Sep 13, 2011
By Amy Goodman
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/troy_davis_and_the_politics_of_death_20110914
Death brings cheers these days in America. In the most recent Republican presidential debate in Tampa, Fla., when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked, hypothetically, if a man who chose to carry no medical insurance, then was stricken with a grave illness, should be left to die, cheers of “Yeah!” filled the hall. When, in the prior debate, Gov. Rick Perry was asked about his enthusiastic use of the death penalty in Texas, the crowd erupted into sustained applause and cheers. The reaction from the audience prompted debate moderator Brian Williams of NBC News to follow up with the question, “What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?”
That “dynamic” is why challenging the death sentence to be carried out against Troy Davis by the state of Georgia on Sept. 21 is so important. Davis has been on Georgia’s death row for close to 20 years after being convicted of killing off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail in Savannah. Since his conviction, seven of the nine nonpolice witnesses have recanted their testimony, alleging police coercion and intimidation in obtaining the testimony. There is no physical evidence linking Davis to the murder.
Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Davis should receive an evidentiary hearing, to make his case for innocence. Several witnesses have identified one of the remaining witnesses who has not recanted, Sylvester “Redd” Coles, as the shooter. U.S. District Judge William T. Moore Jr. refused, on a technicality, to allow the testimony of witnesses who claimed that, after Davis had been convicted, Coles admitted to shooting MacPhail. In his August court order, Moore summarized, “Mr. Davis is not innocent.”
One of the jurors, Brenda Forrest, disagrees. She told CNN in 2009, recalling the trial of Davis, “All of the witnesses—they were able to ID him as the person who actually did it.” Since the seven witnesses recanted, she says: “If I knew then what I know now, Troy Davis would not be on death row. The verdict would be not guilty.”
Troy Davis has three major strikes against him. First, he is an African-American man. Second, he was charged with killing a white police officer. And third, he is in Georgia.
More than a century ago, the legendary muckraking journalist Ida B. Wells risked her life when she began reporting on the epidemic of lynchings in the Deep South. She published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” in 1892 and followed up with “The Red Record” in 1895, detailing hundreds of lynchings. She wrote: “In Brooks County, Ga., Dec. 23, while this Christian country was preparing for Christmas celebration, seven Negroes were lynched in twenty-four hours because they refused, or were unable to tell the whereabouts of a colored man named Pike, who killed a white man ... Georgia heads the list of lynching states.”
The planned execution of Davis will not be at the hands of an unruly mob, but in the sterile, fluorescently lit confines of Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Butts County, near the town of Jackson.
The state doesn’t intend to hang Troy Davis from a tree with a rope or a chain, to hang, as Billie Holiday sang, like a strange fruit: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black body swinging in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” The state of Georgia, unless its Board of Pardons and Paroles intervenes, will administer a lethal dose of pentobarbital. Georgia is using this new execution drug because the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized its supply of sodium thiopental last March, accusing the state of illegally importing the poison.
“This is our justice system at its very worst,” said Ben Jealous, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Amnesty International has called on the State Board of Pardons and Paroles to commute Davis’ sentence. “The Board stayed Davis’ execution in 2007, stating that capital punishment was not an option when doubts about guilt remained,” said Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International USA. “Since then two more execution dates have come and gone, and there is still little clarity, much less proof, that Davis committed any crime. Amnesty International respectfully asks the Board to commute Davis’ sentence to life and prevent Georgia from making a catastrophic mistake.”
But it’s not just the human rights groups the parole board should listen to. Pope Benedict XVI and Nobel Peace Prize laureates President Jimmy Carter and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, among others, also have called for clemency. Or the board can listen to mobs who cheer for death.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
Showing posts with label Georgia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Georgia. Show all posts
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Troy Davis Execution Set — Take Action Today!
Sep 9th, 2011
Rachel Myers, ACLU
http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/troy-davis-execution-set-take-action-today
The State of Georgia plans to execute Troy Davis at midnight on September 21, even though he is very likely innocent.
Davis has been scheduled for execution three times before, and three times his execution has been stayed amid doubts and new evidence against other suspects. Davis was sentenced on the basis of witness testimony, but seven of nine original witnesses have since recanted or changed their testimony.
We can't afford to execute people who might be innocent – let alone people who probably are.
The last chance for remedy of this egregious injustice is an appeal for clemency to the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board. Clemency in Davis' case does not mean setting him free but instead converting his death sentence to life in prison without parole – that way, if his verdict is ever reversed at least he will be alive to see it.
Rachel Myers, ACLU
http://www.aclu.org/blog/capital-punishment/troy-davis-execution-set-take-action-today
The State of Georgia plans to execute Troy Davis at midnight on September 21, even though he is very likely innocent.
Davis has been scheduled for execution three times before, and three times his execution has been stayed amid doubts and new evidence against other suspects. Davis was sentenced on the basis of witness testimony, but seven of nine original witnesses have since recanted or changed their testimony.
We can't afford to execute people who might be innocent – let alone people who probably are.
The last chance for remedy of this egregious injustice is an appeal for clemency to the Georgia Pardons and Parole Board. Clemency in Davis' case does not mean setting him free but instead converting his death sentence to life in prison without parole – that way, if his verdict is ever reversed at least he will be alive to see it.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
“all I want is the Truth…”
Three Days of Alternative Knowledge - February 4th, 5th and 6th, 2011
On February 4th and 5th 2011, the Center Stage in Atlanta hosts The Truth Convention & Symposium, the largest, most complete assembly of speakers on all things left out of the American mainstream — aka The Truth. Unique among similar conferences, TheTruthCon collects in one event the best experts on the wide variety of extra-normal experience, from the Science of Consciousness to Anti-Aging, Holistic and Preventive Healthcare; from Resonant Energy to the 2012 enigma; from the fundamentals of the Constitution to UFO disclosure and the ufological origins of the Military Industrial Complex. Act now! Very limited passes are available to these three days of must-see alternative information, which impacts everyone but that only a few can see in the totality as presented at this conference. The Truth, the WHOLE truth, and nothing but.
http://www.thetruthcon.com/
The Truth Convention
P.O. Box 76797
Atlanta, Georgia 30358
347-47 TRUTH
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Ukraine and Georgia
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4124.shtml
Ukraine and Georgia: Entry into NATO put off indefinitely
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 12, 2008
NATO ministers in Brussels have decided to ignore US wishes and to delay the admission of Ukraine and of Georgia in effect indefinitely in what the Washington administration is sheepishly trying to claim is a positive ‘compromise.’
The decision, following EU member state alarm last August over the prospect of European states having to go to war at some point against Russia over an incalculable despot in the Caucasus or in Kiev who decided to provoke Moscow to react, was simply too much.
The Germans have a far too deep and painful collective memory of the last war with Russia to be willing to treat such a prospect as lightly as Condi Rice or Washington seems willing to do. The decision deepens growing tectonic fault lines across the Atlantic, as the ‘Made in USA’ financial crisis deepens and the dollar looks more and more vulnerable once hedge fund repatriation effects by yearend wind down. The year 2009 will be clearly more turbulent even than 2008 in world geopolitics.
The Brussels decision is the more remarkable as an indication of the slipping power of Washington over European NATO members. The December 3 NATO Foreign Ministers Brussels meeting issued what to the naïve observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy. They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards NATO full membership. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies -- the Nato-Georgia Commission and the Nato-Ukraine Commission -- basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan. As well, NATO ministers agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia ‘in a conditional and graduated manner.’
Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact President-elect Obama retained Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who is strongly on record for bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.
The real reasons
The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia’s incalculable president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and not Moscow who initiated the adventure of sending Georgian troops to try to occupy the breakaway province of South Ossetia, that on evident encouragement of Washington.
On November 28 in Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony, on the background to the August events, which saw Russian troops march into parts of Georgia to repel the attack on Ossetians, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war.
According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia’s “intervention” in the region. “We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable,” Saakavili said.
The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: “The issue is not about why Georgia started military action -– we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory.”
Saakashvili’s surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia’s former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of Parliament.
A former confidant of President Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.
He refused to name the officials who he said had told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, saying that identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had ‘warned’ Mr. Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed.
Kitsmarishvili’s testimony in front of the parliamentary commission, was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for “professional negligence.” Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili’s testimony, called the allegations “irresponsible and shameless fabrication,” and said they were “either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics.” Mr. Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president.
Mr. Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor on December 2. “They don’t want to listen to the truth,” he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.
Full Spectrum Dominance
As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole Superpower Pax Americana.
Russia’s understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and then-US Secretary of State James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any planned sole US superpower domination.
The Bush presidency was a raw attempt to remedy this by brute military force. The militarization of Iraq and the Middle East oilfields was but one step. The creation of a US ‘missile shield’ in Poland and the Czech Republic, was another, a major step.
The misnamed ‘missile defense shield’ would be in reality an offensive capability that, when installed by perhaps 2012, will put the world, especially Western Europe, on a hair-trigger to nuclear war, and combined with entry of Russian border states Georgia and Ukraine would simply present Moscow with de facto defeat. This is not about Russia returning to old Soviet-style rule under Putin or Medvedev. It’s about the ultimate survival of Russia as a nation, as Moscow rightly sees it, not about the fine points of democracy.
No one in either Berlin, Paris, London or Brussels, and certainly not in Washington, is ignorant of that reality. European NATO members are increasingly nervous about the prospect of a military confrontation with Russia. Last August’s swift Russian response to act in aid of South Ossetians against the Georgian invasion sent a reality shock through Europe. Neither Germany nor France wish to admit unstable states like Georgia or Ukraine only to be forced to act militarily in their defense in event of a repeat of the madness of last August.
That, simply stated, is the real, unspoken reason that Washington on December 3 in Brussels was forced to accept a face-saving compromise. The NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine to all intent and purposes is dead. As one NATO military official stated, ‘Nato has lost the glue that once held it together.’
The statement of Rice following the NATO meeting was telling. She was forced to tell the press, ‘ . . . there is a long road ahead for both Georgia and Ukraine to reach those standards. The United States stands resolutely for those standards, meaning that there should be no shortcuts to membership of NATO.’
Polish motorcade shoot was ‘Georgia stunt’
Further adding to the atmosphere of an almost Laurel & Hardy comic farce around Georgia’s erratic president, who was filmed shortly after the Russian invasion in August by the BBC actually swallowing and chewing on his tie, it has now emerged that an alleged shooting incident a week before the Brussels NATO meeting, involving the motorcade of the Georgian and Polish presidents was a staged ‘stunt.’
Special services in Warsaw say the alleged attack near the South Ossetian border was a provocation staged by the Georgians. A report by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego -- ABW), published by the Dziennik newspaper, claims Georgia staged the incident for propaganda purposes.
The incident took place on Sunday evening when Georgian President Saakasvili was showing his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski the area near the border with South Ossetia. After the convoy stopped at a checkpoint, there was gunfire, which the Georgians claimed was an ‘attack by Russian troops.’
Lech Kaczynski’s personal security chief was dismissed. Colonel Krzysztof Olszowiec was accused of failing to ensure proper security for the Polish president during his trip to Georgia. Olszowiec was dismissed despite objections from Kaczynski, according to the Polish media.
The trip to the border area with Russian-backed South Ossetia was the result of a last-minute invitation from Saakashvili, according to Polish Foreign Ministry spoke spokesman Piotr Paskowski.
Initially, Warsaw blamed Russia for the incident. But now Polish security forces say it was staged by Tbilisi. Russia strongly denied the allegations, saying Tbilisi was behind it. President Kaczynski confirmed that shooting had taken place but stopped short of blaming anyone. Russia’s position has now been supported by Poland’s ABW, who said “the shots fired near the cars of Georgian and Polish president were a Georgian provocation.” The Polish document points out that Saakashvili kept on smiling after the first shots and his bodyguards didn’t react. The report also highlights another suspicious fact, namely, that the bus carrying journalists was instructed to travel in front of the motorcade, while the car with Kaczynski’s own bodyguards was pushed back by Georgian soldiers. The result was that they were not in a position to witness the alleged shooting.
All in all it might be that Saakashvili’s tenure as president faces major internal challenges for his bent to undertake such reckless stunts.
The Obama White House will inherit a plateful of geopolitical problems in Europe next January 20.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). This essay is adapted from a book he has just completed, titled Full Spectrum Dominance: The Geopolitical Agenda Behind Washington’s Global Military Buildup (release date estimated Autumn 2008). He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Ukraine and Georgia: Entry into NATO put off indefinitely
By F. William Engdahl
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Dec 12, 2008
NATO ministers in Brussels have decided to ignore US wishes and to delay the admission of Ukraine and of Georgia in effect indefinitely in what the Washington administration is sheepishly trying to claim is a positive ‘compromise.’
The decision, following EU member state alarm last August over the prospect of European states having to go to war at some point against Russia over an incalculable despot in the Caucasus or in Kiev who decided to provoke Moscow to react, was simply too much.
The Germans have a far too deep and painful collective memory of the last war with Russia to be willing to treat such a prospect as lightly as Condi Rice or Washington seems willing to do. The decision deepens growing tectonic fault lines across the Atlantic, as the ‘Made in USA’ financial crisis deepens and the dollar looks more and more vulnerable once hedge fund repatriation effects by yearend wind down. The year 2009 will be clearly more turbulent even than 2008 in world geopolitics.
The Brussels decision is the more remarkable as an indication of the slipping power of Washington over European NATO members. The December 3 NATO Foreign Ministers Brussels meeting issued what to the naïve observer might appear a masterpiece of diplomacy. They unanimously agreed to sidestep the usual Membership Action Plan vote for Georgia and Ukraine, the first concrete step towards NATO full membership. Instead, NATO will expand the activities of two existing bodies -- the Nato-Georgia Commission and the Nato-Ukraine Commission -- basically to oversee the same reforms as would have been contained in the action plan. As well, NATO ministers agreed in their communique to renew ties with Russia ‘in a conditional and graduated manner.’
Translated into real political language, Washington has undergone a stunning setback in its agenda of encircling Russia with NATO. Despite the fact President-elect Obama retained Bush administration Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and named a person to be Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who is strongly on record for bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, key European NATO members, led by Germany and France, blocked what must be a unanimous membership decision.
The real reasons
The real reason for the refusal is the growing realization within European officialdom that it was Georgia’s incalculable president, Mikhail Saakashvili, and not Moscow who initiated the adventure of sending Georgian troops to try to occupy the breakaway province of South Ossetia, that on evident encouragement of Washington.
On November 28 in Georgian official Parliamentary Commission testimony, on the background to the August events, which saw Russian troops march into parts of Georgia to repel the attack on Ossetians, Saakashvili made the surprising announcement that he had indeed initiated the war.
According to Saakashvili, the attack on the South Ossetian capital, which involved night shelling of residential areas with multiple rocket launcher systems, was aimed at protecting Georgian citizens. He said it was a response to Russia’s “intervention” in the region. “We did start military action to take control of Tskhinvali and other unruly areas. But we took this difficult decision to fend off our territory from intervention and save the people who were dying. It was inevitable,” Saakavili said.
The Georgian president claims Russia moved tanks into South Ossetian territory before Georgia launched its attack. He said: “The issue is not about why Georgia started military action -– we admit we started it. The issue is about whether there was another chance when our citizens were being killed? We tried to prevent the intervention and fought on our own territory.”
Saakashvili’s surprising admission came only hours after the testimony of Georgia’s former ambassador to Moscow, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who testified for three hours before he was shouted down by pro-Saakashvili members of Parliament.
