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Obama might send troops into Pakistan
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer Wed
Aug 1, 8:22 AM ET

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists, an attempt to show strength when his chief rival has described his foreign policy skills as naive.


(Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.,
speaks during a town hall meeting, Monday, July..)

The Illinois senator warned Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that he must do more to shut down terrorist operations in his country and evict foreign fighters under an Obama presidency, or Pakistan will risk a U.S. troop invasion and losing hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

"Let me make this clear," Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

The excerpts were provided by the Obama campaign in advance of the speech.

Obama's speech comes the week after his rivalry with New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton erupted into a public fight over their diplomatic intentions.

Obama said he would be willing to meet leaders of rogue states like Cuba, North Korea and Iran without conditions, an idea that Clinton criticized as irresponsible and naive. Obama responded by using the same words to describe Clinton's vote to authorize the Iraq war and called her "Bush-Cheney lite."

The speech was a condemnation of President Bush's leadership in the war on terror. He said the focus on Iraq has left Americans in more danger than before Sept. 11, 2001, and that Bush has misrepresented the enemy as Iraqis who are fighting a civil war instead of the terrorists responsible for the attacks six years ago.

"He confuses our mission," Obama said, then he spread responsibility to lawmakers like Clinton who voted for the invasion. "By refusing to end the war in Iraq, President Bush is giving the terrorists what they really want, and what the Congress voted to give them in 2002: a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences."

Obama said that as commander in chief he would remove troops from Iraq and putting them "on the right battlefield in Afghanistan and Pakistan." He said he would send at least two more brigades to Afghanistan and increase nonmilitary aid to the country by $1 billion.

He also said he would create a three-year, $5 billion program to share intelligence with allies worldwide to take out terrorist networks from Indonesia to Africa.
http://tinyurl.com/2ordqa

McKinney Sues Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Corporate Plan to Crush Black Resistance
August 1, 2007
By GLEN FORD

In a suit filed in Georgia state court, former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney charges the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and its parent company, Cox Enterprises, a multi-national corporation, with waging a libelous, defamatory and malicious vendetta resulting in the loss of her congressional seat, last year.

The case is a window - albeit a narrow, legal one - on the general corporate campaign to penetrate and reshape black politics in the United States, to impose a docile class of corporate-friendly black "leaders." The corporate press is key to accomplishing the coup.

At the core of the suit is Cynthia Tucker, the black editor of the AJC's editorial page, who has for years been incapable of uttering McKinney's name without sneering. Tucker, depicted McKinney's March, 2006, encounter with a Capitol Hill policeman as an unprovoked assault, pure and simple. "She slugged him with her telephone," wrote Tucker, in a column that appeared barely a week before McKinney faced challenger Hank Johnson, the favorite of most whites and the corporate establishment, in a Democratic primary runoff. Tucker "tried to spin this incident into a felony," said McKinney, in her suit. "This false and libelous allegation is not supported by any witness or other evidence." McKinney was never indicted for any crime, and says the incident was the result of racial and political harassment by the Capitol Police.

Tucker made McKinney's defeat a priority project. "Tucker falsely attempted to attribute what she interprets as anti-Semitic statements by Cynthia McKinney's father by stating that ‘her father, [is] a spokesman for the campaign,'" the suit states. "Her father was not a spokesman for the campaign or for her."

McKinney has long been targeted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for her failure to tow the Israeli line in Congress. Although McKinney's father, a former Atlanta police officer and state lawmaker, has indeed made indiscreet comments, no one has ever claimed Rep. McKinney has uttered anything that could remotely be deemed anti-Semitic. "The attempted attribution was false, defamatory and libelous," states her legal brief.

McKinney labels as "malicious" Tucker's repetitive assertions that "She suggested that President Bush had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks but did nothing to stop them so his friends could profit from the ensuing war." That's not what McKinney said, back in the Spring of 2002, and her questioning of the conduct and motives of the Bush regime have since proved prescient.

Cox Enterprises' Atlanta radio outlet, WSB, carried attacks on McKinney. She looks like a "ghetto slut," shrieked talk show personality Neal Boortz - a "slander," according to McKinney's suit.

