From CounterPunch
By Chris Floyd

An important development has been taking place in the real “war” on terror — not the profit-making, fear-and-domination machine of the Bush Administration’s devising, but the genuine struggle to quell the violence of Islamist extremism. Yet despite the potential of this breakthrough, an overwhelming majority of Americans have never heard of it. Certainly it has not been featured — or even mentioned — by the corporate press and government PR engines in the United States. And why not? Because it is a breakthrough toward peace — and peace, as we all know, is not boffo box office.

Last week, the Guardian’s Ian Black reported on “a remarkable recantation” by one of the founding figures of the modern jihadist movement, Sayid Imam al-Sharif. A former comrade-in-arms of Ayman al-Zawahiri — al Qaeda’s own Dick Cheney, the “deputy” who actually runs the gang — Sharif was the mastermind behind the Islamists’ first great “spectacular”: the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now Sharif, imprisoned in Egypt, is finishing a new book “that undermines the Muslim theological basis for violent jihad” and is already creating fissures throughout the Islamist movement, the Guardian reports.

Sharif is now repudiating the very jihadist methods that his group, Islamic Jihad, helped pioneer, instead citing the Quranic precept, “Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not transgress the limits; for God loveth not transgressors.” In a letter from prison indicating his new line, Sharif declared: “We are prohibited from committing aggression, even if the enemies of Islam do that,” reports Asharq Alawsat, the London-based Arabic daily. “Armed operations [are] wrong, counterproductive, and must cease.”

Read more No News

From CounterPunch
By Kathy Kelly

Last weekend was an important one, regarding education, here in Jordan. Jordanian high school students learned the results of exams qualifying them (or not) for University studies. Television news showed students - among the 52% who passed - dancing for joy. And, King Abdullah announced that Jordan will open its public schools to Iraqi students under fifteen years of age. Along with this news came a UNHCR request for $129 million in funding to help provide schooling for Iraqi children living in neighboring countries, especially Jordan and Syria.

I hope this will be good news for several of Abu Mahmoud’s children who have already missed three years of school. Abu Mahmoud came to Jordan three years ago, after assailants attacked him while he was driving home from his job, in Kirkuk, Iraq. He has pictures of his bullet-ridden car. Having narrowly escaped, he and the family moved into a dingy apartment in Amman, Jordan. Since then, none of his children have attended school. He begged the authorities at one school to permit his oldest son, Mahmoud, to just sit in the classroom and listen, but it wasn’t allowed.

With the government’s new ruling, Mahmoud and his brothers, Ahmed and Ali, may be able to gain admission and perhaps even some remedial help in a Jordanian school. Their sister, Najima, is sixteen years old. It seems that the new ruling won’t open classrooms to children over fifteen years of age. Although Najima has missed formal schooling for the past three years, she experienced a very unusual kind of education during two of these years. Slight and quite beautiful, Najima worked in a printing factory, ten hours a day five days a week, for very little money, making books instead of reading them. The paper-cutting machine she operated was much larger than she is, and I asked her if she ever had trouble with it. “No!” she replied, “Never! And I learned how to lift very heavy loads.” She’s proud of her skill, and should be.

Read more Darkness

From The Asia Times
By F William Engdahl

That bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes on the breakfast table or the portion of pasta or corn tortillas, cheese or meat on the dinner table is going to rise in price over the coming months as sure as the sun rises in the East. Welcome to the new world food-price shock, conveniently timed to accompany the current world oil-price shock.

Curiously, it’s ominously similar in many respects to the early 1970s when prices for oil and food both exploded by several hundred percent in a matter of months. That mid-1970s price explosion led the late US president Richard Nixon to ask his old pal Arthur Burns, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, to find a way to alter the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation data to take attention away from the rising prices.

The result then was the now-commonplace publication of the absurd “core inflation” CPI numbers - sans oil and food.

The late American satirist Mark Twain once quipped, “Buy land: They’ve stopped making it.” Today we can say almost the same about corn, or all grains worldwide. The world is in the early months of the greatest sustained rise in prices for all major grains, including maize, wheat and rice, that we have seen in three decades. Those three crops constitute almost 90% of all grains cultivated in the world.

