- A review of "The New Pearl Harbor" by David Ray Griffin
At the Cannes Film Festival last week, a predominantly American audience gave maverick film director Michael Moore a standing ovation for his controversial film, Fahrenheit 9/11. The movie, which won the coveted Palme D'Or, is a blistering critique of the Bush administration’s motives for the "war on terror," and even goes so far as to suggest that the Twin Tower atrocities provided a convenient mandate for America to invade Iraq.
.........British Cabinet Minister, the MP Michael Meacher, wrote the foreword of the book. In it he says: "Never in modern history has an event of such cataclysmic significance been shrouded in such mystery. So many of the key facts remain unexplained on any plausible basis, and so many of the key actors have put forward contradictory accounts only to be forced to retract or cover up later."

The first mistake, due to accident, miscalculation or poor judgement, madness, or intention, could be the last mistake the human race ever makes.

Shortly before 5pm yesterday the Australian Senate passed a motion put by Democrat Senator Lyn Alison recognising that on 26 September 1983, the world had come frighteningly close to nuclear annihilation. It was saved by the reluctance of duty officer Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet missile corps to press a flashing red button that would have initiated an automatic sequence that would have sent 15,000 warheads to incinerate the US and its allies.
This would most likely have ended civilisation and most life.

The Bush administration laid out its legal reasoning for denying terror war suspects the protections of international humanitarian law but immediately repudiated a key memo arguing that torture might be justified in the fight against al-Qaida.
The release Tuesday of hundreds of pages of internal memos by the White House was meant to blunt criticism that President Bush had laid the groundwork for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by condoning torture. The president insisted Tuesday: "I have never ordered torture."

"Instead of leading the world against the real threat of Iran's nuclear program, the president chose to lead America alone into the quicksand to counter the mirage of a threat in Iraq," Kennedy said in the remarks, prepared for a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
He said the administration's efforts to rid Iraq of a nuclear program it didn't have not only has destroyed U.S. credibility around the world, but has made al-Qaida terrorists more determined to launch a nuclear attack on America.

UN agency chief says reliance cripples push to halt proliferation
The world's nuclear powers have failed to reduce their reliance on atomic weapons, creating a double standard that plagues international efforts to reduce their spread, the United Nations top nuclear watchdog said yesterday.

...........In either case, both Bush and Cheney by their behavior have no claim to credibility on this purported connection between Saddam and 9/11 period, and it calls into question their credibility on 9/11 to begin with.

This LA Times article shows that the neocons and their policies have Bush's support. Their increasing influence and war plans may be only in the beginning. Another terrorist attack or other incident, may influence the electorate to re-elect Bush, if his PR crew and the media present it well.

George Bush's war imperils a cherished political tradition
There is a growing sense that Americans have become victims of September 11 in a way that has blinkered their democratic instincts.
So now the hard questions are being put in a pre-September 11 context. Would Americans ordinarily tolerate a president who lies and exaggerates? A leader who uses fear to manipulate his people to his own ends? A president whose staff blow the deep cover of a CIA agent as political payback? A president whose Administration channels billions of dollars to crony corporations on false pretexts? A president who deems torture acceptable?
Would they accept a president who seems to agree with his advisers that he is above the law?

George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard for War Crimes against humanity and the planet.
The indictment is to be held in Christchurch Cathedral Square on AUGUST 7, 2004 and around the world

Katherine van Wormer, Professor of Social Work at the University of Northern Iowa and co-author of 'Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective', argues that Bush can be understood as a "dry drunk": More Evidence that Bush Is a "Dry Drunk"?.

There's nothing cheap in Fahrenheit 9/11. This film goes for the jugular.
See also Comment on Fahrenheit 9/11 Review

America than if Saddam had stayed in power'
"Your government failed you," Mr Clarke told the hearing, turning to the relatives of those who died and who had come to Washington to hear his testimony. "Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter, because we failed."

"We just felt things were so serious, that America's leadership role in the world has been attenuated to such a terrible degree
by both the style and the substance of the administration's approach" William C Harrop, former US ambassador to Israel
WANTED FOR WAR CRIMES POSTER  AND a Tee-shirt plus all the details

"The Super-Watergate noose is tightening around the neck of the Cheney-Bush Administration, showing that Cheney & Co. are
guilty of crimes far worse than Richard Nixon ever dreamed of."
Look at some of the developments of the past 48 hours:

"Torture is only the tip of the iceberg," said Roger Normand, an international lawyer who directs the Center. "From unlawful killings, mass arrests, and collective punishment to outright theft and pillage, the U.S. is violating almost every law intended to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation."

