From The Sunday Times
February 7, 2010
China’s hawks demand cold war on the US
US President Barack Obama
MORE than half of Chinese people questioned in a poll believe China and America are heading for a new “cold war”.
The finding came after battles over Taiwan, Tibet, trade, climate change, internet freedom and human rights which have poisoned relations in the three months since President Barack Obama made a fruitless visit to Beijing.
According to diplomatic sources, a rancorous postmortem examination is under way inside the US government, led by officials who think the president was badly advised and was made to appear weak.
In China’s eyes, the American response — which includes a pledge by Obama to get tougher on trade — is a reaction against its rising power.
Related Links
Chinese super-rich eye London homes
Chinese airport dissident set to return home
Now almost 55% of those questioned for Global Times, a state-run newspaper, agree that “a cold war will break out between the US and China”.
An independent survey of Chinese-language media for The Sunday Times has found army and navy officers predicting a military showdown and political leaders calling for China to sell more arms to America’s foes. The trigger for their fury was Obama’s decision to sell $6.4 billion (£4 billion) worth of weapons to Taiwan, the thriving democratic island that has ruled itself since 1949.
“We should retaliate with an eye for an eye and sell arms to Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba and Venezuela,” declared Liu Menxiong, a member of the Chinese people’s political consultative conference.
He added: “We have nothing to be afraid of. The North Koreans have stood up to America and has anything happened to them? No. Iran stands up to America and does disaster befall it? No.”
Officially, China has reacted by threatening sanctions against American companies selling arms to Taiwan and cancelling military visits.
But Chinese analysts think the leadership, riding a wave of patriotism as the year of the tiger dawns, may go further.
“This time China must punish the US,” said Major-General Yang Yi, a naval officer. “We must make them hurt.” A major-general in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Luo Yuan, told a television audience that more missiles would be deployed against Taiwan. And a PLA strategist, Colonel Meng Xianging, said China would “qualitatively upgrade” its military over the next 10 years to force a showdown “when we’re strong enough for a hand-to-hand fight with the US”.
Chinese indignation was compounded when the White House said Obama would meet the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet, in the next few weeks.
“When someone spits on you, you have to get back,” said Huang Xiangyang, a commentator in the China Daily newspaper, usually seen as a showcase for moderate opinion.
An internal publication at the elite Qinghua University last week predicted the strains would get worse because “core interests” were at risk. It said battles over exports, technology transfer, copyright piracy and the value of China’s currency, the yuan, would be fierce.
As a crescendo of strident nationalistic rhetoric swirls through the Chinese media and blogosphere, American officials seem baffled by what has gone wrong and how fast it has happened.
During Obama’s visit, the US ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, claimed relations were “really at an all-time high in terms of the bilateral atmosphere ... a cruising altitude that is higher than any other time in recent memory”, according to an official transcript.
The ambassador must have been the only person at his embassy to think so, said a diplomat close to the talks.
“The truth was that the atmosphere was cold and intransigent when the president went to Beijing yet his China team went on pretending that everything was fine,” the diplomat said.
In reality, Chinese officials argued over every item of protocol, rigged a town hall meeting with a pre-selected audience, censored the only interview Obama gave to a Chinese newspaper and forbade the Americans to use their own helicopters to fly him to the Great Wall.
President Hu Jintao refused to give an inch on Obama’s plea to raise the value of the Chinese currency, while his vague promises of co-operation on climate change led the Americans to blunder into a fiasco at the Copenhagen summit three weeks later.
Diplomats say they have been told that there was “frigid” personal chemistry between Obama and the Chinese president, with none of the superficial friendship struck up by previous leaders of the two nations.
Yet after their meeting Obama’s China adviser, Jeff Bader, said: “It’s been highly successful in setting out and accomplishing the objectives we set ourselves.”
Then came Copenhagen, where Obama virtually had to force his way with his bodyguards into a conference room where the urbane Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao, was trying to strike a deal behind his back.
The Americans were also livid at what they saw as deliberate Chinese attempts to humiliate the president by sending lower-level officials to deal with him.
“They thought Obama was weak and they were testing him,” said a European diplomat based in China.