Read more Fraud

From Army Times
By Michelle Tan

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will testify before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday morning about what Defense Department leaders knew about the friendly fire death of Cpl. Pat Tillman, the committee confirmed late Tuesday.

The hearing, “The Tillman Fratricide: What the Leadership of the Defense Department Knew,” will begin at 10 a.m. in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

Also confirmed to appear are retired Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; retired Gen. John Abizaid, former commander of U.S. Central Command; and retired Gen. Bryan Douglas Brown, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

The only invited speaker who has not confirmed his attendance is retired Lt. Gen. Philip Kensinger, former commander of Army Special Operations Command. According to the committee, a subpoena has been issued for Kensinger to appear.

The committee’s announcement came hours after Army officials released findings from an investigation by a four-star general into officers in Tillman’s chain of command and the role they played in the mistakes and errors made in reporting Tillman’s April 22, 2004, friendly fire death in Afghanistan.

Read More Tillman

From True Blue Liberal
By Christopher Platt

I took a little ride in the country yesterday. Top down, I drove north out of Manhattan on the Palisades Interstate Parkway, to Bear Mountain and Harriman State Park, about an hour out of the city. Drove slowly around there for an hour, enjoying the lakes, trees, mountains and abundant sunshine. I came back down from Bear Mountain on the Taconic State Parkway. Trees and more trees, rivers, lakes, streams, for at least 90 out of the 110 miles I put on the car. When I got home and pulled into the garage, I noticed something I’d seen before, although today, for some reason, it made more of an impression. After four hours driving through the woods, there was not one single bug squashed on my windshield. None on the front bumper, none on the hood, either. No bugs. On a hot summer day in New York State.

It wasn’t long ago that such a drive would have resulted in a windshield coated with tiny, crushed carcasses that were, frankly, a bitch to clean off. Whole automotive product lines have sprung up to meet this need, which – in some areas of the planet, is serious enough to create hazardous driving conditions. Not today. Not here.

And I realized something else. In all my time driving through the woods today, there were virtually no birds, either. I was surrounded by forests, mountains, the mighty Hudson River. There should have been birds in abundance. Once I left the rock doves (that’s pigeons to you) of Manhattan behind, I saw nothing but three Turkey Vultures the entire day. Wasn’t long ago on such a drive that you would see or hear dozens of birds – Blue Jays, sparrows, finches, warblers, a robin or two, nuthatches, cowbirds, catbirds, grackles, crows, starlings, tufted titmice, cardinals, red-winged blackbirds, and many, many more. But, not today. Not here.

Okay, I hear you saying, too bad about the birds, but what’s so bad about not having to scrape those nasty bugs off your windshield? Normally, I’d agree with you, but, ecologically speaking, this total absence of bugs is very disturbing. It also could be one reason there were no birds, either. Let me explain. Insects are a vital part of our ecosystem — unlike ourselves. Insects eat and destroy smaller organisms that could do us much harm. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Dissident Voice
By John Kelley

Yesterday, the Dow Jones dropped 300+ points, down over 400 at its low for the day. Today, it will probably be just as volatile as it has been, but the shape of things to come is not good. We can only ride this irrational over-exuberance about the market for so long before we have to pay the piper. It’s quite simple. While the market was setting a new record July 20th by breaking 14,000, the actual financial underpinnings of the country were growing quite bleak.

Virtually unreported over at the Washington Post, Michael J. de la Merced was citing a significant crack in the debt dike preventing a flood of defaults on leveraged buyout deals. Most of the run-up on Wall Street has been based on the idea that there is an unlimited amount of debt that can be piled up to buy and flip companies, kind of like the housing market speculators. In fact some of them are the same people. To them the important thing is that they collect fees at every transaction along the way.

What the general public doesn’t understand is that the wealthy have been taking their extra money from tax breaks and investing it in speculation. The theory of trickle down economics is that the rich will invest it in increased production capacity, hire more people and generally lift everyone (“a rising tide lifts all boats”). But, true to human behavior, that’s not what happens. Instead, when people have extra money over their needs they tend to invest it in more speculative investments because the potential loss won’t affect their lifestyle while the potential gains are higher than from a more stable but slow-growing investment. In other words, a cabbie might make a bunch of $5 bets on long shots at the track and even may splurge on the Trifecta but a CEO can afford to make $10,000 bets. Both are gambling an amount that, if he loses, doesn’t impact his lifestyle, but if he wins, he wins big.