Cox did nothing to rein in their radio personality, and Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for her columns, including the one that savaged McKinney. A Cox spokesman called McKinney's suit "preposterous."

Newspaper as Serial Liar

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution worked in tandem with corporate money and AIPAC to first unseat Cynthia McKinney in the 2002 Democratic primary election. The paper, like its corporate siblings across the nation, was anxious to prove that a political sea change had occurred in Black America. Gone were the days of "civil rights-style" rhetoric and confrontation - or so the theory went. Middle class African Americans like those in McKinney's district, centered in Dekalb County, the second most affluent Black majority county in the nation, were becoming more conservative, it was said. According to the new paradigm the Cynthia McKinneys of Black America are passé, and no longer appeal to an upwardly mobile class of African American voters. Dekalb County would tell the tale.

While AIPAC and corporate donors stuffed the coffers of black challenger Denise Majette - a former Republican and protégé of pro-Republican Democratic Senator Zell Miller - the Atlanta Journal Constitution provided Majette with free publicity and attack-dog services. Cynthia Tucker led the local and national corporate media pack, intent on making a fait accompli of their own analysis, that blacks were sliding to the Right. Tens of thousands of white Republicans prepared to cross over to vote as Democrats in the "open primary," eager to put the uppity McKinney in her place. Majette outspent the McKinney by 40 per cent.

Majette won. Corporate media rejoiced, nationwide. As their local representative, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claimed to conduct a study that showed Majette had assembled a "biracial coalition of voters" to win victory, ushering in a new age of "centrist" black politics. The prophecy had been fulfilled.
Bruce Dixon, now Black Agenda Report's managing editor, did his own study of the election data and found that Majette could not have won more than 19 percent of the Black vote. The key to Majette's victory was an abnormally high white turnout, 90 percent of which she won. Majette was not the Great Black Centrist Hope - she was the white candidate, and the black community had overwhelmingly supported McKinney. There was no history-shaking "split" among blacks in relatively affluent Dekalb County; it was a fiction.

More than half a year after Dixon proved that the Atlanta Journal Constitution's "study" was bogus, the paper's own favorite political scientist and quote-man, University of Georgia Prof. Charles Bullock, declared Majette's "bi-racial coalition" a myth. His research showed Majette garnered no more than 17 percent of the black vote. "What Majette needs to be doing is getting out, courting in the black community, trying to broaden her coalition because she did so poorly in her community," wrote Prof. Bullock.

What Majette did was get out of the district, embarking on a Quixotic, hopeless quest for Zell Miller's vacating senate seat. With no time for AIPAC, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and corporate capital to vet a Designated Negro of their own, Cynthia McKinney won her seat back in 2004.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found defamatory manna from heaven in the last year of McKinney's term, when a Capitol Hill policeman confronted her as she attempted to do the people's work. We commend Cynthia McKinney for challenging Tucker and the Cox corporate giant that is Tucker's only backbone, in court, while fully understanding that the chances of judicial success are slim. If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars or bankrupted. McKinney is putting their crimes against truth on the record, and we salute her.

The assaults against McKinney's character and seven-term career are but one skirmish in a nationwide corporate offensive that was sketched out by rightwing strategists in the mid-Nineties and fully implemented in the early years of the Bush regime. For the first time, corporate American would make a concerted and coordinated effort to cleanse the African American polity of what remained of the Black Freedom Movement. The year 2002 was their D-Day for invasion of black politics. They came strapped with millions in cash, and the supporting artillery of corporate media.

The first target was Newark, New Jersey, where the hard right Bradley Foundation’s black acolyte Cory Booker, a 31-year-old second term city councilman and private school voucher advocate, raised millions in his mayoral campaign and won endorsements from every New York region corporate media outlet, thanks to the skills of the Bradley-funded Manhattan Institute. I am proud to say that my research and writings, exposing him as a Trojan Horse for the Right, forestalled Booker's ascension to City Hall for four years. Booker was beaten, but remained on the A-list of corporate-designated "new black leaders" until he finally won the mayor's office in 2006.

The corporate juggernaut rolled on, in 2002, vastly overspending (by 60 percent) and ousting Black Alabama Congressman Earl Hilliard, who had resisted the pro-Israel lobby and corporate demands. He was replaced by the pliant but deviously skilled Artur Davis. Then it was Cynthia McKinney's turn, later that summer.