In Beijing, some diplomats even claim to detect a condescending attitude towards Obama, noting that Yang Jiechi, the foreign minister, prides himself on knowing the Bush dynasty and others among America’s traditional white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elite.
But there are a few voices urging caution on Chinese public opinion. “China will look unreal if it behaves aggressively and competes for global leadership,” wrote Wang Yusheng, a retired diplomat, in the China Daily.
He warned that China was not as rich or as powerful as America or Japan and therefore such a move could be “hazardous”.
It is not clear whether anyone in Beijing is listening.
For those people that don't "have time" to get involved in securing their country for the liberty of their children.
-| Here is a list of things I did Friday. |-
Got up at 7:30
Installed this blog software on a Slackware Linux server.
Got to work by 9:20.
Fixed 4 laptops, & 2 desktops.
Rotated the tires on my truck.
Re aligned the camper on my truck.
Went to the bank to manage my money.
Got home at 5:00, fixed the blog software that didn't work.
Printed out 100 fliers.
Drive to Wal-Mart, and put the fliers in the windows of the cars in the parking lots.
Handed out 9 Endgame DVDs.
Watched Star Trek for 3 hours.
Went to bed at 9:30
Saturday: Got up at 1:30am, went back to work at 2:30 am.
Worked until 7:30am. Slept from 8:00am to 1:00pm
It rained all day.
Newborns DNA Routinely Harvested For Government Bio Banks 080210DNAThe government is harvesting samples of DNA from every newborn child in the country, storing them in monolithic bio banks and providing them to outside researchers and other agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, all without the consent or knowledge of parents.
It sounds like the stuff of dystopian nightmare, and it is, but it is also reality.
At Infowars we have been tracking and reporting the story for years, now it has hit the headlines once again this week with CNN probing the issue via the case of Isabel Brown (pictured) from Florida.
Isabel’s mother Annie Brown was confused when she was told by health authorities that her daughter had a gene that put her at risk for cystic fibrosis, because she had never consented for genetic testing to be carried out on her child.
Ms Brown then learned that genetic testing of all newborn babies is routine in every state, and that DNA is kept indefinitely by the government, without parents ever knowing.
“We were appalled when we found out,” says Brown, who’s a registered nurse. “Why do they need to store my baby’s DNA indefinitely? Something on there could affect her ability to get a job later on, or get health insurance.”
Watch CNN’s report:
Newborns DNA Routinely Harvested For Government Bio Banks FOTR 340x1692
In April 2008, President Bush signed into law a bill which formerly announced the process that the federal government has been engaged in for years, screening the DNA of all newborn babies in the U.S. within six months of birth.
Described as a “national contingency plan” the justification for the law S. 1858, known as The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007, is that it represents preparation for any sort of “public health emergency.”
The bill states that the federal government should “continue to carry out, coordinate, and expand research in newborn screening” and “maintain a central clearinghouse of current information on newborn screening… ensuring that the clearinghouse is available on the internet and is updated at least quarterly”.
Sections of the bill also make it clear that DNA may be used in genetic experiments and tests, both by the government and by researchers chosen to handle the DNA samples and the information that goes with them.
Read the full bill here.
Many have described the law as the first step towards the establishment of a national DNA database, like the one in the UK.
In 2006 and 2007, then, Senator Obama, filed legislation that would create a national DNA database. The same bill was filed by Sen. Patrick Kennedy in 2008. The bills required parental consent, but all three died in the Senate.
Health care expert and prominent critic of DNA screening, Twila Brase, president of the Citizens’ Council on Health Care produced a detailed analysis (PDF) of the DNA law in which she warns that it represents the first program of populationwide genetic testing.
Brase states that S.1858 and H.R. 3825, the House version of the bill, will:
Establish a national list of genetic conditions for which newborns and children are to be tested. Establish protocols for the linking and sharing of genetic test results nationwide. Build surveillance systems for tracking the health status and health outcomes of individuals diagnosed at birth with a genetic defect or trait. Use the newborn screening program as an opportunity for government agencies to identify, list, and study “secondary conditions” of individuals and their families.
