From TruthDig
By Theodore Hamm

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, if the 2008 election were held today Rudy Giuliani would be our next president. Given his stature as a media celebrity, the numbers are not surprising. A fixture on the cable talk shows, Giuliani in fact announced his candidacy on Larry King.

In New York City, the former mayor is regularly and shamelessly promoted by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which recently featured Giuliani kissing his former mistress and now wife, Judi Nathan, on its cover.

Based on the poll numbers and flattering media coverage, you might think there indeed is some kind of national love affair going on between Giuliani and the American people. But rest assured that there is one place where the former mayor is truly despised: the streets of working-class New York.

Read More Giuliani’s Past

From IPS News
By William Fisher

In stark contrast to last week’s U.S. court decision upholding the Military Commissions Act, Canada’s court has unanimously struck down a law that would allow the Canadian government to use secret evidence to detain foreign-born terror suspects indefinitely without charges or open court hearings.

“The overarching principle of fundamental justice that applies here is this: before the state can detain people for significant periods of time, it must accord them a fair judicial process,” wrote Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin in last Friday’s landmark ruling.

And in a further blow to hard-line lawmakers, the Canadian Parliament voted last night not to renew provisions of the law granting the government the power to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects without court hearings.

ommenting on the court’s decision, Mary Shaw of Amnesty International USA told IPS, “These developments in Canada illustrate that our northern neighbours are rejecting knee-jerk reactions to the threat of terrorism in favour of a more reasonable approach that protects the Canadian people while also upholding human rights and international legal standards.”

Read More Tactics

From Washington Post
By Robert Barnes

The Supreme Court, for the first time under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., confronted yesterday the devilishly complicated issue of church-state separation, and whether ordinary taxpayers have the right to sue over the Bush administration’s embrace of faith-based organizations.

With Roberts and newest member Samuel A. Alito Jr. active in the discussion, the justices bombarded the lawyers before them with questions about what kinds of government action could warrant a taxpayer suit. A church built by the government? The number of times a president appears at prayer breakfasts?

Roberts even wondered whether opponents of the administration’s initiatives would extend their concerns to the court itself, which opened yesterday’s session, as it always does, with a marshal appealing for God to “save the United States and this honorable court.”

Constitutional scholars and some justices say that the First Amendment’s religion clauses present some of the most difficult questions to interpret.

Read More Church-State

From The Irish Examiner

Up to 38 people who may have been held in secret CIA prisons are missing, according to an American human rights group.

In a new report Human Rights Watch also detailed a terror suspect’s allegations that he was held for over two years at a so-called black site where he was kept naked for six weeks and chained to the wall of his cell so tightly that he could not stand up.

Marwan Jabour alleged he was placed in painful stress positions that made it difficult to breathe and was threatened with being put in a suffocating dog box if he did not co-operate.

Earlier in Pakistan, he told HRW, he had been beaten, burned with a hot metal rod and had string tied tightly to his penis to prevent him from urinating.

He said he was interrogated by Americans but that nobody physically abused him while they were present.

HRW has demanded that US President George Bush explain where the disappeared detainees have gone.

Read More Explain

From The Nation
By John Nichols

With the Bush administration preparing formal plans for a quick attack on Iran — and, perhaps even more ominously, setting up the sort of faux “discussions” that conveniently break down just in time to confirm the president’s “diplomacy-doesn’t-work” line — a number of current and potential presidential contenders have been positioning themselves as the anti-Iran War candidate.

Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, the most consistently anti-war of the Democratic contenders, has been suitably aggressive in condemning the administration’s machinations — going so far as to suggest that if Bush moves on Iran without a declaration of war the Congress should consider taking steps to impeach the president.

Retired General Wesley Clark, a candidate for the 2OO4 Democratic nomination who may try again in 2OO8, has launched a www.stopiranwar.com website at which he urges visitors to: “Please join the Iraq War veterans at VoteVets.org and me and sign the petition to President Bush today. Military force against Iran is not the solution now, and if we adopt the right strategy, perhaps it need never be. Urge him to work with our allies and use every diplomatic, political, and economic option at our disposal to deal with Iran. War is not the answer.”

Read more Ron Paul

From The Guardian UK
By Matthew Yglesias

For an administration that got itself re-elected largely by bashing the alleged “flip-flops” of its opponent, the Bush team has started reversing course an awful lot. Things kicked off when, on February 13 of this year, the United States reached a nuclear deal negotiated by Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill, a career diplomat whose judgment was for once permitted to override that of the ideologues clustered around the vice president’s office. The deal was a reversal of more than a decade’s worth of the Republican Party’s North Korea policy, dating back to congressional GOP denunciations of the structurally-similar 1994 Agreed Framework reached by the Clinton administration. What’s more, it was in stark contrast to the administration’s policies toward Iran and Syria where, despite many calls at home and around the world for talks, the administration was steadfastly committed to a policy of isolation and, in the case of Iran, increased pressure.

Until now, that is.

Last night, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that she would be attending a regional summit convened by the Iraqi government and including representatives from Damascus and – yes – Tehran. This is, of course, precisely the measure the bipartisan Iraq Study Group recommended in December – a recommendation that was rejected out of hand by the administration. Now, two months later, they’re suddenly on board.

