurd,” he adds. “You know, there would have to be literally thousands of pounds of pure graphite that would have to be introduced to this facility, and there’s no evidence in the destruction. You know, there were a number of reporters who went to the site after it was blown up. If it had been bombed and there was graphite introduced, you would have a signature all over the area of destroyed graphite blocks. There would be graphite lying around, etc. This was not the case.”

US intelligence officials told RAW STORY they “found no radiation signatures after the bombing, so there was no uranium or plutonium present.”

“We don’t have any independent intelligence that it was a nuclear facility — only the assertions by the Israelis and some ambiguous satellite photography from them that shows a building, which the Syrians admitted was a military facility.”

The site of the alleged reactor was bombed in 2007. The UN is currently probing US claims.

“I don’t know what was going on at this site,” Ritter said. “If the images are accurate, it appears that Syria was producing a very, very small research reactor. But it is not a reactor usable in a nuclear weapons program. Syria was not violating the law.”

The interview was highlighted by a diarist on Daily Kos.

Report fingers new Pentagon planning

Ritter’s remark about Iran comes on the heels of a report Sunday in the UK Sunday Times’ which alleges that the Pentagon is drawing up plans for a “surgical strike” against an alleged insurgent training camp in Iran, and a CBS report that suggests US forces are prepared to launch small-scale attacks.

Attributing the assertion to Western intelligence officials, the Times’ Michael Smith asserts that US officials have become increasingly frustrated with Iran’s Republican Guard force — an elite corps of the country’s military — which the Bush Administration has designated a terrorist group. Western officials have accused Iran of helping arming rebel militias in Iraq, and have accused Iran of supplying IEDs.

Smith was the first to reveal the Downing Street Minutes, an account of a secret 2002 meeting between Bush Administration officials and British intelligence surrounding Iraq, in which MI6 director Richard Dearlove remarked that facts around Iraq were being “fixed” around a policy for war.

“US commanders are increasingly concerned by Iranian interference in Iraq and are determined that recent successes by joint Iraqi and US forces in the southern port city of Basra should not be reversed by the Quds Force,” Smith writes.”‘If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,’” he quotes a defense official as saying.

Nuclear facilities ‘not targets’

Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker and RAW STORY’s Larisa Alexandrovna revealed internal Pentagon planning in a buildup to a potential Iran conflict. Since the reports ran, however, rhetoric about Iran has been toned down and concerns of a potential all-out war have diminished.

American officials are opposed to any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, Smith says. They believe, however, that an attack on a militant camp could send a message to the Republican Guard.

CBS News reported last week about a potential strike on Iran.

“Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq,” they wrote.

“U.S. officials are also concerned by Iranian harassment of U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf as well as Iran’s still growing nuclear program,” CBS adds. “New pictures of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant show the country’s defense minister in the background, as if deliberately mocking a recent finding by U.S. intelligence that Iran had ceased work on a nuclear weapon.”

Sources told Smith that no attack was planned on Iranian nuclear facilities. Such attack plans have been criticized, because many of Iran’s facilities are located underground and not all locations might be neutralized by an airstrike.

“If an attack happens it will be on a training camp to send a clear message to Iran not to interfere,” one intelligence officer said. ++

Democrats Okay Funds for Covert Ops
Secret Bush “Finding” Widens War on Iran
Andrew Cockburn, CounterPunch
02/05/08

Six weeks ago, President Bush signed a secret finding authorizing a covert offensive against the Iranian regime that, according to those familiar with its contents, “unprecedented in its scope.”

Bush’s secret directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan – but is also far more sweeping in the type of actions permitted under its guidelines – up to and including the assassination of targeted officials. This widened scope clears the way, for example, for full support for the military arm of Mujahedin-e Khalq, the cultish Iranian opposition group, despite its enduring position on the State Department’s list of terrorist groups.

Similarly, covert funds can now flow without restriction to Jundullah, or “army of god,” the militant Sunni group in Iranian Baluchistan – just across the Afghan border — whose leader was featured not long ago on Dan Rather Reports cutting his brother in law’s throat.

Other elements that will benefit from U.S. largesse and advice include Iranian Kurdish nationalists, as well the Ahwazi arabs of south west Iran. Further afield, operations against Iran’s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon will be stepped up, along with efforts to destabilize the Syrian regime.

All this costs money, which in turn must be authorized by Congress, or at least a by few witting members of the intelligence committees. That has not proved a problem. An initial outlay of $300 million to finance implementation of the finding has been swiftly approved with bipartisan support, apparently regardless of the unpopularity of the current war and the perilous condition of the U.S. economy.

Until recently, the administration faced a serious obstacle to action against Iran in the form of Centcom commander Admiral William Fallon, who made no secret of his contempt for official determination to take us to war. In a widely publicized incident last January, Iranian patrol boats approached a U.S. ship in what the Pentagon described as a “taunting” manner.

According to Centcom staff officers, the American commander on the spot was about to open fire. At that point, the U.S. was close to war. He desisted only when Fallon personally and explicitly ordered him not to shoot. The White House, according to the staff officers, was “absolutely furious” with Fallon for defusing the incident.

Fallon has since departed. His abrupt resignation in early March followed the publication of his unvarnished views on our policy of confrontation with Iran, something that is unlikely to happen to his replacement, George Bush’s favorite general, David Petraeus.

Though Petraeus is not due to take formal command at Centcom until late summer, there are abundant signs that something may happen before then. A Marine amphibious force, originally due to leave San Diego for the Persian Gulf in mid June, has had its sailing date abruptly moved up to May 4. A scheduled meeting in Europe between French diplomats acting as intermediaries for the U.S. and Iranian representatives has been abruptly cancelled in the last two weeks. Petraeus is said to be at work on a master briefing for congress to demonstrate conclusively that the Iranians are the source of our current troubles in Iraq, thanks to their support for the Shia militia currently under attack by U.S. forces in Baghdad.