....We are not talking the partisan frame-up of the Clinton impeachment era. We are talking about serious crimes and possible violations of the US Constitution that threaten the way the administration conducts our national business. These writers have been hearing behind the scenes rumbling about ticking time bombs that could bring down Bush before or (like Nixon) just after the presidential elections.

"This manipulation may serve the Administration's political interests," Waxman wrote in his May 17 letter to Powell, "but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report."

Everyone likes to say, "Hitler did this," and "Hitler did that." But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the death camps to WWII, was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who, because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster.

Howard Dean & The New York Times  Warn America To "Hold Up On E-Voting"
50 million American voters are scheduled to use electronic-voting machines during our upcoming general election.  Nevertheless, the USA's technopolistic faith in e-voting is being criticized worldwide because it's tantamount to wheeling a cybernetic Trojan horse through our city gates that will destroy our democracy while we slumber in indifference

President George W. Bush's increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader's state of mind.
In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as "enemies of the state."
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
"It reminds me of the Nixon days," says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. "Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That's the mood over there."

Howard Dean & The New York Times  Warn America To "Hold Up On E-Voting"
50 million American voters are scheduled to use electronic-voting machines during our upcoming general election.  Nevertheless, the USA's technopolistic faith in e-voting is being criticized worldwide because it's tantamount to wheeling a cybernetic Trojan horse through our city gates that will destroy our democracy while we slumber in indifference

On May 20, the Israeli Defense Forces brutally killed a number of Palestinian school children and wounded dozens of others peacefully demonstrating at the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The United Nations Security Council quickly passed a resolution condemning the action, urging Israel to stop demolishing Palestinian homes, and calling for an end to violence. While not vetoing the resolution, as it has done on past occasions, the U.S. abstained from the vote.

The times of ignorance are long past. The Nuremberg Trials were held 60 years ago, and mass murderers were declared war criminals and hanged.
An international citizens' tribunal comprised of distinguished law professors from around the world has recently declared Bush guilty of war crimes in Afghanistan, especially for the dispersion of depleted uranium.

For some time now, I have been searching for answers to a deeply perplexing question: Why is the United States promoting the spread of atomic bombs worldwide?
By "atomic bombs" I mean the kind that turned Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a fiery hell in 1945 -- A-bombs made from plutonium (Nagasaki) or "enriched" uranium (Hiroshima).

What is it going to take to get the people to rise up and demand Congress remove George W. Bush and his whole administration from power on charges of and conviction for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors?

The problem is that labeling and demonizing a people as evil is easy.
However, eliminating them after malicious classification is impossible.

The father of orphans and the defender of widows
is God in his holy dwelling.
God gives a home to the forsaken;
he leads forth prisoners to prosperity.
Psalm 67: 6-7
http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/052404.htm    Contrast this verse with the actions of Bush and Sharon.

Thousands at the White House will say: "Bush and Rumsfeld - Guilty of War Crimes"
"I plan to be in Washington DC on June 5 at the peace rally. We will be marching from Bush's White House to Rumsfeld's house and I am hoping that everyone who cares about peace in this country will join us."
- Michael Berg

President George Bush's bid to stop international action to combat global warming faces failure this weekend, as he is left more isolated than ever before both at home and abroad.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin - who will effectively decide whether the Kyoto Protocol stands or falls - announced on Friday that his country would "rapidly move towards ratification" in the wake of a complex deal with the European Union.

The diplomat who quit over Nixon's invasion of Cambodia asks Americans on the front lines of foreign service to resign from the "worst regime by far in the history of the republic."       . . . . .
Dear Trustees:
I am respectfully addressing you by your proper if little-used title. The women and men of our diplomatic corps and intelligence community are genuine trustees. With intellect and sensibility, character and courage, you represent America to the world. Equally important, you show the world to America. You hold in trust our role and reputation among nations, and ultimately our fate. Yours is the gravest, noblest responsibility. Never has the conscience you personify been more important.