* Subject citizens to genetic research without their knowledge or consent.
“Soon, under this bill, the DNA of all citizens will be housed in government genomic biobanks and considered governmental property for government research,” Brase writes. “The DNA taken at birth from every citizen is essentially owned by the government, and every citizen becomes a potential subject of government-sponsored genetic research.”
“The public is clueless. S. 1858 imposes a federal agenda of DNA databanking and population-wide genetic research. It does not require consent and there are no requirements to fully inform parents about the warehousing of their child’s DNA for the purpose of genetic research.”
The government may outsource genetic research to private companies, who may manipulate, alter or splice the DNA in any way they see fit. Hundreds of samples have already been used in government comissioned studies.
Such information represents a goldmine to employers, insurance companies, medical institutions, and big pharma.
Under such conditions we are faced with the prospect of a society that is literally the mirror image of the nightmarish vision outlined by Aldous Huxley in his 1932 novel Brave New World, where individuals are categorized in a social hierarchy according to their genetic traits.
DNA of newborns has already been harvested, tested, stored and experimented with nationwide.
The National Conference of State Legislatures lists for all 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia, the various statutes or regulatory provisions under which newborns’ DNA is already being collected.
In addition, all 50 states are now routinely providing these results to the Department of Homeland Security.
The Newborn Screening Saves Lives Act of 2007 merely established this practice within the law.
The History Channel recently featured a report on the issue as part of its Eternal Life program. Here is the segment followed by a local news report on the matter from kxan Austin:
Here is a more detailed report from kxan news, aired last November:
In certain states, authorities are required to destroy a child’s DNA sample if a parent demands they do so. Ludicrously, parents wishing to do this must fill in a form like this one from Texas or this one from Minnesota.
In other states, parents have to put their request in writing, however, there is no legal requirement for states to destroy the samples.
The practice of taking DNA from all newborns is not limited to the U.S.
In the UK, a similar DNA harvesting program was rejected in 2005 by The Human Genetics Commission, who cited cost and ethical problems in a report to government ministers.
However, DNA profiling of all newborn babies has since been called for by lawmakers and senior police officers.
In December 2009, a Dublin hospital was revealed to have built a secret database containing the DNA of almost every person born in the country since 1984 without their knowledge.
The retention of newborn screening cards has also caused controversy in Australia and New Zealand where the DNA has been used by police to help to solve crimes. A sample in New Zealand was used to identify the father of a dead child against the wishes of the mother.
There is no doubt that the practice is in operation all over the developed world.
Unless this practice is widely exposed and publicized, we could find ourselves sleepwalking towards the basis for a new eugenics movement, the practice of “perfecting” the human race through genetic manipulation, previously endorsed by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and toyed with by the likes of Adolf Hitler.
Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate and now the darling who plays guitar on Fox News, wants to engage in mass murder.
Is Mike Huckabee really a psychopath or is he simply sucking up to the neocons?
“The U.S. should support an Israeli military strike against Iranian nuclear installations if the Jewish state, fearing diplomacy has failed, ultimately takes that course of action, stated former Arkansas governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee,” reports WorldNetDaily.
Asked whether the U.S. should support an Israeli strike, Huckabee replied, “Absolutely.”
“We’ve got to remember that for Iran, Israel is not the primary target. The United States is. They see [Israel] as certainly an enemy,” Huckabee said. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Huckabee “has made clear that he would like to wipe them off the face of the earth.”
In fact, Ahmadinejad never said this. “Imam [Khomeini] said: This regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history,” the Iranian leader said.
Not that it matters. The neocons — and Huckabee is a neocon — will repeat discredited lies and invent fabrications in order to attack Iran. Supposed Tea Party luminary Sarah Palin also supports the idea of slaughtering Iranian school children and grandmothers.
“True to form, she is, so far, the only politician willing to touch the hot potato of the political implications of bombing Iran,” writes the Muslim hater Daniel Pipes for the neocon house organ, the National Review Online, the web version of the magazine founded by CIA operative Bill Buckley (the “conservative” worked for the CIA’s covert Special Activities Division). The magazine is so popular it has lost $25 million over 50 years, according to Buckley.