At the end of the 2002 offensive, the corporate blitzkrieg had installed Artur Davis, Denise Majette, and an obscure new congressman from the Atlanta-area, David Scott, in the Congressional Black Caucus. They joined Columbus, Georgia's Sanford Bishop and the rapidly Right-rushing Harold Ford, Jr. (TN) to form a corporate faction within the Caucus, along with Maryland's Albert Wynn and shaky members who trembled whenever the winds blew rightward. The Congressional Black Caucus was finished as a coherent political force on Capitol Hill, unable to resist corporate capital as represented in its own ranks.

The black masses have not undergone any political sea change; they have simply been abandoned by their representatives, who have been suborned or terrorized by money and concentrated media and lobby power. Corporations have embraced "diversity" as a weapon. About a decade ago, they realized that their vast wealth empowered them to create an alternative black political structure, and that there were plenty of black opportunists eager to be recruited. At this point, corporate victory is all but complete, having neutered black electoral and traditional institutions in lightning speed.

The disaster puts in graphic relief the failures of legal strategies, which are so narrow that nine people on the Supreme Court can thwart the will of 40 million African Americans, and the impotence of conventional electoral strategies, which are negated in Dekalb County, Georgia, and everywhere else in the nation through sheer force of money.

There is no substitute for a mass movement in opposition to the cages that capital erects around us. Cynthia McKinney represents the overwhelming majority of black people in her district. They are inspired by her courage and defiance of Power - and are no different than African Americans, everywhere. The corporate project uses its media to invent a fantasy black polity, and then deploys its media muscle and money to make it so. Some of us believe the constantly repeated lie. If it goes unchallenged long enough, it becomes a received truth - and progressive politics, with its base in black America, will be over.

African Americans must press for self-determination, not mitigated by money or the power of white voter "democracy" - a democracy from Hell, as we have known throughout our entire sojourn on this continent. Only WE affirm ourselves, not corporate media, not the millions that Barack Obama gathers from his rich friends. But that means we must organize. It is a lifelong project, as it was for our ancestors.
http://tinyurl.com/2gjbbb

Britain’s Gordon Brown becomes patron of Zionist agency
By Redress Information & Analysis
28 July 2007

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has agreed to become patron of the UK arm of the Jewish National Fund, whose funds have contributed to Israeli ethnic cleansing, the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expropriation of Palestinian land, and whose constitution requires it to promote and implement policies that discriminate against Israel’s Arab population.

Gordon Brown has crossed a new threshold on the path to becoming a fully-fledged Zionist.

According to a report in the Jewish Chronicle, Gordon Brown has agreed to become a patron of the British arm of the Jewish National Fund (JNF UK) “following an invitation from JNF UK President Gail Seal, who wrote conveying her good wishes the day after he took office”.

In a letter to Gail Seal, Gordon Brown said that he was “delighted to accept your offer to become a patron of JNF UK”. A spokesman for Brown confirmed that the British prime minister had “agreed to become a patron of JNF UK”, and that he had done so “in order to encourage their work to promote charitable projects for everyone who lives in Israel”.

In fact, far from being “a charity” that benefits “everyone who lives in Israel”, the JNF is a principal tool of Israel's discriminatory system of land administration. Founded in 1901 to help establish a Jews-only state in the Arab country of Palestine, the JNF’s constitution requires it to benefit Jews exclusively. It therefore promotes and implements policies that discriminate against the Arab population of Israel.

The JNF is also guilty of ethnic cleansing, the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expropriation of Palestinian land. According to PalestineRemembered.com, in its operation in Israel, the JNF has

expropriated illegally most of the land of 372 Palestinian villages which had been ethnically cleansed by Zionist forces in 1948. The owners of this land are over half the UN-registered Palestinian refugees. The JNF had actively participated in the physical destruction of many villages, in evacuating these villages of their inhabitants and in military operations to conquer these villages. Today, the JNF controls over 2500 sq. km of Palestinian land which it leases to Jews only. It also planted 100 parks on Palestinian land.

