More
Matrix Masters
Blogs
World Events
US News
Science & Health
Earth News
Free Speech
News from Africa
News from Palestine
Bill of Rights Under Attack

Matrix Masters'
SUPPORTERS

Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

Top White House posts go to Jews
(Nathan Guttman, Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2006)
After appointing Joshua Bolten to be the White House chief of staff, US President George W. Bush nominated another Jewish staffer, Joel Kaplan, to serve as Bolten's deputy, putting him in charge of the daily policy planning. . . . The fact that White House policy is now in the hands of two Jews is not seen as significant by activists in the American Jewish community. . . . Bolten and Kaplan will probably be the most prominent Jewish members of the Bush administration, but not the only ones. Apart from Bolten, there is another Jewish cabinet member, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and there are other Jewish senior staff members, including Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and White House staffer Jay Lefkowitz. . . . In the past year, several Jews who were holding senior posts in the administration have left, among them deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz, undersecretary of defense Doug Feith, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby [who were largely responsible for talking the dimwitted Bush into attacking Iraq] and political adviser Ken Mehlman, who now heads the Republican National Committee. . . . Neusner recalled that in the Bush White House there was always great respect for religious practices of the staffers and predicted that this policy would remain now that Bolten is running its daily operations. . . . One tradition likely to go on [in the White House] is the reading of the Purim megilla led by Chabad Rabbi Levi Shemtov, which attracts many of the Jewish staffers. . . . The relatively small number of Jews in Bush's cabinet became an issue largely due to the comparison with his predecessor, Bill Clinton. The former administration had such Jewish cabinet members as Robert Reich, Robert Rubin, Sandy Berger, Lawrence Summers and Madeline Albright and State Department officials Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk and Aaron Miller.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 4:42 AM

 

Bush Junta Planing to Begin World War III
(Andrew Stephen, New Statesman, 17 April 2006 )
There will be an attack; that much is already assumed in Washington. Whether it should be nuclear is a matter of intense debate. The verdict may depend upon the wild card of the president's Messianic "To me it would be a worse crime to stay silent if telling the truth could prevent war." . . . So the Third World War is imminent and the madman in the White House bunker is about to nuke Iran. . . . Washington is already working from the assumption that the US will launch some form of conventional-weapon attack on Iran during this presidency. That much is not news here. . . . Nuclear weapons, however, are another matter. Whether they might be used against Iran is a critical issue in the struggle under way between foreign-policy pragmatists and ideological zealots. Washington is divided between these two camps, of which the former is by far the bigger. It consists of sensible people inside the administration itself, the State Department, CIA, Pentagon and the powerful think-tanks, and its numbers are growing exponentially as the president's incompetence becomes undeniable to all but the most fanatical. . . . The second Washington faction is tiny, but unstable and dangerous. It consists of a tiny handful of people. . . . Bush, Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, attended by a dwindling band of neoconservatives, sit in their bunker, increasingly detached from reality, still insisting on viewing the world and plotting its course as they choose to do, unhindered by inconvenient realities. . . . The first faction overwhelmingly agrees with the British, French and German view that Iran must be isolated diplomatically rather than militarily, and it is solidly behind the tough UN Security Council statement of 29 March on Iran. Its members are terrified, however, that in the meantime the madmen in the bunker will lose it completely. . . . There are many, including people at the United Nations, who believe that Bush can and will press the nuclear button. Yet a clear majority in Washington believes that an all-powerful establishment, from the might of the top brass at the Pentagon to the consensus wisdom of practically every senior politician, will prevail against even an out-of-control president. . . . Disinformation from Mossad fuelled the US neo-cons' miscalculations over Iraq, and Israel has a clear interest in persuading Bush to strike first against a country that threatens to be a nuclear rival in the Middle East. It could be provoking the ideological struggle in Washington in the hope that the publicity itself might prove self-fulfilling. . . . Then I asked a former senior nuclear strategist with Nato about the practicalities of the US launching nuclear strikes against 400 separate sites, most of them underground, in Iran. His answer was blunt. "The only nuclear weapon that might penetrate a little before exploding is the B-61 bomb," he said. "If you penetrate a bunker, you create a Chernobyl. The fallout would spread all over the Middle East and who knows where else." There were too many targets, the Shias and Hezbollah would make Iraq even more hellish than it is, and the price of oil would immediately rise to more than $100 a barrel. . . . the Bush administration's denials over Iran sound horribly like its pre-2003 denials over Iraq. There are midterm elections coming up in November, he noted, and, although not all military men are right-wing hawks, not by any means, "Bush is a jackass who needs to prove his manhood". . . . Here we come full circle, back to the struggle being fought in Washington. The dominant view, including from the Pentagon, is that nuclear strikes against Iran would be disastrous, militarily and politically. Yet there remains the terrifying wild card of what Hersh so rightly calls Bush's Messianic complex.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 6:30 AM

