From The Guardian UK
By Lolita C. Baldor

The U.S. military is working more aggressively to forge cease-fires with Iraqi militants and quell the violence around Baghdad, judging that 80 percent of enemy combatants are “reconcilable,” a top U.S. commander said Thursday.

However, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno also warned that he may not be able to make a full assessment of the situation in Iraq by September, as demanded by lawmakers.

Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, told Pentagon reporters by video conference that he is pressing his military officers to reach out to the tribes, to some small insurgent groups and to religious and political leaders to push them to stop the violence.

“We are talking about cease-fires, and maybe signing some things that say they won’t conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces,” Odierno said from Camp Victory in Baghdad. “We believe a large majority of groups within Iraq are reconcilable and are now interested in engaging with us. But more importantly, they want to engage and become a part of the government of Iraq.”

Stemming the violence in and around the capital city is key to giving the Iraqi government time to stabilize and move toward reconciliation with the warring sectarian factions. That would then allow the U.S. to begin withdrawing troops.

Read More Cease Fire

From Brisbane Times Australia

After months of saying very little, the former KGB agent accused of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko says Britain’s secret services may have had a hand in the murder.

Andrei Lugovoi’s sensational claim, which was certain to further damage relations between Moscow and London, was part of an elaborate tale that included a secret codebook and a supposed British plot to smear Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But he offered no evidence to back his claims, and for some his explanation created more confusion than clarity.

Litvinenko, a renegade member of the Russian secret services hated by many former colleagues, died in a London hospital in November after ingesting radioactive polonium-210. On his deathbed Litvinenko accused Putin of being behind his killing - charges the Kremlin has angrily denied.

Lugovoi, who met Litvinenko in London on November 1, hours before the former agent fell ill, described the British accusations against him as an effort to shift suspicion away from the British spy services, who he said might be implicated in the crime.

Read More Litvinenko

From The Hill
By Brent Budowsky

Now we read in the Boston Globe how John Kerry, preparing to campaign to be commander in chief, voted in 2002 for the Iraq war after his political consultants informed the would-be leader of the free world that he would not be politically viable unless he voted yes.

This followed the disclosure that Bob Shrum advised John Edwards to send young men and women to die as a way of improving his weak national-security resume in 2002.

Why Democratic officials listen to this is beyond me.

Here are the presidential campaigns that Bob Shrum lost: 1972, 1976, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004.

Here are the presidential campaigns Mr. Shrum won: none.

Nice work, if you can get it.

By the way, Republican consultants are no better. They loved the Iraq war when they could use it to run television ads, accusing Democrats of being unpatriotic. Now they are reduced to gibberish about surrender dates while their members run to the White House and whine to the president, waving their polls, then vote for it again.

Read more War Love

From The Atlanta Journal Constitution
By Cynthia Tucker

There is an old spiritual with a line that goes like this:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but the fire next time.

I used to think that was a bit of overwrought lyricism from the minds of a people who read the Bible too literally. Or maybe it was just another expression of humankind’s eternal obsession with fire, bound up with our earliest attempts at community: light, warmth, cooked meat, death, destruction, all associated with flame.

But lately, as my eyes burn and my clothes reek from the smoke of wildfires raging 250 miles away, I’ve begun thinking about the line in that old spiritual differently. Maybe those long-dead lyricists were prescient after all. Maybe we’ve already struck a match to the planet and lit a conflagration that will consume us. We’ve been careless — very careless — with this sphere we call home.

The wildfires have burned for 45 days and consumed more than a half-million acres. Winds blow the smoke right through my bedroom windows, where I awoke one recent morning thinking a house was aflame in my neighborhood.

Last weekend, I didn’t consider jogging or playing tennis or even sitting on my front porch with a glass of lemonade. My eyes water, and my sinus passages ache even when I’m indoors. How utterly miserable it must be for the residents of Waycross and Race Pond and Fargo, who struggle to breathe even as they cope with fear, uncertainty and loss.

Read more Burning

From Salon
By Glenn Greenwald

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman — last seen expressing admiration for the “reassuring” “male” qualities exuded by the GOP presidential field — was on Hardball last night heaping praise on Fred Thompson. According to Fineman, Thompson not only is “tough on defense,” but he himself is “a tough guy.” Fineman also swooned: “He’s got a strong record on cultural issues as a cultural conservative from the South.”

What, in Fineman’s mind, makes Thompson “tough on defense” and gives him credibility as “a tough guy”? Fineman obviously means that as a high compliment, but what — in actuality — has Thompson ever done that warrants such praise for his alleged “tough-guy-ness”?

Here is Thompson’s biography — his own official, endorsed version. He’s been a government lawyer, an actor and a Senator. Though Thompson does not mention it, he also has been — for two decades — what a 1996 profile in The Washington Monthly described as “a high-paid Washington lobbyist for both foreign and domestic interests.” This folksy, down-home, regular guy has spent his entire adult life as a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, except when he was an actor in Hollywood.

And — like the vast, vast majority of Republican “tough guys” who play-act the role so arousingly for our media stars, from Rudy Giuliani to Newt Gingrich — Thompson has no military service despite having been of prime fighting age during the Vietnam War (Thompson turned 20 in 1962, Gingrich in 1963, Giuliani in 1964). He was active in Republican politics as early as the mid-1960s, which means he almost certainly supported the war in which he did not fight.

