So many factors threaten human existence. .... One would think that such warnings from top people, who know from the inside, would result in remedial behaviour from rational human beings who wish to live and want their children and other human beings to continue to live on our planet. But it is not so.

According to a new report from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, some 100,000 asteroids and comets routinely pass between the Sun and the Earth's orbit. About 20,000 of these orbit close enough to us that they could one day hit the Earth and destroy a major city.
But the really worrying news from NASA is that over a thousand of these things are large enough (almost a mile wide in diameter) and their orbits close enough to us as to pose a real potential hazard of crashing into the Earth with enough force to end most life on this planet. Scientists think this is what killed off the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago.

Bush, Blair, Howard and other leaders, boosted by US-dictated anti-Iran Security Council resolutions, are bursting with desire to bomb Iran as Pinter says... very few seem to care or think about the probable number of dire consequences and results of such barbarity. It is a few very perceptive writers on internet who care. Certainly not our crop of current world leaders. Like Tony Blair, who lies so well and convincingly for Bush, as he moves his eyebrows up and down to get our agreement.  Bush's tamed world leaders talk languidly about diplomacy as Bush and his 'coalition-of-the-willing' deploy their military forces for the long-planned assault on Iran.

Why George Bush is Insane

.... The US is at this moment developing advanced systems of "weapons of mass destruction" and it prepared to use them where it sees fit. It has more of them than the rest of the world put together. It has walked away from international agreements on biological and chemical weapons, refusing to allow inspection of its own factories. The hypocrisy behind its public declarations and its own actions is almost a joke.
The United States believes that the three thousand deaths in New York are the only deaths that count, the only deaths that matter. They are American deaths. Other deaths are unreal, abstract, of no consequence.

If "the US can own the weather" as stated in the US Air Force report, it could presumably generate destructive weather events.
These might be used on nations chosen as enemies, or nations the US might wish to punish in order to bring them into line and to see things the way the US wants them to. Will such events be obviously HAARP generated? Or will they appear to be one of the consequences of global warming? If the latter, then the US could inflict severe deprivation and disaster on a nation without being known to be the aggressor. It remains to be seen whether this new evidence of human evil will ever be developed and used.

It may sound like something out of a James Bond movie, but a weapon capable of triggering climate change is in the works - and may already be fully operational.

Heather Wokusch, M.A. in Clinical Psychology, is an educator, journalist and writes extensively on US political developments, wars and nuclear issues.
Her following article has similar conclusions to mine and other writers on the preliminary strategies the US is likely to use to justify its War On Iran.
All the indications are that the US will soon massively strike Iran, including the probable use of nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration continues moving closer to a nuclear attack on Iran, and we ignore the obvious buildup at our peril.
Russian media is sounding alarms. In February, ultra-nationalist leader Vladimir Shirinovsky warned that the US would launch a strike against Tehran at the end of this month. Then last week, the Russian News and Information Agency Novosti (RIA-Novosti) quoted military experts predicting the US will attack Iran on April 6th, Good Friday.

Federation of American Scientists (www.fas.org)
Your one-stop-shop for WMD information, clearly organized under subheadings including (among others) Biological and Chemical Weapons, Nuclear Weapons, Arms Trade and Weapons in Space. The site also handily provides information on weapons systems around the world, easily accessible by country name.

Some of the many lies used by leaders to get popular support for their wars are mentioned below. Ask yourself why people believe such lies and never seem to learn? One reason is that they are conditioned by the mass media to believe, follow and obey their leader. John Helmer illuminates this.
Inadvertently, he may have started his article with a lie - that David Kelly committed suicide. That is the official version. But many examining doctors disagree with the suicide story. They don't presume to say who may have done it to Kelly, but that someone must have staged it, because the forensic evidence did not support the suicide story. John Helmer has certainly had the journalistic war experience to justify his comments.

Wars usually start with one large lie. Throwing more troops into the breach requires a great many little lies. Wars usually end when the lying can't staunch the bleeding, and the stench.
According to the wife of the David Kelly, the British Defense Ministry expert on Iraqi weapons who committed suicide last Friday by cutting his left wrist, and bleeding to death while on painkillers, "this was not really the kind of world he wanted to live in". But the kind of world prime ministers of England and presidents of the United States hatch, when they go to war together, should have been familiar to Kelly, as he was old enough to remember the Vietnam War.