A former confidant of President Saakashvili, Kitsmarishvili said Georgian officials told him in April that they planned to start a war in Abkhazia, one of two breakaway regions at issue in the war, and had received a green light from the United States government to do so. He said the Georgian government later decided to start the war in South Ossetia, the other region, and continue into Abkhazia.
He refused to name the officials who he said had told him about planned actions in Abkhazia, saying that identifying them would endanger their lives. The official US line has been that they had ‘warned’ Mr. Saakashvili against taking action in the two enclaves, where Russian peacekeepers were stationed.
Kitsmarishvili’s testimony in front of the parliamentary commission, was shown live on Georgian television. The chairman of the commission, Paata Davitaia, said he would initiate a criminal case against Kitsmarishvili for “professional negligence.” Deputy Foreign Minister Giga Bokeria, who was called on short notice to comment on Kitsmarishvili’s testimony, called the allegations “irresponsible and shameless fabrication,” and said they were “either the result of a lack of information or the personal resentment of a man who has lost his job and wants to get involved in politics.” Mr. Kitsmarishvili was fired in September by the president.
Mr. Kitsmarishvili walked out amid the furor on December 2. “They don’t want to listen to the truth,” he told reporters. Two days later, Saakashvili proved Kitsmarishvili right.
Full Spectrum Dominance
As I detail at some length in my book, due out in January 2009, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, the strategy of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is part of a far larger and more dangerous strategic long-term plan of Washington to ultimately encircle, confront and dismember Russia as a functioning state. Russia, even more than China, is the most formidable obstacle to a Washington-centered sole Superpower Pax Americana.
Russia’s understandable refusal to abandon its nuclear strike force in the face of US violations of agreements made in 1989 between the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and then-US Secretary of State James Baker III, namely that NATO would not expand east to the former states of the Warsaw Pact or USSR, presents a dilemma for any planned sole US superpower domination.
The Bush presidency was a raw attempt to remedy this by brute military force. The militarization of Iraq and the Middle East oilfields was but one step. The creation of a US ‘missile shield’ in Poland and the Czech Republic, was another, a major step.
The misnamed ‘missile defense shield’ would be in reality an offensive capability that, when installed by perhaps 2012, will put the world, especially Western Europe, on a hair-trigger to nuclear war, and combined with entry of Russian border states Georgia and Ukraine would simply present Moscow with de facto defeat. This is not about Russia returning to old Soviet-style rule under Putin or Medvedev. It’s about the ultimate survival of Russia as a nation, as Moscow rightly sees it, not about the fine points of democracy.
No one in either Berlin, Paris, London or Brussels, and certainly not in Washington, is ignorant of that reality. European NATO members are increasingly nervous about the prospect of a military confrontation with Russia. Last August’s swift Russian response to act in aid of South Ossetians against the Georgian invasion sent a reality shock through Europe. Neither Germany nor France wish to admit unstable states like Georgia or Ukraine only to be forced to act militarily in their defense in event of a repeat of the madness of last August.
That, simply stated, is the real, unspoken reason that Washington on December 3 in Brussels was forced to accept a face-saving compromise. The NATO membership of Georgia and Ukraine to all intent and purposes is dead. As one NATO military official stated, ‘Nato has lost the glue that once held it together.’
The statement of Rice following the NATO meeting was telling. She was forced to tell the press, ‘ . . . there is a long road ahead for both Georgia and Ukraine to reach those standards. The United States stands resolutely for those standards, meaning that there should be no shortcuts to membership of NATO.’
Polish motorcade shoot was ‘Georgia stunt’
Further adding to the atmosphere of an almost Laurel & Hardy comic farce around Georgia’s erratic president, who was filmed shortly after the Russian invasion in August by the BBC actually swallowing and chewing on his tie, it has now emerged that an alleged shooting incident a week before the Brussels NATO meeting, involving the motorcade of the Georgian and Polish presidents was a staged ‘stunt.’
Special services in Warsaw say the alleged attack near the South Ossetian border was a provocation staged by the Georgians. A report by Poland’s Internal Security Agency (Agencja Bezpieczenstwa Wewnetrznego -- ABW), published by the Dziennik newspaper, claims Georgia staged the incident for propaganda purposes.
The incident took place on Sunday evening when Georgian President Saakasvili was showing his Polish counterpart Lech Kaczynski the area near the border with South Ossetia. After the convoy stopped at a checkpoint, there was gunfire, which the Georgians claimed was an ‘attack by Russian troops.’
Lech Kaczynski’s personal security chief was dismissed. Colonel Krzysztof Olszowiec was accused of failing to ensure proper security for the Polish president during his trip to Georgia. Olszowiec was dismissed despite objections from Kaczynski, according to the Polish media.
The trip to the border area with Russian-backed South Ossetia was the result of a last-minute invitation from Saakashvili, according to Polish Foreign Ministry spoke spokesman Piotr Paskowski.
Initially, Warsaw blamed Russia for the incident. But now Polish security forces say it was staged by Tbilisi. Russia strongly denied the allegations, saying Tbilisi was behind it. President Kaczynski confirmed that shooting had taken place but stopped short of blaming anyone. Russia’s position has now been supported by Poland’s ABW, who said “the shots fired near the cars of Georgian and Polish president were a Georgian provocation.” The Polish document points out that Saakashvili kept on smiling after the first shots and his bodyguards didn’t react. The report also highlights another suspicious fact, namely, that the bus carrying journalists was instructed to travel in front of the motorcade, while the car with Kaczynski’s own bodyguards was pushed back by Georgian soldiers. The result was that they were not in a position to witness the alleged shooting.
All in all it might be that Saakashvili’s tenure as president faces major internal challenges for his bent to undertake such reckless stunts.
The Obama White House will inherit a plateful of geopolitical problems in Europe next January 20.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press), and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca). This essay is adapted from a book he has just completed, titled Full Spectrum Dominance: The Geopolitical Agenda Behind Washington’s Global Military Buildup (release date estimated Autumn 2008). He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Beast of the Month - September 2008
Beast of the Month - September 2008
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Obama Foreign Policy Guru
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"
The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
Those evil Russians. With their mastermind Vladimir Putin in charge (using "President" Dmitry Medvedev as his front-man puppet) those nasty Soviets invaded the noble, peace-loving nation of Georgia, just so they could steal land from a thriving little democracy that just wanted to be left alone.
At least that's how it’s been portrayed in the press.
Okay, maybe Russia isn't the most sympathetic "victim" in world affairs, and Putin has proven himself to be quite the would-be dictator. But the story as it's been presented just doesn't add up. Let's start with the issue of who attacked who first. In fact, it was Georgia, who bombarded the province of South Ossetia unilaterally. The mainstream media even admits this truth, but then argues that since South Ossetia is part of Georgia sovereign nation, the attack was legitimate. Of course, this ignores that South Ossetia long has had secessionist desires from Georgia so it could reunite with the Russian homeland. Indeed, a 2006 referendum in which voter turnout was 95 percent showed that 99 percent of South Ossetians supported their continued quasi-independence from Georgia, a landslide of near-universal proportions. 34 international observers monitored the election, and none disputed the validity of the results. This shouldn't be a surprise: since 1992, Russian peacekeeper have remained in the province under agreement with Georgia to protect its desired independence from the rest of the nation.
In attacking South Ossetia, Georgia went after the city of Tskhinvali, which has no military targets and is a residential and industrial center home to 30,000 people. The majority of these people, incidentally, have both Russian citizenship and passports. The massive bombing and shelling of these people can rightly be deemed a war crime, and according to Russia, over 2,000 people were murdered in the massacre. Given this provocation, Russia did what any superpower nation would do under similar circumstances: sent its own military to repel the assault and defend its own citizens.
(This, of course, leads to the ultimate absurdity of the situation: Team USA feigns outrage at supposed Russian violation of sovereignty of a hostile nation situated right at its border, while the invasion of the Iraqi nation half-way across the planet continues in its sixth year.)
Even in the Western media, Putin (long made out to be a Bond-like super-villain) and Medvedev (long mocked as Putin's poodle) didn't lose the most PR-wise, since they didn't have far to fall. It was Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who long had been championed as a supposed leader devoted to democracy. At best, he appeared to be a sniveling opportunist who falsely assumed that Russia wouldn't respond to its attack, or that NATO would defend it if Russia did. At worst, he was revealed as a political charlatan who uses charm and Western propaganda to hide his power-hungry actions, actions which have made him increasingly unpopular in Georgia. (And as far as NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine goes, does anyone really believe that defending a nation on the border of Russia with the NATO pact is a good idea, even ignoring what an arrogant buffoon Saakashvili is in particular?)
Still, focusing on Saakashvili misses the big picture of who is in charge here. After all, if Medvedev is Putin's puppet, so is Mikhail S. to NATO and the West. (In fact, Saakashvili is such a tool, it is safe to assume the Bush Team greenlighted the South Ossetia invasion.) And in particular, Saakashvili is beholden to one man: Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Konformist Beast of the Month.
Brzezinski, for those unaware, was founding executive director in 1973 of the Trilateral Commission, the conspiracy bugaboo long alleged to be the major not-so-secret player in international affairs. Created by David Rockefeller, the TLC got together leaders of the US, Western Europe and Japan (hence the "trilateral" part of its name) to coordinate foreign policy plans in secret. Jimmy Carter became a member, and when he was elected President, he named Z-man as his National Security Advisor.
Nearly twenty-eight years after his presidency, Carter is known for being a warm, snuggly Nobel Peace Prize winner, but whatever fuzzy, peace-loving tendencies Jimmy had, Zbig didn't share them. He was the decided hawk in the Democratic establishment, and he is best described as the Democratic Party's answer to Henry Kissinger. Nor is he particularly fond of democracy, as the 1974 TLC report "The Crisis of Democracy" revealed: it argued the masses had too much influence over government and economics, influence that needed to be curtailed.
How to curtail that democratic influence on government? The best way, it seems, is by creating faux-populist leaders who would dazzle the public, then let the same old club of powerful insiders run the show behind the curtain. Jimmy Carter was the first of these in 1976, followed by Ronald Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and GWB in 2000. All of these candidates feigned that they were outsiders during the campaign, but then mainly served sectors of the establishment after occupying the White House. (Bush Sr. was the solitary admitted insider after he won in '88.) This leads to this year's election, where the Democrat's have Mr. "Hope and Change" Barack Obama battling the Republican's "Maverick" John McCain. Do we see a pattern?
Of course, as far as ties to Brzezinski go, Barack Obama is far deeper than McCain, something heavily detailed by author Webster Tarpley in the recent political expose Obama - The Postmodern Coup. Zbig's support of Obama turned covert after Brzezinski became publicly critical of Israel and its lobby. As Obama would explain in February, "He's not one of my key advisers. I've had lunch with him once. I've exchanged e-mails with him maybe three times. He came to Iowa to introduce me for a speech on Iraq." (If this line of argument sounds familiar, it's the same one he used for his deep ties to financial swindler Tony Rezko and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.) But until the Israeli controversy, Brzezinski was featured prominently as a chief Obama foreign policy advisor, a de facto position that has likely remained the same.
This may not be for the better. While the GOP has been taken over by the destructively incompetent neocons, at least even George W. Bush was smart enough to know that wars in the Middle East are less dangerous than an overt battle with either Russia or China (which is why he wisely ducked a major confrontation with Russia over the Georgia crisis.)
Don't take The Konformist's word for it. Brzezinski laid it all out in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard, where he argued the 21st century would turn into a major battle between Russia, China and the West for control of natural resources, in particular oil. Ten years later, his book looks more like a blueprint than a prediction, although the battle between the West and both Russia and China still remains extremely cold. But that could change: both Georgia's Saakashvili and Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko (two former Soviet Republic's with important strategic locations in the battle for access to Caspian Sea oil between the West and Russia) are presidents whose campaigns were backed by the brains of Brzezinski and the funds of George Soros. Both were rushed in on a wave of gushing populist frenzy, followed by increasing unpopularity as they followed policies of neoliberal economics and provoking the Russian bear in foreign policy. That the same recipe behind Saakashvili and Yushchenko is being used for the Obamahead cult shouldn't be too comforting.
But so this doesn't get confused as an advertisement for the McCain campaign, Mr. Maverick has as his foreign policy guru Randy Scheunemann, a frothing neocon who for four years was a paid foreign lobbyist of (drum roll please) the nation of Georgia. It is important to note that after the Georgia-Russia conflict began, McCain immediately was far more forceful in bellicose anti-Russian posturings than Obama. No surprise for the one 2008 candidate more tied to Bush's Iraq War than any other.
All of which suggests that, when it comes to foreign policy, 2008 is a rigged game. Obama, after feigning to be the "antiwar candidate" during the Democratic primary, has shed all such pretensions as November approaches. To his credit, McCain has never pretended otherwise than to be a Commander-in-Chief President. Either way, we're looking at four more years of Afghanistan, Iraq and possibly new misadventures in Iran and, yes, Russia. Meet the new boss...
In any case, we salute Zbigniew Brzezinski as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Z-man!!!
Sources:
Adams, Cecil. "Is the Trilateral Commission the Secret Organization that Runs the World?" The Straight Dope 6 November 1987 <http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/524/is-the-trilateral-commission-the-secret-organization-that-runs-the-world>.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Judis, John B. "Neo-McCain." New Republic 16 October 2006 <http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=23c3a0ff-9d55-4d28-a94e-0b0e09e26505>.
Scheer, Robert. "Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?" Truthdig 12 August 2008 <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080812_georgia_war_a_neocon_election_ploy/>.
Smith, Ben. "Obama Adviser Worries Israel Supporters." Politico 12 September 2007 <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5783.html>.
Sweet, Lynn. "Obama Assures Jewish Leaders on Religion, Israel Stance." Chicago Sun-Times 25 February 2008 <http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/811251,CST-NWS-sweet25.article>.
Tarpley, Webster Griffin. "Brzezinski's Georgia Puppets Attack Russia - WWIII In Sight." Rense.com 11 August 2008 <http://rense.com/general82/indt.htm>.
Tarpley, Webster Griffin. Obama - The Postmodern Coup. Joshua Tree: Progressive Press, 2008.
Traynor, Ian. "Georgia Crisis: Medvedev Promises to Guarantee Any Vote by Rebel States to Break with Tbilisi." The Guardian 15 August 2008 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/15/russia.georgia>.
Whitney, Mike. "Putin's Winning Hand." Information Clearing House 16 August 2008 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20535.htm>.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Obama Foreign Policy Guru
"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"
"Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"
The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"
Those evil Russians. With their mastermind Vladimir Putin in charge (using "President" Dmitry Medvedev as his front-man puppet) those nasty Soviets invaded the noble, peace-loving nation of Georgia, just so they could steal land from a thriving little democracy that just wanted to be left alone.
At least that's how it’s been portrayed in the press.
Okay, maybe Russia isn't the most sympathetic "victim" in world affairs, and Putin has proven himself to be quite the would-be dictator. But the story as it's been presented just doesn't add up. Let's start with the issue of who attacked who first. In fact, it was Georgia, who bombarded the province of South Ossetia unilaterally. The mainstream media even admits this truth, but then argues that since South Ossetia is part of Georgia sovereign nation, the attack was legitimate. Of course, this ignores that South Ossetia long has had secessionist desires from Georgia so it could reunite with the Russian homeland. Indeed, a 2006 referendum in which voter turnout was 95 percent showed that 99 percent of South Ossetians supported their continued quasi-independence from Georgia, a landslide of near-universal proportions. 34 international observers monitored the election, and none disputed the validity of the results. This shouldn't be a surprise: since 1992, Russian peacekeeper have remained in the province under agreement with Georgia to protect its desired independence from the rest of the nation.