It should be noted that Tea Party Sarah also writes for the National Review and NRO. She is apparently right at home with other contributors from the American Enterprise Institute, the criminal organization that played an instrumental role in the invasion of Iraq (current death toll over a million people).
Is Mike Huckabee really a psychopath or is he simply sucking up to the neocons?
I guess we will have wait for the war crimes trial after the U.S. attacks Iran to find out.
Neo-Con pro-war witch Sarah Palin has endorsed Rick Perry. Rick Perry, a gun grabbing, illegal alien & NAFTA supporting Bilderberg attendee. If Sarah Palin truly cared about Liberty, as she sells herself as, she would support Deborah Medina.
The TEA party movement is now run by the RNC. It has been HiJacked by the neo-cons. It is no longer a valid movement. In 5 years, you will get raped just as bad by the government, just like the Obama idiots.
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, February 8, 2010
Frightening Taste Of Internet Censorship As Major Free Speech Websites Blocked 080210top
With influential proponents recently calling for a newly regulated world wide web, we got a preview of how that might look this past weekend after both Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com were completely blocked to many Internet users in New Zealand.
The block was only removed early this morning following a raft of complaints after both websites were unavailable on many ISP’s since Friday.
As the New Zealand based InfoNews website reported yesterday, both of Alex Jones’ flagship websites were blocked by ISPs using Asia Netcom for their international internet traffic.
It is important to stress that we receive emails on a weekly basis informing us that our websites have been blocked as “hate speech” or “offensive material” at Internet cafes, libraries, transport hubs, workplaces, and numerous other buildings not only in the United States but across the world. The censorship is being done at the ISP level, so whereas some people in a particular country will still have access, others will be blocked.
As we reported in 2008, London’s St. Pancras International, which millions of people traveling across mainland Europe pass through every year, completely blocks Prison Planet, Infowars and even more mainstream political websites as a matter of course.
In 2007, MySpace admitted their policy to censor and filter out posts containing links to the Prison Planet.com website, adding that the MySpace server automatically blocks such information. The social networking giant, as well as others such as Facebook, periodically block links to Alex Jones material and only revoke such filters when people complain.
In 2005, Time Warner subscribers from New York to California reported that their access to Infowars and Prison Planet had been blocked due to “hate speech,” before their access was restored.
UK ISP Tiscali also blocked the websites following the 7/7 London bombings in 2005.
Infowars’ social network was also blocked by libraries in the U.S. in 2008 using Safesquid and Google filtering software.
We receive numerous reports every single week of Alex Jones’ websites being blocked by ISPs and by filtering software in public buildings.
“An avid fan of Infowars.com and a 9/11 truth activist, Jeff Mitchell, reported on Saturday that he contacted his ISP, Orcon, to establish what was causing the block, and was advised by a computer technician who did a trace route, that the break in traffic to the two websites was found to be occurring at Asia Netcom’s router in Sydney,” stated the report.
The websites were blocked on every ISP that relied on Asia Netcom as its upstream provider, including Woosh, Telecom, Slingshot and Orcon.
According to Duncan Blair, Head of Brand and Communications at Orcon, access to content hosted on the Limelight content distribution network, including Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com, was blocked as a result of a “technical issue”.
“I’m the person who half-made this story possible by calling my ISP,” wrote Jeff Mitchell in a comment on Prison Planet. “Just want to report that infowars.com is now working for me, even though it was down all weekend! We complained to ISPs and they were “very concerned” about censorship; that, combined with this article on prisonplanet could very well have been the reason for us regaining access.”
Whether the problem was down to technical issues or deliberate censorship, the fact that ISP’s can selectively block certain websites at the flick of a switch gives us a frightening preview of what a Chinese-style government regulated Internet would look like, which is exactly what influential insiders are calling for.
The move to impose centralized government control and regulation of the free Internet has accelerated over the past 12 months.
Last week, Time Magazine enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon to back Microsoft executive Craig Mundie’s call for Internet licensing, as authorities push for a system even more stifling than in Communist China, where only people with government permission would be allowed to express free speech.
During a recent conference at the Davos Economic Forum, Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses – in other words government permission to use the web.