Read more Debt Economy

From Information Clearing House
By George Carlin

The game is rigged! Nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.

Watch Video

From Think Progress
By Matt

Yesterday, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, gave the Bush administration until noon today “to resolve the controversy over apparent contradictions in Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s congressional testimony.”

Missing the noon deadline, the White House released a letter this afternoon from Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, which stated “one particular aspect” of the NSA’s domestic spying program, “and nothing more, was publicly acknowledged by the President and described in December of 2005.” Gonzales was also supposed to provide a letter of clarification to Specter by noon, but it has not been sent.

On CNN’s The Situation Room this evening, Specter briefly responded to McConnell’s letter, saying “I am not prepared to say” Gonzales didn’t lie “until we get Attorney General Gonzales’ letter.”

Watch Video

From Information Clearing House
By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich

“He who lives by fighting with an enemy has an interest in the preservation of the enemy’s life.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

Holding a joint press conference with the new British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, George W. Bush called Iraq a ‘new democracy’; The gift of democracy from the Bush White House. It would seem appropriate that a statue of George W. Bush be erected where Saddam’s statue once stood – after all, he is the liberator. The momentous unveiling ought to be accompanied by the wailing of mothers rocking back and forth as they beat their chests holding corpses and shrieking in anguish. The ‘new democracy’ should have its orphaned children present, delivering their gratitude with growling stomachs and tears that are all they have to relieve their parched throats. The liberator’s statue would be adorned not with the promised flowers, but with stains left behind by the blood of the innocent buried in mass graves – the shame of women raped. Indeed, they were liberated from their dreams, their tomorrows, from their hopes.

And of so much more…

Perhaps the Iraqis should also thank the ‘liberator’ for unburdening them of their oil – it was the oil, and Saddam, that was a threat to them. Both are gone. While the Iraqis risk their lives standing in line for a can of gas, wondering what happened to their country’s riches, under the watchful eyes of soldiers, smugglers divert billions of dollars worth of crude onto tankers. This, thanks to the genius of Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton (and Parsons) for the oil metering system that is supposed to monitor how much crude flows into and out of ABOT and KAAOT Southern oil terminals has not worked since the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.[i] The oil simply gets stolen, Halliburton does not fix it, and the soldiers don’t stop it.

Read more Liberator

From Helena Independent Record
By John Smart

Forget the spin about WMD’s or “Iraqi Freedom” or the “War On Terror.” The White House is lying, Congress is lying, and the media stopped asking questions. What we are not told is that Iraq is about oil, war profiteering and a larger plan to control energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia. This scheme goes beyond our domestic energy needs and seeks to give multinational corporations dominance over global markets while feeding a hungry American war machine.

The recent surprise called “terrorism” is essentially blowback from past covert and official foreign policy targeting the black gold of the Middle East. Our failure to understand the enemy we have created will result in endless cycles of violence without resolving the root cause of “terrorism.” Rather than making the world a safer place, the present “war on terror” has become a smokescreen for 21st Century imperialism. This will generate perpetual conflict and an economic addiction to war that may bankrupt our nation in more ways than one. In order to find a solution we must first recognize the problem.

History teaches that imperialism can be terribly expensive. Empires require huge military forces to impose agendas designed by the economic elite. Yet, over time the military cost of maintaining an overextended empire can exceed the value of resources acquired. The brutality used to enforce injustice also creates determined enemies and alienates allies. The “old Europe” refused to join “Operation Iraqi Freedom” having lived through the rise and fall of many destructive empires. The British dumped Blair rather than return to their old imperial ways that eventually became a burden. Slavery is another economic system that eventually became dysfunctional and unacceptable.

The high-tech “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq has been a trillion dollar mistake producing little more than flag-draped coffins, 500,000 dead Iraqis, soaring national debt and global resentment. A largely unreported “benchmark” for the green zone “government” would grant various oil giants like ExxonMobil 80 percent of Iraq’s reserves with 20 percent for Iraqis. This robber-baron exploitation will require a permanent occupation as Iraq continues to resist as they did under historic British rule.

Read more Expenses