Professor Griffin's new book "Debunking 9/11 Debunking" meticulously dissects the flaws in Bush's official story about the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Paul Craig Roberts gives a splendid review of it below and agrees with its findings. But the implications that the Official Story of the 9/11 attacks was basically a collection of lies and myths is not examined in detail in this article. However the appalling conclusions and implications must be made.

The 9/11 attack has been used to start wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to plan an attack on Iran, to curtail constitutional protections and civil liberties in the US, to radically expand US military budgets and the power of the executive, and to enrich entrenched vested interests.
Professor David Ray Griffin is the nemesis of the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.  In his latest book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking, Griffin destroys the credibility of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Popular Mechanics reports, annihilates his critics, and proves himself to be a better scientist and engineer than the defenders of the official story.

As one who foresaw, and lectured against the Vietnam War before it started in the early 60's, and more or less continuously ever since about the nuclear arms race, wars and lately the Iraq War and the US planned War against Iran, I have been concerned about the peace movement. Where are the thousands that demonstrated in 2003 before Bush launched his illegal war on Iraq ? Now the Iraq body count is 655,000, the same people don't bother to demonstrate or make any noticeable gesture against this war now. Why? Tom Englehart gives some of the answers below.

Excuse me if, at 62, and well into my second era of protest against yet another distant, disastrous, and disabling American war, I express a little confusion.

If the mass media informed the public about Bush's lies to fool the people and Congress into supporting his war on Iraq, and how it violates the US Constitution and international law, and his preparations to use nuclear weapons on Iran, based on the same type of lies, the Polls would be much higher against Bush and his illegal wars. However telling the truth about the Bush Administration and its phony war on terrorism, is not something the media would do. Their role has been to act as cheerleaders for Bush and his wars, repeating his every lie, and preventing the truth from being known.

More Than Half Favor a Deadline for Withdrawal, Bush Suffers Longest Streak Without Majority Support Since Truman
A record number of Americans disapprove of the war in Iraq , and a clear majority now favors the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces, even if civil order has not been restored there — potentially a tipping point in public attitudes on the war.

Russian military sources warns     The long awaited US military attack on Iran is now on track for the first week of April, specifically for 4 am on April 6, the Good Friday opening of Easter weekend, writes the well-known Russian journalist Andrei Uglanov in the Moscow weekly “Argumenty Nedeli.” Uglanov cites Russian military experts close to the Russian General Staff for his account.

This article presents the realities of Bush's intentions and plans to attack Iran. As in the Iraq War. Bush's UK  poodle has staged a provocation in violation of Iranian waters. This will appear to be more authentic, than if the US did it. It also provides the UK with an excuse to satisfy Parliament and the Public, for its participation with the US in a war on Iran.

The timing of the recent incident in which 15 British sailors were arrested by Iran at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway for purportedly entering Iranian waters couldn't have been more provocative if it had been planned that way. And perhaps it was. The question is, however, who did the planning?

The new Democratically-controlled Congress has totally capitulated to Bush's power, even signalling that he can proceed with his plans for a war on Iran.
The power of the Bush criminal conspiracy is virtually unlimited and is backed by at least 25% of the richest, most powerful people and institutions in America, including many who are afraid not to appear to support the many manifestations of Bushism.

The "war on terror" has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration's elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America's psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

Alan Bock must have known all this about the new 'nuclear to use permissiveness' of the Bush Administration.
There has been a nuclear transformation - only to be used as a last resort in response to an attack on the US - to - nuclear weapons to be used when desired in pursuit of military objectives. Where was Alan Bock when this was unfolding before his eyes?

Earlier this week another of the Bush administration hawks fairly quietly left the State Department, apparently upset at the deal the administration struck with North Korea. Robert Joseph occupied a "special perch" in the administration, according to David Sanger in the New York Times. And now – like Paul Wolfowitz (the architect pushed upstairs to the World Bank – shades of Vietnam), Stephen Cambone, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, John Bolton, and Donald Rumsfeld – he is gone.