Internet censorship bills currently working their way into law in the UK, Australia and the U.S. legislate for government powers to restrict and filter any website that it deems to be undesirable for public consumption. In Italy, new rules to be imposed by government decree force anyone who wishes to upload a video to the web to get permission from the government’s Communications Ministry.
Power brokers in the White House have openly declared war on free speech and targeted Internet “conspiracy theorists” as the main threat to their agenda.
In a 2008 white paper, Obama’s Regulation Czar Cass Sunstein called for the government to tax or even ban outright political opinions of which it disapproved.
On page 14 of Sunstein’s January 2008 white paper entitled “Conspiracy Theories,” the man who is now Obama’s head of information technology in the White House proposed that each of the following measures “will have a place under imaginable conditions” according to the strategy detailed in the essay.
1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing.
2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories.
The ominous spectacle of major free speech websites going dark in supposedly democratic countries is a shocking portend of what the establishment wants to impose on a widespread basis. Only by screaming bloody murder in defense of the last true outpost of free speech – the Internet – and threatening boycotts and aggressive public relations campaigns can we counter the insidious move to silence the only remaining open forum of lawful dissent.
As Israel keeps threatening the regional countries with war, Egyptian maritime sources say the Israeli navy has deployed two missile ships to the Persian Gulf.
Citing the sources, Yediot Ahronot reported Saturday that two Israeli missile ships passed through the Suez Canal en route to the Red Sea on Thursday morning.
The sources said the ships are expected to reach the Persian Gulf within the next four days.
According to the report, Cairo adopted tight security measures to ensure the safe passage of the Israeli ships through the canal.
The waterway, which had not previously been used by Israeli vessels for intelligence reasons, was traversed for the first time in June 2009 when a Dolphin-class submarine reportedly sailed from the Mediterranean to reach military exercises in the Red Sea.
The alleged “Massacre at Fort Pillow” was nothing more than election propaganda to ensure that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t defeated in the bitter election of 1864.
Photo Right: Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. One of the most inventive and successful Generals in world history. Today Forrest is studied in military academies worldwide. Both Gen. Patton and Gen. Erwin Rommel, the top two Generals in WWII, were avid fans of Forrest. The exploits of Gen. Forrest became so famous that he was treated like a modern Hollywood celebrity in both the North and the South after the war.
When it comes to the Afro-mythologists, no one is more viciously slandered than our great Confederate heroes.
The most vicious slander against Forrest, that is being repeated more and more frequently, is that he ordered the killing of surrendering black soldiers at Fort Pillow.
Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, Gen. Forrest was well known among the Union army for the generosity he showed to captured Union troops. Forrest spent the entire war capturing large numbers of Union troops. Usually they were immediately paroled for the prisoner exchange program. It was recorded by many Confederate and Union soldier alike, that Forrest often received applause and shouts of glee from Union captives when they were read their terms.
In April of 1864, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest led 1,500 troopers to Fort Pillow along the Mississippi River. The fort was ripe for plundering with only 557 defenders, 262 of them a Negro militia regiment. Forrest rode up to the fort with a white flag of truce to negotiate a peaceful surrender of the fort.
As soon as Forrest reached the fort, a Union soldier shot at him killing his horse. This violated the rules of engagement under a flag of truce. It wouldn’t be the first time. As Forrest tried repeatedly to get the fort inhabitants to surrender, a second horse was killed and a third badly injured.
By this time Forrest was badly injured himself, from having been thrown from three horses. Forrest had to be taken to the back of the lines. Even then Confederates returned under a flag of truce and delivered a note stating that the fort would be “easily taken” with minimum loss to the Confederates. Confederates informed the inhabitants of the fort that they would all receive Forrest’s gracious treatment as prisoners of war.
The entire time, black Union troops had been yelling taunts and profanities at the Confederates egging them on. However, Forrest thought that the white officers would come to their senses and surrender. Forrest was used to intimidating Union forts into surrendering with little or no fight.
The 557 Yankees still did not surrender. Knowing that three steamships were coming down the Mississippi with re-enforcements, the Yankees sent notes back to Forrest begging for more time to think about it. Forrest, however, had already positioned troops to block the steamboats from landing.
