Found a few good things you can read for free online. Sometimes it’s hard to find good stuff.
Rall makes a good case for trying Bush as an attempted murderer for the CIA’s assassination attempt of an alleged rival of Hamid Karzai. You really should read the whole thing yourself. It’s priceless. Here’s a good piece of it:
You and I, faced with such information, might have had Hekmatyar picked up for questioning. We might put him and his pals on trial for conspiracy and, if he were found guilty, thrown in prison. But the guys in the White House aren’t like us. They’re gangsters. Gangsters are above the law. Gangsters don’t bother with judges and juries. They pay off judges; they have their enemies whacked.
And so your illegitimate gangster government, less than a month after it attempted to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Venezuela, sent up one of those unmanned Predator drone planes. Some dude punched a button on an iMac at an undisclosed location in the Virginia suburbs and fired a Hellfire missile at Hekmatyar’s car convoy on a road just outside Kabul. “I believe some others were killed in the strike, but the target escaped,” an unnamed U.S. official told Reuters. Hekmatyar’s spokesman and son-in-law Ghairat Baheer in Islamabad said: “He is in Afghanistan…but there was no attack.”
Experts speculate that the missile hit a group of cars that had nothing to do with Hekmatyar.
Have you ever noticed how government sources are all anonymous these days? I think it is a calculated decision so that people cannot follow up with further questions to said sources. I don’t think Rall goes far enough. I think there is enough evidence from many things that Bush has done (ie. executing people, killing innocents, graft, corruption, election fraud, assassination) to have him tried for murder or worse.
We bomb your people, depose your government, set up our guy Karzai, and then we build our pipeline. What, you thought this was about Bin Laden and the Taliban? Go back to sleep.
Unocal – which led a consortium of companies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Japan and South Korea – has maintained the project is both economically and technically feasible once Afghan stability was secured.
This article fails to mention that Karzai, the puppet leader of Afghanistan, is a former employee of Unocal. And when Unocal uses the word ‘stability’ they mean once the US has crushed all opposition to Karzai. Earlier this week, the CIA admitted to trying to assassinate one of Karzai’s rivals who supported the US against the Taliban.
You can read the entire book about Richard Stallman and the free software/GNU-LINUX movement online. Now put that wallet away!
DOCUMENTS FROM NAFTA’S SECRET TRIBUNALS from the National Security Archives
The PBS documentary Bill Moyers Reports: Trading Democracy, which premieres tonight, February 5, at 10 p.m. Eastern time (local times may vary) exposes an obscure provision of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that has given multinational corporations the power to demand compensation if a law of any one of the three NAFTA countries – the United States, Mexico or Canada – threatens their potential profits. Laws designed to protect the environment or public health, the decisions of states or local communities – even jury verdicts – can prompt a corporation to file a lawsuit. But instead of bringing claims through the court system, these NAFTA Chapter 11 cases are heard by trade tribunals that meet in secret, without public participation or oversight. And although the rulings can mandate millions of tax dollars in compensatory payments, NAFTA makes no provision for a full appeal to US courts – and sets no caps on the amount of damages that can be awarded.
I can’t wait for this movie to come out. Watch the first trailer here.
I really enjoyed reading this article in the Washington Post on the frustrations that American soldiers are experiencing trying to fight Afghan guerrillas. These well-fed, kevlar-wearing American soldiers sound like a bunch of spoiled crybabies. It really tickled the funny bone to hear them cuss and complain about ‘adversaries’ who don’t wear uniforms and pesky ‘rules of engagement’ that prevent them from shooting whoever they like.
The soldiers demonstrated the casual racism and hatred common to the US military by reducing the Afghan people to ‘Habibs’ as they quaintly call them. This is the ‘gook’ or ‘jap’ of the new conflict.
I enjoyed hearing how stupid most of our hired killers are. It confirms personal experience. I know that with people like this there is hope for a future without American military oppression because despite the overwhelming technological and financial advantages of the US in the end decisions will be made by macho morons like these.
Then he posed the ultimate question to the group. “When have we completed our mission in Afghanistan?”
No one had an answer.
I can’t believe I waste my taxes on crap like this. We need to have the military building roads or doing something useful.
Watch the Greg Palast BBC video exposing the US participation in the US coup. This video is staggering. The evidence is coming out that the US directly aided the Venezuelan plotters. The US funded assassination plots against Chavez by Colombian paramilitaries, the US military assisted by jamming cell phone communications, and used surveillance to track Chavez’s movements. Remember Venezuela is the LARGEST exporter of oil to the United States.
I haven’t been doing a good job of keeping up with the US-led Venezuelan coup. Then the other day Heather sent me a great link to a story in the Guardian by investigative journalist Greg Palast which had some information I had never heard about. Evidently, the secretary general of Opec, Venezuelan Ali Rodriguez, had advanced warning of the American coup attempt which allowed Chavez and his allies to take measures against it. This is amazing!
It was Venezuela which shattered the oil embargo of 1973 by replacing Arab oil with its own huge reserves.
The warning – revealed by a Newsnight investigation to be shown on BBC2 tonight – explains the swift and safe return of Mr Chavez to power within two days of his April 12 capture by military officers under the direction of the coup leader, Pedro Carmona.
Until now, it was unclear why Mr Carmona – who had declared himself president – and the military chiefs who backed the coup surrendered without firing a shot.
The answer to the mystery, Newsnight was told by a Chavez insider, is that several hundred pro-Chavez troops were hidden in secret corridors under Miraflores, the presidential palace.
Juan Barreto, a leader of Mr Chavez’s party in the national assembly, was with Mr Chavez when he was under siege.
Mr Barreto said that Jose Baduel, chief of the paratroop division loyal to Mr Chavez, had waited until Mr Carmona was inside Miraflores.
Mr Baduel then phoned Mr Carmona to tell him that, with troops virtually under his chair, he was as much a hostage as Mr Chavez. He gave Mr Carmona 24 hours to return Mr Chavez alive.
Escape from Miraflores was impossible for Mr Carmona. The building was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of pro-Chavez demonstrators who, alerted by a sympathetic foreign affairs minister, had marched on it from the Ranchos, the poorest barrios.
Mr Chavez told Newsnight that, after receiving the warning from Opec, he had hoped to stave off the coup entirely by issuing a statement to mollify the Bush adminstration. He pledged that Venezuela would neither join nor tolerate a renewed oil embargo.
But Mr Chavez had already incurred America’s wrath by slashing Venezuelan oil output and rebuilding Opec, causing oil prices to nearly double to over $20 a barrel.
His opponents had made it clear that they would not abide by Opec production limits and would reverse his plan to double the royalties charged to foreign oil companies in Venezuela, principally the US petroleum giant Exxon-Mobil. The US government’s panic over the calls for an oil embargo, made public by Iraq and Libya on April 8 and 9, also explains what Venezuelans see as the state department’s ill-concealed and clumsy support for the coup attempt.
Mr Chavez told Newsnight: “I have written proof of the time of the entries and exits of two US military officers into the headquarters of the coup plotters – their names, whom they met with, what they said – proof on video and on still photographs.”
Last month the Guardian reported a former US intelligence officer’s claims that the US had been considering a coup to overthrow the Venezuelan president for nearly a year.