Or are they? To some extent, the administration simply has no choice. The Iraqi government has diplomatic ties to Iran, and many of its leading figures have personal ties to Tehran from their years in exile. When Iraq holds a regional summit, then, it would naturally invite Iran as well as the United States – and, having been invited, the US would look exceedingly foolish not to attend.

Read more Flip-Floppers

From The NY Observer
By Sydney Schanberg

Day by day, witness by witness, exhibit by exhibit, Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the trial of Dick Cheney’s man, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, is accomplishing what no one else in Washington has been able to: He has impeached the Presidency of George W. Bush.

Of course, it’s an unofficial impeachment, but it will also, through its documentation, be inerasable. The trial record–testimony, exhibits, the lot–will be there, in one place, for investigators, scholars, reporters and Congress to pore over. It goes far beyond the charges against Mr. Libby. It is, instead, a road map to the abuses of power that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney and their shadow government of neoconservatives have committed as the neocons carried out what they had been planning for years: an invasion of Iraq–and other military excursions–for the purpose of expanding American dominion.

From the start, when he was named special prosecutor in late 2003, Mr. Fitzgerald seemed to understand and embrace this much wider significance.

Yet he was careful not to overreach, crafting the indictment of Mr. Libby narrowly: He had lied to a grand jury, and to F.B.I. agents, about leaks he had given his favorite media people to discredit a vocal critic of the war.

The critic was former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Mr. Wilson, whose diplomatic service had included work in Africa, was asked in 2002 by the C.I.A. to investigate unconfirmed reports that Saddam Hussein had recently tried to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger to be further refined to produce nuclear weapons.

Read more Shadow Government

From Tehran Times
By Yuram Weiler

Since the onslaught of the Reagan administration in 1981, the free market has been promoted as the panacea to cure all economic ills. The idea is that market forces, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, best determine the most efficient distribution of scarce economic resources. The free market solution, also known as privatization or deregulation, has been applied to everything from private companies such as railroads and telephone companies, once thought of as having an obligation to serve the public, to governmental agencies such as water systems, public transit and even prisons. Now, the free market solution is slowly being applied to the U.S. military as well as civilian police forces.

Enter Blackwater, co-founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former Navy Seal, and Gary Jackson, a major Republican Party contributor. Erik Prince is a billionaire, right-wing fundamentalist Christian with strong Republican Party connections who gave some $80,000 to the Republican National Committee in support of Bush’s presidential coup in 2000 and more in 2004.

Read More Republican Guard

From The Huffington Post
By Jon Soltz

Senator Lieberman, I have a challenge for you. Let’s call it the American Troops Challenge. Here’s how it goes.

First, your office needs to give up the basic tools that it uses everyday to make it function and allows people to do their jobs. Let’s say you’ll only have one pen in your office, for starters.
Of course, you’ll have computers, but only two of them. Then let’s look at your staff. Your legislative assistants will be replaced by highly qualified gym teachers. Even though they’re not trained properly to work the legislative process, they are excellent at what they do. They’ll adapt the best they can, and work incredibly hard, but be patient. Remember, they were never trained for the job. Be sure to wear your sweatpants, though, because you won’t be allowed to wear a nice suit. Hmm.. sweats might be too comfortable, but nevermind. Oh, pack your deodorant too, because we’re going to place portable heaters in the office, and also bring a few dumptrucks of sand for the floor.

Your office staff, and you, will have to stay in the Capitol for eight months, without the chance to rest or go home. At the eight-month mark, we’ll have a little surprise. You and your staff will be involuntarily extended for another few months. You know, just until you pass a couple of more pieces of legislation and complete your job.

Now, if Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi or Jack Murtha tries to get you some pens, computers, trained staff, and rest, we’re going to trash them in the media and call them weak. Your job is too important to worry about such trivial things.

Do you get it now, Senator Lieberman?

Read More Lieberman

From The Nation
By Tom Engelhardt

The US government and military have undergone a series of jolting expansions in the Bush years. We got, for instance, a second Defense Department called the Department of Homeland Security. We got a military command for North America called United States Northern Command. More than anything else, however, while we already had an “imperial presidency,” we also got an add-on–an imperial vice-presidency, a new form of shadow government in the United States, a startlingly unbound, constitutionally unmandated new institutional power.

On taking office, Dick Cheney promptly began to set up a vice-presidential office that essentially mimicked, and then to some extent replaced, the National Security Council (NSC). Just as promptly, his office plunged itself into utter, blinding secrecy–as journalist Robert Dreyfuss discovered when he simply tried to chart out who was working in this new center of power. No information, it turned out, could be revealed to a curious reporter, not even the names and positions of those who worked for the Vice President, those who, theoretically, were working for us. Cheney’s office would not even publicly acknowledge its own employees, no less let them be interviewed.

From that office (and allied posts elsewhere in the executive branch and the federal bureaucracy), the Vice President and his various right-hand men like I Lewis “Scooter” Libby and present Chief of Staff David Addington, both fierce believers in the so-called unitary executive theory of government (in which a “wartime” commander-in-chief president is said to have unfettered power to command just about anything), elbowed the State Department, the NSC, and the Intelligence Community. With the President’s ear, and in league with Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon (among others), they spearheaded a series of mis- and disinformation operations that led to Iraq and beyond. (Reporter Jim Lobe wrote about this at Tomdispatch in August 2005, “Dating Cheney’s Nuclear Drumbeat.”)

Read more V.P. Bunker