"Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign"

From Iraq to Scooter Libby, Bush and Cheney have broken America's trust and stabbed this nation in the back. It is time for them to go.
By Keith Olbermann

Jul. 04, 2007 | Finally tonight, as promised, a Special Comment on what is, in everything but name, George Bush's pardon of Scooter Libby.

"I didn't vote for him," an American once said, "But he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." That -- on this eve of the Fourth of July -- is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The man who said those 17 words -- improbably enough -- was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them when he learned of the hair's-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon, in 1960.

"I didn't vote for him but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job." The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier. But there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne's voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgment that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our commander in chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party and often the scourge of all others.

We as citizens must, at some point, ignore a president's partisanship. Not that we may prosper as a nation, not that we may achieve, not that we may lead the world, but merely that we may function.

But just as essential to the 17 words of John Wayne is an implicit trust, a sacred trust: that the president for whom so many did not vote can in turn suspend his political self long enough, and for matters imperative enough, to conduct himself solely for the benefit of the entire republic.

Our generation's willingness to state "We didn't vote for him, but he's our president, and we hope he does a good job" was tested in the crucible of history, and earlier than most.

And in circumstances more tragic and threatening. And we did that with which history tasked us. We enveloped our president in 2001. And those who did not believe he should have been elected -- indeed those who did not believe he had been elected -- willingly lowered their voices and assented to the sacred oath of nonpartisanship.

And George W. Bush took our assent, and reconfigured it, and honed it, and shaped it to a razor-sharp point and stabbed this nation in the back with it.

Were there any remaining lingering doubt otherwise, or any remaining lingering hope, it ended yesterday when Mr. Bush commuted the prison sentence of one of his own staffers.

Did so even before the appeals process was complete. Did so without as much as a courtesy consultation with the Department of Justice. Did so despite what James Madison -- at the Constitutional Convention -- said about impeaching any president who pardoned or sheltered those who had committed crimes "advised by" that president.

Did so without the slightest concern that even the most detached of citizens must look at the chain of events and wonder: To what degree was Mr. Libby told, "Break the law however you wish -- the president will keep you out of prison"?

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you broke that fundamental compact between yourself and the majority of this nation's citizens, the ones who did not cast votes for you.

In that moment, Mr. Bush, you ceased to be the president of the United States. In that moment, Mr. Bush, you became merely the president of a rabid and irresponsible corner of the Republican Party.

And this is too important a time, Sir, to have a commander in chief who puts party over nation. This has been, of course, the gathering legacy of this administration. Few of its decisions have escaped the stain of politics. The extraordinary Karl Rove has spoken of "a permanent Republican majority," as if such a thing -- or a permanent Democratic majority -- is not antithetical to that upon which rests our country, our history, our revolution, our freedoms.

Yet our democracy has survived shrewder men than Karl Rove. And it has survived the frequent stain of politics upon the fabric of government. But this administration, with ever-increasing insistence and almost theocratic zealotry, has turned that stain into a massive oil spill.

The protection of the environment is turned over to those of one political party who will financially benefit from the rape of the environment.

The protections of the Constitution are turned over to those of one political party who believe those protections unnecessary and extravagant and quaint.

The enforcement of the laws is turned over to those of one political party who will swear beforehand that they will not enforce those laws.

The choice between war and peace is turned over to those of one political party who stand to gain vast wealth by ensuring that there is never peace, but only war.

And now, when just one cooked book gets corrected by an honest auditor, when just one trampling of the inherent and inviolable fairness of government is rejected by an impartial judge, when just one wild-eyed partisan is stopped by the figure of blind justice, this president decides that he, and not the law, must prevail.

I accuse you, Mr. Bush, of lying this country into war. I accuse you of fabricating in the minds of your own people a false implied link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. I accuse you of firing the generals who told you that the plans for Iraq were disastrously insufficient. I accuse you of causing in Iraq the needless deaths of 3,586 of our brothers and sons, and sisters and daughters, and friends and neighbors. I accuse you of subverting the Constitution, not in some misguided but sincerely motivated struggle to combat terrorists, but to stifle dissent. I accuse you of fomenting fear among your own people, of creating the very terror you claim to have fought. I accuse you of exploiting that unreasoning fear, the natural fear of your own people who just want to live their lives in peace, as a political tool to slander your critics and libel your opponents. I accuse you of handing part of this republic over to a vice president who is without conscience and letting him run roughshod over it.