Finally the charge was sounded. Forrest’s troops easily stormed the fort. 14 Confederate were killed and 86 wounded. Both of the fort’s commanders died. Of the 557 Union troops, 228 were taken prisoner and marched away. At least 32 wounded Yankees were allowed to remain at the fort’s hospital under the care of Union doctors.
The rest of the Yankee troops either died, drowned in the Mississippi, or went AWOL. When Confederates stormed the fort, only the white troops held their ground. Just like numerous other battles, the black troops immediately broke ranks and went into a panic. Many fled out the back of the fort and began jumping in the Mississippi River. It is presumed that some drowned and some went AWOL.
A short time later, during a truce, the 228 Union prisoners of war (both black and white) were paroled and turned over to the Union army safe and sound.
Forrest was still nursing his wounds from earlier in the day and was not in the assault.
With Abraham Lincoln facing election defeat, he needed a new source of propaganda to vilify the South. When Lincoln got word of yet another humiliating Union defeat at the hands of Forrest, he ordered a committee of pro-Lincoln Congressmen to investigate the battle. It was determined that it would be good for Lincoln’s campaign if it was said that Forrest was standing on the front lines ordering his troops to kill members of the Negro regiment who were trying to surrender.
Over 100 eyewitness accounts were collected by the committee operating in Cairo, IL. Almost all were thrown out because they did not support what the pro-Lincoln committee wanted. Even officers of the Negro regiment at Fort Pillow said that there was never an attempt to surrender to the Confederates.
The entire battle was over in less than twenty minutes. With stunning athleticism, the Confederates had formed human ladders to breach the earthworks. Within minutes, nearly 1,000 Confederates were inside the fort and half the defenders were dead or wounded. Much of the Negro regiment immediately broke and fled out the opposite side of the fort the instant Confederates poured in. This caused a stampede and crippled the entire Union defense. The same thing happened at Fredericksburg, only on a much larger scale.
A completely libelous and outlandish report was drawn up and 40,000 copies were printed for distribution.
The report declared that the Confederates, not the Union, had repeatedly violated the flag of truce at Fort Pillow. The report then claims that Confederates chanted “no quarter” and “black flag” as they stormed the fort. Then Forrest himself orders the troops to slaughter members of the Negro regiment. None of these claims are even remotely supported by the facts.
Today Forrest remains one of the greatest heroes of the South. He was a self-made man, who accumulated a fortune from real estate and selling horses. When the Civil War was about to start, he was commissioned as a colonel. Using his own personal fortune he bought state of the art pistols and equipment for his original 600 man cavalry unit at his own expense.
Forrest’s tactics and training were so overwhelmingly effective, that the Confederacy repeatedly changed his command so he would have all different troopers. The Confederacy knew that he would whip each new batch into an elite force.
Nearly half of western Europeans believe jews exploit their 'past persecution' in order to extort money, a new Israeli report says.
The report, which the Jewish Agency conducted jointly with Israel's Information and Diaspora Ministry, found that 42 percent of those polled by the University of Bielefeld in Germany agreed that "jews exploit the past to extort money," Haaretz reported on Monday.
The countries in which the highest percentage of the population agreed with that statement were Poland and Spain.
There were more anti-Israeli incidents in 2009 than in any year since World War II, according to the annual Jewish Agency report released January 24.
During the first three months of 2009, immediately following Israel's three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip, there were as many “anti-Semitic” incidents recorded as there had been for the entire year of 2008.
"With the start of the operation, a wave of acts of anti-Semitism started across the world," the report said, referring to last winter's Operation Cast Lead, during which over 1,400 Palestinians were killed.
At the press conference in which the report was released, officials also referred to a film that accuses Israel of stealing human organs at the field hospital set up by the Israel Defense Forces in Haiti.
The Jewish Agency is in charge of immigration and the absorption of jews coming into Israel.