Interestingly, despite the bellicose complaints, Petraeus has made little effort to seal the Iran-Iraq border, and in any case two thirds of U.S. casualties still come from Sunni insurgents. “The Shia account for less than one third,” a recently returned member of the command staff in Baghdad familiar with the relevant intelligence told me, “but if you want a war you have to sell it.”

Even without the covert initiatives described above, the huge and growing armada currently on station in the Gulf is an impressive symbol of American power. ++

Mullen Cites U.S. ‘Vulnerability’
Transition to New President in Wartime Concerns the Military
Joint Chiefs Chairman Michael G. Mullen said the U.S. needs to be in a
“deterrent mode” toward Iran.
Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post
Thursday, May 1, 2008

The nation’s top military officer warned yesterday that the transition to a new American president will mark a “time of vulnerability” as the United States fights two wars, and he said military leaders are already actively preparing for the changing of the guard.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, said the U.S. political transition will be “extraordinarily challenging,” particularly as the military is engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan and faces interference in both countries from Iran.

“Iran is not going away,” Mullen said. “We need to be strong and really in the deterrent mode, to not be very predictable” regarding Iran, he said in a meeting with editors and reporters at The Washington Post.

Mullen spoke on a day when Pentagon officials announced that a second U.S. aircraft carrier group, the USS Lincoln, had arrived in the Persian Gulf for a brief overlap with another carrier. Having two carriers in the Gulf will provide additional air power for strikes and reconnaissance in the combat zone, giving commanders added flexibility, said Lt. Gen. Carter F. Ham, the Joint Staff operations chief. “It allows us, also, to demonstrate to our friends and allies in the region a commitment to security in the region,” he said.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that the carrier could serve as a “reminder” to Iran. But its presence is part of a regular fluctuation of U.S. Navy ships in the region and does not mark an “escalation” of force, he told reporters traveling with him in Mexico.

In a wide-ranging interview, Mullen detailed how Iran continues to supply weapons, training and financing to insurgents not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan. He said the Iranian involvement with Taliban fighters “mirrors what they are doing with Iraqis,” although on a smaller scale.

“There’s training going on, weapons which are entering,” as well as technology — assistance that is “very well connected” with the Taliban leadership, particularly in western Afghanistan, he said.

A State Department annual report on terrorism released yesterday said that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or Quds Force, last year provided to the Taliban grenades, mortars, 107mm rockets and possibly shoulder-fired air defense weapons.

In Iraq, the report said, Iranian authorities continued to supply Shiite militias with advanced rockets, sniper rifles and explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), which have killed thousands of coalition and Iraqi forces. U.S. troop casualties rose in April to 48, the highest number since September, partly as a result of intensified fighting with Iranian-backed militias in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Mullen said recent unrest in the southern Iraqi city of Basra demonstrated that Iran is “very interwoven into southern Iraq in ways that had not been highlighted,” adding that “they want to have a weak Iraq.”

Offering an unusual insight into how senior military leaders are anticipating the transition to a new president, Mullen said he is continually thinking about how military decisions taken today will play out under a new administration.

“There are very few either briefings or meetings that I’m in that I’m not thinking about ‘How does what we’re talking about right now transition to next spring?’ ” Mullen said. He said U.S. commanders in regions overseas, as well as chiefs of the different services, are having similar discussions.

The transition is unlikely to be smooth, predicted Mullen, who assumed his position seven months ago for a two-year term. He said he hopes to offer a stabilizing influence as a military leader who will bridge two administrations.

“We will be tested. . . . I’m preparing that this country will be tested, and I have a role in that regard, certainly providing advice to whoever the new president’s going to be,” he said. He said his current priority is to develop military strategies for the Middle East and the globe to “tee up” for a new president.

Specifically, Mullen said he hopes that the change in politically appointed leaders will unfold at a wartime pace, rather than at a “peacetime” one. “I think it’s important for us to get as many principals in positions as rapidly as possible in a time of war,” he said. ++

Pandemic response plan: let the elderly, the sick, and the poor die
Larry Chin, Global Research
May 5, 2008

The Bush-Cheney administration’s Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have collectively set guidelines that recommend—in the event of a “pandemic” or mass crisis—that the elderly, the sick, the severely injured, and the poor will be denied life-saving medical treatment.

Details are discussed in this Associated Press report:

Who should MDs let die in a pandemic? Report offers answers

The proposed guidelines, meant to serve as a blueprint to be followed by hospitals across the country, specifically recommends that the those deemed at “higher risk of death” with a “slimmer chance of survival” will be denied services and “scarce resources”, as dictated by designated officials.

Specifically, those who will be denied help include people who are:

* older than 85,

* suffering from severe trauma, which include injuries from crashes and shootings,

* severely burned,

* suffering from mental impairment (Alzheimer’s disease), and

* suffering from chronic diseases, including lung, heart, and diabetes

In other words, the most disadvantaged will be left to die.

For years now, we have witnessed the gutting and militarization of the US, and the systematic march towards total population control: the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the destruction of law and civil liberties, manufactured elections, domestic spying, and the increasingly aggressive reduction, rationing of social and health care services.

With the world plunging deeper into crisis (manufactured as well as natural)—endless world war, economic upheaval, energy and food shortages—this bone-chilling new plan is further evidence that the powers that be are preparing (and/or planning for) a die-off.

This is nothing short of eugenics—the “cleansing of the unfit” that Hitler and his like only dreamed of—delivered through Bush-Cheney, obediently carried out by legions of surrogates, and opposed by few. ++

“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.

Entry Filed under: Political Waves