And I accuse you now, Mr. Bush, of giving, through that vice president, carte blanche to Mr. Libby to help defame Ambassador Joseph Wilson by any means necessary, to lie to grand juries and special counsel and before a court, in order to protect the mechanisms and particulars of that defamation with your guarantee that Libby would never see prison and, in so doing, as Ambassador Wilson himself phrased it here last night, of becoming an accessory to the obstruction of justice.

When President Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox during the infamous "Saturday Night Massacre" on October 20th, 1973, Cox initially responded tersely, and ominously.

"Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and, ultimately, the American people."

President Nixon did not understand how he had crystallized the issue of Watergate for the American people. It had been about the obscure meaning behind an attempt to break in to a rival party's headquarters, and the labyrinthine effort to cover up that break-in and the related crimes.

And in one night, Nixon transformed it. Watergate -- instantaneously -- became a simpler issue: a president overruling the inexorable march of the law, insisting -- in a way that resonated viscerally with millions who had not previously understood -- that he was the law.

Not the Constitution. Not the Congress. Not the courts. Just him. Just, Mr. Bush, as you did, yesterday.

The twists and turns of Plamegate, of your precise and intricate lies that sent us into this bottomless pit of Iraq; your lies upon the lies to discredit Joe Wilson; your lies upon the lies upon the lies to throw the sand at the "referee" of prosecutor Fitzgerald's analogy, these are complex and often painful to follow and too much, perhaps, for the average citizen.

But when other citizens render a verdict against your man, Mr. Bush, and then you spit in the faces of those jurors and that judge and the judges who were yet to hear the appeal, the average citizen understands that, Sir.

It's the fixed ballgame and the rigged casino and the prearranged lottery all rolled into one, and it stinks.

And they know it.

Nixon's mistake, the last and most fatal of them, the firing of Archibald Cox, was enough to cost him the presidency. And in the end, even Richard Nixon could say he could not put this nation through an impeachment. It was far too late for it to matter then, but as the decades unfold, that single final gesture of nonpartisanship, of acknowledged responsibility not to self, not to party, not to "base," but to country, echoes loudly into history.

Even Richard Nixon knew it was time to resign. Would that you could say that, Mr. Bush. And that you could say it for Mr. Cheney. You both crossed the Rubicon yesterday. Which one of you chose the route no longer matters. Which is the ventriloquist, and which the dummy, is irrelevant. But that you have twisted the machinery of government into nothing more than a tawdry machine of politics is the only fact that remains relevant.

It is nearly July Fourth, Mr. Bush, the commemoration of the moment we Americans decided that rather than live under a king who made up the laws, or erased them, or ignored them -- or commuted the sentences of those rightly convicted under them -- we would force our independence and regain our sacred freedoms.

We of this time -- and our leaders in Congress, of both parties -- must now live up to those standards which echo through our history. Pressure, negotiate, impeach: get you, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Cheney, two men who are now perilous to our democracy, away from its helm.

And for you, Mr. Bush, and for Mr. Cheney, there is a lesser task. You need merely achieve a very low threshold indeed. Display just that iota of patriotism which Richard Nixon showed on August 9th, 1974.

Resign.

And give us someone -- anyone -- about whom all of us might yet be able to quote John Wayne, and say, "I didn't vote for him, but he's my president, and I hope he does a good job."

-- By Keith Olbermann Salon

The Coulterization of the American Right

The "faggot" episode isn't about Ann Coulter. It's about the deal conservatism made with the devil -- a deal that has cost it its soul.

By Gary Kamiya

Mar. 13, 2007 | So Ann Coulter has done it again. She called John Edwards a "faggot" at a major conservative conference and everyone is outraged. But do we have to go through this ridiculous charade again? Nothing's going to happen. This is old and profitable hat for the shameless buffoon who once compared Hillary Clinton to a prostitute (when Clinton was first lady, no less) and displayed her keen grasp of geopolitical strategy after 9/11 by declaiming, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." (Following her sage advice, George W. Bush acted on the first two recommendations, with splendid results, but the third, despite the best efforts of some of his holy pals, is proving difficult.) We all know that Coulter will emerge from this episode selling even more books, appearing on even more right-wing talk shows and being even more fanatically worshipped by her legions of fans. A few newspapers have dropped her column, and some GOP presidential candidates condemned her statement -- who cares? As should be amply clear by now, there is virtually nothing that Ann Coulter can do that will cause her to be cast out of the bosom of the American right. And even if she was to lose her head and cross a line that even she can't cross -- calling Obama a "nigger" is about the only thing that would do the trick -- a thousand hissing Coulters would spring up to take her place.