 

Bush Is Planning Another War - Nuclear Attack on Iran Scheduled Before U.S. Elections
(Seymour Hersch, The New Yorker, April 10, 2006)
[NOTE: The following is only a very brief summary of a long and very detailed article by Seymour Hersch. Click on the link above to read the complete story.]

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. . . . American and European intelligence agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.), agree that Iran is intent on developing the capability to produce nuclear weapons. But there are widely differing estimates of how long that will take, and whether diplomacy, sanctions, or military action is the best way to prevent it. . . . There is a growing conviction among members of the United States military, and in the international community, that President Bush's ultimate goal in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change. Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has challenged the reality of the Holocaust and said that Israel must be "wiped off the map." [COMMENT by Lorenzo: So it looks like once again the Bush Crime Family involves the U.S. in a war to protect their Israeli interests.] . . . A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was "absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb" if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do "what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do," and "that saving Iran is going to be his legacy." [COMMENT by Lorenzo: WOW! This insane monster in the White House is now about to drag the world into a nuclear war. I can't believe no one in the Pentagon has the courage to come to the aid of the American People and stop this maddness.] . . . One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that "a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." He added, "I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, 'What are they smoking?' " . . . "People think Bush has been focussed on Saddam Hussein since 9/11," but, "in my view, if you had to name one nation that was his focus all the way along, it was Iran." . . . "This is much more than a nuclear issue," one high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna. "That's just a rallying point, and there is still time to fix it. But the Administration believes it cannot be fixed unless they control the hearts and minds of Iran. The real issue is who is going to control the Middle East and its oil in the next ten years." . . . A senior Pentagon adviser on the war on terror expressed a similar view. "This White House believes that the only way to solve the problem is to change the power structure in Iran, and that means war," he said. The danger, he said, was that "it also reinforces the belief inside Iran that the only way to defend the country is to have a nuclear capability." A military conflict that destabilized the region could also increase the risk of terror: "Hezbollah comes into play," the adviser said, referring to the terror group that is considered one of the world's most successful, and which is now a Lebanese political party with strong ties to Iran. "And here comes Al Qaeda." . . . In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress . . . The House member said that no one in the meetings "is really objecting" to the talk of war. "The people they're briefing are the same ones who led the charge on Iraq. At most, questions are raised: How are you going to hit all the sites at once? How are you going to get deep enough?" (Iran is building facilities underground.) "There's no pressure from Congress" not to take military action, the House member added. "The only political pressure is from the guys who want to do it." Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, “The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision." . . . Some operations, apparently aimed in part at intimidating Iran, are already under way. American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions, rapid ascending maneuvers known as "over the shoulder" bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars. . . . "Nuclear planners go through extensive training and learn the technical details of damage and fallout—we're talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years. This is not an underground nuclear test, where all you see is the earth raised a little bit. These politicians don't have a clue, and whenever anybody tries to get it out" - remove the nuclear option — "they’re shouted down." . . . The attention given to the nuclear option has created serious misgivings inside the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he added, and some officers have talked about resigning. Late this winter, the Joint Chiefs of Staff sought to remove the nuclear option from the evolving war plans for Iran—without success, the former intelligence official said. "The White House said, 'Why are you challenging this? The option came from you.' " . . . The Pentagon adviser on the war on terror confirmed that some in the Administration were looking seriously at this option, which he linked to a resurgence of interest in tactical nuclear weapons among Pentagon civilians and in policy circles. He called it "a juggernaut that has to be stopped." He also confirmed that some senior officers and officials were considering resigning over the issue. "There are very strong sentiments within the military against brandishing nuclear weapons against other countries," the adviser told me. "This goes to high levels." The matter may soon reach a decisive point, he said, because the Joint Chiefs had agreed to give President Bush a formal recommendation stating that they are strongly opposed to considering the nuclear option for Iran. "The internal debate on this has hardened in recent weeks," the adviser said. "And, if senior Pentagon officers express their opposition to the use of offensive nuclear weapons, then it will never happen." . . . The Pentagon adviser questioned the value of air strikes. "The Iranians have distributed their nuclear activity very well, and we have no clue where some of the key stuff is. It could even be out of the country,” he said. He warned, as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke "a chain reaction" of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: "What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?" . . . The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that "ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it's the way to operate" — that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives. . . . Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State in Bush’s first term, told me, "I think Iran has a secret nuclear-weapons program—I believe it, but I don’t know it." [COMMENT by Lorenzo: You remember Richard Armitage, don't you? He is named consistently by investigators as the man who helped the drug warlords market their crops beginning his dirty trade during the American war in Viet Nam.] . . . Joseph Cirincione, the director for nonproliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote, "The unfolding administration strategy appears to be an effort to repeat its successful campaign for the Iraq war." He noted several parallels: . . . . The vice president of the United States gives a major speech focused on the threat from an oil-rich nation in the Middle East. The U.S. Secretary of State tells Congress that the same nation is our most serious global challenge. The Secretary of Defense calls that nation the leading supporter of global terrorism. . . . Cirincione called some of the Administration's claims about Iran "questionable" or lacking in evidence. When I spoke to him, he asked, What do we know? What is the threat? The question is: How urgent is all this? . . . The threat of American military action has created dismay at the headquarters of the I.A.E.A., in Vienna. The agency's officials believe that Iran wants to be able to make a nuclear weapon, but "nobody has presented an inch of evidence of a parallel nuclear-weapons program in Iran," the high-ranking diplomat told me. The I.A.E.A.'s best estimate is that the Iranians are five years away from building a nuclear bomb. "But, if the United States does anything militarily, they will make the development of a bomb a matter of Iranian national pride," the diplomat said. "The whole issue is America's risk assessment of Iran’s future intentions, and they don't trust the regime. Iran is a menace to American policy." . . . at this point, "there’s nothing the Iranians could do that would result in a positive outcome. American diplomacy does not allow for it. Even if they announce a stoppage of enrichment, nobody will believe them. It's a dead end." . . . The Europeans are rattled, however, by their growing perception that President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney believe a bombing campaign will be needed, and that their real goal is regime change. "Everyone is on the same page about the Iranian bomb, but the United States wants regime change," a European diplomatic adviser told me. He added, "The Europeans have a role to play as long as they don't have to choose between going along with the Russians and the Chinese or going along with Washington on something they don't want. Their policy is to keep the Americans engaged in something the Europeans can live with. It may be untenable." . . . "The Brits think this is a very bad idea," Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council staff member who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center, told me, "but they’re really worried we're going to do it." . . . the British "are jumpy about the Americans going full bore on the Iranians, with no compromise." . . . Any American bombing attack, Richard Armitage told me, would have to consider the following questions: "What will happen in the other Islamic countries? What ability does Iran have to reach us and touch us globally—that is, terrorism? Will Syria and Lebanon up the pressure on Israel? What does the attack do to our already diminished international standing? And what does this mean for Russia, China, and the U.N. Security Council?" . . . one industry expert estimated that the price per barrel would immediately spike, to anywhere from ninety to a hundred dollars per barrel, and could go higher, depending on the duration and scope of the conflict. . . . Michel Samaha, a veteran Lebanese Christian politician and former cabinet minister in Beirut, told me that the Iranian retaliation might be focussed on exposed oil and gas fields in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. "They would be at risk," he said, "and this could begin the real jihad of Iran versus the West. You will have a messy world. . . . "The best terror network in the world has remained neutral in the terror war for the past several years," the Pentagon adviser on the war on terror said of Hezbollah. "This will mobilize them and put us up against the group that drove Israel out of southern Lebanon. If we move against Iran, Hezbollah will not sit on the sidelines. Unless the Israelis take them out, they will mobilize against us." (When I asked the government consultant about that possibility, he said that, if Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel, "Israel and the new Lebanese government will finish them off.") . . . "If we go, the southern half of Iraq will light up like a candle." The American, British, and other coalition forces in Iraq would be at greater risk of attack from Iranian troops or from Shiite militias operating on instructions from Iran. (Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, has close ties to the leading Shiite parties in Iraq.) A retired four-star general told me that, despite the eight thousand British troops in the region, "the Iranians could take Basra with ten mullahs and one sound truck." . . . "If you attack," the high-ranking diplomat told me in Vienna, "Ahmadinejad will be the new Saddam Hussein of the Arab world, but with more credibility and more power. You must bite the bullet and sit down with the Iranians." . . . The diplomat went on, "There are people in Washington who would be unhappy if we found a solution. They are still banking on isolation and regime change. This is wishful thinking." He added, "The window of opportunity is now."