In attacking South Ossetia, Georgia went after the city of Tskhinvali, which has no military targets and is a residential and industrial center home to 30,000 people. The majority of these people, incidentally, have both Russian citizenship and passports. The massive bombing and shelling of these people can rightly be deemed a war crime, and according to Russia, over 2,000 people were murdered in the massacre. Given this provocation, Russia did what any superpower nation would do under similar circumstances: sent its own military to repel the assault and defend its own citizens.
(This, of course, leads to the ultimate absurdity of the situation: Team USA feigns outrage at supposed Russian violation of sovereignty of a hostile nation situated right at its border, while the invasion of the Iraqi nation half-way across the planet continues in its sixth year.)
Even in the Western media, Putin (long made out to be a Bond-like super-villain) and Medvedev (long mocked as Putin's poodle) didn't lose the most PR-wise, since they didn't have far to fall. It was Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who long had been championed as a supposed leader devoted to democracy. At best, he appeared to be a sniveling opportunist who falsely assumed that Russia wouldn't respond to its attack, or that NATO would defend it if Russia did. At worst, he was revealed as a political charlatan who uses charm and Western propaganda to hide his power-hungry actions, actions which have made him increasingly unpopular in Georgia. (And as far as NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine goes, does anyone really believe that defending a nation on the border of Russia with the NATO pact is a good idea, even ignoring what an arrogant buffoon Saakashvili is in particular?)
Still, focusing on Saakashvili misses the big picture of who is in charge here. After all, if Medvedev is Putin's puppet, so is Mikhail S. to NATO and the West. (In fact, Saakashvili is such a tool, it is safe to assume the Bush Team greenlighted the South Ossetia invasion.) And in particular, Saakashvili is beholden to one man: Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Konformist Beast of the Month.
Brzezinski, for those unaware, was founding executive director in 1973 of the Trilateral Commission, the conspiracy bugaboo long alleged to be the major not-so-secret player in international affairs. Created by David Rockefeller, the TLC got together leaders of the US, Western Europe and Japan (hence the "trilateral" part of its name) to coordinate foreign policy plans in secret. Jimmy Carter became a member, and when he was elected President, he named Z-man as his National Security Advisor.
Nearly twenty-eight years after his presidency, Carter is known for being a warm, snuggly Nobel Peace Prize winner, but whatever fuzzy, peace-loving tendencies Jimmy had, Zbig didn't share them. He was the decided hawk in the Democratic establishment, and he is best described as the Democratic Party's answer to Henry Kissinger. Nor is he particularly fond of democracy, as the 1974 TLC report "The Crisis of Democracy" revealed: it argued the masses had too much influence over government and economics, influence that needed to be curtailed.
How to curtail that democratic influence on government? The best way, it seems, is by creating faux-populist leaders who would dazzle the public, then let the same old club of powerful insiders run the show behind the curtain. Jimmy Carter was the first of these in 1976, followed by Ronald Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and GWB in 2000. All of these candidates feigned that they were outsiders during the campaign, but then mainly served sectors of the establishment after occupying the White House. (Bush Sr. was the solitary admitted insider after he won in '88.) This leads to this year's election, where the Democrat's have Mr. "Hope and Change" Barack Obama battling the Republican's "Maverick" John McCain. Do we see a pattern?
Of course, as far as ties to Brzezinski go, Barack Obama is far deeper than McCain, something heavily detailed by author Webster Tarpley in the recent political expose Obama - The Postmodern Coup. Zbig's support of Obama turned covert after Brzezinski became publicly critical of Israel and its lobby. As Obama would explain in February, "He's not one of my key advisers. I've had lunch with him once. I've exchanged e-mails with him maybe three times. He came to Iowa to introduce me for a speech on Iraq." (If this line of argument sounds familiar, it's the same one he used for his deep ties to financial swindler Tony Rezko and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.) But until the Israeli controversy, Brzezinski was featured prominently as a chief Obama foreign policy advisor, a de facto position that has likely remained the same.
This may not be for the better. While the GOP has been taken over by the destructively incompetent neocons, at least even George W. Bush was smart enough to know that wars in the Middle East are less dangerous than an overt battle with either Russia or China (which is why he wisely ducked a major confrontation with Russia over the Georgia crisis.)
Don't take The Konformist's word for it. Brzezinski laid it all out in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard, where he argued the 21st century would turn into a major battle between Russia, China and the West for control of natural resources, in particular oil. Ten years later, his book looks more like a blueprint than a prediction, although the battle between the West and both Russia and China still remains extremely cold. But that could change: both Georgia's Saakashvili and Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko (two former Soviet Republic's with important strategic locations in the battle for access to Caspian Sea oil between the West and Russia) are presidents whose campaigns were backed by the brains of Brzezinski and the funds of George Soros. Both were rushed in on a wave of gushing populist frenzy, followed by increasing unpopularity as they followed policies of neoliberal economics and provoking the Russian bear in foreign policy. That the same recipe behind Saakashvili and Yushchenko is being used for the Obamahead cult shouldn't be too comforting.
But so this doesn't get confused as an advertisement for the McCain campaign, Mr. Maverick has as his foreign policy guru Randy Scheunemann, a frothing neocon who for four years was a paid foreign lobbyist of (drum roll please) the nation of Georgia. It is important to note that after the Georgia-Russia conflict began, McCain immediately was far more forceful in bellicose anti-Russian posturings than Obama. No surprise for the one 2008 candidate more tied to Bush's Iraq War than any other.
All of which suggests that, when it comes to foreign policy, 2008 is a rigged game. Obama, after feigning to be the "antiwar candidate" during the Democratic primary, has shed all such pretensions as November approaches. To his credit, McCain has never pretended otherwise than to be a Commander-in-Chief President. Either way, we're looking at four more years of Afghanistan, Iraq and possibly new misadventures in Iran and, yes, Russia. Meet the new boss...
In any case, we salute Zbigniew Brzezinski as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Z-man!!!
Sources:
Adams, Cecil. "Is the Trilateral Commission the Secret Organization that Runs the World?" The Straight Dope 6 November 1987 <http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/524/is-the-trilateral-commission-the-secret-organization-that-runs-the-world>.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
Judis, John B. "Neo-McCain." New Republic 16 October 2006 <http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=23c3a0ff-9d55-4d28-a94e-0b0e09e26505>.
Scheer, Robert. "Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?" Truthdig 12 August 2008 <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080812_georgia_war_a_neocon_election_ploy/>.
Smith, Ben. "Obama Adviser Worries Israel Supporters." Politico 12 September 2007 <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5783.html>.
Sweet, Lynn. "Obama Assures Jewish Leaders on Religion, Israel Stance." Chicago Sun-Times 25 February 2008 <http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/811251,CST-NWS-sweet25.article>.
Tarpley, Webster Griffin. "Brzezinski's Georgia Puppets Attack Russia - WWIII In Sight." Rense.com 11 August 2008 <http://rense.com/general82/indt.htm>.
Tarpley, Webster Griffin. Obama - The Postmodern Coup. Joshua Tree: Progressive Press, 2008.
Traynor, Ian. "Georgia Crisis: Medvedev Promises to Guarantee Any Vote by Rebel States to Break with Tbilisi." The Guardian 15 August 2008 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/15/russia.georgia>.
Whitney, Mike. "Putin's Winning Hand." Information Clearing House 16 August 2008 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20535.htm>.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Al Franken's Race Counted on Flawed Systems
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6641Al Franken's Razor-Thin MN Senate Race Counted on Flawed Optical-Scan Systems
PLUS: Details on 'What in the Hell Happened in Alaska' and Georgia and Oregon...
Posted By Brad Friedman On 5th November 2008
Diebold/Premier, Oregon, Georgia, Alaska, Election 2008, Minnesota, Al Franken 38 Comments
I'm exhausted, so forgive me if I make this quicker than it deserves. And if I haven't yet been able to jump into a myriad of other elections of serious concern around the country still today.
But just a few quick facts on the Al Franken (D) / Norm Coleman (R) U.S. Senate race in Minnesota, which we noted last night [1] (with some updates today) stands at some 700 votes currently between them. More hopefully after I've figured out how to sneak in some rest.
Here are three quick, bullet-point facts that Franken may want to know, since his was the only show on Air America which never had me on as a guest, as he simply refused to discuss serious issues concerning Election Integrity, now - ironically enough.
(And see below these for some quick skinny on serious concerns about the outstanding Senate races in AK, OR and GA...)
While all of Minnesota [2] votes on paper ballots, thankfully. Though all of those ballots are scanned, rather than counted, on proprietary optical-scan systems made by either ES&S or Diebold. Both companies produce systems that regularly fail to count and/or record ballots correctly.
The majority of counties use the ES&S M-100, precinct-based optical scanner. As we noted on Monday [3], that same scanner was found, according to a letter sent to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) by a county in MI, to have failed pre-election "logic and accuracy testing". The M-100, according to the letter from county officials, “reported inconsistent vote totals", such that “The same ballots run through the same machines, yielded different results each time.” Public Record has more details tonight [4].
Two of Minnesota's three largest counties (Anoka and Dakota) use the Diebold AccuVote OS scanners to "count" their ballots. That system is the same one seen being hacked via its memory card in the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Hacking Democracy [5]. You can watch the actual hack from the film below (appx 9 mins)
(By the way, the Diebold op-scanner used above, and in MN, was also used in January's New Hampshire primary when pre-election polls and exit polls determined Obama would be the winner, only to see him lose to Hillary Clinton. Obama was found to have won in the 20% of NH which counts their ballots by hand. While Clinton won, by an almost precisely flipped margin, in the 80% of NH that used the Diebold op-scan system seen being hacked in the mock-election seen being manipulated in the clip above.)
In late August of this year, Diebold admitted [6], while being sued because of it by the state of Ohio, that their GEMS central tabulator system routinely drops thousands of votes, without giving notice, while they are being uploaded from memory cards to the main server. That failed GEMS tabulator model was used yesterday, with both Diebold's touch-screen and op-scan systems, in some 34 states across the country.
An automatic recount has been triggered in the Franken/Coleman race, and will take place mid-November. I haven't checked yet as to whether it'll be a machine or hand recount --- hopefully the latter --- but it looks like I have time to find out later (Updated: News accounts say it will be by hand). Either way, hopefully the ballots --- both voted and unvoted --- will be carefully guarded and their chain of custody will be secure, transparent and well-documented between now and then.
If you'd like more details on all of these concerns, Al, feel free to contact me. All is forgiven. Sorta. Just as long as you don't concede before every vote is counted, and counted accurately.
Other U.S. Senate Races of Concern...
While I was writing this, Kim Zetter at WIRED posted a similar story [7] on the failed ES&S scanners used across much of MN. She also tosses in a quick summary of several of the other outstanding Senate races still in question in Alaska, Georgia and Oregon, and the types of voting systems used in each. Given my exhaustion, I'll hope both she and you will forgive if I simply repost those summaries here, along with a couple of my own quick additional points on each...
Alaska
Republican Senator, and convicted felon [8], Ted Stevens is leading Democratic challenger and Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich by 48.2 percent to 46.7 percent. Some 49,000 absentee, early votes and provisional ballots remain to be counted. If Stevens wins, it's unclear if he'll resign or face possible expulsion by his Senate peers. If either happens, there's talk of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin running for his seat. Voting System: Alaska uses optical-scan machines made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) statewide.
Note: Alaska is one of the few places where the Democratic Party actually went to court to fight for transparency against the Electoral-Industrial Complex, successfully suing the state for the release of Diebold databases detailing how voters voted in the 2004 election. The state fought tooth and nail, including the invocation of "security threat" claims, to avoid releasing the information, even after they'd lost the suit. Alaska is very much a Diebold "company town."
Additional Note: A source of ours in Alaska, has contacted us to let us know about concerns of "shenanigans" in the counting up there. I hope to get more soon, but I'm told that Palin's Lt. Governor is in charge of overseeing the counting and that some are being denied access from observing the counting. So what's happening up there?
We're not the only ones wondering, as Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com asks today [9]: "What in the Hell Happened in Alaska?"...
Although Ted Stevens holds a small lead in Alaska and is the favorite to retain his seat, the outcome is not as inevitable as it might appear to be. Stevens currently holds a lead of 3,353 votes, or about 1.5 percent of the votes tallied so far. But, there are quite a large number of ballots yet to count. According to Roll Call [10], these include "at least 40,000 absentee ballot, 9,000 early voting ballots, and an undetermined number of questionable ballots".
Indeed, it seems possible that the number of "questionable" ballots could be quite high. So far, about 220 thousand votes have been processed in Alaska. This compares with 313 thousand votes cast in 2004. After adding back in the roughly 50,000 absentee and early ballots that Roll Call accounts for, that would get us to 270 thousand ballots, or about a 14 percent drop from 2004. It seems unlikely that turnout would drop by 14 percent in Alaska given the presence of both a high-profile senate race and Sarah Palin at the top of the ticket.
But even if Begich were to make up ground and win a narrow victory, this would seem to represent a catastrophic failure of polling, as three polls conducted following the guilty verdict in Stevens' corruption trial had Begich leading by margins of 7, 8 and 22 points, respectively.
...
[T]he polling failures in Alaska weren't unique to Stevens. They also applied to the presidential race, as well as Alaska's at-large House seat. In each case, the Republican outperformed his pre-election polling by margins ranging from 12 to 14 points.
Troubling? Um, yup. Silver offers some more numbers and details.
But back to Zetter's summaries...
Georgia
Incumbent Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss seized only 49.9 percent of votes [11] so far, narrowly missing the 50 percent majority that is required in Georgia to avoid a runoff race. Therefore he'll likely face off against Democratic challenger Jim Martin in a December 2 runoff election if some 50,000 absentee and other ballots that are still being counted fail to tip his percentage numbers. Voting System: Georgia uses AccuVote paperless touchscreen machines made by Premier Election Solutions statewide.
Note: Speaking of "company towns", GA was the first, along with MD, to adopt Diebold's wholly unverifiable touch-screen systems across the entire state. MD has since decided to replace the system with paper-based optical-systems, following scientific report after report warning about failure after failure with those Diebold touch-screen systems. MD will be replacing them for the 2010 election. The error-prone, easily-hacked, inaccurate touch-screens were first used in 2002 in GA, when Chambliss defeated incumbent Max Cleland in a surprising and controversial upset which has raised many questions about the machines, and Diebold's now-admitted secret patching of the systems, with uncertified software, just before the election.
Oregon
Incumbent Republican Senator Gordon Smith is currently leading Democratic challenger Jeff Merkley by less than 1 percent. Voting System: Oregon uses mail-in paper ballots statewide [12]. It's the only state that has gone entirely postal.
Note: The move to Vote-by-Mail is one of the unfortunate side-effects of the raised awareness about problems with touch-screen voting machines. It's a bad idea for democracy, as we detailed some months ago here [13]. (Special note for Oregon readers: You needn't send me emails disagreeing with my position. I already realize many of you love your VBM system very much and don't share my concerns with it. Nonetheless, I stand fully by the points made in that referenced article.)