In addition, the JNF has a long record of discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel as reported by the UN. The JNF also extends its operations by proxy or directly to the occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. All this is in clear violation of international law and particularly the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the confiscation of property and settling the occupiers' citizens in occupied territories. Ethnic cleansing, expropriation of property and destruction of houses are war crimes. As well, use of tax-exempt donations in these activities violates the domestic law in many countries where JNF is domiciled.

Since becoming prime minister at the end of June 2007, Gordon Brown has appointed several Israel apologists to key positions in the British government. He has also been at pain to stress his Christian Zionist credentials.

As patron of JNF UK, Gordon Brown will join a club that includes prominent British politicians and religious figures who, on the one hand, speak of the need for peace and justice in the Middle East while, on the other, promote and defend the racist Jews-only state of Israel. They include Tony Blair, Conservative leader David Cameron and Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who is said to be a close friend of Brown.
http://tinyurl.com/2avawh

Will Bush cancel the 2008 election?
By Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis
Online Journal Guest Writers
Aug 1, 2007, 01:11

It is time to think about the "unthinkable."

The Bush administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.

The GOP strategy for another electoral theft in 2008 has taken clear shape, though we must assume there is much more we don't know.

But we must also assume that if it appears to Team Bush/Cheney/Rove that the GOP will lose the 2008 election anyway (as it lost in Ohio 2006), we cannot ignore the possibility that they would simply cancel the election. Those who think this crew will quietly walk away from power are simply not paying attention.

The real question is not how or when they might do it. It's how, realistically, we can stop them.

In Florida 2000, Team Bush had a game plan involving a handful of tactics. With Jeb Bush in the governor's mansion, the GOP used a combination of disenfranchisement, intimidation, faulty ballots, electronic voting fraud, a rigged vote count and an aborted recount, courtesy of the US Supreme Court.

A compliant Democrat (Al Gore) allowed the coup to be completed.

In Ohio 2004, the arsenal of dirty tricks exploded. Based in Columbus, we have documented more than a hundred different tactics used to steal the 20 electoral votes that gave Bush a second term. More are still surfacing. As a result of the King-Lincoln-Bronzeville federal lawsuit (in which we are plaintiff and attorney) we have now been informed that 56 of the 88 counties in Ohio violated federal law by destroying election records, thus preventing a definitive historical recount.

As in 2000, a compliant Democrat (John Kerry) allowed the coup to proceed.

For 2008 we expect the list of vote theft maneuvers to escalate yet again. We are already witnessing a coordinated nationwide drive to destroy voter registration organizations and to disenfranchise millions of minority, poor and young voters.

This carefully choreographed campaign is complemented by the widespread use of electronic voting machines. As reported by the Government Accountability Office, Princeton University, the Brennan Center, the Carter-Baker Commission, US Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and others, these machines can be easily used to flip an election. They were integral to stealing both the 2000 and 2004 elections. Efforts to make their source codes transparent, or to require a usable paper trail on a federal level, have thus far failed. A discriminatory Voter ID requirement may also serve as the gateway to a national identification card.

Overall, the GOP will have at its command even more weapons of election theft in 2008 than it did in Ohio 2004, which jumped exponentially from Florida 2000. The Rovian GOP is nothing if not tightly organized to do this with ruthless efficiency. Expect everything that was used these past two presidential elections to surface again in 2008 in far more states, with far more efficiency, and many new dirty tricks added in.

But in Ohio 2006, the GOP learned a hard lesson. Its candidate for governor was J. Kenneth Blackwell. The secretary of state was the essential on-the-ground operative in the theft of Ohio 2004.

When he announced for governor, many Ohioans joked that "Ken Blackwell will never lose an election where he counts the votes."

But lose he did . . . along with the GOP candidates for secretary of state, attorney general and US Senate.

By our calculations, despite massive grassroots scrutiny, the Republicans stole in excess of 6 percent of the Ohio vote in 2006. But they still lost.

Why? Because they were so massively unpopular that even a 6 percent bump couldn't save them. Outgoing Governor Bob Taft, who pleaded guilty to four misdemeanors while in office, left town with a 7 percent approval rating (that's not a typo). Blackwell entered the last week of the campaign down 30 percent in some polls.

So while the GOP still had control of the electoral machinery here in 2006, the public tide against them was simply too great to hold back, even through the advanced art and science of modern Rovian election theft.

