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Tuesday, September 9, 2008 |
TimesOnline: "Israel's president, Shimon Peres, has warned the prime minister that a military attack on Iran's nuclear facilities could provoke a broader conflict.
Peres is the first senior politician to advise Ehud Olmert against such an attack at a time of growing tension when other leading figures are threatening airstrikes unless Tehran halts its nuclear programme.
The Israeli air force has rehearsed an operation to destroy sites connected with the project.
'The military way will not solve the problem,' said Peres, the 85-year-old founder of the Jewish state's nuclear programme, in an interview with The Sunday Times."
11:39:08 AM 
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PressTV: "Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili vows to regain control over two independence-seeking provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
'Our goal is the return of our territory and the peaceful unification of Georgia,' Saakashvili said in a televised appearance, adding that such a process is between Russia and the 'rest of the world'."
Of course Saakashvili means it is between Russia and him and Cheney, and if it depends on him it will be by force. Saakashvili is giving the Russians a powerful argument to take back and annex the whole of Georgia (if Saakashvili claims the right to annex South Ossetia and Abkhazia, then logically Russia even has a bigger right to annex Georgia).
WashingtonPost: "As open war between Georgia and Russia has subsided into a tense standoff among world powers, Georgians inside and outside the government have begun to question the wisdom of the costly confrontation, and of the leaders who set it in motion.
They are doing so carefully, saying they don't want to be seen as supporting the Kremlin's call for the ouster of President Mikheil Saakashvili. But whispers of discontent first heard during the early days of the war have grown louder and bolder.
Opposition leaders as well as some longtime supporters of the president are calling for investigations into what they call failures in diplomacy and warfare, and some are predicting Saakashvili will be forced from office by a war they say he hoped would earn him a place in history.
'He has no communication with anybody except this small circle, which is a serious reason why he decided to go to South Ossetia,' said a highly placed official who has worked in the government since Saakashvili took office but said he now feels let down. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the official said Saakashvili 'wants to be a hero, not a normal president who increases the taxes, et cetera.'"
My guess is that Saakashvili was losing it in Georgia. It would have been a matter of time before he was ousted by the Georgian opposition. He wanted to save his own neck, hoping that in a situation of war he would have the nation behind him.
WashingtonPost: "The irony is that, beneath that overweening campaign to contain Russian belligerence, American officials are still seething at Saakashvili. His impulsive and militarily foolhardy attack on the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 8 opened the way for Putin's aggression. True, provocations by Russian-controlled Ossetian militias preceded the Georgian move, and Russian troops' subsequent takeover of much of Georgia was clearly planned and prepared well in advance. But the mercurial Saakashvili disregarded direct American warnings that he not fall into Putin's trap. He embarrassed his staunchest defenders in Washington and plunged both his country and the United States into what has been a costly - and so far losing - battle.
That's why during the same State Department news conference at which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that Georgia would become one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid, Saakashvili's move was again labeled 'a mistake' by his principal administration handler, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Matt Bryza. It is also why other administration officials are privately far more scathing in their assessments of a man who repeatedly has presented Washington with ugly surprises. Just nine months before the South Ossetian fighting, Saakashvili sent riot police to attack demonstrators in his own capital and closed down an opposition television station, forcing a U.S. intervention to rescue the political freedoms that justify the American alliance with Georgia."
It looks like NATO's (read 'US' ) involvement in Georgia was meant to be kept a secret as much as possible, so they could blame Saakashvili for the debacle. The West unleashed a rabid dog.
Anyway, Saakashvili does not care about his own people, he is willing to risk another and next time much more devastating war - his own wet dream.
11:35:36 AM
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Guardian: "The U.S. Treasury's takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is good news in the short term for China, the biggest holder of the giant mortgage lenders' debt, but Beijing's huge U.S. exposure still poses a serious risk, a prominent government researcher said on Monday.
China owned $376 billion of debt issued by U.S. government agencies, principally Fannie and Freddie, as of mid-2007.
The seizure of the two firms, prompted by worries over their shrinking capital, was the latest in a series of emergency steps taken by U.S. authorities to quell a year-long credit crisis that has helped push many economies toward recession.
'China has bought a lot of asset-backed securities, and there might be short-term improvement in price,' said He Fan, an economist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. But, taking a longer view, he said the bailout posed a problem: if the Treasury issues new debt to fund the rescue, should China be a buyer or not?
'For China, whether or not you buy the new treasuries, there will be losses: if you buy them, you're getting deeper in the hole; if you don't buy, your existing holdings will lose value,' He said.
The Treasury's equity stake could reach $100 billion in each of the lenders, which own or guarantee almost half of America's $12 trillion in home loans, but it said the ultimate cost of the rescue plan depends on how well the companies perform.
He said the takeover was the last resort for the U.S. government, underlining that the credit crunch was far from over."