737 US Bases in 103 countries and a defence budget larger than that of all other nations in the world. That's the US Empire.
The mission is building the US Empire through imperial conquest, using "9/11 and the war on terror" as their mantra, war cry and justification.
US Military Historian Chalmers Johnson dissects this imperial military industrial complex and predicts calamites for what may be next.
" If there weren't terrorists, Bush and Cheney would have had to invent them? " asks Karlin.

I believe that we're close to a tipping point right now. What happened to the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991 could easily be happening to us for essentially the same reasons. Imperial overreach, inability to reform, rigid economic ideology. ... The world's balance of power didn't change one iota on September 11, 2001. The only way we could lose the power and influence we had at that time was through our own actions, and that's what we did. -- Chalmers Johnson, author of Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
Has our "leadership" traded democracy for empire? Have their over-bloated egos convinced them that they are the world's newly crowned colonial kings? Author Chalmers Johnson is certainly not given to wearing rose-colored glasses. As he concludes in his newest book, Nemesis: "... my country is launched on a dangerous path that it must abandon or else face the consequences."

Have you ever wondered why people were so worried about nuclear dangers in past decades, yet so unconcerned now?
One reason is that in spite of many nuclear crisis - (remember how people evacuated US cities during the Cuban missile crisis)   - nothing ever happened. So people are used to the dire predictions never eventuating. Also, with the end of the cold war, they have been taught to believe that the nuclear risks have decreased, and some undoubtedly have. But some, and new risks, have got much worse. The media deliberately avoids informing the public about the increasing nuclear risks; that the US Defence budget is the highest in history; and that the Bush Administration is making new nuclear weapons to go with the new nuclear doctrines.

Karen Kwiatkowski is an ex-US Air Force Lieut. Colonel and a very perceptive well informed writer on real US military objectives and policies.
Her warnings of a US attack on Iran soon, after staging some kind of provocation that can be blamed on Iran as an excuse, must be taken seriously.
My own view, as readers know from my previous articles, is that the US will stage a 'false flag' allegedly terrorist attack on the US like 9/11, for which Iran will be blamed, to provide Bush with the kind of serious excuse he needs to get public and Congressional support for a nuclear attack on Iran. 

The Cheney speech to AIPAC – reassuring militant rightwingers in Israel and the US that America is leaning forward on Iran, and that we are never leaving Iraq – was filled with honesty and conviction, and gives us a clear window into the administration's thinking.
Cheney's description of terrorists is somewhat emotional and overblown. Calling them "freedom's enemies," he comes dangerously close to describing this administration's id. His emphasis on one-side's victims in last summer's war with Lebanon, and his proud silence on the thousands killed, injured, made homeless and jobless by American weaponry is also understandable as he speaks to the AIPAC audience.

The following article gives yet more proof that the US is preparing for nuclear war. Whether a nuclear attack on Iran will rapidly escalate to a general nuclear war is unknown. But it seems a likely result for a variety of reasons.  What is stupefying is the casualness with which people regard the obvious and growing nuclear threat - the lack of media coverage - Bush's "all options are on the table" threats - the many preparations. - the sheer irrationality of the Bush regime and its statements - the colossal costs of its illegal wars. It is difficult to figure out why people are not more worried and active to prevent this threat to themselves, families and world.

The Trident submarine base at Bangor, just 20 miles from Seattle, has become home to the largest single stockpile of nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal. In November 2006, the Natural Resources Defense Council declared that the 2,364 nuclear warheads at Bangor are about 24 percent of the entire U.S. arsenal.
Most of the warheads are deployed on "launch-ready" or hair-trigger alert status.
The Trident submarine system at Bangor has long been a leading indicator of U.S. military intentions. During the Cold War, the Trident system represented a major shift in nuclear war fighting strategy -- from mutually assured destruction to a pre-emptive first strike.