In traditional electoral terms, that may also be the case in 2008. Should things proceed as they are now, it's hard to imagine any Republican candidate going into the election within striking distance. The potential variations are many, but the graffiti on the wall is clear.

What's also clear is that this administration has a deep, profound and uncompromised contempt for democracy, for the rule of law, and for the US Constitution. When George W. Bush went on the record (twice) as saying he has nothing against dictatorship, as long as he can be dictator, it was a clear and present policy statement.

Who really believes this crew will walk quietly away from power? They have the motivation, the money and the method for doing away with the electoral process altogether. So why wouldn't they?

The groundwork for dismissal of both the legislative and judicial branch has been carefully laid. The litany is well-known, but worth a very partial listing:

The continuation of the drug war, and the USAPATRIOT Act, Homeland Security Act and other dictatorial laws prompted by the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, have decimated the Bill of Rights, and shredded the traditional American right to due process of law, freedom from official surveillance, arbitrary violence, and far more.

The current attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, has not backed away from his announcement to Congress that the Constitution does not guarantee habeas corpus. The administration continues to act on the assumption that it can arrest anyone at any time and hold them without notification or trial for as long as it wants.

The establishment of the Department of Homeland Security has given it additional hardware to decimate the basic human rights of our citizenry. Under the guise of dealing with the "immigration problem," large concentration camps are under construction around the US.

The administration has endorsed and is exercising its "right" to employ torture, contrary to the Eighth Amendment and to a wide range of international treaties, which Gonzales has labeled "quaint."

With more than 200 "signing statements," the administration acts on its belief that the "unitary executive" trumps the power of the legislative branch in any instance it chooses. This belief has been further enforced with the administration's use of a wide range of precedent-setting arguments to keep its functionaries from testifying before Congress.

There is much more. In all instances, the 109th Congress and the public have rolled over without significant resistance.

Most crucial now are Presidential Directive #51, Executive Orders #13303, #13315, #13350, #13364, #13422, #13438, and more, by which Bush has granted himself an immense arsenal of powers for which the term "dictatorial" is a modest understatement.

The framers established our government with checks and balances. But executive orders have accumulated important precedent. The Emancipation Proclamation, by which Lincoln declared an end to slavery in the South, was issued under the "military necessity" of adding blacks to the Union Army, a step without which the North might not have won the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt's Executive Order #8802 established the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Harry Truman's Executive Order #9981 desegregated the military.

More to the point, FDR's Executive Order #9066 ordered the forcible internment of 100,000 people of Japanese descent into the now infamous concentration camps of World War II.

There is also precedent for a president overriding the Supreme Court. In the 1830s, Chief Justice John Marshall enshrined the right of the Cherokee Nation to sovereignty over its ancestral land in the Appalachian Mountains. But President Andrew Jackson scorned the decision. Some 14,000 native Americans were moved at gunpoint to Oklahoma. More than 3,000 died along the way.

All this will be relevant should Team Bush envision a defeat in the 2008 election and decide to call it off. It's well established that Richard Nixon -- mentor to Karl Rove and Dick Cheney -- commissioned the Huston Plan, which detailed how to cancel the 1972 election.

Today we must ask: who would stop this administration from taking dictatorial power in the instance of a "national emergency" such as a terror attack at a nuclear power plant or something similar?

Nothing in the behavior of this Congress indicates that it is capable of significant resistance. Impeachment seems beyond it. Nor does it seem Congress would actually remove Bush if it did put him on trial.

Short of that, Bush clearly does not view anything Congress might do as a meaningful impediment. After all, how many divisions does the Congress command?

The Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would almost certainly rubber stamp a Bush coup. If not, like Jackson, he could ignore it as easily as he would ignore Congress.

What does that leave? There is much idle speculation now about what the armed forces would do. We also hear loose talk about "90 million gun owners."

From the public side, the only conceivable counterforce might be a national strike or an effective long-term campaign of general non-cooperation.

But we can certainly assume the mainstream media will give lockstep support to whatever the regime says and does. It's also a given that those likely to lead the resistance will immediately land in those new prisons being built by Halliburton et. al.