As long promised, The BRAD BLOG [14] has covered your electoral system 2008, fiercely and independently, like no other media outlet in the nation. Please support our work with a donation [15] to help us keep going. If you like, we'll send you some great election integrity documentary films in return. Details on that right here... [16]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URLs in this post:
[1] we noted last night: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6634
[2] all of Minnesota: http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/searched.php?ec=standard&state=MN&equipment_type%5B%5D=All+Types&vendor%5B%5D=All+Vendors&model%5B%5D=All+Models&vvpat=all&submit=Search&rowspp=50&topicText=&county=St.+Louis&stateText=
[3] we noted on Monday: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6613
[4] Public Record has more details tonight: http://pubrecord.org/politics/474-e-voting-machines-used-in-disputed-franken-coleman-race-failed-tests.html
[5] Hacking Democracy: http://HackingDemocracy.com
[6] Diebold admitted: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6309
[7] Kim Zetter at WIRED posted a similar story: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/ess-machines-th.html
[8] convicted felon: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6088781&page=1
[9] Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com asks today: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-in-hell-happened-in-alaska.html
[10] Roll Call: http://www.rollcall.com/news/29893-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS
[11] seized only 49.9 percent of votes: http://www.sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2008_1104/swscroll.htm
[12] mail-in paper ballots statewide: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88074936
[13] detailed some months ago here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6003
[14] The BRAD BLOG: http://www.BradBlog.com
[15] a donation: http://www.bradblog.comhttps://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=Brad@BradBlog.com&item_name=Support+for+The+BRAD+BLOG&item_number=2008
[16] Details on that right here...: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6472
[4] Public Record has more details tonight: http://pubrecord.org/politics/474-e-voting-machines-used-in-disputed-franken-coleman-race-failed-tests.html
[5] Hacking Democracy: http://HackingDemocracy.com
[6] Diebold admitted: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6309
[7] Kim Zetter at WIRED posted a similar story: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/ess-machines-th.html
[8] convicted felon: http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=6088781&page=1
[9] Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com asks today: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/11/what-in-hell-happened-in-alaska.html
[10] Roll Call: http://www.rollcall.com/news/29893-1.html?CMP=OTC-RSS
[11] seized only 49.9 percent of votes: http://www.sos.georgia.gov/elections/election_results/2008_1104/swscroll.htm
[12] mail-in paper ballots statewide: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88074936
[13] detailed some months ago here: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6003
[14] The BRAD BLOG: http://www.BradBlog.com
[15] a donation: http://www.bradblog.comhttps://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=Brad@BradBlog.com&item_name=Support+for+The+BRAD+BLOG&item_number=2008
[16] Details on that right here...: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6472
'08 turnout same as or only slightly higher than '04
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/06/report-08-turnout-same-or-only-slightly-higher-than-04/
November 6, 2008
Report: '08 turnout same as or only slightly higher than '04
From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart
North Carolina had the highest increase in voter turnout, according to a report released Thursday.
WASHINGTON (CNN) – A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago — or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.
The report released Thursday estimates that between 126.5 and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election earlier this week. Those figures represent 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.
“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.
“Many people were fooled (including this student of politics although less so than many others) by this year’s increase in registration (more than 10 million added to the rolls), citizens’ willingness to stand for hours even in inclement weather to vote early, the likely rise in youth and African American voting, and the extensive grassroots organizing network of the Obama campaign into believing that turnout would be substantially higher than in 2004,” Curtis Gans, the center’s director, said in the report. “But we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats.”
Some experts also note that national turnout trends may mask higher turnout in swing states with more intensive attempts by both campaigns to get their supporters to the polls. Several large states, including California and New York, had no statewide races and virtually no advertising or get-out-the-vote efforts by either presidential campaign.
According to the report, several Southern states — North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi — and the District of Columbia saw the greatest increases in voter turnout.
Overall turnout was highest in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, South Dakota and North Carolina, according to the report.
In 2004, 122 million Americans voted in the general election.
November 6, 2008
Report: '08 turnout same as or only slightly higher than '04
From CNN Associate Producer Martina Stewart
North Carolina had the highest increase in voter turnout, according to a report released Thursday.
WASHINGTON (CNN) – A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago — or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.
The report released Thursday estimates that between 126.5 and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election earlier this week. Those figures represent 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.
“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.
“Many people were fooled (including this student of politics although less so than many others) by this year’s increase in registration (more than 10 million added to the rolls), citizens’ willingness to stand for hours even in inclement weather to vote early, the likely rise in youth and African American voting, and the extensive grassroots organizing network of the Obama campaign into believing that turnout would be substantially higher than in 2004,” Curtis Gans, the center’s director, said in the report. “But we failed to realize that the registration increase was driven by Democratic and independent registration and that the long lines at the polls were mostly populated by Democrats.”
Some experts also note that national turnout trends may mask higher turnout in swing states with more intensive attempts by both campaigns to get their supporters to the polls. Several large states, including California and New York, had no statewide races and virtually no advertising or get-out-the-vote efforts by either presidential campaign.
According to the report, several Southern states — North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi — and the District of Columbia saw the greatest increases in voter turnout.
Overall turnout was highest in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, South Dakota and North Carolina, according to the report.
In 2004, 122 million Americans voted in the general election.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
“Obama Implodes in Georgia”
http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/09/12/obama-implodes-in-georgia/
“Obama Implodes in Georgia”
By Bud White
September 12, 2008
Barack Obama, Bloggers, Florida, Georgia, Howard Dean, Ohio, Pennsylvania, general election
One of the arguments many Obama supporters made against Hillary was that she did not support Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. Obama embraced the 50-state strategy to garner the support of the netroots and other activists. In a mydd diary posted this January, Obama, with his usual humility, was quoted as saying:
I think that we’re shifting the political paradigm here. And if I’m the nominee, I think I can bring a lot of folks along on my coattails. You know, there’s a reason why in 2006, I made the most appearances for members of Congress. I was the most requested surrogate to come in and campaign for people in districts that were swing districts, Republican districts where they wouldn’t have any other Democrat.
A narrative was developed in the blogosphere that Obama, unlike Hillary, would be able to touch the hearts of red state conservatives and turn them into Democrats. Hillary was too polarizing, it was argued, and she would be fighting for Kerry’s states plus 1.
It was mandatory at dailykos to believe that Obama was a map-changer. A diarist from North Dakota named Ab2kgj, in a post which would be funny if it weren’t so painful, suggested that Obama had a real shot at grabbing that state:
I’ll start with ripping a part of McCain’s base right out from under him. I live in North Dakota, and I have a feeling that we will be more of a swing state than people realize. Up here in nowhereland, the reason that Republicans do so well is because of “family values,” and an automatic 15 point bump in the polls. I gotta tell ya though. I see change in the air, because we also can smell phonies a mile away, and John McCain calling us “his friends” doesn’t seem to cut it for the sensible, middle of the roaders up here.
Regardless of what Ab2kgj sees in the air, Obama is not going to win North Dakota, but that fact didn’t stop the Obama campaign from expending millions in red states.
The Obama campaign has always known that they would have a hard time winning both Ohio and Florida, the recent path to the presidency. Campaign manager Plouffe:
said Ohio and Florida start out very competitive — but he stressed that they are not tougher than other swing states and said Obama will play “extremely hard” for both. But he said the strategy is not reliant on one or two states.
Talk of map-changing was utilized by Obama in the primary campaign as a tactic to hide his real weakness with blue-collar voters. Obama and his team have shown disdain for this core group of the Democratic Party, and Obama’s “hope” message fails to offer them a compelling reason to vote for him. Anglachel explains their hostility this way:
In the minds of the liberal elite, the problems and failures of the progressive agenda could be laid at the feet of bigoted whites, the “Archie Bunkers” of the North, and the “Bubbas” of the South. And there lies the strategic fault line of the Democratic Party, the willingness of a significant portion of the party, and I’m willing to wager the majority of the party power brokers, to see the electoral problem as how to minimize the damage of the Bunkers.
Not only has Obama insulted these Democrats who live in the greater Appalachia region with accusations of being bitter and bigoted, some of his supporters inferred that voters’ resistance to Obama was because of racism. But the real problem is that Obama does not appear to offer solutions to their economic problems. Howard Fineman believes that part of Obama’s troubles now stem from the fact that he does not articulate a clear, concise economic message:
It is not enough to be for change – everybody is, or is trying to be. To make it stick, Obama needed, and needs, to put forth an easy-to-grasp grand proposal, one that would encapsulate what his central message. That tagline? That he is dedicated, body and soul, to advancing the economic interests of hard-working, average Americans. He has the makings of such a proposal – his tax cuts for low and middle-income families. But he has yet to package that, or anything else, in an easy-to-grasp, hard-number plan for voters. Instead, he’s got more of a laundry list than an actual rallying cry.
Turning their backs on the rust-belt, Obama’s team, as recently as June, looked to deep-red states:
“You have a lot of ways to get to 270,” Plouffe said. “Our goal is not to be reliant on one state on November 4th.”
Plouffe has been pitching such a new approach to the electoral map in calls and meetings, according to several people who discussed the conversations on the condition of anonymity because they were meant to be private. Plouffe confirmed the descriptions in the interview.
Plouffe and his aides are weighing where to contest, and where chances are too slim to marshal a large effort. A win in Virginia (13 electoral votes) or Georgia (15 votes) could give Obama a shot if he, like Kerry, loses Ohio or Florida.
Although it appears Virginia is still competitive at this point, Georgia is now off the table. A new poll by InsiderAdvantage says that “Obama Implodes in Georgia,” and:
Poll Position survey of likely registered voters in Georgia indicates a steep decline for the Barack Obama campaign and likely explains why the candidate is moving resources out of Georgia and into other states.
Q. If the election were held today, would you vote for:
John McCain: 56%
Barack Obama: 38%
Other: 2%
Undecided: 4%
Obama’s collapse in Georgia has been sudden and dramatic. McCain is in the process of solidifying his base, but the demographics of this collapse do not bode well for Obama, and we should expect smaller but real shifts towards McCain in the more competitive states; that has always been the danger of over-extending your resources into unwinnable states:
InsiderAdvantage’s Matt Towery: “This is a huge slide from what had been, in our prior surveys, a relatively close race. The reason is simple—Obama lost serious ground in virtually every demographic.
“At first glance it would seem that Obama is headed for no better than the low 40 percentile level achieved by John Kerry in 2004. But let me warn observers that in both our national tracking and surveys in other states, the biggest change has been a near parity between the two candidates among the youngest of voters.
“Should that group return to Obama and the African-American vote end up where we expect it to be, the race could be closer in November. But as of now Georgia is no longer a “leans McCain” state. As of this survey, Georgia is in the McCain column.”
Obama’s shrinking map is not a shock to Hillary supporters, but it’s ironic now that Obama will have to turn to Ohio, Florida, and, particularly, Pennsylvania to attempt to squeak out a victory, places where he performed poorly in the primaries and to the voters he and his campaign have continually insulted.
“Obama Implodes in Georgia”
By Bud White
September 12, 2008
Barack Obama, Bloggers, Florida, Georgia, Howard Dean, Ohio, Pennsylvania, general election
One of the arguments many Obama supporters made against Hillary was that she did not support Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy. Obama embraced the 50-state strategy to garner the support of the netroots and other activists. In a mydd diary posted this January, Obama, with his usual humility, was quoted as saying:
I think that we’re shifting the political paradigm here. And if I’m the nominee, I think I can bring a lot of folks along on my coattails. You know, there’s a reason why in 2006, I made the most appearances for members of Congress. I was the most requested surrogate to come in and campaign for people in districts that were swing districts, Republican districts where they wouldn’t have any other Democrat.
A narrative was developed in the blogosphere that Obama, unlike Hillary, would be able to touch the hearts of red state conservatives and turn them into Democrats. Hillary was too polarizing, it was argued, and she would be fighting for Kerry’s states plus 1.
It was mandatory at dailykos to believe that Obama was a map-changer. A diarist from North Dakota named Ab2kgj, in a post which would be funny if it weren’t so painful, suggested that Obama had a real shot at grabbing that state:
I’ll start with ripping a part of McCain’s base right out from under him. I live in North Dakota, and I have a feeling that we will be more of a swing state than people realize. Up here in nowhereland, the reason that Republicans do so well is because of “family values,” and an automatic 15 point bump in the polls. I gotta tell ya though. I see change in the air, because we also can smell phonies a mile away, and John McCain calling us “his friends” doesn’t seem to cut it for the sensible, middle of the roaders up here.
Regardless of what Ab2kgj sees in the air, Obama is not going to win North Dakota, but that fact didn’t stop the Obama campaign from expending millions in red states.
The Obama campaign has always known that they would have a hard time winning both Ohio and Florida, the recent path to the presidency. Campaign manager Plouffe:
said Ohio and Florida start out very competitive — but he stressed that they are not tougher than other swing states and said Obama will play “extremely hard” for both. But he said the strategy is not reliant on one or two states.
Talk of map-changing was utilized by Obama in the primary campaign as a tactic to hide his real weakness with blue-collar voters. Obama and his team have shown disdain for this core group of the Democratic Party, and Obama’s “hope” message fails to offer them a compelling reason to vote for him. Anglachel explains their hostility this way:
In the minds of the liberal elite, the problems and failures of the progressive agenda could be laid at the feet of bigoted whites, the “Archie Bunkers” of the North, and the “Bubbas” of the South. And there lies the strategic fault line of the Democratic Party, the willingness of a significant portion of the party, and I’m willing to wager the majority of the party power brokers, to see the electoral problem as how to minimize the damage of the Bunkers.
Not only has Obama insulted these Democrats who live in the greater Appalachia region with accusations of being bitter and bigoted, some of his supporters inferred that voters’ resistance to Obama was because of racism. But the real problem is that Obama does not appear to offer solutions to their economic problems. Howard Fineman believes that part of Obama’s troubles now stem from the fact that he does not articulate a clear, concise economic message:
It is not enough to be for change – everybody is, or is trying to be. To make it stick, Obama needed, and needs, to put forth an easy-to-grasp grand proposal, one that would encapsulate what his central message. That tagline? That he is dedicated, body and soul, to advancing the economic interests of hard-working, average Americans. He has the makings of such a proposal – his tax cuts for low and middle-income families. But he has yet to package that, or anything else, in an easy-to-grasp, hard-number plan for voters. Instead, he’s got more of a laundry list than an actual rallying cry.
Turning their backs on the rust-belt, Obama’s team, as recently as June, looked to deep-red states:
“You have a lot of ways to get to 270,” Plouffe said. “Our goal is not to be reliant on one state on November 4th.”
Plouffe has been pitching such a new approach to the electoral map in calls and meetings, according to several people who discussed the conversations on the condition of anonymity because they were meant to be private. Plouffe confirmed the descriptions in the interview.
Plouffe and his aides are weighing where to contest, and where chances are too slim to marshal a large effort. A win in Virginia (13 electoral votes) or Georgia (15 votes) could give Obama a shot if he, like Kerry, loses Ohio or Florida.
Although it appears Virginia is still competitive at this point, Georgia is now off the table. A new poll by InsiderAdvantage says that “Obama Implodes in Georgia,” and:
Poll Position survey of likely registered voters in Georgia indicates a steep decline for the Barack Obama campaign and likely explains why the candidate is moving resources out of Georgia and into other states.
Q. If the election were held today, would you vote for:
John McCain: 56%
Barack Obama: 38%
Other: 2%
Undecided: 4%
Obama’s collapse in Georgia has been sudden and dramatic. McCain is in the process of solidifying his base, but the demographics of this collapse do not bode well for Obama, and we should expect smaller but real shifts towards McCain in the more competitive states; that has always been the danger of over-extending your resources into unwinnable states:
InsiderAdvantage’s Matt Towery: “This is a huge slide from what had been, in our prior surveys, a relatively close race. The reason is simple—Obama lost serious ground in virtually every demographic.