For this isn't really about Coulter at all. This is about a pact the American right made with the devil, a pact the devil is now coming to collect on. American conservatism sold its soul to the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world to gain power, and now that its ideology has been exposed as empty and its leadership incompetent and corrupt, free-floating hatred is the only thing it has to offer. The problem, for the GOP, is that this isn't a winning political strategy anymore -- but they're stuck with it. They're trapped. They need the bigoted and reactionary base they helped create, but the very fanaticism that made the True Believers such potent shock troops will prevent the Republicans from achieving Karl Rove's dream of long-term GOP domination.

It is a truism that American politics is won in the middle. For a magic moment, helped immeasurably by 9/11, the GOP was able to convince just enough centrist Americans that extremists like Coulter and Limbaugh did in fact share their values. But the spell has worn off, and they have been exposed as the vacuous bottom-feeders that they are.

It will be objected that Coulter, Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and their ilk are just the lunatic fringe of a respectable movement. But in what passes for conservatism today, the lunatic fringe is respectable. In the surreal parade of Bush administration follies and sins, one singularly telling one has gone almost entirely unremarked: Vice President Dick Cheney has appeared several times on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Think about this: The holder of the second-highest office in the land has repeatedly chummed it up with a factually challenged right-wing hack, a pathetic figure only marginally less creepy than Coulter. Imagine the reaction if Al Gore, when he was vice president, had routinely appeared on a radio show hosted by, say, Ward Churchill. (The comparison is feeble: There really is no left-wing equivalent of Limbaugh, just as there is no left-wing equivalent of Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy.) The entire American political system would melt down. Beltway wise men would trip on their penny loafers in their haste to demand Gore's head. Robert Bork would come out of retirement to call for a coup to restore the caliphate, I mean the Judeo-Christian moral law in America. Yet the grotesque Cheney-Limbaugh love-in doesn't raise an eyebrow. We're so inured to the complete convergence of "respectable" conservatism and reactionary talk-radio ravings that we don't even deem it worthy of comment.

The right in America has always flirted with various forms of gutter populism, but its latest incarnation may represent its lowest limbo-dance yet. It's worth pausing for a moment to recall how this happened. Newt Gingrich, the adulterous moralist and demagogic hit man who led the vaunted Republican Revolution of 1994, is largely responsible for the GOP's debased state, along with evangelical holy warriors -- let's call them Christo-jihadists -- like Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed and James Dobson. In a reprise of Nixon's "Southern strategy," which used racist appeals to white Southerners to devastating political effect, Gingrich and the Christo-jihadists fired up the so-called values or social issues conservatives by ranting about guns, God and gays.

Just as important as Newt and the holy men was what former right-wing operative David Brock called "the Republican noise machine," the well-funded media apparatus that ceaselessly broadcasts right-wing propaganda. Figures like Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and, of course, Ann Coulter, using the enormous power of the new Fox News network and of talk radio, whipped their audience into a resentful, self-righteous fury, raging against "godless secularists" and "liberal elites" who they blamed for the moral collapse of America. This vicious culture war played on the fear and confusion of traditional Americans confronting massive societal and cultural changes -- a process brilliantly described in Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas?"

In fact, the right's culture war was -- and is -- mostly bogus. Most of the deep societal changes it decried -- the decline of community, the loss of religious faith, economic insecurity, selfishness, social atomization, anomie -- cannot be blamed on liberalism: They are products of modernity itself and of the modern world's triumphant economic system, capitalism. (Daniel Bell pointed this out more than 30 years ago in his 1976 classic "The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.") And those changes have been greatly exacerbated by the monopolistic, heck-of-a-job-Brownie, corporate-crony version of capitalism -- one loudly championed by, naturally, the GOP. Other aspects of the right's culture war are simply reactionary and/or unconstitutional, like its attack on science and its outrageous attempt to tear down the wall between church and state. There are some culture-war issues, like the fight over abortion, that are genuine moral cruxes and difficult to resolve. But even these have been made far more toxic and destructive than necessary by the right's hysterical use of them as a bludgeon to attack its enemies.