The Bush regime would not have built such a huge embassy (see below) if it had not planned to occupy Iraq indefinitely. It is a demonstration that that the talk of withdrawing US troops at some point has always been a diversion and never a serious intention of the Bush regime.
This Imperial complex of 21 buildings on 104 acres in the heart of Baghdad , with 5,000 employees, must be intended to be much more than just an embassy to Iraq . It looks like some kind of permanent headquarters for the US in the Middle East - perhaps a centre for directing most regional  US operations in the area.

The headline reads: "Thousands of angry Iraqis pillage billion-dollar U.S. Embassy in Baghdad." The article details the ransacking of the grandiose American Embassy by Iraqi mobs.
This is the story I expect to read one day within the next decade.
In the 1950s, when I was in high school in Baghdad, my friends and I admired the technological advances of America and the West. But we resented the colonial tendencies of the West (especially, at the time, those of the British). Many demonstrations were held in front of the British and American embassies. The Iraqis are a proud people, and they resented foreigners meddling in their affairs. And the British were, in reality, running the country through a puppet regime.

This article based on opinions of a Spanish judge that Bush should face charges as a war criminal for his illegal war on Iraq based on lies, is vitally important. It should be read by everyone who accepts Bush lies as truth, and by those who deny, justify, minimize or accept the continuing situation today. Its findings are similar to our own at the PANNZ mock war crimes trial of Bush, Blair and Howard that we held in August 2004 in Christchurch New Zealand. Every MP, government servant, and member of the legal profession, and other interested person should read this and consider their own and their nation's policies.

[JURIST] Baltasar Garzon [BBC profile; JURIST news archive ], an investigating judge for Spain's National Court [official website, in Spanish], said Tuesday that President George W. Bush and his allies eventually should face war crimes charges for their actions in Iraq. In an opinion piece [text, in Spanish] for El Pais , Garzon called the war in Iraq "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history." Garzon also criticized those who joined the US president in the war against Iraq as having equally responsible for joining the war effort despite their doubts. In 1999, Garzon tried to extradite former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet [JURIST news archive] from Britain and try him for crimes against humanity. Reuters has more .

.... This reaction either shows total and profound ignorance of the situation, or corrupt duplicity in enabling Bush to make war without hindrance or seeking permission from a Democratic Congress recently elected to stop Bush's wars. ...
It could become millions of deaths, and horrific long-term consequences for everyone, including the US public.
That is the spineless Pelosi and Democratic Party gift to the American public for their support in the last election.

The AIPAC Girl

If George W. Bush launches a pre-emptive war on Iran, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will bear full moral responsibility for that war.
For it was Pelosi who quietly agreed to strip out of the $100 billion funding bill for Iraq a provision that would have required President Bush to seek congressional approval before launching any new war on Iran. Pelosi's capitulation came in the Appropriations Committee.
What went down, and why?

Greg Palast spell's out the real motives of the Bush regime. It's Iaq's oil and a secret plan of the Houston oil moguls. From the oil moguls standpoint the Iraq war is going very well and according to plan  - to limit production in order to keep the price of oil as high as possible. Exxon-Mobil reported the highest profit of any corporation in history  a record $10 billion in profit last quarter. As Bush said: "Mission Accomplished".

It's STILL The Oil: Secret Condi Meeting on Oil Before Invasion

Four years ago this week, the tanks rolled for what President Bush originally called, “ Operation Iraqi Liberation ” — O.I.L. - I kid you not.
And it was four years ago that, from the White House, George Bush, declaring war, said, "I want to talk to the Iraqi people." That Dick Cheney didn't tell Bush that Iraqis speak Arabic … well, never mind. I expected the President to say something like, "Our troops are coming to liberate you, so don't shoot them."
Instead, Mr. Bush told, the Iraqis,"Do not destroy oil wells." Nevertheless, the Bush Administration said the war had nothing to do with Iraq's oil.

This paper has some valuable insights into the character and relatively unknown mental illness affecting our society. It is particularly incarnate in George Bush. Paul Levy has called it "malignant egophrenic" illness or malignant egophrenia. In fact the illness could be named other known psychiatric names but "ME disorder" is the term used here.
As he says "George Bush does not exist in isolation. We can view his entire Administration (Cheney, Rice, Wolfowitz, et all) as well as the corporate, military industrial complex that they are co-dependently enmeshed with, the media they control, and the voters that support them, as interconnected parts of the whole system, or a "field".