Two articles, one by anti-war conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan and the other by neoconservative Daniel Pipes, deal with the issue of Obama moving toward war on Iran for political reasons. In “Will Obama Play the War Card?,” Patrick Buchanan points out that this option is certainly a political temptation for Obama especially since Congress is pushing him in that direction. Buchanan cites Congress’ effort to impose very stiff sanctions on refined petroleum exports to Iran as a move toward war.
[On January 28, 2010, the U.S. Senate passed by voice vote the “Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act of 2009” (S. 2799). The bill now goes to conference committee to be reconciled with a similar bill from the House of Representatives, the “Iran Refined Petroleum Sanctions Act” (H.R. 2194), which passed the House in December 2009. Because of the similarity of the two bills and the strong bipartisan support in both Houses of Congress, a final bill incorporating the essence of the Senate bill is almost guaranteed to be passed by both houses of Congress. The Obama administration has expressed objections, but there is no indication that Obama would dare to veto the final bill—and given the overwhelming congressional support, any presidential veto could be easily over-ridden.]
“Senate bill 2799,” Buchanan writes, “would punish any company exporting gasoline to Iran. Though swimming in oil, Iran has a limited refining capacity and must import 40 percent of the gas to operate its cars and trucks and heat its homes.” He argues that “cutting off a country’s oil or gas is a proven path to war.” And he cites the examples of Japan attacking the US in 1941 after the US embargo on oil supplies and Israel attacking Egypt in 1967 after Nasser threatened to close the Straits of Tiran through which Israel received 95 percent of its oil. While the implementation of the current sanctions would not cause Iran to attack the United States, it certainly would increase tensions and help to lead to war. Iran will certainly try to get around the sanctions and any American naval efforts to prevent gasoline from entering Iran could precipitate war.
“The Senate,” Buchanan writes, “is trying to force Obama’s hand, box him in, restrict his freedom of action, by making him impose sanctions that would cut off the negotiating track and put us on a track to war.”
Buchanan also hits the mark by pointing out that “U.S. interests would seem to dictate supporting those elements in Iran who wish to be rid of the regime and re-engage the West. But if that is our goal, the Senate bill, and a House version that passed 412 to 12, seem almost diabolically perverse.” The sanctions obviously will tend to unify the country behind the regime. Of course, the neocon/Israel goal is not to bring in the reformers—who also tend to support the Palestine resistance and seek to develop nuclear power—but to destabilize the country by war. This can best be achieved by keeping the demonized Ahmadinejad in power.
In the second article, “How to Save the Obama Presidency: Bomb Iran,” neocon Daniel Pipes naturally encourages Obama to opt for war. “He [Obama] needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a light-weight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.
“Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapon capacity.”
Pipes candidly admits that the imposition of “crippling” sanctions on Iran would not contribute to a peaceful settlement but would help to put the United States “on an escalator to confrontation that could lead straight to war.”
Pipes correctly observes that “Obama’s attempts to ‘reset’ his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics.” There are no simply no easy answers for the economic problems that beset America.
Now Pipes is obviously not out to help Obama, but what he says about the political benefits of war are certainly true. If Republican Party leaders were half-way intelligent, they would realize that pushing the country to war is not in their political interest. But the Republican Party is not called the “stupid party” for nothing, and it is in the thrall of the neoconservatives—at least indirectly, since the neocons control Murdoch’s Fox News and strongly influence the popular right-wing radio broadcasters such as Rush Limbaugh. Republicans already did irreparable damage to their party by giving whole-hearted support for the war on Iraq, so the Republicans are quite likely to snatch defeat from the hands of victory.
Pipes presents something on the order of the spurious claim of Saddam’s super dangerous WMD to justify the need for a US bombing attack on Iran. “Eventually, they [Iran] could launch an electromagnetic pulse attack on the United States, utterly devastating the country. By eliminating the Iranian nuclear threat, Obama protects the homeland and sends a message to American’s friends and enemies.” Of course, an Iranian electromagnetic pulse attack is highly theoretical. A high altitude explosion would cause damage to electronic communication devices (a nuclear atmospheric test explosion 800 miles from Hawaii in 1962 knocked out a small percentage of the island’s civilian electronic devices) but that it would disrupt all communications devices to the point of preventing a devastating counter strike is highly questionable. Perhaps China, Russia, and the US possess the capability of developing a weapon that could deliver a knockout blow that would prevent nuclear retaliation (though tests to determine this with certitude would seem almost impossible to conduct), but the likelihood that Iran could do this or would dare to take such a risk would seem very remote compared to threats from other countries against the US that would increase every time the US made an unprovoked attack on another country—the more the US engages in allegedly preventive wars, the more likely it is for a fearful nuclear power to launch a preventive war against the US.
