Protester Waves Blood-Colored Hands in Rice’s Face

Published on Wednesday, October 24, 2007 by Reuters

WASHINGTON — An anti-war protester waved blood-colored hands in U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s face at a congressional hearing on Wednesday and shouted “war criminal!”, but was pushed away and detained by police.“The blood of millions of Iraqis is on your hands!” yelled the protester, Desiree Anita Ali-Fairooz of the Code Pink organization which often disrupts hearings on Capitol Hill with protests against the Iraq war.

Rice, an architect of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy, appeared unfazed by the incident, which occurred when she entered a House of Representatives meeting room to testify at a hearing on U.S. Middle East policy.

“Out!,” shouted the chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, Rep. Tom Lantos, as plain-clothes security men and police hustled the woman away. The California Democrat also ordered the removal of several other Code Pink activists.

Capitol Police said later five people were arrested, including Ali-Fairooz, who was charged with disorderly conduct and assault on a police officer.

She was also charged with defacing government property for smearing the red paint from her hands on the hallway wall outside the hearing room. The other four protesters faced disorderly conduct charges.

© 2007 Reuters

General claims Bush gave 'marching orders' on aggressive interrogation at Guantanamo

New book says US uses 'methods of the most tyrannical regimes'

Source: The Raw Story
Nick Juliano
Published: Monday October 22, 2007

More than 100,000 pages of newly released government documents demonstrate how US military interrogators "abused, tortured or killed" scores of prisoners rounded up since Sept. 11, 2001, including some who were not even suspected of having terrorist ties, according to a just-published book.

In Administration of Torture, two American Civil Liberties Union attorneys detail the findings of a years-long investigation and court battle with the administration that resulted in the release of massive amounts of data on prisoner treatment and the deaths of US-held prisoners.

"[T]he documents show unambiguously that the administration has adopted some of the methods of the most tyrannical regimes," write Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. "Documents from Guantanamo describe prisoners shackled in excruciating 'stress positions,' held in freezing-cold cells, forcibly stripped, hooded, terrorized with military dogs, and deprived of human contact for months."

Most of the documents on which Administration of Torture is based were obtained as a result of ongoing legal fights over a Freedom of Information Act request filed in October 2003 by the ACLU and other human rights and anti-war groups, the ACLU said in a news release.

The documents show that prisoner abuse like that found at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was hardly the isolated incident that the Bush administration or US military claimed it was. By the time the prisoner abuse story broke in mid-2004 the Army knew of at least 62 other allegations of abuse at different prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, the authors report.

Drawing almost exclusively from the documents, the authors say there is a stark contrast between the public statements of President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the policies those and others in the administration were advocating behind the scenes.

President Bush gave "marching orders" to Gen. Michael Dunlavey, who asked the Pentagon to approve harsher interrogation methods at Guantanamo, the general claims in documents reported in the book.

The ACLU also found that an Army investigator reported Rumsfeld was "personally involved" in overseeing the interrogation of a Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al Qahtani. The prisoner was forced to parade naked in front of female interrogators wearing women's underwear on his head and was led around on a leash while being forced to perform dog tricks.

“It is imperative that senior officials who authorized, endorsed, or tolerated the abuse and torture of prisoners be held accountable," Jaffer and Singh write, "not only as a matter of elemental justice, but to ensure that the same crimes are not perpetrated again.”

America's war without end

These days, terrorism seems to be whatever the Bush administration says it is.

The Guardian

By Simon Tindall | October 23, 2007

Planned US spending on the "global war on terror" is set to rise sharply in the coming year, despite claims from the president, George Bush, that al-Qaida is on the run in Iraq.

A funding request sent to Congress this week seeks $196.4bn (£96bn) for counter-terrorism in 2007-8, $25bn up on this year. The Pentagon's separate budget request amounts to an additional $481.4bn.

Justifying these whopping increases, Mr Bush repeats a favourite mantra, that "America is safer but not yet safe", implying that absolute safety is attainable at some point in the future. In a speech this week, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, was franker: he said the US was engaged in an ideological struggle amounting to war without end.

Keep reading . . .