The following essay offers a penetrating look at the psychopathology of George W. Bush and the collective psychosis that is gripping America, from a Jungian perspective. (This should be read as part of a series, beginning with my previous post, Parading Jesus , in which I'm exploring the idea of approaching the problem in terms of the interconnection of a "many headed hydra," or what this author terms as an "interrelated field." I think if you read this piece in its entirety you'll appreciate why it is important to look at the problem as a symbiosis rather than isolated parts.

From London to New York and Washington to Los Angeles in fact all over the world thousands of people were rallying and marching in protest on the 4th anniversary, March 17, of Bush's illegal Iraq war based on his lies. Freezing weather deterred thousands more.
In Christchurch New Zealand about 100 rallied in Cathedral Square. An Iraqi speaker told of the horrible conditions and 600,000 deaths in Iraq and the deprivation, squalor and incredible misery his relatives were suffering in Iraq, as a result of the Bush Administration.

Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets of New York Sunday to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq , in a second day of national rallies to mark the fourth anniversary of the war.
Organizers from the group United for Peace and Justice said between 25,000 and 30,000 people marched in the rally, which came a day after similar mass protests in Washington and Los Angeles . Police did not estimate the turnout.
A colorful mixture of students, cyclists, Vietnam war veterans and musicians marched through Midtown Manhattan, drumming and chanting slogans such as "Troops out now" and calling for President George W. Bush to be impeached.

This paper is an excellent guide to how propaganda permeates and influences our opinions and guides our reactions. It is one of the best I have seen. Given the power of the Bush Administration over the media, it is unlikely that the mass media will report the facts about Bush's deceits to initiate wars of aggression. 

United State of Minds

America's methods of mind control or better put, manufacturing consent through efficient and careful use of media, must be the envy of every tyrannical dictator ruling the most oppressive regimes in the world. . . .
. . . Shaping of one's attitude, beliefs, and personality without that person's knowledge or consent works by gradually exerting increasing control through a variety of techniques which includes repetition and herding.

Preparing For A US Dictatorship   The Late, Great American Nation

We live in a fundamentally different country since 9/11. Not only do many Americans view their government with suspicion, but how their government views them has drastically changed.
A perfect example of this took place last fall. Prior to the elections that transformed the makeup of Congress, the Bush Administration pushed for the inclusion of two stealth provisions into a mammoth defense budget bill. The additions made it easier for the government to declare martial law and establish a dictatorship.
Since the days of our Founding Fathers, when King George III used his armies to terrorize and tyrannize the colonies, the American people have understandably distrusted the use of a national military force to intervene in civilian affairs, except in instances of extreme emergency and limited duration.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's dramatic confessions before a US military hearing are beginning to backfire on the Bush administration. Legal experts are casting serious doubt about their validity as evidence, and human rights activists say they only illuminate a "sham process" of justice in the US war on terror, including the apparent use of torture on Mohammed and potentially dozens of other al-Qa'ida suspects.

This article shows how the nuclear power industry is spending millions on public relations to revise the image of nuclear power from something dangerous, not to be touched,  to something clean, green and desirable. The way the PR companies, and the media, use the industry's ex-Greenpeace spokesman - and will not reveal what they pay him - is most instructive. The comments following the original version are excellent and contain many provoking pros and cons of the debate. Serious nuclear power researchers should read these, and develop counter arguments, if they wish to be able to answer the pro-nuclear lobbyists.

"We just find it maddening that Hill & Knowlton , which has an $8 million account with the nuclear industry, should have such an easy time working the press," concluded the Columbia Journalism Review in an editorial in its July / August 2006 issue.
The magazine was rightly bemoaning the tendency of news outlets to present former Greenpeace activist Patrick Moore and former EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman as environmentalists who support nuclear power, without noting that both are paid spokespeople for a group bankrolled by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI). NEI represents nuclear power plant operators, plant designers, fuel suppliers and other sectors of the nuclear power industry. Hill & Knowlton is NEI's public relations firm, though it's not the only firm working to build support for nuclear power.