“At first glance it would seem that Obama is headed for no better than the low 40 percentile level achieved by John Kerry in 2004. But let me warn observers that in both our national tracking and surveys in other states, the biggest change has been a near parity between the two candidates among the youngest of voters.
“Should that group return to Obama and the African-American vote end up where we expect it to be, the race could be closer in November. But as of now Georgia is no longer a “leans McCain” state. As of this survey, Georgia is in the McCain column.”
Obama’s shrinking map is not a shock to Hillary supporters, but it’s ironic now that Obama will have to turn to Ohio, Florida, and, particularly, Pennsylvania to attempt to squeak out a victory, places where he performed poorly in the primaries and to the voters he and his campaign have continually insulted.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Saakashvili’s “democracy” in Georgia
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3677.shtml
Saakashvili’s “democracy” in Georgia
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 28, 2008
(WMR) -- While the neocon media and the George Soros-funded “progressive left” defends the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili against so-called Russian “aggression,” it should be recalled that Saakashvili is anything but a paragon of democracy.
Shalva Natelashvili would agree with those in Russia and the United States who question Saakashvili’s foreign entanglements and political and economic agenda. Natelashvili, as the leader of Georgia’s opposition Labor Party, has experienced Saakashvili’s dictatorship first-hand.
Natelashvili is no friend of Saakashvili’s patrons in the United States, backers that span the political aisle from Barack Obama’s financial backer George Soros and chief foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann. For that reason, Natelashvili favors closer ties between Georgia and Russia. Natelashvili has called Soros the “real president of Georgia,” suggesting that Saakashvili is merely Soros’ puppet. Natelashvili has also called Matthew Bryza, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and her special envoy to Georgia, a tool of the Soros-backed Georgian government. Natelashvili has called for Bryza’s resignation.
Natelashvili’s program of restoring free natural gas and electricity to Georgia for three years as a way to lighten the financial burden of utility bills on poor Georgian households did not earn him any points with Saakashvili or Soros, a person who preys on the poor and unemployed through his vulture capitalist practices. And to earn him greater wrath from the Soros crowd, Natelashvili opposes the privatization of state-owned industries and wants them returned to state control, as well as reducing the power of Georgia’s neocon “unitary executive” presidency.
The pseudo-democrat Saakashvili responded to Natelashvili by accusing him of espionage prior to the presidential election last January, an election which Saakashvili won amid charges by the opposition of election fraud. Natelashvili was accused by the neocon government in Tbilisi of meeting with Russian intelligence agents and planning to overthrow the government. Earlier, Saakashvili’s government had arrested opposition leader Irakli Okruashvili and issued charges against wealthy businessman and opposition leader Badri Patarkatsishvili and Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, the son of the first Georgian president. Patarkatsishvili, the co-owner of Georgia’s Imedi TV network, died suddenly outside of London last February at the age of 53. He was a bitter opponent of Saakashvili and many Georgians and some British police suspected foul play in his death, ruled later as a heart attack.
The convergence of Soros and the Obama campaign on one side and Scheunemann and the McCain campaign on the other illustrates the lack of difference between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to revanchist Cold War politics. Scheunemann was a member of the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and favors expansion of NATO. Obama’s foreign policy team of Brzezinski and Wesley Clark are in agreement with Scheunemann whose Orion Strategies has made a fortune in lobbying for NATO expansion and awarding countries like Latvia lucrative contracts in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Scheunemann is close to Iraq National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi whose bogus intelligence helped launch the U.S. misadventure in Iraq.
The Soros network has funded a series of democracy manipulation revolutions around the world, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Olive Tree Revolution in Palestine (that saw Hamas come to power), the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Purple Revolution in Iraq (that saw a Shi’a-dominated government friendly to Iran come to power), and the Saffron Revolution in Burma (one that was crushed by the military). There were also abortive themed revolutions in Moldova and Belarus. Not to be omitted is the Orange Democratic Movement’s uprising in Kenya, one that saw thousands murdered before the Orange movement’s leader Raila Odinga became Prime Minister in a power-sharing government. Odinga’s father Oginga Odinga was a close friend of Barack Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
Saakashvili’s “democracy” in Georgia
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 28, 2008
(WMR) -- While the neocon media and the George Soros-funded “progressive left” defends the Georgian government of Mikheil Saakashvili against so-called Russian “aggression,” it should be recalled that Saakashvili is anything but a paragon of democracy.
Shalva Natelashvili would agree with those in Russia and the United States who question Saakashvili’s foreign entanglements and political and economic agenda. Natelashvili, as the leader of Georgia’s opposition Labor Party, has experienced Saakashvili’s dictatorship first-hand.
Natelashvili is no friend of Saakashvili’s patrons in the United States, backers that span the political aisle from Barack Obama’s financial backer George Soros and chief foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski to John McCain’s top foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann. For that reason, Natelashvili favors closer ties between Georgia and Russia. Natelashvili has called Soros the “real president of Georgia,” suggesting that Saakashvili is merely Soros’ puppet. Natelashvili has also called Matthew Bryza, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs and her special envoy to Georgia, a tool of the Soros-backed Georgian government. Natelashvili has called for Bryza’s resignation.
Natelashvili’s program of restoring free natural gas and electricity to Georgia for three years as a way to lighten the financial burden of utility bills on poor Georgian households did not earn him any points with Saakashvili or Soros, a person who preys on the poor and unemployed through his vulture capitalist practices. And to earn him greater wrath from the Soros crowd, Natelashvili opposes the privatization of state-owned industries and wants them returned to state control, as well as reducing the power of Georgia’s neocon “unitary executive” presidency.
The pseudo-democrat Saakashvili responded to Natelashvili by accusing him of espionage prior to the presidential election last January, an election which Saakashvili won amid charges by the opposition of election fraud. Natelashvili was accused by the neocon government in Tbilisi of meeting with Russian intelligence agents and planning to overthrow the government. Earlier, Saakashvili’s government had arrested opposition leader Irakli Okruashvili and issued charges against wealthy businessman and opposition leader Badri Patarkatsishvili and Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, the son of the first Georgian president. Patarkatsishvili, the co-owner of Georgia’s Imedi TV network, died suddenly outside of London last February at the age of 53. He was a bitter opponent of Saakashvili and many Georgians and some British police suspected foul play in his death, ruled later as a heart attack.
The convergence of Soros and the Obama campaign on one side and Scheunemann and the McCain campaign on the other illustrates the lack of difference between the Democrats and Republicans when it comes to revanchist Cold War politics. Scheunemann was a member of the neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and favors expansion of NATO. Obama’s foreign policy team of Brzezinski and Wesley Clark are in agreement with Scheunemann whose Orion Strategies has made a fortune in lobbying for NATO expansion and awarding countries like Latvia lucrative contracts in U.S.-occupied Iraq. Scheunemann is close to Iraq National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi whose bogus intelligence helped launch the U.S. misadventure in Iraq.
The Soros network has funded a series of democracy manipulation revolutions around the world, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Olive Tree Revolution in Palestine (that saw Hamas come to power), the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, the Purple Revolution in Iraq (that saw a Shi’a-dominated government friendly to Iran come to power), and the Saffron Revolution in Burma (one that was crushed by the military). There were also abortive themed revolutions in Moldova and Belarus. Not to be omitted is the Orange Democratic Movement’s uprising in Kenya, one that saw thousands murdered before the Orange movement’s leader Raila Odinga became Prime Minister in a power-sharing government. Odinga’s father Oginga Odinga was a close friend of Barack Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2008 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
Saturday, August 23, 2008
World Opinion Favors Russia
http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/18-08-2008/106136-worldopinion-0
World Opinion Favors Russia - Winning the Media War
18.08.2008
Even Americans are saying, “Thank you Russia for standing up to the crackpots in control of our government.” As much as the corporate elitist media in the west blathers and carries on with lies and obfuscation about the events in Georgia and South Ossetia, as much as they try to cover up the facts and the truth and the war crimes committed by their puppet state, Georgia, they have failed to convince the world community.
Their all too numerous outlets are pummeling the world community with distortions, trying to shove the castor oil of the empire down our collective throats, but the gag reflex is well intact and their lies remain unpalatable. The empire is used to and expects everyone to jump when told to and to believe what they hear and read. They don’t expect and can’t understand when someone or some country tells them to back off with their egotistical, haughty, self important orders or pronouncements. But their “orders” and pronouncements have become irrelevant. We are again living in a multicolor world.
Comments from the World Community
In a recent Internet tally asking respondents who they favor, 75.8% were in favor of Russia and only 24.2% in favor of Georgia. Some American respondents actually came right out and thanked Russia for standing up to their government, referring to their government as “crackpots“ and “lunatics.”
One respondent said that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should become independent and the west lives under double standards. Another wrote, “the Abkhaz, Ossetian and Adjarian people will never agree to live under Georgian arrogant oppression.”
Yet another respondent said, “This is NATO's prime moment to show that it as an organization is not yet obsolete.” Of course we heard this when Yugoslavia was bombed too. In another comment he said, “I literally laughed out loud when President Bush made his speech toward Russia about how ‘bullying is unacceptable in foreign policy in the 21st century.’"
A respondent who considers himself a Republican wrote, “There is no reason that we should be antagonizing them on their border. It scares me that this oilman president will take us into another war with a much more deadly foe over an oil pipeline through Georgia. I am a registered Republican, but enough is enough. Impeach George Bush, if he gets us involved in the Russo-Georgian war.”
Some notable and succinct quotes from another:
"I feel like I am living in the bizarro world. Do you people not realize that Georgia started the conflict. Do you people not realize that Georgia attacked civilians and peacekeeping troops in an INTERNATIONAL ZONE. Do you not realize that the news media has been caught showing footage of the destroyed cities in Ossetia (destroyed by Georgians) and claims it is Gori and Russian aftermath. Do you not realize that the Caucasus Region is an oil pipeline area. Do you not realize that the US armed and trained the Georgians.”
“Georgia’s president is the new Hitler. He is invading areas and his lies are so incredibly manipulative. The American Media is really showing stupidity here in hopes for new cold war ratings. Neo-cons and globalists are thrilled because now Russia has taken its eye off of the Iran situation."
Another poll taken in Greece yielded the following results:
Who is responsible for the war:
1. Georgia who started the attack and the US who encouraged them
(77.86%, or 3559 votes)
2. The Russians
(3.22 %, 147 votes)
3. All of them
(15.99 % , 731 votes)
4. I don't know
(2.93 %, 134 votes)
South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgia in the 1990s when Georgia itself broke away from the Soviet Union. Saaskashvili was determined not only to reincorporate them into Georgia again, entirely against the will of their inhabitants, but to punish them for wanting to be independent. There are no military installations or targets in the city of Tskhinvali, none whatsoever. It is an industrial center, with quiet civilian residential areas. It was the home to 30,000 South Ossetians.
When Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he was determined to have what he wanted and ordered the bombing anyway. What took place in South Ossetia was not merely an invasion or a siege, it was a bloody massacre, a genocide. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully equipped modern army. It was a war crime and the world community is fully aware of that fact despite the best efforts of the western corporate media to conveniently omit reporting on the crime.
By the time the Georgians along with their American and Israeli enablers were driven out, the city’s downtown area was in engulfed in flames and strewn along streets and sidewalks were the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper fire. Those who did not flee and stayed behind were simply too old, handicapped or infirm to leave. They had to seek shelter in basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed, another war crime. Over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the full knowledge, planning and assistance of the Bush White House.
An independence referendum was held in 2006: 99% of South Ossetians said they wanted independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992, and has been a de facto independent state ever since.
If Russia applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the empire and anyone else objecting.
The representative of Russia to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, was quite blunt in announcing some home truths. "If we all respect the territorial integrity of Serbia in regards to its Kosovo province, then we are also going to honor the territorial integrity of Georgia. But if someone doesn't respect Serbia's territorial integrity and sovereignty over Kosovo and Metohija, then they better shut up about the territorial integrity of Georgia", Rogozin said.
Meanwhile it is absurd to listen to Bush, Rice and Gates jump up and down about borders, territorial integrity and sovereignty when they have shown no respect for any international laws, treaties or agreements they have made. Borders and sovereignty are only concepts they talk about when convenient for their interests. Hypocritically they speak of “bullying” and of the 21st Century as one where nations don’t go around invading other nations…while they themselves have done so seemingly with impunity and certainly with the complete disapproval of the world community.
Lisa KARPOVA
PRAVDA.Ru
World Opinion Favors Russia - Winning the Media War
18.08.2008
Even Americans are saying, “Thank you Russia for standing up to the crackpots in control of our government.” As much as the corporate elitist media in the west blathers and carries on with lies and obfuscation about the events in Georgia and South Ossetia, as much as they try to cover up the facts and the truth and the war crimes committed by their puppet state, Georgia, they have failed to convince the world community.
Their all too numerous outlets are pummeling the world community with distortions, trying to shove the castor oil of the empire down our collective throats, but the gag reflex is well intact and their lies remain unpalatable. The empire is used to and expects everyone to jump when told to and to believe what they hear and read. They don’t expect and can’t understand when someone or some country tells them to back off with their egotistical, haughty, self important orders or pronouncements. But their “orders” and pronouncements have become irrelevant. We are again living in a multicolor world.
Comments from the World Community
In a recent Internet tally asking respondents who they favor, 75.8% were in favor of Russia and only 24.2% in favor of Georgia. Some American respondents actually came right out and thanked Russia for standing up to their government, referring to their government as “crackpots“ and “lunatics.”
One respondent said that South Ossetia and Abkhazia should become independent and the west lives under double standards. Another wrote, “the Abkhaz, Ossetian and Adjarian people will never agree to live under Georgian arrogant oppression.”
Yet another respondent said, “This is NATO's prime moment to show that it as an organization is not yet obsolete.” Of course we heard this when Yugoslavia was bombed too. In another comment he said, “I literally laughed out loud when President Bush made his speech toward Russia about how ‘bullying is unacceptable in foreign policy in the 21st century.’"
A respondent who considers himself a Republican wrote, “There is no reason that we should be antagonizing them on their border. It scares me that this oilman president will take us into another war with a much more deadly foe over an oil pipeline through Georgia. I am a registered Republican, but enough is enough. Impeach George Bush, if he gets us involved in the Russo-Georgian war.”
Some notable and succinct quotes from another:
"I feel like I am living in the bizarro world. Do you people not realize that Georgia started the conflict. Do you people not realize that Georgia attacked civilians and peacekeeping troops in an INTERNATIONAL ZONE. Do you not realize that the news media has been caught showing footage of the destroyed cities in Ossetia (destroyed by Georgians) and claims it is Gori and Russian aftermath. Do you not realize that the Caucasus Region is an oil pipeline area. Do you not realize that the US armed and trained the Georgians.”
“Georgia’s president is the new Hitler. He is invading areas and his lies are so incredibly manipulative. The American Media is really showing stupidity here in hopes for new cold war ratings. Neo-cons and globalists are thrilled because now Russia has taken its eye off of the Iran situation."
Another poll taken in Greece yielded the following results:
Who is responsible for the war:
1. Georgia who started the attack and the US who encouraged them
(77.86%, or 3559 votes)
2. The Russians
(3.22 %, 147 votes)
3. All of them
(15.99 % , 731 votes)
4. I don't know
(2.93 %, 134 votes)
South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgia in the 1990s when Georgia itself broke away from the Soviet Union. Saaskashvili was determined not only to reincorporate them into Georgia again, entirely against the will of their inhabitants, but to punish them for wanting to be independent. There are no military installations or targets in the city of Tskhinvali, none whatsoever. It is an industrial center, with quiet civilian residential areas. It was the home to 30,000 South Ossetians.
When Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he was determined to have what he wanted and ordered the bombing anyway. What took place in South Ossetia was not merely an invasion or a siege, it was a bloody massacre, a genocide. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully equipped modern army. It was a war crime and the world community is fully aware of that fact despite the best efforts of the western corporate media to conveniently omit reporting on the crime.
By the time the Georgians along with their American and Israeli enablers were driven out, the city’s downtown area was in engulfed in flames and strewn along streets and sidewalks were the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper fire. Those who did not flee and stayed behind were simply too old, handicapped or infirm to leave. They had to seek shelter in basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed, another war crime. Over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the full knowledge, planning and assistance of the Bush White House.
An independence referendum was held in 2006: 99% of South Ossetians said they wanted independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992, and has been a de facto independent state ever since.
If Russia applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the empire and anyone else objecting.
The representative of Russia to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, was quite blunt in announcing some home truths. "If we all respect the territorial integrity of Serbia in regards to its Kosovo province, then we are also going to honor the territorial integrity of Georgia. But if someone doesn't respect Serbia's territorial integrity and sovereignty over Kosovo and Metohija, then they better shut up about the territorial integrity of Georgia", Rogozin said.
Meanwhile it is absurd to listen to Bush, Rice and Gates jump up and down about borders, territorial integrity and sovereignty when they have shown no respect for any international laws, treaties or agreements they have made. Borders and sovereignty are only concepts they talk about when convenient for their interests. Hypocritically they speak of “bullying” and of the 21st Century as one where nations don’t go around invading other nations…while they themselves have done so seemingly with impunity and certainly with the complete disapproval of the world community.
Lisa KARPOVA
PRAVDA.Ru
Thursday, August 21, 2008
“President Bush, why don’t you shut up?”
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3618.shtml
“President Bush, why don’t you shut up?”
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 14, 2008
The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war.
Back in the Reagan years, the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a Cold War tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states.
The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.
The NED was also used to dismember the former Yugoslavia with its interventions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, told the Washington Post in 1991 that much of what the NED does “today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The Bush Regime, having established a puppet, Mikheil Saakashvili, as president of Georgia, tried to bring Georgia into NATO.
For readers too young to know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance between the US and Western European countries to resist any Soviet move into Western Europe (and to ensure European countries lined up behind the US, and bought its weapons systems. Editors). There has been no reason for NATO since the Soviet Union’s internal political collapse almost two decades ago. The neocons turned NATO into another tool, like the NED, for US world hegemony. Subsequent US administrations violated the understandings that President Reagan had reached with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and have incorporated former parts of the Soviet empire into NATO. The neocon goal of ringing Russia with a hostile military alliance has been proclaimed many times.
Western European members of NATO balked at the admission of Georgia, as they understood it as a provocative affront to Russia, on whom Western Europe is dependent for natural gas. Western Europeans are also disturbed at the Bush Regime’s intentions to install ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic as the consequence will be Russian nuclear cruise missiles targeted on European capitals. Europeans don’t see the advantage of helping the US block Russian nuclear retaliation against the US at the expense of their own existence. Ballistic missile defenses are not useful against cruise missiles.
Every country is tired of war except for the US. War, including nuclear war, is the neoconservative strategy for world hegemony.
The entire world, except for Americans, knows that the outbreak of armed conflict between Russian and Georgian forces in South Ossetia was entirely due to the US and its Georgia puppet, Saakashvili. Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them.
Everyone else in the world knows that the unstable and corrupt Saakashvili, who proclaims democracy and runs a police state, would not have taken on Russia by attacking South Ossetia unless given the go-ahead by Washington.
The purpose of the Georgian attack on the Russian population of South Ossetia is twofold:
To convince Europeans that their action in delaying Georgia’s NATO membership is the cause of “the Russian aggression” and that to save Georgia from conquest Georgia must be given NATO membership.
To ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of its Russian population. Two thousand Russian civilians were targeted and killed by the US-equipped and trained Georgian Army, and tens of thousands fled into Russia. Having achieved this goal, Saakashvili and his puppet-masters in Washington quickly called for a cease fire and a halt to “the Russian invasion.” The hope is that the Russian population will be afraid to return or can be prevented from returning, thus removing the secessionist threat.
No doubt the Bush Regime can con the American population, just as it did with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, and 9/11 itself, but the rest of the world is not buying it, not even America’s bought-and-paid-for European allies.
Writing in the Asia Times, Ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, notes the disinformation that is being peddled by the Bush Regime and the US media and reports that “at the outbreak of violence, Russia had tried to have the United Nations Security Council issue a statement calling on Georgia and South Ossetia to immediately lay down weapons. However, Washington was disinterested.”
Amb. Bhadrakumar notes that the American and Georgian resort to violence and propaganda has brought an end to the Russian government’s belief that diplomacy and good will can bring about a settlement of the South Ossetia issue. If Russia wished, Russia could terminate Georgia’s existence as a separate country at will, and there is nothing the US could do about it.
It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.”
Faced with the collapse of his army when Russia sent in troops to protect South Ossetians from the Georgian troops, Saakashvili declared: “This is not about Georgia any more. It is about America, its values.”
The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.”
The Washington Post hosted neocon Robert Kagen’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.”
Only a fool like Kagen could think that if Putin intended to invade Georgia he would do so from Beijing, or that after sending the American-trained Georgian army in flight, he would not continue and conquer all of Georgia in order to put an end to American machinations on Russia’s most sensitive border, machinations that are likely to eventually end in nuclear war.
The New York Tiimes hosted Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” Kristol presents a new axis of evil--Russia, China, North Korea and Iran--and warns against “delay and irresolution” that “simply invite future threats and graver dangers.”
In other words, “attack Russia now.”
Dick Cheney, the insane American vice president, telephoned Saakashvili to express US solidarity with Georgia in the conflict with Russia and declared, “Russian aggression must not go unanswered. Only an idiot would tell Saakashvili anything other than “to cease immediately.”
What must be the effect on US Intelligence services and the US military of Cheney’s propagandistic and irresponsible statement of US support for Georgia’s war crimes? Does anyone really believe that the CIA or any US intelligence service told the vice president that Russia opened the conflict with an invasion? Russian troops arrived in South Ossetia after thousands of Ossetians had been killed by the Georgian attack and after tens of thousands of Ossetians had fled into Russia to escape the Georgian attack. According to news reports, Russian forces have captured Americans who were with the Georgian troops directing their attack on civilians.
The US military certainly has no resources for a war against Russia on top of lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a planned war with Iran.
With its Georgian venture, the Bush Regime is guilty of a new round of war crimes. What will be the consequence?
Many will reply that having got away with 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and with its preparations for attacking Iran, the Bush Regime will get away with its Georgian venture as well.
Possibly, however, this time the Bush Regime has overreached.
Certainly Russia now recognizes that the US is determined to exert hegemony over Russia and is Russia’s worst enemy.
China realizes the US threat to its own energy supply and, thereby, economy.
Even America’s European allies, chafing under their role of supplying troops for America’s Empire, must now realize that being an American ally is dangerous and has no benefits. If Georgia becomes a NATO member and renews its attack on South Ossetia, it must drag Europe into a war with Russia, a main supplier of energy to Europe.
Moreover, if Russian troops are sent across European frontiers, there is nothing to stop them.
What does America offer Europe, aside from the millions of dollars it pays to buy off Europe’s political leaders to insure that they betray their own peoples? Nothing whatsoever.
The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony.
The US is financially bankrupt, with budget and trade deficits that exceed the combined deficits of the rest of the world together. The dollar has wilted. The American consumer market is dying from the offshoring of American jobs and, thereby, incomes, and from the wealth effect of the real estate and derivatives collapses. The US has nothing to offer Europe. Indeed, American economic decline is killing European exports by driving up the value of the euro.
America long ago lost the moral high ground. Hypocrisy has become America’s best known hallmark. Bush, the invader of Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, thunders at Russia for coming to the defense of its peacekeepers and Russian citizens in South Ossetia. Bush who ripped Kosovo out of Serbia’s heart and handed it to the Muslims, has taken an adamant stand against other separatist movements, especially the South Ossetians who wish to be part of the Russian Federation.
The neoconned Bush Regime is furious that the Russian bear was not intimidated by the US supported aggression of the American puppet state, Georgia. Instead of accepting the act of American hegemony that the neocon script called for, Russia sent the Americanized Georgian army fleeing in fear.
Having failed with weapons, the Bush Regime now unleashes the rhetoric. The White House is warning Russia that failure to acquiesce to US hegemony could have a “significant, long-term impact on relations between Washington and Moscow.”
Do the morons who comprise the Bush Regime really not understand that short of a surprise nuclear attack on Russia there is nothing whatsoever the US can do to Moscow?
The Bush Regime owns no Russian currency that it can dump. The Russians own US dollars.
The Bush Regime owns no Russian bonds that it can dump. The Russians own US bonds.
The US can cut Russia off from no energy supplies. Russia can cut America’s European allies off from energy.
President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The neoconservatives, whom Reagan fired and drove from his administration, were furious. The neocons had hoped to win the Cold War, thereby establishing American hegemony.
The Republican Establishment reestablished its hegemony under Bush 1st that it had lost to Ronald Reagan. With this feat, intelligence was driven from the Republican Party.
The neocons engineered their comeback with the First Gulf War and their propaganda, pure lies, that Iraqi troops bayoneted Kuwait babies in hospitals.
The neocons made a further comeback with President Clinton, whom they convinced to bomb Serbia in order to permit separatist movements to become independent states dependent on America.
With Bush 2nd, the neocons took over. Their agenda, American world hegemony, includes Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
So far the schemes of these ignorant and dangerous ideologues have come a cropper. Iraq, formerly in the hands of secular Sunnis who were a check on Iran, is, after the American invasion and occupation, in the hands of religious Shi’ites allied with Iran.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent, and a large NATO/US army there is unable to control the situation.
One consequence of the neocons’ Afghan war has been the loss of power of the American puppet president of Pakistan, a Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons. The puppet president now faces impeachment, and the Pakistani military has informed the Americans to stop conducting military operations in Pakistani territory.
The American puppets in Egypt and Jordan might be next to fall.
In Iraq, the Shi’ites, having completed their ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from neighborhoods, have declared a cease fire in order to contradict the US propaganda that American withdrawal would lead to a blood bath. Negotiations on withdrawal dates are now underway between the Americans and the Iraqi government, which is no longer behaving like a puppet.
Last year Hugo Chavez ridiculed Bush before the UN. Russia’s Putin ridiculed Bush as Comrade Wolf.
On August 12, Pravda ridiculed Bush, “Bush: Why don’t you shut up?”
Americans may think they are a superpower before whose presence the world trembles. But not the Russians.
Those Americans stupid enough to think that America’s “superpower” insures its citizens from danger need to read the total contempt shown for President Bush in Pravda:
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? In your statement on Monday regarding the legitimate actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, you failed to mention the war crimes perpetrated by Georgian military forces, which American advisors support, against Russian and Ossetian civilians
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your faithful ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, was announcing a ceasefire deal while his troops, with your advisors, were massing on Ossetia’s border, which they crossed under cover of night and destroyed Tskhinvali, targeting civilian structures just like your forces did in Iraq.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your American transport aircraft gave a ride home to thousands of Georgian soldiers from Iraq directly into the combat zone.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? How do you account for the fact that among the Georgian soldiers fleeing the fighting yesterday you could clearly hear officers using American English giving orders to “Get back inside” and how do you account for the fact that there are reports of American soldiers among the Georgian casualties?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen?
Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives?
Do you really believe you have any right to make a statement on any point of international law after your trumped-up charges against Iraq and the subsequent criminal invasion?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is ‘magnificent foreign intelligenc’ such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being ‘driven around the country in vehicles’? Suppose Russia declares for instance that ‘Saakashvili stiffed the world’ and it is ‘time for regime change’?
Nice and simple, isn’t it, President Bush?
So, why don’t you shut up? Oh and by the way, send some more of your military advisors to Georgia, they are doing a sterling job. And they look all funny down the night sight, all green.
The US is not a superpower. It is a bankrupt farce run by imbeciles who were installed by stolen elections arranged by Karl Rove and Diebold. It is a laughing stock, that ignorantly affronts and attempts to bully an enormous country equipped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
“President Bush, why don’t you shut up?”
By Paul Craig Roberts
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 14, 2008
The neoconned Bush Regime and the Israeli-occupied American media are heading the innocent world toward nuclear war.
Back in the Reagan years, the National Endowment for Democracy was created as a Cold War tool. Today the NED is a neocon-controlled agent for US world hegemony. Its main function is to pour US money and election-rigging into former constituent parts of the Soviet Union in order to ring Russia with American puppet states.
The neoconservative Bush Regime used the NED to intervene in Ukrainian and Georgian internal affairs in keeping with the neoconservative plan to establish US-friendly and Russia-hostile political regimes in these two former constituent parts of Russia and the Soviet Union.
The NED was also used to dismember the former Yugoslavia with its interventions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, told the Washington Post in 1991 that much of what the NED does “today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
The Bush Regime, having established a puppet, Mikheil Saakashvili, as president of Georgia, tried to bring Georgia into NATO.
For readers too young to know, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was a military alliance between the US and Western European countries to resist any Soviet move into Western Europe (and to ensure European countries lined up behind the US, and bought its weapons systems. Editors). There has been no reason for NATO since the Soviet Union’s internal political collapse almost two decades ago. The neocons turned NATO into another tool, like the NED, for US world hegemony. Subsequent US administrations violated the understandings that President Reagan had reached with Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, and have incorporated former parts of the Soviet empire into NATO. The neocon goal of ringing Russia with a hostile military alliance has been proclaimed many times.
Western European members of NATO balked at the admission of Georgia, as they understood it as a provocative affront to Russia, on whom Western Europe is dependent for natural gas. Western Europeans are also disturbed at the Bush Regime’s intentions to install ballistic missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic as the consequence will be Russian nuclear cruise missiles targeted on European capitals. Europeans don’t see the advantage of helping the US block Russian nuclear retaliation against the US at the expense of their own existence. Ballistic missile defenses are not useful against cruise missiles.
Every country is tired of war except for the US. War, including nuclear war, is the neoconservative strategy for world hegemony.
The entire world, except for Americans, knows that the outbreak of armed conflict between Russian and Georgian forces in South Ossetia was entirely due to the US and its Georgia puppet, Saakashvili. Americans, alone in the world, are unaware that the hostilities were initiated by Saakashvili, because Bush, Cheney and the Israeli-occupied American media have again lied to them.
Everyone else in the world knows that the unstable and corrupt Saakashvili, who proclaims democracy and runs a police state, would not have taken on Russia by attacking South Ossetia unless given the go-ahead by Washington.
The purpose of the Georgian attack on the Russian population of South Ossetia is twofold:
To convince Europeans that their action in delaying Georgia’s NATO membership is the cause of “the Russian aggression” and that to save Georgia from conquest Georgia must be given NATO membership.
To ethnically cleanse South Ossetia of its Russian population. Two thousand Russian civilians were targeted and killed by the US-equipped and trained Georgian Army, and tens of thousands fled into Russia. Having achieved this goal, Saakashvili and his puppet-masters in Washington quickly called for a cease fire and a halt to “the Russian invasion.” The hope is that the Russian population will be afraid to return or can be prevented from returning, thus removing the secessionist threat.