The Bush Administration has not made it easy on its supporters. David Brooks now admits that he was gripped with a "childish fantasy" about Iraq. Tucker Carlson is "ashamed" and "enraged" at himself. Tom Friedman, admitting to being "a little slow," is finally off the reservation. Die-hard Republican publicist William Kristol admits of Bush, "He did drive us into a ditch." The neocon fantasist and sometime Republican speechwriter Mark Helprin complains on the Wall Street Journal editorial page--the movement's Pravda--of "the inescapable fact that the war has been run incompetently, with an apparently deliberate contempt for history, strategy, and thought, and with too little regard for the American soldier, whose mounting casualties seem to have no effect on the boastfulness of the civilian leadership."        This site is a must see

This is the New York newspaper Village Voice's review of Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9/11" shown at the Cannes film festival. The film is an effective opposition to Bush's Iraq war and chronicles his endless lies to justify endless wars to achieve the new US empire. NZ's national party is enthusiastic for NZ to do our ANZUS duty, and play a small role in helping our "ally" build this empire.   
See also Michael Moore's new 'Fahrenheit 9/11' scorches

It's time to stop beating around this Bush and start beating up on him -- but good. There is no set of humanitarian or democratic principles by which this administration would not have been removed in any sane society. The last election was questionable at best, and his reckless, dangerous and criminal actions in the ensuing years have shown the whole world he is unfit to govern. The only democratic remedy, impeachment, was set aside early and forcibly by an opposition still afraid of its own shadow. It did make some sense, early on, to argue that, since the Greasy Oil Plutocrats (GOP) controlled both houses, it was a waste of time and energy.

Bush White House checked with rapture Christians before latest Israel move.
It was an e-mail we weren't meant to see. Not for our eyes were the notes that showed White House staffers taking two-hour meetings with Christian fundamentalists, where they passed off bogus social science on gay marriage as if it were holy writ and issued fiery warnings that "the Presidents [sic] Administration and current Government is engaged in cultural, economical, and social struggle on every level"—this to a group whose representative in Israel believed herself to have been attacked by witchcraft unleashed by proximity to a volume of Harry Potter. Most of all, apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios.

On August 6, 2001, while vacationing in Crawford, Texas, George Bush received an intelligence briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It included revelations that al Qaeda members were conducting "surveillance of federal buildings in New York"; the World Trade Center was mentioned in the first paragraph, the prospect of terrorist "retaliat[ion] in Washington" in the second. According to the briefing, Osama bin Laden's organization was acting in ways "consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

Bush and Blair will share in the historic guilt, Israel will bear for the crimes of Sharon, writes Haim Bresheeth*
Like a ventriloquist dummy speaking the words of its master, we heard the world's most powerful man reciting a script written in Jerusalem by one responsible for bathing the Middle East in blood for decades. This most bizarre spectacle -- Bush unable to answer a simple question, repeating key phrases like a broken automaton -- was then followed by the even more bizarre suggestion by Blair that this was not a departure from what was policy in Washington and London for decades.

>>> The text below comes from MSNBC's posting here. The Memory Hole has made a FOIA request for this report. For some of the photos that triggered this investigation, see "Photos of Iraqis Being Abused by US Personnel."

The pictures are appalling, the words devastating. As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived his night air attack. "Someone wounded," the pilot cries. Then he received the reply: "Hit him, hit the truck and him." As the helicopter's gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at the wounded man, vaporising him in a second.

...The graphic images, passed around among military police who served at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, are a new batch of photographs similar to those broadcast a week ago on CBS's "60 Minutes II" and published by the New Yorker magazine. They appear to provide further visual evidence of the chaos and unprofessionalism at the prison detailed in a report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. His report, which relied in part on the photographs, found "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" that were inflicted on detainees.

Is the Commander In Chief capable of the Job or does he just not give a damm.
If he is such a great leader, how do the troups dare to act in this way.
How could he not know. He is Bush, he has access to all information.
He should not be in power, running the biggest bullying army in the world.

The official word from the Bush administration is that the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is not “systematic,” according to General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This type of torture of indigenous and Third World people, however, is well-documented as a pattern and practice of the U.S. military and the CIA.

.......The war is a stupid, unjust and criminal war. It is a quagmire from which no immediate escape seems possible. Many more Americans are going to die so that American ''democracy and freedom'' can be imposed on the Iraqis -- whether they want them or not. Many more Iraqis will die, too. Americans who support the war share in its criminality.