Bush has established a record as spinning a litany of lies to fool the American people and Congress into supporting an illegal assault, bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq . He is also spinning similar lies about Iran as an excuse to make war on Iran . He has destroyed Iraq and killed some 655,000 Iraqis. Thus he is a war criminal who has violated the US Constitution and should be impeached. There is suspicion that his crimes may be far greater, regarding the 9/11 issue. So is it any wonder that he wants to be able to suppress if not destroy any evidence of these crimes? The fact that he has taken steps to prevent some of his papers from being seen indicates this.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush was inside Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Fla., to promote his education reform when he learned that America was under attack.
This was a day that changed the Bush presidency and the nation's history.
Scholars and archivists will one day travel to the Bush presidential library on the campus of Southern Methodist University in Dallas to learn more about the nation's leaders and the decisions they made on that day.
The history textbooks and papers that they will write after visiting the Bush library might very well be incomplete.
"On November 1, 2001, less than two months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Bush issued an executive order that allows former presidents to keep some of their papers secret indefinitely. This executive order violates the Presidential Records Act of 1978, legislation that guarantees public access to papers 12 years after a president has left office.... This order should be overturned so that historians and scholars will get an honest portrait of the Bush administration and future administrations," writes the Republican.

Students everywhere will be interested in this article and video about US students becoming more active against the Iraq war and Bush's plans for a new major war against Iran. Because the US mass media acts as the war propaganda department of the Bush Administration there is a virtual media blackout on news about Campus protest activities and teach-ins in the USA. 'Embedded' reporters usually only report war news, and war-related news, the way the Pentagon wants.
The following gives students the facts. It would be a great help if readers would forward this article to students, student organizations and their media.
If Bush is not stopped, he will try and target today's students, and make them tomorrow's cannon fodder. They have a right to be informed and warned.

On Saturday, March 17, anti-war activists from around the country will gather near the Vietnam Memorial and march to the Pentagon. This event comes 40 years after the historic march on the Pentagon which many observers saw as a turning point in the movement against the Vietnam War. Student organizers are also planning events on campuses around the country between March 15 and 20.

This paper by Tom Engelhardt shows that dramatic and questionable developments under the Bush Administration have not been reported, commented upon, or questioned by the US mass media. For example Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that:
 "a special planning group has been established in the offices of the Join Chiefs of Staff charged with creating a contingency bombing plan for Iran that can be implemented, upon orders of the President within 24 hours and that it's new assignment was to identify not just nuclear facilities and possible regime change targets, but targets in Iran that may be involved in supplying or aiding militants in Iraq." 
What this means is that just about anything and anyone in Iran may be considered a target.

... and no one notices....
In my childhood, one of the Philadelphia papers regularly ran cartoon ads for itself in which some poor soul in a perilous situation - say, clinging to the ledge of a tall building - would be screaming for help, while passersby were so engrossed in the paper that they didn't even look up. Now, we have the opposite situation. A journalist essentially writing bloody murder in a giant media and governmental crowd. In this case, no one in the mainstream evidently cares -– not yet anyway - to pay the slightest attention. It seems that there's a crime going on and no one gives a damn. Think Kitty Genovese on a giant scale.

I wonder why top politicians in the US and other countries, top military people, government executives and ordinary informed citizens, don't speak out and take action before it's too late, to Impeach Bush before he starts a new war that could easily escalate and destroy our world. The only chance to do something constructive to prevent this disaster is before Bush starts it. That's now.
Once started, it's too late. No turning the clock back. The war momentum will take over then and a series of devastating disasters will rapidly follow.

Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit President Bush's authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.
Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.
Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy.

Paul Craig Roberts has that rare ability to sum up in one page what's happened to our world. The U.S. has been taken over by a criminal conspiracy, using the wars they started and phoney threats to establish a dictatorship in America . They use the familiar words of 'freedom, democracy and liberty' as a cover and justification. Most people are either not aware, deny, or justify this process. They don't know, or feel, the effects of what's happened to their culture. They seldom used their freedoms and rights before. Indeed, they were hardly aware of them or their origin, or their establishment in law. So they don't really miss them - at least, not yet.

