Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Belafonte Was Right QUOTE OF THE DAY "This is a time for a loud voice, open speech, and fearless thinking. I rejoice that I live in such a splendidly disturbing time." - - Helen Keller RHINO HERE: I'm happy to report to you that the Code Orange Terror Alert that scared hell out of half the country, and made record profits for Home Depot due to record high duct tape sales, was based on what ABC news is now calling, "fabricated information". That's spin speak for "lies". They're blaming it on "a captured al Qaeda member" who told them a dirty bomb would be detonated somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. Convenient it all came to a head the weekend of the largest protests in the history of the planet so the Big Apple's Mayor could be convinced by the shrub gang to refuse the protestors request for a permit and tell everyone to stay home. Another episode of TRANSPARENT SPIN. "False Alarm? Terror Alert Partly Based on Fabricated Information" ABC Online, Feb. 13 - A key piece of the information leading to recent terror alerts was fabricated, according to two senior law enforcement officials in Washington and New York. http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/US/terror030213_falsealarm.html "Report From New York" AlterNet , 2/16/03 - "This is so unconstitutional!" frustrated demonstrators kept exclaiming, as police kept blocking their passage. Protestors in New York City on Saturday were angry, not only because President Bush was making plans to wage a brutal war on Iraq, but because, five days earlier, a federal judge had upheld the city's right to deny organizers a permit for a march. http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15196 Belafonte Was Right - General Powell Is A House Slave Speaking of Transparent Spin, anyone who still thinks GENERAL Colin Powell has any credibility needs to wake up and smell the yellow ink. The man may have once had a mind of his own (maybe) but his actions over the last few weeks have confirmed what Harry Belafonte said about him, that he's just a new form of the "house slave", who says what he's told to say and does what he's told to do. Following a list of articles that each point to the flimsy lies Powell has been telling in behalf of the shrub gang. The first article from the NY Times is an in depth report on the extensive information that's been provided to the Feds by one Shadi Abdullah, a 26-year-old gay Jordanian with close ties to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the man Colin Powell called "the missing link between Iraq and Al Qaeda". But close examination of the facts show no connection to Iraq, but instead to Iran. Did Powell not have access to the results of 9 months of interrogation of the man American and European intelligence officials described in recent interviews as "one of the most credible and useful Qaeda informers in Europe". Of course he had access. He just flat out lied. "Qaeda Informant Helps Trace Group's Trail" NY Times, 2/15/03, LONDON, - Early last April, while German intelligence agents eavesdropped, one of Europe's most powerful terrorists had a cryptic phone conversation with an associate, ordering him to begin preparations for a spectacular strike against a Jewish target somewhere in Germany... http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/international/europe/17QAED.html The next article reminds us that last October, after Bin Laden appeared on the Arabic TV station, Al Jazeera saying... "One million Iraqi children have thus far died in Iraq although they did not do anything wrong," Bin Laden protested. "Israeli tanks and tracked vehicles also enter to wreak havoc in Palestine [sigma] and we hear no voices raised." ...Powell replied with his forcefully sincere tone... "We cannot let Usama bin Laden pretend that he is doing it in the name of helping the Iraqi people or the Palestinian people. He doesn't care one whit about them. He has never given a dollar toward them. He has never spoken out for them." Then last Tuesday, responding to the new audio taped which supposedly had the voice of Bin Laden, General Powel, assuming the American public is too dumb to remember, said, again with that steady sincere voice... "once again he speaks to the people of Iraq and talks about their struggle and how he is in partnership with Iraq. This nexus between terrorists and states that are developing weapons of mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and ignored." "Baghdad Back Flip - Colin Powell's Cynical Reversal" Slate, 2/11/03 - If you want to know why people don't trust what the United States says about Iraq, get a load of what Secretary of State Colin Powell said this morning.... http://slate.msn.com/id/2078437/ And then there's all the "PROOF" General Powell offered to the U.N. recently regarding Iraq's alleged nuke weapons program. The article linked below was written by Imad Khadduri, a man with an MSc in Physics from the University of Michigan (US) & a PhD in Nuclear Reactor Technology from the University of Birmingham (UK). Khadduri worked with the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission from 1968 until 1998. He was able to leave Iraq in late 1998 with his family. He now teaches and works as a network administrator in Toronto, Canada. He's been interviewed by the Toronto Star, Reuters, & other news agencies on his knowledge of the Iraqi nuclear program. "The nuclear bomb hoax" Yellow Times.org, 2/7/03 - In his speech in front of the U.N. Security Council on February 5, 2003, Colin Powell did not offer any viable new evidence concerning Iraq's nuclear weapon capability that Bush and his entourage continue to wave as a red flag in front of the eyes of the American people to incite them shamefully into an unjust war. On the contrary, the few flimsy so-called pieces of evidence that were presented by Powell regarding a supposed continued Iraqi nuclear weapon program serve only to weaken the American and British accusations and reveal their untenable attempt to cover with a fig leaf their thread bare arguments and misinformation campaign. The false and untrue pieces of evidence follow... http://yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1055 THE BOTTOM LINE today is an important piece written by Stephen C. Pelletiere, who was the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, a professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000. and is author of "Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Persian Gulf." In it he details how the claim made by shrub, Powell & the gang, that Saddam used chemical weapons against his own people, is also a lie. Remember that wars are often started from a lie; like the Gulf Of Tonkin episode that began U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, & the phoney incubator story that got the Desert Storm war going. I urge you to read this one through. It's key. 8:23:09 AM    comment

A War Crime or an Act of War? NY Times, 1/31/03, MECHANICSBURG, Pa. - It was no surprise that President Bush, lacking smoking-gun evidence of Iraq's weapons programs, used his State of the Union address to re-emphasize the moral case for an invasion: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured." The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq's "gassing its own people," specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein. But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds. This is not the only distortion in the Halabja story... READ THE STORY AT: War Crime? "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. 8:06:12 AM    comment

© Copyright 2005 Gary Rhine.