So how do we cope with the harsh realities of such a Bush/Cheney/Rove dictatorial coup?

We may have about a year to prepare. Every possible scenario needs to be discussed in excruciating detail.

For only one thing is certain: denial will do nothing.
http://tinyurl.com/yrqre7

Ex-CIA officer Slams US Allegations against Iran as Sham
US Creating False pretexts for Another War
Global Research, July 29, 2007

In an alarming exposure of the acceleration and urgency of the American war party's push towards catastrophic war with Iran, Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter terrorism officer, in an interview [1] on 24th July with Anti War Radio debunked the NeoCons' repeated myth of Iran's support for AlQaeda as a pretext for war. Whilst acknowledging Iran's helpfulness in trying to establish security in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Giraldi spoke of the United States' hypocritical and illegal support for terrorist separatists groups inside Iran, and various plans and scenarios which have been drawn up to destroy Iran's military and economic infrastructure by massive bombardment, with the use of nuclear bombs a real and stated possibility.

Giraldi refuted the assumption that sharing hostilities towards the US, placed Iran and AlQaeda in the same camp and sharing similar agenda, arguing that Iran followed a very different agenda in its dealings with the US. He emphasised both the fact of Iranians' helpfulness in Iraq, in terms of pushing for greater stability, and also their help and cooperation in Afghanistan, as well as the reality of the deep hostilities between Shiia Iran and Sunni extremism of AlQaeda. Giraldi recalled the major attack against the Iranian consulate general in Afghanistan by the Taliban, a close ally of AlQaeda, in which 11 Iranian diplomats were killed, and the regular AlQaeda violent attacks against Shiia population in Iraq, and concluded that a Shiia Iranian-AlQaeda alliance was not a plausible possibility.

He described the recent New York Sun's allegation [2] that AlQaeda prisoners in Iran led terrorist operations inside Iraq under the advice of the Iranian government, as one of many propaganda pieces making a case for war. He said how in 2003, the Iranian government, through the Swiss embassy, had offered to hand over the six AlQaeda prisoners kept in Iran, which includes Osama Bin Laden's son, in exchange for the US ceasing its support for the MEK, and how this offer was rejected by the US. He said of the MEK that it was sheltered and armed by Saddam against Iran, and now supported and armed by Pentagon against Iran.

Highlighting what he called American "ultimate hypocrisy", Giraldi explained how the US government is supporting terrorist groups and ethnic division in Iran and charging the Iranians in Iraq for what the US was doing in Iran itself and with a lot more evidence. Giraldi talked of US's support for Jundollah which he described as a Sunni Baluchi separatist group in eastern Iran that has launched deadly terrorist attacks inside Iran. He also spoke of US support for separatists amongst the Arab minority which is closer to the border with Iraq.

Giraldi repeated the alarm call he first made in his revelations in the American Conservative Magazine in 2005 that Dick Cheney, who has no authority under the constitution, had ordered the air force to draw up plans for air strike against Iran that even included the use of nuclear weapons. He said he thought there was a lot of evidence since then to suggest that nuclear weapons are still very much on the table and named Republican Senators such as McCain, Gilliani and Romney who had not "flinched at all" in the debate about the prospect of using nuclear weapons against Iran.

He spoke of various war scenarios cooked up by the war party. One scenario was of the automatic use of the nuclear weapons in order to reach and destroy the Iranian nuclear sites buried under ground. Another scenario was to use the nuclear threat if the "Iranians continue to fight back after we staged our attack", the idea being "that's what the nukes are for, our nukes that everybody knows that we in fact do have, is to tell them, listen, you are going to sit there and take it while we bomb you for a week or two and you are not going to fight back and if you do fight back then we will use nuclear weapons on you", and he cited the example scenario of Iranians resisting by staging attack in the Strait of Hormouz or destabilising Afghanistan.

Setting out the horrifying context of the possibility of the US using nuclear strikes against Iran, under the pretext of destroying Iranian nuclear bombs which do not exist and Iran's cooperation with AlQaeda, another propaganda fabrication, Giraldi drew attention to the recent warning to Iran and the threat of war issued by AlQaeda for Iran's support for the Shiia government in Iraq, as well as AlQaeda's constant horrific attacks inside Iraq targeting Shiia population and mosques.