Trillion-dollar war: Afghanistan and Iraq set to cost more than Vietnam and Korea

The Independent, October 24, 2007

By Leonard Doyle in Washington

President George Bush will have spent more than $1 trillion on military adventures by the time he leaves office at the end of next year, more than the entire amount spent on the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

There are also disturbing signs that Mr Bush is preparing an attack on Iran during his remaining months in office. He has demanded $46bn (£22.5bn) emergency funds from Congress by Christmas and included with it a single sentence requesting money to upgrade the B-2 "stealth" bomber.

By wrapping his request in the flag of patriotism, the President has made it very difficult even for an anti-war Congress to refuse the money. He was accompanied by the family of a dead US marine when he made the request for funds on Monday.

Keep reading . . .

Right-Wing Constructions of God

ZNet, October 15, 2007

And Why He Punishes Us

By Badri Raina

Say: ‘Unbelievers, I do not serve what you worship,
nor do you serve what I worship. I shall never serve
what you worship, nor will you ever serve what I
worship. You have your own religion, and I have mine.’

(The Koran, Penguin Classics, trans., N.J.Dawood, 1956; p. 401)

It used to be said that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel; for sometime now, it is the first.

Strikingly, the more it trumpets itself, the more suspect it becomes. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, a fascist construction of patriotism that at bottom reflects the violence-ridden impatience of global capital to gobble up the earth requires a medieval recall for longer life. And what more medieval than the idea of the crusade. Ruling classes everywhere engaged in the most irreligious of brutalities thus project themselves as the chief patrons of religion. And there are those who innocently buy the idea.

I am looking at an article posted on alternet.org titled “The Religious Right’s New Tactics for Invading Public Schools.”

In the month of August, ’07, the Governor of Texas signed a legislation designated “Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act.” This law “requires every public school in the state to adopt a policy guaranteeing student’s right to religious expression. It mandates that schools create ‘limited public forums’ for religious and other types of speech.”

That this new law is not as catholic or innocuous as it sounds is obvious enough to the best of practising Christians, not to speak of adherents of other faiths. Kathy Miller, President of the Texas Freedom Network has this to say: “The law is fundamentally at odds with the principle of religious freedom.” And more explicitly, “It will force public school students to participate in. . .proselytising.”

Keep reading ...

Did two hired assassins snatch weapons inspector David Kelly?

by Norman Baker

Global Research, October 22, 2007

Daily Mail

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Marked man: Dr David Kelly made himself unpopular Weapons inspector David Kelly was the decent man apparently hounded to suicide after exposing Tony Blair's lies on Iraq. But the crusading MP Norman Baker felt sure there was something more to his death - and gave up his front-bench role to investigate the case. In the Mail he revealed extraordinary evidence that he believes proves Kelly did not take his own life and was instead murdered by Iraqi dissidents. Here, he reveals how the murder may have been carried out... While investigating the death of Dr David Kelly I have made many strange discoveries, not least some disturbing parallels with the case of a young American journalist named Danny Casolaro. Mr Casolaro made himself deeply unpopular with elements in the murky world of U.S. defence by probing too deeply into their activities. One morning in August 1991, he was found dead in a hotel room near Harpers Ferry in Virginia. He was in the bath, naked, with his wrist slashed. Keep reading . . .

Benazir Bhutto Sups With the Devil

LewRockwell.com

By Eric Margolis

Just before departing for her dramatic return to Pakistan after years of self-imposed exile, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told me of her joy at going home, and plans to rebuild democratic government in her nation.

Tragically, Benazir’s triumphant homecoming turned into a bloodbath as an attempt to assassinate her in Karachi left nearly 150 dead and hundreds wounded. While the Western media blamed Islamic radicals, Ms. Bhutto was quick to accuse unnamed elements within the armed forces and security establishment. She was, in effect, blaming Gen. Musharraf, the man with whom she is now expected to cooperate under a US-brokered power-sharing deal.

Meanwhile, Washington, and even the First Lady Laura Bush, have been blasting Burma’s military junta for brutal repression. At the same time, Pakistan’s US-backed military junta, which receive $1 billion monthly in covert US payments, is waging war against its own restive people, thousands of whom have been killed by the armed forces. According to the Bush Administration’s thinking, shooting and beating rebellious Buddhist monks is evil; shooting and beating rebellious Muslim religious leaders is "anti-terrorism."

Keep reading . . .