Disarm: The Lesson of the Georgia Fiasco

George Bush, with the clock ticking down the last months of his presidency, nearly started yet another war that might have escalated in the manner of World War I: a diplomatic failure backed by arms that resulted in a superpower clash.

It is a wonder that the world has survived his "war on terror," which turned out to be a war on American liberty and anyone in the world who got on his nerves. His confrontation with Russia in defense of a belligerent little client state of the US could have sealed his fate and ours too.

We need to examine Bush's actions and see how the US nearly stumbled into a calamity. For in the last weeks, we have gained a picture of the future with this continued push for a secure American world empire with its endless webs of payments, relationships, jockeying for power and treasure, and a diplomatic corps honeycombed with belligerents and lobbyists for foreign governments. The peace, such as it is, can be shattered through small screwups that will end in massive death.

Make no mistake about it: the flare-up was caused entirely by US diplomatic failures. You wouldn't know this, however, if all you did was watch television news. Fox and CNN have portrayed Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili as a benevolent leader of a "young democracy" struggling in the shadow of the mighty bear Russia.

In fact, Saakashvili was elected on a "National Movement" ticket with a centralizing, revanchist platform of retaking the autonomous provinces in the Caucasus, and he has ruled this country the size of South Carolina with an iron fist under a state of emergency for years. He had every intention of ruling these non-Georgian peoples who do not want to be ruled by him, as even the CIA admits.

Find the Truth About Bush's Wars Nancy Pelosi, You Must Impeach!

Speaker Pelosi, President Bush could have achieved his goal of "regime change" in Iraq quickly and without the violence of war. Saddam Hussein offered, weeks before his country was invaded, to leave Iraq and go into exile. President Bush withheld this offer from public view-and refused it. Nor did the President need to invade Afghanistan to apprehend Osama bin Laden. On five different occasions, George Bush refused a standing offer from the Taliban to surrender Osama bin Laden-three times before 9/11 and twice thereafter, again without public disclosure.

No, the military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan are not directed against terrorism. They are territorial in nature. Mr. Bush intended from his first days in office to invade the two countries: as early as late January, 2001, his Administration was developing the decisions and beginning the preparations for both military incursions. 9/11 was in the distant future, so the conflicts cannot be exercises in counter-terrorism, as the Bush Administration frequently and dishonestly insists. They are premeditated wars of unprovoked conquest and occupation.

Madam Speaker, if you know this, and if you continue refusing impeachment, then you are a criminal accomplice in violating the trust of the American people-and in violating both U.S. and international law.

If you do not know this truth about the wars, Madam Speaker, you must learn its details and embrace it, and then you must seek with dispatch and justice to impeach George Bush and Richard Cheney.

You claim you don't have the votes. But to say that is to canvass the jury before the trial begins, before the evidence is presented and scrutinized. When the hideous truth of these wars is finally exposed-as it will be in the impeachment process-you will have the vote of every honest and patriotic member of the House of Representatives, Democrat and Republican alike.

Why isn't the truth already widely known? There are two reasons. The Bush Administration is infamous for its pathological lying and secrecy: they have done everything in their power to distort or suppress the truth. And the mainstream press has become an engine of entertaining, not informing the American people: it is indifferent to the truth.

But the truth is always there, and it can be discovered in foreign news outlets, in the domestic alternate press, in book-length treatises, and in the passion for truth and unconstrained inquiry displayed by people posting to the Internet. These are the sources for the exposition to follow.

Madam Speaker, if you will not impeach, then you must refute this history, if you can.

She will not impeach. She is complicit in the insanity that our government has become. She clearly must know the facts, as do the rest of those elected to "serve the people" in Congress. She has made her deal with the devil to sell OUR freedom for money and power, and she's sticking to it. Very good article...you can read it in its entirety by hitting the link in the title.

7 Countries Considering Abandoning the US Dollar (and what it means)

It’s no secret that the dollar is on a downward spiral. Its value is dropping, and the Fed isn’t doing a whole lot to change that. As a result, a number of countries are considering a shift away from the dollar to preserve their assets...........

What does this all mean?


Countries are growing weary of losing money on the falling dollar. Many of them want to protect their financial interests, and a number of them want to end the US oversight that comes with using the dollar. Although it’s not clear how many of these countries will actually follow through on an abandonment of the dollar, it is clear that its status as a world currency is in trouble.