Prof. Abbas Edalat of CASMII said today: "Giraldi's revelations is consistent with and confirms the emergence of a shift in the dynamics of the American foreign policy decision making away from dialogue and in favour of war. The reality of the shared strategic interests between Iran and the US in stabilising Iraq and the possibility and great benefits for both countries in reaching a rapprochement in their bilateral relationship, based on mutual respect and cooperation rather than threat and coercion, is persistently obscured and sabotaged by the fanatical warmongers of Cheney camp and the Israeli lobby, who are relentlessly pushing for war".

It is incumbent upon the media and journalists to give active voice to informed and conscientious individuals like Giraldi who have well-established connections within the intelligence community and are warning the international community about the impending catastrophic war against Iran.

For more information please contact CASMII or visit http://www.campaigniran.org

Notes
[1] http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2007/07/24/philip-giraldi-5/
[2] http://www.nysun.com/article/58599
http://tinyurl.com/33skd3

Kurdish gangs emerge in Nashville
By KRISTIN M. HALL, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jul 31, 1:44 PM ET

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A proud enclave of Kurds has lived in this city for decades, starting businesses and soccer leagues, holding down good jobs and blending into the immigrant neighborhoods south of town.

But now the Kurdish immigrant community has been shaken to see its young people joining a street gang that blends old-world customs and new-world thuggery. Police blame the gang for a string of rapes, assaults and home invasions.

The gang calls itself Kurdish Pride and is made up of 20 to 30 teenagers and young adults.

"We don't have the phenomenon anywhere else. This is a unique situation in Nashville," said Pary Karadaghi, president and chief executive of Kurdish Human Rights Watch, based in Fairfax, Va.

The gang members borrow from California gangster culture by adopting rap slang, scrawling "KP" graffiti on street signs, wearing gang colors and flashing hand signs in photos posted online.

They also put Kurdish flags on their cars, and use yellow — from the Kurdish Democratic Party banner — as their gang color. On their Web sites, they talk about Kurdish music and culture.

Unlike other gang members, most Kurdish Pride followers grew up in stable, working-class, two-parent homes, and many of their parents own successful businesses or work at universities, Nashville Detective Mark Anderson said.

The Kurds, most of whom are Sunni Muslim, come mainly from Turkey, Iraq and Iran but have their own language and culture. Kurdish immigrants have sought refuge in Nashville since the 1970s, creating the largest community of Kurds in an American city, with about 10,000 members, Karadaghi said. More Kurds fleeing persecution came to Nashville in the late '90s, and many attend the city's public schools.

Gang members say they formed Kurdish Pride in response to threats and harassment after the Sept. 11 attacks, Anderson said. But Anderson, who works their neighborhood, said he has never heard of any violence against the Kurds.

"They started out wanting to be a group of kids that would hang out and stick up for each other," Karadaghi said. "They feel they have to have a gang in order to survive."

At the Salahadeen Center, a mosque and community center, Ibrahim Ahmed says he is so worried about his son joining the gang that he is pulling him out of his public school.

"They say it's very hard. If you don't join them, they are not going to protect you," Ahmed said.

While the gang has been around since at least 2001, the intensity of its violence has escalated recently, Anderson said.

Nashville has seen a string of 10 home invasions targeting Hispanic immigrants since January. In one such case, a pregnant woman was raped by a group of attackers. Police charged a 17-year-old Kurd, Zana Noroly, with the rape, but he hanged himself in his jail cell before going to trial.

Last month police arrested four Kurdish Pride members on suspicion of trying to murder a park police officer who had stumbled upon a drug deal. One of them, Aso Nejad, 21, was already out on bail on charges he attacked a student at a high school graduation.

Members of the Kurdish community are hoping that summer school at a mosque and the recent start of a youth soccer group will keep others from joining the gang.

"We are not going to sit still and do nothing," said Kirmanj Gundi, a professor of educational administration at Tennessee State University. "They need to realize what they do is harming themselves and to a larger extent to the Kurdish community."

Karadaghi wants a discussion among Nashville police, school leaders and Kurds to try to figure out a solution.

"I'd be glad to talk to her," Anderson said.
http://tinyurl.com/2bsn7v