ICH: "With yesterday's announcement of the most massive federal bailout of all time, it's now official: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two largest mortgage lenders on Earth, are bankrupt.
Some Washington bigwigs and bureaucrats will inevitably try to spin it. They'll avoid the 'b' word with vengeance. They'll push the 'c' word (conservatorship) with passion. And in the newspeak of 21st century bailouts, they'll tell you 'it all depends on what the definition of solvency is'.
The truth: Without their accounting smoke and mirrors, Fannie and Freddie have no capital. The government is seizing control of their operations. Their chief executives are getting fired. Common shareholders will be virtually wiped out. Preferred shareholders will get pennies. If that's not wholesale bankruptcy, what is?
Some Wall Street pundits and pros will also try to twist the facts to their own liking. They'll treat the bailout like long-awaited manna from heaven. They'll declare that the 'credit crisis is now behind us'. They may even jump in to buy select financial stocks. And then they'll try to persuade you to do the same.
The reality: This was the same pitch we heard in August of last year when the world's central banks made a coordinated attempt to rescue credit markets with massive injections of fresh cash. It was also the same pitch we heard in March when the Fed bailed out Bear Stearns. But each time, the crisis got progressively worse. Each time, investors lost fortunes."
IHT: "Brazil and Argentina are ready to stop using U.S. dollars to trade goods between them.
Brazil's president tells the Buenos Aires-based Clarin newspaper that exports and imports between the two nations will be bought and sold in local currency - reals and pesos."
11:08:14 AM
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AfterDowningStreet: "Months before the Bush administration ends, historians and open-government advocates are concerned that Vice President Cheney, who has long bristled at requirements to disclose his records, will destroy or withhold key documents that illustrate his role in forming U.S. policy for the past 7 1/2 years.
In a preemptive move, several of them have agreed to join the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington in asking a federal judge to declare that Cheney's records are covered by the Presidential Records Act of 1978 and cannot be destroyed, taken or withheld without proper review.
The group expects to file the lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It will name Cheney, the executive offices of the president and vice president, and the National Archives and chief archivist Allen Weinstein as defendants."
CRW: "Today CREW, along with two eminent historians and three organizations of historians and archivists filed a complaint against Vice President Cheney, the Office of the Vice President, the archivist and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), challenging their exclusion of a vast majority of Vice President Cheney's papers from the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and the obligation to preserve for the American public. In an executive order issued in 2001, President Bush declared that the PRA applied only to the 'executive records' of the vice president. Since that time, the vice president has taken the view that he is not part of the executive and is attached, if at all, to the congressional branch. Moreover, the archivist takes the view that the congressional records of a vice president are his personal, not presidential, records that he is free to dispose of at will. As a result of these unlawful policies, without judicial intervention on January 20, 2009, the vast majority of Vice President Cheney's records will not be transferred to NARA for eventual release to the public, but instead will remain under the vice president's custody and control. CREW is also seeking an order mandating preservation of all of the vice president's records pending the lawsuit."
10:59:58 AM
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A roadside bomb has killed another Dutch soldier in Afghanistan, several others were wounded. The total of Dutch casualties is now 17, some of which fell under 'friendly' fire. The Dutch presence in Afghanistan should be reconsidered. Many soldiers plainly state at the end of their term that their deployment is totally useless. It's time to pull out.
DePers: Foreign troops under Dutch command have mistreated their prisoners. The prisoners were beaten, attacked by dogs and administered electric shocks, according to the Afghan Human Rights Commission.
TimesOnline: "The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war."
JustWorldNews: "You know there's been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over the number of civilians killed in a controversial US air attack near Azizabad, Afghanistan on August 22.
According to this story in today's London Times it turns out the US military was relying to some degree in its repeated confirmation of its original (very low) casualty estimates on the say-so of - guess who - that infamous trickster Oliver North."
Guardian: "The slavish attachment of London to Washington under Tony Blair is a continuing problem, the 'shoulder to shoulder' and 'hug 'em close' baloney and the folly of endorsing such a weird notion as the 'global war on terror' included. This is the elephant in the front room of Britain's position today, a creature about whom Gordon Brown and David Miliband, his foreign secretary, seem to be in complete denial.
Despite the satellites, the Reaper and Global Hawk pilotless spy planes, the controllers - often back in the United States - cannot tell the difference between an Afghan wedding party and a shooting party. We are now getting reports every other day from Pakistan and Afghanistan of accusations of Nato - US commanded - strikes by planes and drones killing civilians.
In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the UK seems to be operating more to an American operation and plan - cooked up primarily for US domestic consumption. The US is about to 'surge' another brigade, somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 extra troops, into Afghanistan for a renewed offensive in the borderlands with Pakistan. British and Australian special forces, as in Iraq, will be expected to help in the fray to an American plan and to American standards of behaviour."
10:51:19 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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