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Friday, January 12, 2007 |
IHT: "American forces raided the Iranian consulate in the mainly Kurdish city of Erbil in northern Iraq before dawn today, detaining at least five Iranian employees in the building and seizing some property, according to Iraqi and Iranian officials and witnesses."
Yesterday there were world-wide demonstrations against the illegal Guantanamo prison.
WireTap: "It's not clear yet how Lt. Ehren Watada's court-martial will proceed. At a pretrial hearing last Thursday at Fort Lewis, Wash., Watada's attorney, Eric Seitz, requested an evidentiary hearing to defend Watada's rationale for not boarding a plane to Iraq last June. The 28-year-old officer chose not to deploy because of his belief that the war is illegal, and if an evidentiary hearing were granted, Seitz would marshal legal, academic and military experts to argue the case."
Avaaz: Add your voice NOW to block Bush's military escalation and demand a real plan to end the war.
Guardian: "According to recent leaks in the Israeli and British press, Israel believes that military action is the only answer. Officials in Tel Aviv argue that a nuclear bomb in Tehran's hands poses an unacceptable risk, one that a massive onslaught by warplanes - perhaps deploying Israel's own nuclear arsenal - could pre-empt and smash.
The Israelis may have a number of motives for spinning this story. They may be trying to intimidate Tehran, or soften up world opinion in advance of a strike. They could also be pressing Washington into taking a harder line with Iran. But what is certain is that the use of military force against Tehran would be an unmitigated disaster for everyone involved, not just the civilians incinerated in such an attack.
Not only would military strikes be unlikely to knock out targets that are well dispersed and defended, they would provoke deadly retaliation by Tehran's proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan against British and US servicemen; the price of oil would rocket, particularly if Iranian commanders retaliated by disrupting tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz; and throughout in the Muslim world and beyond massive popular reaction could well bring down pro-western regimes.
To dissuade the Iranians from pursuing either goal - nuclear energy or warheads - Washington would have to make massive concessions. It would need to fit the issue into a wider Middle East picture and find ways of making Iran feel less threatened."
When you need to enforce your will at the point of a gun, you have lost credibility, goodwill, trust, democracy and freedom, in short you have lost it all.
In the meantime the killing of civilians goes unabated.
Yahoo: "About 60 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed by NATO planes during fighting in the southern province of Kandahar during Eid al-Fitr, a major Muslim holiday, last year, according to local leaders."
TheNews: "Purported Taliban spokesman Mohammad Hanif said Thursday the allied forces killed the civilians in Paktika crackdown; they were not Taliban militants."
11:09:16 AM 
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FAS: "The growing military presence at U.S. embassies abroad is arousing suspicion among some foreign officials and producing friction between civilian foreign service officers and military personnel, according to a new staff report from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
'There is evidence that some host countries are questioning the increasingly military component of America's profile overseas,' the report found. 'Some foreign officials question what appears to them as a new emphasis by the United States on military approaches to problems that are not seen as lending themselves to military solutions.'"
The United States government is a fascist government that wants to rule the world. They don't recognize the sovereignty of foreign nations. It's as simple as that.
10:51:14 AM
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BBC: "Former BBC director general Greg Dyke was effectively sacked by the corporation's governors in the wake of the Hutton Report, new documents show.
Dyke resigned in 2004 after the report criticised the BBC's reporting.
But he felt he was 'mistreated' by the BBC's board of governors and was 'shattered' to be forced out of his job, previously secret minutes reveal.
The Hutton Inquiry was convened after the death in July 2003 of government scientist Dr David Kelly, who was named as the source of a BBC story about the Iraq War.
The inquiry focused on Dr Kelly's death and the allegation, reported by former BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, that the government had 'sexed up' an intelligence dossier.
Lord Hutton absolved the government of misleading the public, found the central allegation in Gilligan's report was untrue and said the BBC's editorial system was 'defective'."
Since then it has been proven that the Blair government had indeed sexed up the dossier, i.e. lied.
10:46:08 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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