......... They're not campaigning. They have not instructed their individual-state campaign managers. In 34 of the 50 states, they haven't even bothered to print any political paraphernalia - posters, handbills, pens, and bumper stickers. What does that tell you?"

What's wrong with the American people? It's so obvious by now that Bush is a liar and a conniver, and an idiot to boot. He got us into the Iraq mess with deceitful tactics and a plan built on fantasy. No WMD, no Al Qa'eda link, no threat to the US. The only point was to control Iraq's oil. He's bankrupting the American treasury in order to enrich his oil buddies. And the fantasy has turned into a nightmare.

COMMENT FROM SISTER LAETITIA BORDES: "I'm filled with sadness. I'm filled with fear. I fear for the people of Iraq, because I feel that John Negroponte certainly is not concerned about the democracy of Iraq. I think that John Negroponte is concerned about his reputation. He is an expert in counter insurgency tactics. We see that in his background. And John Negroponte will stop at nothing. At nothing."

Most Americans, including many liberals and critics of the Bush administration, have bought the official story that 9-11 was perpetrated by Al Qa'eda, and the only questions to be asked have to do with the failure of intelligence. Those who question this story and want to investigate other possibilities are dismissed as "conspiracy kooks".
As a practicing psychiatrist, I hear many stories from my patients about how they are being conspired against. Some of the stories are psychotic paranoia, others are all too real. A woman being abused by her spouse, for instance, is truly being persecuted, and the perpetrator may have the whole family convinced that she is "crazy". I would be remiss if I didn't take her story seriously.

“President Bush poses the greatest threat to America that we have seen in modern history,” Ritter told an audience in the University Union's Potomac Lounge.   ~ ~ ~
Ritter, a former intelligence officer for the US Marine Corps who served as the UN's Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, said the U.S. government “brought us into this war on false pretenses.”   ~ ~ ~
“Our real policy has been regime change,” Ritter said. “Our plan was to dethrone Saddam, not to find weapons of mass destruction.”

...As resistance attacks continued to increase in the city against the occupiers, so did the retaliation by the military. And so it has grown to bring us to the current siege of Fallujah where hundreds of women, children, elderly and unarmed men have been slain by soldiers, along with some mujahedeen.

Why Bush is spending so much on nuclear weapons.
The budget is busted; American soldiers need more armor; they're running out of supplies. Yet the Department of Energy is spending an astonishing $6.5 billion on nuclear weapons this year, and President Bush is requesting $6.8 billion more for next year and a total of $30 billion over the following four years. This does not include his much-cherished missile-defense program, by the way. This is simply for the maintenance, modernization, development, and production of nuclear bombs and warheads.

Musings about a second Bush term typically assume four years of the same right-wing policies we've had to date. But it'd likely be far worse. So far, the Bush administration has had to govern with the expectation of facing American voters again in 2004. But suppose George W. Bush wins a second term. The constraint of a re-election contest will be gone. Knowing that voters can no longer turn them out, and this will be their last shot at remaking America, the radical conservatives will be unleashed........
...............Nothing is more dangerous to a republic than fanatics unconstrained by democratic politics. Yet in a second term of this administration, that's exactly what we'll have.

To commit a crime against peace, one must engage in “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive war.” Bush is guilty on all these counts. The most damning evidence coming not from the liberal left, but in a series of well-documented books providing revelations by people in his own administration or party. Now, with Woodward’s work, the President is condemned with his own words.

Once there was a time when American conservatives defended their country from government. No more. Today conservatives defend Bush’s warmongering neo-Jacobin government at all costs.

A warmonger. A crackpot fundamentalist. A fanatic and a fool who has only the barest grasp of the killing power of the forces under his command.

“The world is too terrible a place to live in, not because of the bad things that happen,
but because of the good people who stand by and do nothing.” -- Albert Einstein

“The world is too terrible a place to live in, not because of the bad things that happen,
but because of the good people who stand by and do nothing.” -- Albert Einstein

Local Iraqis in Christchurch have united to call on NZ and US to withdraw troops and described how US media have grossly distorted the true picture. (See Chch Press story section B Page 2 on April 14, 2004.) Iraqis call for NZ to get out

At least 600 Iraqis have died so far, mostly women and children. Ambulances are being shot up, people are being told to flee the city and then stopped in the desert without food or water. These heinous crimes are being committed by the American military, no doubt following orders from Rumsfeld and Bush.