Obviously, an abandonment of the dollar is bad news for the currency. Simply put, as demand lessens, its value drops. Additionally, the revenue generated from the use of the dollar will be sorely missed if it’s lost. The dollar’s status as a cheaply-produced US export is a vital part of our economy. Losing this status could rock the financial lives of both Americans and the worldwide economy.


Our government is quickly spending us into third world nation status. Worse than bankrupt, we are billions in debt to foreign nations to keep our economy afloat. All of this "creative financing" will fall apart at some point, rather like this whole sub-prime lending fiasco....the signs are quite clear that it is beginning already.

Explosive charge blows up in US's face

When the United States military command accused the Iranian Quds Force in January of providing the armor-piercing EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) that were killing US troops, it knew that Iraqi machine shops had been producing their own EFPs for years, a review of the historical record of evidence on EFPs in Iraq shows.

The record also shows that the US command had considerable evidence that the Mahdi Army of Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr had received the technology and the training on how to use it from Hezbollah, rather than Iran.

The command, operating under close White House supervision, chose to deny these facts in making the dramatic accusation that became the main rationale for the present aggressive US stance toward Iran. Although the George W Bush administration initially limited the accusation to the Quds Force, it has recently begun to assert that top officials of the Iranian regime are responsible for arms that are killing US troops.

British and US officials observed from the beginning that the EFPs being used in Iraq closely resembled the ones used by Hezbollah against Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, both in their design and the techniques for using them.

Hezbollah was known as the world's most knowledgeable specialists in EFP manufacture and use, having perfected this during the 1990s in the military struggle with Israeli forces in Lebanon. It was widely recognized that it was Hezbollah that had passed on the expertise to Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups after the second Intifada began in 2000.

US intelligence also knew that Hezbollah was conducting the training of Mahdi Army militants on EFPs. In August 2005, Newsday published a report from correspondent Mohammed Bazzi that Shi'ite fighters had begun in early 2005 to copy Hezbollah techniques for building the bombs, as well as for carrying out roadside ambushes, citing both Iraqi and Lebanese officials.

In late November 2006, a senior intelligence official told both CNN and the New York Times that Hezbollah troops had trained as many as 2,000 Mahdi Army fighters in Lebanon.

The fact that the Mahdi Army's major military connection has always been with Hezbollah rather than Iran would also explain the presence in Iraq of the PRG-29, a shoulder-fired anti-armor weapon. Although US military briefers identified it last February as being Iranian-made, the RPG-29 is not manufactured by Iran but by the Russian Federation.

Lies and more lies....all to manufacture an excuse that will seem plausible to the Sheeple to occupy another Mideastern oil rich country....the invasion plans have been written for years...just the public relations work to complete before they are put into motion....will the sheeple be gullible enough to buy this nonsense AGAIN?

Putin: US Plan Evokes '62 Cuban Crisis

President Vladimir Putin on Friday evoked one of the most dangerous confrontations of the Cold War to highlight Russian opposition to a proposed U.S. missile defense system in Europe, comparing it to the Cuban missile crisis of 45 years ago.

The comments — made at the end of a summit between Russia and European Union that failed to resolve several festering disputes — were the latest in a series of belligerent statements from the assertive Putin.

Emboldened by oil- and gas-fueled economic clout, Russia is increasingly at odds with Washington and much of Europe on issues ranging from Iran and Kosovo to energy supplies and human rights.

Putin used a news conference at the summit's conclusion to reiterate Russia's stalwart opposition to U.S. plans to put elements of a missile defense system in the former Soviet bloc countries of Poland and the Czech Republic — both of which are now NATO members.

"Analogous actions by the Soviet Union, when it deployed missiles in Cuba, prompted the 'Caribbean crisis,'" Putin said, using the Russian term for the Cuban missile crisis.

"For us the situation is technologically very similar. We have withdrawn the remains of our bases from Vietnam, from Cuba, and have liquidated everything there, while at our borders, such threats against our country are being created," he said.

Yep...Bushco is working hard to make our country safer, inflaming cold war tensions in Europe, creating terrorists in Islamic nations, and a fascist police state at home...atta boy Georgie!....way to make the world safe for democracy.