Read more Acting

From CounterPunch
By Marjorie Cohn

As the nation focused on whether Congress would exercise its constitutional duty to cut funding for the war, Bush quietly issued an unconstitutional bombshell that went virtually unnoticed by the corporate media.

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007, would place all governmental power in the hands of the President and effectively abolish the checks and balances in the Constitution.

If a “catastrophic emergency”–which could include a terrorist attack or a natural disaster–occurs, Bush’s new directive says: “The President shall lead the activities of the Federal Government for ensuring constitutional government.”

What about the other two co-equal branches of government? The directive throws them a bone by speaking of a “cooperative effort” among the three branches, “coordinated by the President, as a matter of comity with respect to the legislative and judicial branches and with proper respect for the constitutional separation of powers.” The Vice-President would help to implement the plans.

“Comity,” however, means courtesy, and the President would decide what kind of respect for the other two branches of government would be “proper.” This Presidential Directive is a blatant power grab by Bush to institutionalize “the unitary executive.”

Read more King George

From Raw Story

The operational commander of US troops in Iraq on Thursday said officers are seeking local ceasefire deals with insurgents, after the deadliest month for American forces in two-and-a-half years.

Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, the number two US officer in Iraq, told reporters that about four-fifths of the militants currently fighting American forces were thought to be ready to join Iraq’s political process.

“So we want to reach back to them,” he said. “And we’re talking about ceasefires and maybe signing some things that say they won’t conduct operations against the government of Iraq or against coalition forces.”

As Odierno was speaking to reporters by a videolink to the Pentagon in Washington, residents in west Baghdad reported that insurgents from the nationalist 1920 Brigades were fighting their former Al-Qaeda allies.

US commanders hope to convince local Iraqi resistance groups to split from Islamist outfits like Al-Qaeda that are thought irreconcilable. In the western province of Anbar, tribal leaders have already turned on insurgents.

Read more Iraq

From The Asia Times
By Philip Smucker

Beaten and ridiculed by the Taliban for teaching in a clandestine girl’s school, Shukriya Barakzai welcomed the US invasion in 2001 with an open heart and hopes for the future. Now, she wants to know just what the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) thinks it is doing in Afghanistan.

“They are too worried about getting shot themselves,” the Parliament member says. “Just who are they here to protect - the Afghan people or themselves?”

Nearly six years after US forces invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban and hunt down al-Qaeda operatives, expectations about what the US and NATO can and will do have plummeted, say Afghans and Westerners.

“One of the problems is that the US and its allies raised expectations so high when they came here,” says Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat in Iraq and the director of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-governmental organization helping to develop Kabul’s crumbling inner city. “By talking so much about democracy and propping up warlords without delivering serious progress, we have managed to discredit a lot of our basic notions in the eyes of the Afghans.”

Read more Afghanistan

From sjlendman.blogspot
By Stephen Lendman

Probably no word better defines or underscores the Bush presidency than “terrorism” even though his administration wasn’t the first to exploit this highly charged term. We use to explain what “they do to us” to justify what we “do to them,” or plan to, always deceitfully couched in terms of humanitarian intervention, promoting democracy, or bringing other people the benefits of western civilization Gandhi thought would be a good idea when asked once what he thought about it.

Ronald Reagan exploited it in the 1980s to declare “war on international terrorism” referring to it as the “scourge of terrorism” and “the plague of the modern age.” It was clear he had in mind launching his planned Contra proxy war of terrorism against the democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua and FMLN opposition resistance to the US-backed El Salvador fascist regime the same way George Bush did it waging his wars of aggression post-9/11.

It’s a simple scheme to pull off, and governments keep using it because it always works. Scare the public enough, and they’ll go along with almost anything thinking it’s to protect their safety when, in fact, waging wars of aggression and state-sponsored violence have the opposite effect. The current Bush wars united practically the entire world against us including an active resistance increasingly targeting anything American.

George Orwell knew about the power of language before the age of television and the internet enhanced it exponentially. He explained how easy “doublethink” and “newspeak” can convince us “war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.” He also wrote “All war propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from (chicken hawk) people who are not fighting (and) Big Brother is watching….” us to be sure we get the message and obey it. Read the rest of this entry »

From Tom Paine
By Jim Harkness

The recent discovery of an industrial chemical in animal feed and pet food imported from China has added to the mounting criticism of U.S. food safety agencies. But this case represents much more than simply governmental incompetence. It exposes the inherent weaknesses of an industrial global food system designed to benefit multinational agribusiness companies at the expense of public health.

Last year, the United States imported about $10 billion more in food, feed and beverages than it exported. Imports came from 175 different countries and represented a 60 percent jump over the last decade. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors were simply overwhelmed. They were only able to examine physically 1.3 percent of food imports last year, about three-quarters of the already minute portion examined in 2003.

Our food system’s increasing dependence on imports is no accident. Import dependency is a defining characteristic of an industrial food model driven by U.S. farm and trade policies over the last half century on behalf of agribusiness. U.S. farm policy has encouraged the mass production of only a few cheap crops largely used as food ingredients, animal feed and exports. U.S. trade policy has aggressively pushed for the removal of trade barriers paving the way for the global food trade.

Missing from this industrial model is a national priority to produce healthy food to feed Americans. For example, most rural Midwest supermarkets, surrounded by farms, import nearly all their food from elsewhere in the country and around the world. Taken to an extreme, some chicken grown in the United States actually is sent to China to be processed and then re-exported back the United States!

Read more Risk