Despite the fantasy aspect of an Iranian electromagnetic pulse threat, it is reasonable to believe that such a claim, if publicized widely, could resonate with a substantial proportion of the American public and help to cause the US to launch a preventive war. In fact, this would seem to be the element that is currently lacking in the existing war propaganda —the American people have not yet been made to believe that Iran really threatens the US homeland.
A previous essay of mine provides similar arguments:
“Strengthening US Defenses in the Gulf as a Step Toward War”
Alex Jones joins with fellow patriot Mark Dice in protesting America’s favorite sports ritual– the Super Bowl. Sure, the game is a good contest between two top rivals, but football isn’t what really matters. While America has fallen asleep in front of the television and allowed so many distractions and frivolous issues to take over its thoughts, our country has been looted financially, our military has been used to carry out ever-expanding wars, our President and Congress have ignored the Constitution and our people have stopped their participation in the process.
Until we wake up and fight back against the damage being wielded politically, we have no business getting caught up in gladiatorial distractions. The heat of the contest has become a substitute for our real manhood and our real humanity.
Our tribal instincts to protect the community and drive away its enemies has been overtaken by the thrill of cheering, shouting, painting our faces and wearing the colors of a team.
Alex calls on each of us to remember what really matters on this Super Bowl weekend– forget the pizza, nachos and the half-time musicians and educate yourself, your family and your neighbors on what the globalists have done by design to our culture and our very humanity.
Colts’ players say Ben Bernanke “Looks Like a Crook”
A leading US professor of law has filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court prosecutor against former US President George W. Bush and a number of his senior lieutenants alleging crimes against humanity for their policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” and requesting that the ICC prosecutor obtain international arrest warrants against Mr Bush and his co-accused.
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois College of Law in Champaign, USA, has filed a complaint with the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague against US citizens George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice and Alberto Gonzales (the “Accused”) for their criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition” perpetrated upon about 100 human beings.
“Extraordinary rendition” is a euphemism for the enforced disappearance of persons and their consequent torture. This criminal policy and practice by the Accused constitutes crimes against humanity in violation of the Rome Statute establishing the ICC.
The United States is not a party to the Rome Statute. Nevertheless, the Accused have ordered and been responsible for the commission of actions considered as crimes under the ICC statute within the respective territories of many ICC member states, including several in Europe. Consequently, the ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute the Accused for their ICC statutory crimes under Rome Statute Article 12(2)(a) that affords the ICC jurisdiction to prosecute for ICC statutory crimes committed in ICC member states.
The complaint requests:
1. That the ICC prosecutor open an investigation of the Accused on his own accord under Rome Statute article 15(1); and
2. That the ICC Prosecutor also formally “submit to the [ICC] Pre-Trial Chamber a request for authorization of an investigation” of the Accused under Rome Statute Article 15(3).
For similar reasons, the highest level officials of the Obama administration risk the filing of a follow-up complaint with the ICC if they do not immediately terminate the Accused’s criminal policy and practice of “extraordinary rendition, which the Obama administration has continued to implement.
The complaint concludes with a request that the ICC prosecutor obtain international arrest warrants for the Accused from the ICC in accordance with Rome Statute articles 58(1)(a), 58(1)(b)(i), 58(1)(b)(ii), and 58(1)(b)(iii).
Please contacting the ICC prosecutor by letter, fax or email – contact details below – to demonstrate your support for this complaint.
The Honourable Luis Moreno-Ocampo
Office of the Prosecutor
International Criminal Court
Post Office Box 19519
2500 CM, The Hague
The Netherlands
Fax No.: 31-70-515-8555
Email: OTP.InformationDesk@icc-cpi.int