No doubt the Bush Regime can con the American population, just as it did with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Iranian nukes, and 9/11 itself, but the rest of the world is not buying it, not even America’s bought-and-paid-for European allies.
Writing in the Asia Times, Ambassador M. K. Bhadrakumar, a former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service, notes the disinformation that is being peddled by the Bush Regime and the US media and reports that “at the outbreak of violence, Russia had tried to have the United Nations Security Council issue a statement calling on Georgia and South Ossetia to immediately lay down weapons. However, Washington was disinterested.”
Amb. Bhadrakumar notes that the American and Georgian resort to violence and propaganda has brought an end to the Russian government’s belief that diplomacy and good will can bring about a settlement of the South Ossetia issue. If Russia wished, Russia could terminate Georgia’s existence as a separate country at will, and there is nothing the US could do about it.
It is certain that the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia was a Bush Regime orchestrated event. The American media and the neocon think tanks were ready with their propaganda blitzes. Neocons had ready a Wall Street Journal editorial page article for Saakashvili that declares “the war in Georgia is a war for the West.”
Faced with the collapse of his army when Russia sent in troops to protect South Ossetians from the Georgian troops, Saakashvili declared: “This is not about Georgia any more. It is about America, its values.”
The neocon Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., quickly called a conference hosted by warmonger Ariel Cohen, “Urgent! Event: Russian-Georgian War: A Challenge for the U.S. and the World.”
The Washington Post hosted neocon Robert Kagen’s war drums, “Putin Makes His Move.”
Only a fool like Kagen could think that if Putin intended to invade Georgia he would do so from Beijing, or that after sending the American-trained Georgian army in flight, he would not continue and conquer all of Georgia in order to put an end to American machinations on Russia’s most sensitive border, machinations that are likely to eventually end in nuclear war.
The New York Tiimes hosted Billy Kristol’s rant, “Will Russia Get Away With It?” Kristol thunders against “dictatorial and aggressive and fanatical regimes” that “seem happy to work together to weaken the influence of the United States and its democratic allies.” Kristol presents a new axis of evil--Russia, China, North Korea and Iran--and warns against “delay and irresolution” that “simply invite future threats and graver dangers.”
In other words, “attack Russia now.”
Dick Cheney, the insane American vice president, telephoned Saakashvili to express US solidarity with Georgia in the conflict with Russia and declared, “Russian aggression must not go unanswered. Only an idiot would tell Saakashvili anything other than “to cease immediately.”
What must be the effect on US Intelligence services and the US military of Cheney’s propagandistic and irresponsible statement of US support for Georgia’s war crimes? Does anyone really believe that the CIA or any US intelligence service told the vice president that Russia opened the conflict with an invasion? Russian troops arrived in South Ossetia after thousands of Ossetians had been killed by the Georgian attack and after tens of thousands of Ossetians had fled into Russia to escape the Georgian attack. According to news reports, Russian forces have captured Americans who were with the Georgian troops directing their attack on civilians.
The US military certainly has no resources for a war against Russia on top of lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a planned war with Iran.
With its Georgian venture, the Bush Regime is guilty of a new round of war crimes. What will be the consequence?
Many will reply that having got away with 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and with its preparations for attacking Iran, the Bush Regime will get away with its Georgian venture as well.
Possibly, however, this time the Bush Regime has overreached.
Certainly Russia now recognizes that the US is determined to exert hegemony over Russia and is Russia’s worst enemy.
China realizes the US threat to its own energy supply and, thereby, economy.
Even America’s European allies, chafing under their role of supplying troops for America’s Empire, must now realize that being an American ally is dangerous and has no benefits. If Georgia becomes a NATO member and renews its attack on South Ossetia, it must drag Europe into a war with Russia, a main supplier of energy to Europe.
Moreover, if Russian troops are sent across European frontiers, there is nothing to stop them.
What does America offer Europe, aside from the millions of dollars it pays to buy off Europe’s political leaders to insure that they betray their own peoples? Nothing whatsoever.
The only military threat that Europe faces comes from being dragged into America’s wars for American hegemony.
The US is financially bankrupt, with budget and trade deficits that exceed the combined deficits of the rest of the world together. The dollar has wilted. The American consumer market is dying from the offshoring of American jobs and, thereby, incomes, and from the wealth effect of the real estate and derivatives collapses. The US has nothing to offer Europe. Indeed, American economic decline is killing European exports by driving up the value of the euro.
America long ago lost the moral high ground. Hypocrisy has become America’s best known hallmark. Bush, the invader of Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies and deception, thunders at Russia for coming to the defense of its peacekeepers and Russian citizens in South Ossetia. Bush who ripped Kosovo out of Serbia’s heart and handed it to the Muslims, has taken an adamant stand against other separatist movements, especially the South Ossetians who wish to be part of the Russian Federation.
The neoconned Bush Regime is furious that the Russian bear was not intimidated by the US supported aggression of the American puppet state, Georgia. Instead of accepting the act of American hegemony that the neocon script called for, Russia sent the Americanized Georgian army fleeing in fear.
Having failed with weapons, the Bush Regime now unleashes the rhetoric. The White House is warning Russia that failure to acquiesce to US hegemony could have a “significant, long-term impact on relations between Washington and Moscow.”
Do the morons who comprise the Bush Regime really not understand that short of a surprise nuclear attack on Russia there is nothing whatsoever the US can do to Moscow?
The Bush Regime owns no Russian currency that it can dump. The Russians own US dollars.
The Bush Regime owns no Russian bonds that it can dump. The Russians own US bonds.
The US can cut Russia off from no energy supplies. Russia can cut America’s European allies off from energy.
President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The neoconservatives, whom Reagan fired and drove from his administration, were furious. The neocons had hoped to win the Cold War, thereby establishing American hegemony.
The Republican Establishment reestablished its hegemony under Bush 1st that it had lost to Ronald Reagan. With this feat, intelligence was driven from the Republican Party.
The neocons engineered their comeback with the First Gulf War and their propaganda, pure lies, that Iraqi troops bayoneted Kuwait babies in hospitals.
The neocons made a further comeback with President Clinton, whom they convinced to bomb Serbia in order to permit separatist movements to become independent states dependent on America.
With Bush 2nd, the neocons took over. Their agenda, American world hegemony, includes Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
So far the schemes of these ignorant and dangerous ideologues have come a cropper. Iraq, formerly in the hands of secular Sunnis who were a check on Iran, is, after the American invasion and occupation, in the hands of religious Shi’ites allied with Iran.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban are resurgent, and a large NATO/US army there is unable to control the situation.
One consequence of the neocons’ Afghan war has been the loss of power of the American puppet president of Pakistan, a Muslim country armed with nuclear weapons. The puppet president now faces impeachment, and the Pakistani military has informed the Americans to stop conducting military operations in Pakistani territory.
The American puppets in Egypt and Jordan might be next to fall.
In Iraq, the Shi’ites, having completed their ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from neighborhoods, have declared a cease fire in order to contradict the US propaganda that American withdrawal would lead to a blood bath. Negotiations on withdrawal dates are now underway between the Americans and the Iraqi government, which is no longer behaving like a puppet.
Last year Hugo Chavez ridiculed Bush before the UN. Russia’s Putin ridiculed Bush as Comrade Wolf.
On August 12, Pravda ridiculed Bush, “Bush: Why don’t you shut up?”
Americans may think they are a superpower before whose presence the world trembles. But not the Russians.
Those Americans stupid enough to think that America’s “superpower” insures its citizens from danger need to read the total contempt shown for President Bush in Pravda:
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? In your statement on Monday regarding the legitimate actions of the Russian Federation in Georgia, you failed to mention the war crimes perpetrated by Georgian military forces, which American advisors support, against Russian and Ossetian civilians
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your faithful ally, Mikhail Saakashvili, was announcing a ceasefire deal while his troops, with your advisors, were massing on Ossetia’s border, which they crossed under cover of night and destroyed Tskhinvali, targeting civilian structures just like your forces did in Iraq.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Your American transport aircraft gave a ride home to thousands of Georgian soldiers from Iraq directly into the combat zone.
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? How do you account for the fact that among the Georgian soldiers fleeing the fighting yesterday you could clearly hear officers using American English giving orders to “Get back inside” and how do you account for the fact that there are reports of American soldiers among the Georgian casualties?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Do you really think anyone gives any importance whatsoever to your words after 8 years of your criminal and murderous regime and policies? Do you really believe you have any moral ground whatsoever and do you really imagine there is a single human being anywhere on this planet who does not stick up his middle finger every time you appear on a TV screen?
Do you really believe you have the right to give any opinion or advice after Abu Ghraib? After Guantanamo? After the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens? After the torture by CIA operatives?
Do you really believe you have any right to make a statement on any point of international law after your trumped-up charges against Iraq and the subsequent criminal invasion?
President Bush,
Why don’t you shut up? Suppose Russia for instance declares that Georgia has weapons of mass destruction? And that Russia knows where these WMD are, namely in Tblisi and Poti and north, south, east and west of there? And that it must be true because there is ‘magnificent foreign intelligenc’ such as satellite photos of milk powder factories and baby cereals producing chemical weapons and which are currently being ‘driven around the country in vehicles’? Suppose Russia declares for instance that ‘Saakashvili stiffed the world’ and it is ‘time for regime change’?
Nice and simple, isn’t it, President Bush?
So, why don’t you shut up? Oh and by the way, send some more of your military advisors to Georgia, they are doing a sterling job. And they look all funny down the night sight, all green.
The US is not a superpower. It is a bankrupt farce run by imbeciles who were installed by stolen elections arranged by Karl Rove and Diebold. It is a laughing stock, that ignorantly affronts and attempts to bully an enormous country equipped with tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.
Putin's Winning Hand
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20535.htm
Putin's Winning Hand:
Once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered, America's lifeline to the world is kaput
By Mike Whitney
16/08/08 "ICH" -- - There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway.
There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved.
What took place in South Ossetia last Thursday, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equiped modern army. It was a war crime.
In less than 24 hours, the Russian army was deployed to the war zone where it chased the Georgian army away without a fight. Journalist Michael Binyon put it like this, "The attack was short, sharp and deadly---enough to send the Georgians fleeing in humiliating panic." Indeed, the Georgians left in such haste that many of their weapons were left behind. It was a complete rout; another black-eye for the US and Israeli advisers who trained the clatter of thugs they call the Georgian army. Soon vendors on the streets of Tskhinvali will be hawking weapons that were left behind with a mocking sign: "Georgia Army M-16; Never used, dropped once."
By the time the army was driven out, the downtown area was in engulfed in flames and the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper-fire were strewn along the streets and sidewalks. Many of people who stayed behind were simply too old or infirm to leave. Instead, they huddled in their basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed; another war crime. By day's end, over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the assistance of the Bush White House. Bush regards Saakashvilli as his main client in the region; they are friends. He is America's cat's paw in the Caucasus. Saakashvilli's assignment is to try to get Putin to overreact militarily and demonstrate to European allies that Russia still poses a threat to their national security. Fortunately, many Europeans see through the ruse and know that the trouble originates in Washington.
For the most part, Americans are still in the dark about what really happened last weekend. There's a great video circulating on the Internet by a Russian citizen that has been living in USA for the last 10 years. He sums up the role of the US media with great precision. He says, "The western media--especially CNN--is feeding you complete horseshit. Russia did not invade Georgia first." The youtube can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c26Q-qxDEA
The coverage of the western media has been abysmal. Nearly every article and TV news segment begins with accusations of Russian aggression concealing the fact that the Georgian Army bombarded and invaded the capital of South Ossetia one full day before the first Russian even tank crossed the border. By the time the Russians arrived, the city was already in a shambles and thousands were dead.
These facts are not in dispute by those who followed the developments as they took place. Now the media is revising the facts to manage public perceptions, just as they did with the fictional WMD in Iraq. Many people think that the media learned its lesson after they were exposed for using bogus information in the lead up to the war in Iraq. But that is not true. The corporate media--especially FOX News, CNN and PBS (the smug, liberal-sounding channel)---continue to operate like the propaganda arm of the Pentagon. Its disgraceful.
In a 2006 referendum, 99% of South Ossetians said they supported independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992 and has been a de facto independent state ever since. If Putin applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the UN. (Sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander) But Putin and newly-elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have taken a conciliatory attitude towards the international community and tried to resolve the issue through diplomatic channels. So far, they have conducted themselves with restraint and avoided any confrontation.
Still, Russia's operation in South Ossetia has ignited a firestorm in the US political establishment and Democrats and Republicans alike are demanding that Russia be "taught a lesson". Condoleeza Rice flew to Tbilisi on Friday and ordered Russian combat troops to withdraw from Georgia immediately. Saakashvili topped off Rice's comments by saying that the Russian troops were "cold-blooded killers" and "barbarians". So much for reconciliation.
Saakashvili's hyperbolic rhetoric was followed by a surprise announcement from Poland that they had approved Bush's plans for deploying the Missile Defense Shield in Eastern Europe. The system is supposed to defend Europe from the possibility of attacks from so-called "rogue states" like Iran, but the Kremlin knows that it is intended to neutralize their nuclear arsenal. Political analyst William Engdahl explains the importance of the proposed system in his recent article, "Missile Defense: Washington and Poland just moved the World closer to War":
"The signing now insures an escalation of tensions between Russia and NATO and a new Cold War arms race in full force. It is important for readers to understand...the ability of one of two opposing sides to put anti-missile missiles to within 90 miles of the territory of the other in even a primitive first-generation anti-missile missile array gives that side virtual victory in a nuclear balance of power and forces the other to consider unconditional surrender or to pre-emptively react by launching its nuclear strike before 2012."
The new "shield" will be integrated into the larger US nuclear weapons system placing the world's most lethal weapons just a few hundred miles from Russia's capital. It is a clear threat to Russia's national security and it must be opposed at all cost. It is no different than nuclear weapons in Cuba. The timing of the announcement is particularly troubling as it only adds to the tensions between the two superpowers.
President Medvedev made this statement after hearing of Poland's decision: "This decision clearly demonstrates everything we have said recently. The deployment of new anti-missile forces in Europe is aimed at the Russian Federation."
It was President Ronald Reagan, the darling of the neoconservatives, who decided to remove short-range nuclear weapons from the European theater. Now, ironically, it is his ideological heir, George W. Bush, who is on track to restart the Cold War by putting a high-tech nuclear system on Russia's perimeter. The younger Bush has already broken his father's commitment to Mikail Gorbachev to never expand NATO beyond Germany. Presently, Bush is pushing to gain NATO membership for two former-Soviet states; Ukraine and Georgia. If they are approved, then any future dispute with Russia will pit the United States and Europe against Moscow. It's no wonder Putin is trying to derail the process.
The Bush administration has been planning for a confrontation with Russia for more than a year. In fact, Raw Story reported on operations that were conducted by the military on July 14, 2008 which were probably a dress rehearsal for the current conflict. According to Raw Story:
"US troops on Monday (July 14) began military exercises near the Russian border in ex-Soviet Ukraine and were poised to launch them in Georgia, amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington. A ceremony inaugurating the Sea Breeze-2008 NATO exercise was held off Ukraine's Black Sea coast against anti-NATO protests and a hostile reaction from officials in Russia. Sea Breeze-2008...includes forces from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Macedonia and Turkey...'The US-Georgia joint exercises will be held at the Vaziani military base' less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Russian border with a total of 1,650 servicemen taking part."
So, it appears the Bush administration, working in conjunction with the Pentagon, did have contingency plans for dealing with a flare-up with Georgia. The real question is whether or not they planned to initiate those hostilities to advance their own regional agenda? No one knows for sure.