Alas, Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, published in 1925 and George Orwell's novel, 1984, published in 1949, also have been turned into period pieces by the practices of the Bush Regime.
In Kafka's novel, Josef K. is arrested for reasons never given, tried for an unspecified crime, and executed.
The Trial is the model for the Bush Regime's Military Tribunals, which permit execution on the basis of hearsay, secret evidence unknown to the defendant, or confession extracted by torture.

Though U.S. legislators voted against appropriating funds for permanent bases in Iraq, the White House and Pentagon have ignored that prohibition by portraying the huge construction projects to be for temporary facilities tied to the on-going conflict.
F rom the very start, the debate over Iraq has been obscured by a miasma of bogus statistics and facts: issues no one really wanted to deal publicly with—not the White House; certainly not the Republican-led Congress.

A domestic war casualty, Stacy Bannerman, shows below some of the high social costs to America of casualties that are fooled into giving their services, futures and even lives to kill for the Bush regime in their illegal war on Iraq. Her figures are startling and don't cover some of the long-term costs of broken marriages, psychologically damaged children and adults, and veterans who may have become unemployable. Also, what about the social effect of damaged human beings feeling embittered and cheated 'by the system'. When some of the vets realise that the Bush regime is essentially a criminal group who are waging a series of wars based on lies and deceptions, that they have been conned and sucked into and used by this group as trained killers, and may now suffer long term physical and psychological effects, there's no doubt that there will be costs to society. Some may become very high in the long term. Stacy reveals the obvious, immediate costs.

"They volunteered, didn't they?"
As the war in Iraq has gone from wrong to worse, that question, often delivered as a statement, has become the fallback stance of folks who are attempting to silence the voices of those of us who actually have loved ones in uniform, or who died while wearing it. I love my country dearly, but sometimes it's difficult to retain a feeling of love for my countrymen who have said, "They volunteered, didn't they?" in an effort to shut up the growing numbers of military and Gold Star families who are speaking out against this war.

The Democrats are not intending to use their power to cut off funding and end the Iraq  war. Basically they are continuing to give Bush a carte blanche to do as he pleases, when he pleases, to whomever he pleases.
The US has become a de-facto dictatorship, and the Democrats have already signalled that they are ready to approve a war with Iran.

I have always admired George Monbiot's articles about the Iraq war and the Bush Administration. That makes it very hard to understand why Monbiot rubbished those very eminent well-known writers and scholars who questioned the official 9/11 story. Below, David Ray Griffin, one of the best authorities on 9/11, answers Monbiot. His forthcoming book in April will give a far more thorough answer to Monbiot and others like him.

In “ Bayoneting a Scarecrow The 9/11 conspiracy theories are a coward's cult.” (Guardian, February 20), George Monbiot accuses members of the 9/11 truth movement of being “morons” and “idiots” who believe in “magic.” Having in his previous attack---“ A 9/11 conspiracy virus is sweeping the world, ” Guardian, February 6---called me this movement's “high priest,” he now describes my 9/11 writing as a “concatenation of ill-attested nonsense.”

Full-scale war on Iran may just be a concocted terrorist attack away from starting the "shock and awe."
The Samson Option is terminology used to explain Israel's intention to use its nuclear arsenal as an ultimate defense strategy if its leaders feel threatened enough to think they have no alternative. It comes from the biblical Samson said to have used his great strength to bring down the pillars of a Philistine temple, downing its roof and killing himself and thousands of Philistine tormentors. It's a strategy saying if you try killing me, we'll all die together, or put another way, we'll all go together when we go. Richard Wagner had his apocalyptic version in the last of his four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen - Gotterdammerung, or Twilight of the Gods based on Norse mythology referring to a prophesied war of the Gods resulting in the end of the world.

In the energy-rich Middle East, only two countries have failed to subordinate themselves to Washington's basic demands: Iran and Syria. Accordingly both are enemies, Iran by far the more important. As was the norm during the cold war, resort to violence is regularly justified as a reaction to the malign influence of the main enemy, often on the flimsiest of pretexts. Unsurprisingly, as Bush sends more troops to Iraq,