The Costs of War for Oil

Bonnie Bricker and Adil E. Shamoo

"We have to decide, as a nation, whether our need for Middle Eastern oil is more important to our future than our conduct as a moral and ethical people." Which brave presidential candidate would lay it on the line so clearly? None yet. And that's the problem with the national debate on the war in Iraq, and possibly, our foray into Iran as well.

Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, has declared that "...the Iraq war is largely about oil" in his recently released memoirs. "People say we're not fighting for oil. Of course we are," said the Republican Senator from Nebraska Chuck Hagel to law students of Catholic University last September. "They talk about America's national interest. What the hell do you think they're talking about? We're not there for figs."

Yet, although anti-war activists decried the "blood for oil" connection from the beginning of the war, no honest conversations have occurred in the public to involve Americans in this discussion.

This is the debate that Americans should be having: on the one hand, America's economy is fueled by our use of energy to run our lives--fueling our cars and SUVs, our industry, our homes. The United States uses 25% of the world's oil and but we're only 4% of the world's population.

We like to be cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and we love the freedom of choosing to use as much energy as we want. We also don't like anyone telling us that we have to change our ways. If we keep using energy the way we always have, we're going to need a dependable source of it to ensure that our children and grandchildren have access to the same way of life. But we have competitors for oil in the world marketplace--China, especially--and many argue that if we don't lock up Middle Eastern oil for ourselves now, we won't have it for our use in the very near future. That will mean paying even more for energy and allowing other nations to rev up their economic engines at our expense.

On the other hand, the cost of ensuring this oil supply is a hefty one. Americans are losing lives. A generation of veterans will be suffering through the vast wounds of this war. Our actions in Iraq have led to as many as a million Iraqi deaths and many more wounded, and displaced 4.4 million Iraqis. We have, in the name of "The War on Terror", created so many U.S. enemies around the world, that our college-age students sew Canadian flags on their backpacks when abroad in the hopes of disguising their American identities.

As a result of this war, many Americans have come to accept that U.S. policy will include the moral and ethical disruptions of war--even when we have not been attacked by the people we invade, but rather are invading a weakened nation for the resource we desire.

We, as citizens of this country, bear the responsibility of our government's actions. We are not (yet) a country under the thumb of a tyrant, with no control over foreign policy. We look the other way as the government we elected does terrible, inhumane things to secure our standard of living...our desire for frivolous things. How many have died to make sure we can fill up the huge tanks on the monstrous SUV's that are so popular these days? We are a spoiled and shallow society ......a reality check is long overdue.

Time To Choose

By Charley Reese

Most politicians, when they talk about reducing spending, chatter on about cutting waste and fraud. That's OK, but it's a mere nick on the federal budget. If you really want to reduce spending, you must dismantle the overseas empire....

Wars start when empires wish to expand. That was the cause of the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II. The Korean and Vietnam wars were civil wars in which our politicians involved us. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq are again wars of an empire trying to expand. In these cases, we are the empire, and you might as well face the ugly truth that our invasions of both countries were no different from the Nazi invasions that led to World War II. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq had attacked us or were even capable of attacking us.

In Afghanistan, we could have gone after al-Qaeda without overthrowing the Taliban government. In the case of Iraq, like Adolf Hitler did with Poland, we simply published a pack of lies to justify our invasion.

Americans need to realize that we are not the police force of the world. It is not our responsibility to overthrow dictators or effect regime change in other people's countries. It is not our responsibility to stop slaughters such as seem to be a permanent feature of Africa.

If we could only learn to mind our own business and see to the needs of our own people, we could lead a peaceful, prosperous and happy existence. As for the terrorists, they are mainly a problem for intelligence and police. If any military force is necessary, one company of Rangers or Marines would be enough.


You can't have a free republic and an empire. It is time to choose.


Not only is it not our responsibility to run the world, we are in no position to do so, with our own affairs in such disarray. The current slogan speak from our government attempts to portray our invasion and occupation of oil rich nations as "exporting freedom".....well, it rather seems we haven't much of that to spare these days, our freedom quickly disappearing within our own borders as our leaders adopt the despotic characteristics of those they endeavor to depose in other nations. Our attention should be directed at the impending crisis at home.