Now that Georgia's American-trained army has been humiliated in front of the world, Bush is trying desperately to save face by demanding that Russia allow the US Air force to deliver humanitarian aid via C-17 military aircraft to the tens of thousands of Georgians who were displaced in the fighting. It is worth noting that, as yet, Bush has never delivered as much as a bag of rice to the 2 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria due to his war in Iraq. Bush's magnanimity is not only suspect, it also creates real problems for Putin who will have to decide whether the offer is sincere or just a ploy to open up the ports and airfields so that more weaponry and ordnance can be delivered. As Barry Grey suggests in his article "Bush Dispatches US Military forces to Georgia" the humanitarian operation could be a scam:
"This is a formula for an injection of US military and naval forces into Georgia of indeterminate scope and duration. It will certainly involve the presence of hundreds if not thousands of uniformed US military personnel on the ground, and a substantial number of warships in the region. The US is introducing this military force into a situation that remains highly unstable and combustible, raising the possibility of a direct military clash between the United States and Russia."
Grey is right, but what choice does Putin have? His task is to avoid a military confrontation with the United States while demonstrating to his Europeon partners that their future lies with Russia not America. That's the real goal. To achieve that, he needs to expose Bush as reckless, petulant, and incapable of being a responsible steward of the global system. Maybe Putin will have to back-down at some point and swallow his pride; it makes no difference. What matters, is the endgame; showing that Russia is strong and dependable and will provide its European allies with oil and natural gas in a businesslike manner. That's the winning hand. Meanwhile, the United States will be forced to take a long-overdue look in the mirror and revisit its strategy for perennial war. Unfortunately, once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered; America's lifeline to the world is kaput.
Putin's Winning Hand:
Once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered, America's lifeline to the world is kaput
By Mike Whitney
16/08/08 "ICH" -- - There are no military installations in the city of Tskhinvali. In fact, there are no military targets at all. It is an industrial center consisting of lumber mills, manufacturing plants and residential areas. It is also the home to 30,000 South Ossetians. When Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili ordered the city to be bombed by warplanes and shelled by heavy artillery last Thursday, he knew that he would be killing hundreds of civilians in their homes and neighborhoods. But he ordered the bombing anyway.
There was no "Battle of Tskhinvali"; that's another fiction. A battle implies that there is an opposing force that is resisting or fighting back. That's not the case here. The Georgian army entered the city unopposed; after all, how can unarmed civilians stop armed units. Most of the townspeople had already fled across the border into Russia or hid in their basements while the tanks and armored vehicles rumbled bye firing at anything that moved.
What took place in South Ossetia last Thursday, was not an invasion or a siege; it was a massacre. The people had no way to defend themselves against a fully-equiped modern army. It was a war crime.
In less than 24 hours, the Russian army was deployed to the war zone where it chased the Georgian army away without a fight. Journalist Michael Binyon put it like this, "The attack was short, sharp and deadly---enough to send the Georgians fleeing in humiliating panic." Indeed, the Georgians left in such haste that many of their weapons were left behind. It was a complete rout; another black-eye for the US and Israeli advisers who trained the clatter of thugs they call the Georgian army. Soon vendors on the streets of Tskhinvali will be hawking weapons that were left behind with a mocking sign: "Georgia Army M-16; Never used, dropped once."
By the time the army was driven out, the downtown area was in engulfed in flames and the bodies of those who had been killed by sniper-fire were strewn along the streets and sidewalks. Many of people who stayed behind were simply too old or infirm to leave. Instead, they huddled in their basements waiting for the shelling to stop. It was a bloodbath. The city's only hospital was deliberately targeted and destroyed; another war crime. By day's end, over 2,000 people were killed in an operation that was clearly engineered with the assistance of the Bush White House. Bush regards Saakashvilli as his main client in the region; they are friends. He is America's cat's paw in the Caucasus. Saakashvilli's assignment is to try to get Putin to overreact militarily and demonstrate to European allies that Russia still poses a threat to their national security. Fortunately, many Europeans see through the ruse and know that the trouble originates in Washington.
For the most part, Americans are still in the dark about what really happened last weekend. There's a great video circulating on the Internet by a Russian citizen that has been living in USA for the last 10 years. He sums up the role of the US media with great precision. He says, "The western media--especially CNN--is feeding you complete horseshit. Russia did not invade Georgia first." The youtube can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c26Q-qxDEA
The coverage of the western media has been abysmal. Nearly every article and TV news segment begins with accusations of Russian aggression concealing the fact that the Georgian Army bombarded and invaded the capital of South Ossetia one full day before the first Russian even tank crossed the border. By the time the Russians arrived, the city was already in a shambles and thousands were dead.
These facts are not in dispute by those who followed the developments as they took place. Now the media is revising the facts to manage public perceptions, just as they did with the fictional WMD in Iraq. Many people think that the media learned its lesson after they were exposed for using bogus information in the lead up to the war in Iraq. But that is not true. The corporate media--especially FOX News, CNN and PBS (the smug, liberal-sounding channel)---continue to operate like the propaganda arm of the Pentagon. Its disgraceful.
In a 2006 referendum, 99% of South Ossetians said they supported independence from Georgia. The voter turnout was 95% and the balloting was monitored by 34 international observers from the west. No one has challenged the results. The province has been under the protection of Russian and Georgian peacekeepers since 1992 and has been a de facto independent state ever since. If Putin applied the same standard as Bush did in Kosovo, he would unilaterally declare South Ossetia independent from Georgia and then thumb his nose at the UN. (Sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander) But Putin and newly-elected Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have taken a conciliatory attitude towards the international community and tried to resolve the issue through diplomatic channels. So far, they have conducted themselves with restraint and avoided any confrontation.
Still, Russia's operation in South Ossetia has ignited a firestorm in the US political establishment and Democrats and Republicans alike are demanding that Russia be "taught a lesson". Condoleeza Rice flew to Tbilisi on Friday and ordered Russian combat troops to withdraw from Georgia immediately. Saakashvili topped off Rice's comments by saying that the Russian troops were "cold-blooded killers" and "barbarians". So much for reconciliation.
Saakashvili's hyperbolic rhetoric was followed by a surprise announcement from Poland that they had approved Bush's plans for deploying the Missile Defense Shield in Eastern Europe. The system is supposed to defend Europe from the possibility of attacks from so-called "rogue states" like Iran, but the Kremlin knows that it is intended to neutralize their nuclear arsenal. Political analyst William Engdahl explains the importance of the proposed system in his recent article, "Missile Defense: Washington and Poland just moved the World closer to War":
"The signing now insures an escalation of tensions between Russia and NATO and a new Cold War arms race in full force. It is important for readers to understand...the ability of one of two opposing sides to put anti-missile missiles to within 90 miles of the territory of the other in even a primitive first-generation anti-missile missile array gives that side virtual victory in a nuclear balance of power and forces the other to consider unconditional surrender or to pre-emptively react by launching its nuclear strike before 2012."
The new "shield" will be integrated into the larger US nuclear weapons system placing the world's most lethal weapons just a few hundred miles from Russia's capital. It is a clear threat to Russia's national security and it must be opposed at all cost. It is no different than nuclear weapons in Cuba. The timing of the announcement is particularly troubling as it only adds to the tensions between the two superpowers.
President Medvedev made this statement after hearing of Poland's decision: "This decision clearly demonstrates everything we have said recently. The deployment of new anti-missile forces in Europe is aimed at the Russian Federation."
It was President Ronald Reagan, the darling of the neoconservatives, who decided to remove short-range nuclear weapons from the European theater. Now, ironically, it is his ideological heir, George W. Bush, who is on track to restart the Cold War by putting a high-tech nuclear system on Russia's perimeter. The younger Bush has already broken his father's commitment to Mikail Gorbachev to never expand NATO beyond Germany. Presently, Bush is pushing to gain NATO membership for two former-Soviet states; Ukraine and Georgia. If they are approved, then any future dispute with Russia will pit the United States and Europe against Moscow. It's no wonder Putin is trying to derail the process.
The Bush administration has been planning for a confrontation with Russia for more than a year. In fact, Raw Story reported on operations that were conducted by the military on July 14, 2008 which were probably a dress rehearsal for the current conflict. According to Raw Story:
"US troops on Monday (July 14) began military exercises near the Russian border in ex-Soviet Ukraine and were poised to launch them in Georgia, amid tense relations between Moscow and Washington. A ceremony inaugurating the Sea Breeze-2008 NATO exercise was held off Ukraine's Black Sea coast against anti-NATO protests and a hostile reaction from officials in Russia. Sea Breeze-2008...includes forces from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Macedonia and Turkey...'The US-Georgia joint exercises will be held at the Vaziani military base' less than 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the Russian border with a total of 1,650 servicemen taking part."
So, it appears the Bush administration, working in conjunction with the Pentagon, did have contingency plans for dealing with a flare-up with Georgia. The real question is whether or not they planned to initiate those hostilities to advance their own regional agenda? No one knows for sure.
Now that Georgia's American-trained army has been humiliated in front of the world, Bush is trying desperately to save face by demanding that Russia allow the US Air force to deliver humanitarian aid via C-17 military aircraft to the tens of thousands of Georgians who were displaced in the fighting. It is worth noting that, as yet, Bush has never delivered as much as a bag of rice to the 2 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria due to his war in Iraq. Bush's magnanimity is not only suspect, it also creates real problems for Putin who will have to decide whether the offer is sincere or just a ploy to open up the ports and airfields so that more weaponry and ordnance can be delivered. As Barry Grey suggests in his article "Bush Dispatches US Military forces to Georgia" the humanitarian operation could be a scam:
"This is a formula for an injection of US military and naval forces into Georgia of indeterminate scope and duration. It will certainly involve the presence of hundreds if not thousands of uniformed US military personnel on the ground, and a substantial number of warships in the region. The US is introducing this military force into a situation that remains highly unstable and combustible, raising the possibility of a direct military clash between the United States and Russia."
Grey is right, but what choice does Putin have? His task is to avoid a military confrontation with the United States while demonstrating to his Europeon partners that their future lies with Russia not America. That's the real goal. To achieve that, he needs to expose Bush as reckless, petulant, and incapable of being a responsible steward of the global system. Maybe Putin will have to back-down at some point and swallow his pride; it makes no difference. What matters, is the endgame; showing that Russia is strong and dependable and will provide its European allies with oil and natural gas in a businesslike manner. That's the winning hand. Meanwhile, the United States will be forced to take a long-overdue look in the mirror and revisit its strategy for perennial war. Unfortunately, once the Atlantic Alliance is shattered; America's lifeline to the world is kaput.
Bigfoot and chupacabra double feature
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/08/bigfoot-and-chupacabra-found-c.html
Bigfoot and chupacabra double feature
Wednesday August 13, 2008
posted by Rod Drehe
Woo, it's a great week for cryptozoologists. Not only has a south Texas sheriff's deputy filmed the dreaded chupacabra with his dashboard cam, but a couple of likely suspects in Georgia (Boss Hogg's Georgia, not Saakashvili's) claim to have found a Bigfoot body. You can see the alleged Bigfoot photos here (handsome devil, he is). They say they're having it independently analyzed, and will present the results at a Friday press conference in California. If these boys really are onto something, they'd do well to hire a press agent, because this goofball press release doesn't do much for their credibility. Still, we might know on Friday.
Belief in Bigfoot is not altogether crazy, though skepticism is of course in order. From Michael Shermer in Scientific American:
The reason cryptids merit our attention is that enough successful discoveries have been made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori. The most famous examples include the gorilla in 1847 (and the mountain gorilla in 1902), the giant panda in 1869, the okapi (a short-necked relative of the giraffe) in 1901, the Komodo dragon in 1912, the bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) in 1929, the megamouth shark in 1976 and the giant gecko in 1984. Cryptozoologists are especially proud of the catch in 1938 of a coelacanth, an archaic-looking species of fish that had been thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous.
Although discoveries of previously unrecorded species of bugs and bacteria are routinely published in the annals of biology, these instances are startling because of their recency, size, and similarity to cryptid cousins Bigfoot, Nessie, et al. They also have in common--a body! In order to name a new species, one must have a type specimen--a holotype--from which a detailed description can be made, photographs taken, models cast and a professional scientific analysis prepared.
If such cryptids still survived in the hinterlands of North America and Asia, surely by now one would have turned up. So far all we have are the accounts. Anecdotes are a good place to begin an investigation--which by themselves cannot verify a new species. In fact, in the words of social scientist Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley--words that should be elevated to a maxim: "Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten."
Scientific American also profiled a Bigfoot researcher (not the good ol' boys who claim to have rustled up a Sasquatch carcass).
When I was a kid growing up in the country, I used to scare myself silly reading Bigfoot books. No kidding, I still get chills thinking about it (commercials for the 1972 B-movie "The Legend of Boggy Creek" rocked my first-grade world; a mere description of this scene made me afraid to go to the bathroom after sundown; you can imagine how that worked out). I hope this Bigfoot is real, so we can find them all and kill 'em daid before they git us.
Bigfoot and chupacabra double feature
Wednesday August 13, 2008
posted by Rod Drehe
Woo, it's a great week for cryptozoologists. Not only has a south Texas sheriff's deputy filmed the dreaded chupacabra with his dashboard cam, but a couple of likely suspects in Georgia (Boss Hogg's Georgia, not Saakashvili's) claim to have found a Bigfoot body. You can see the alleged Bigfoot photos here (handsome devil, he is). They say they're having it independently analyzed, and will present the results at a Friday press conference in California. If these boys really are onto something, they'd do well to hire a press agent, because this goofball press release doesn't do much for their credibility. Still, we might know on Friday.
Belief in Bigfoot is not altogether crazy, though skepticism is of course in order. From Michael Shermer in Scientific American:
The reason cryptids merit our attention is that enough successful discoveries have been made by scientists based on local anecdotes and folklore that we cannot dismiss all claims a priori. The most famous examples include the gorilla in 1847 (and the mountain gorilla in 1902), the giant panda in 1869, the okapi (a short-necked relative of the giraffe) in 1901, the Komodo dragon in 1912, the bonobo (or pygmy chimpanzee) in 1929, the megamouth shark in 1976 and the giant gecko in 1984. Cryptozoologists are especially proud of the catch in 1938 of a coelacanth, an archaic-looking species of fish that had been thought to have gone extinct in the Cretaceous.
Although discoveries of previously unrecorded species of bugs and bacteria are routinely published in the annals of biology, these instances are startling because of their recency, size, and similarity to cryptid cousins Bigfoot, Nessie, et al. They also have in common--a body! In order to name a new species, one must have a type specimen--a holotype--from which a detailed description can be made, photographs taken, models cast and a professional scientific analysis prepared.
If such cryptids still survived in the hinterlands of North America and Asia, surely by now one would have turned up. So far all we have are the accounts. Anecdotes are a good place to begin an investigation--which by themselves cannot verify a new species. In fact, in the words of social scientist Frank J. Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley--words that should be elevated to a maxim: "Anecdotes do not make a science. Ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten."
Scientific American also profiled a Bigfoot researcher (not the good ol' boys who claim to have rustled up a Sasquatch carcass).
When I was a kid growing up in the country, I used to scare myself silly reading Bigfoot books. No kidding, I still get chills thinking about it (commercials for the 1972 B-movie "The Legend of Boggy Creek" rocked my first-grade world; a mere description of this scene made me afraid to go to the bathroom after sundown; you can imagine how that worked out). I hope this Bigfoot is real, so we can find them all and kill 'em daid before they git us.
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