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 5:38 AM

 

Bush orders large-scale nuclear bomb production restarted
(Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2006)
The Bush administration Wednesday unveiled a blueprint for rebuilding the nation's decrepit nuclear weapons complex, including restoration of a large-scale bomb manufacturing capacity. . . . The plan calls for the most sweeping realignment and modernization of the nation's massive system of laboratories and factories for nuclear bombs since the end of the Cold War. . . . Until now, the nation has depended on carefully maintaining aging bombs produced during the Cold War arms race, some several decades old. The administration, however, wants the capability to turn out 125 new nuclear bombs per year by 2022, as the Pentagon retires older bombs that it says will no longer be reliable or safe. . . . Under the plan, all of the nation's plutonium would be consolidated into a single facility that could be more effectively and cheaply defended against possible terrorist attacks. The plan would remove the plutonium kept at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory by 2014, though transfers of the material could start sooner. In recent years, concern has grown that Livermore, surrounded by residential neighborhoods in the Bay Area, could not repel a terrorist attack. . . . But the administration blueprint is facing sharp criticism, both from those who say it does not move fast enough to consolidate plutonium stores and from those who say restarting bomb production would encourage aspiring nuclear powers across the globe to develop weapons. . . . The plan was outlined to Congress on Wednesday by Thomas D'Agostino, head of nuclear weapons programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department. Though the weapons proposal would restore the capacity to make new bombs, D'Agostino said it was part of a larger effort to accelerate the dismantling of aging bombs left from the Cold War. . . . D'Agostino acknowledged in an interview that the administration was walking a fine line by modernizing the U.S. nuclear weapons program while assuring other nations that it was not seeking a new arms race. The credibility of the contention rests on the U.S. intent to sharply reduce its inventory of weapons. . . . The administration is also quickly moving ahead with a new nuclear bomb program known as the "reliable replacement warhead," which began last year. Originally described as an effort to update existing weapons and make them more reliable, it has been broadened and now includes the potential for new bomb designs. Weapons labs currently are engaged in a design competition. . . . The blueprint calls for a modern complex to design a new nuclear bomb and have it ready in less than four years, allowing the nation to respond to changing military requirements. Similar proposals in the past, such as for a nuclear bomb to attack underground bunkers, provoked concern that they undermined U.S. policy to stop nuclear proliferation.

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 9:50 AM

 

Argentina and Uruguay shun U.S. terrorist training camp
(Duncan Campbell, The Guardian, April 6, 2006)
Two Latin American countries are to stop sending troops for training to a controversial military academy in the US. . . . The move was welcomed by groups that have been campaigning against the academy since it was accused, in its previous incarnation, of training Latin American soldiers in illegal interrogation [i.e., TORTURE] techniques. . . . The defence ministers of Argentina and Uruguay have decided to stop sending soldiers to train at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Whinsec), the military academy based at Fort Benning, Georgia, . . . The institute, which is attended by between 700 and 1,000 students annually, replaced the School of the Americas (SOA) when the latter was closed in 2000. SOA became notorious when it emerged that some of its graduates had gone on to become brutal military leaders in Latin America's "dirty wars" using SOA manuals. . . . Graduates included the late Salvadoran rightwing militia leader Roberto D'Aubuisson, known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his interrogation methods; Efraín Ríos Montt, later accused of genocide in Guatemala; Leopoldo Galtieri, the late Argentinian junta leader jailed for human rights abuses, and Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian leader now serving 40 years for drugs offences in the US. . . . In 2001, following a long campaign against it, the school was officially closed and Whinsec was created. SOA Watch argue that, despite the changes, it should still be closed. . . . "To Latin Americans, the SOA/Whinsec represents nothing but the gravest violations," said Mr Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch. "No amount of reforms will repair those relationships. We must close this school if we want to show that the United States is serious about human rights." . . . The two countries join Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chávez, ended his country's involvement with the school in January 2004. Currently, Colombia has the highest number of students enrolled there.

ALSO SEE:
Latin America hears the message: 'Close the School of the Americas!'

Bolivia to Gradually Close SOA

. . . Read more!


posted by LoZo 1:26 PM