But if the right's culture war is almost entirely a fraud, and is one of the major factors behind the unraveling of the American polity, it paid big political dividends. The right's embrace of "values" allowed it to stave off what should have been its inexorable decline. If the price is obeisance to an increasingly vulgar, bigoted, nativist, know-nothing and theocratic ideology -- well, apparently it is better to survive as a slimy Gollum hungering after the Ring of Power than not to survive at all.

By rights, American conservatism should be dead or on life support by now. The ideology has always been incoherent, deeply divided between its libertarian, free-market wing and its traditionalist, "values" wing. As George H. Nash noted in his 1976 book "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945," a shared anti-communism and political convenience temporarily concealed these profound differences. Ronald Reagan's anti-communism, and his sunny personality, allowed free-market conservatives to overlook the fact that government actually grew enormously on his watch. With a majority of Americans continuing to believe in Democratic social policies and programs, and demographic trends running in the Democrats' favor, the right was facing disaster after Reagan's exit and the fall of communism. It desperately needed a boogeyman to unify its unruly factions. Fortunately, conjuring up boogeymen has been a right-wing specialty since the days of the Know-Nothing movement.

First the right launched the culture war, a key part of which was demonizing the Clintons. This and a disgraceful Supreme Court decision sufficed to get a featherweight named George W. Bush named president. But Bush lived down to his résumé, and after his first year his approval ratings were tanking. The old culture-war tricks weren't working anymore; the magic was wearing off. And then a miracle literally fell from the skies: 9/11.

The terror attacks were just what the right needed. It allowed it to fold "national security" into its culture war portfolio -- a potent mixture, especially with Congress and the mainstream media drugged by patriotic fervor. Islamic terrorism was hastily dressed up as the new Red Menace, liberals were painted as Chamberlain-like appeasers, and all was well for a while. In 2004, Bush's strategy of appealing to his base proved successful, despite his disastrous war on Iraq, and inspired GOP hopes that Rove's dream of a decades-long realignment might prove true.


But the "Islamofascist" solution to the right's woes proved to be short-lived. Bush's bungled war on Iraq angered not just the old-style traditionalists, who tended to be isolationist, but the free-marketers and libertarians, who seethed as Bush busted the budget and squandered trillions of dollars on his war of choice. As for the neoconservatives, who dominated Bush's administration, they never established themselves as a dominant political force to begin with, and they lost all credibility after the Iraq debacle.

That left only the base -- the culture warriors for whom the battle over "values" trumps everything else, the zealots who brook no compromise. The problem is, no political movement led by its most extreme elements can win. The right's culture warriors are too manifestly unhinged; their obsessive mean-spiritedness, more than their actual positions, leaves them out of the American mainstream, even out of the mainstream of the Republican Party. A movement figuratively led by the likes of Ann Coulter (or literally by Newt Gingrich, who is lurking on the sidelines, ready to run) cannot win a general election in this country. A red, white and blue banner inscribed with "Faggot!" may rally the hardcore, but most Americans will reject a politics based on hate and fear.

And they will do so in large part because they've been there and done that. The disastrous Bush presidency, which is certain to be recorded as one of the worst in American history, managed to stay politically afloat by making primal appeals to fear, revenge and patriotism. But like the boy who cried "wolf" -- or, in this case, "terrorism!" -- once too often, it has used up its fearmongering capital.

Episodes like the Coulter debacle make it all too clear, especially to the swing and independent voters and pragmatic Republicans who will decide the election, that the GOP's base (which, by the way, is what "al-Qaida" means in Arabic) is a rather scary group. The GOP is reaping what it has sown. It preached hatred, fear and resentment for years, it whipped up the troops with apocalyptic rhetoric, and now it has created a core constituency that only too obviously reflects that negativity. Indeed, the Republican base increasingly defines itself not by positive values, which a true conservatism would affirm and which could hold broad appeal, but only by its partisan hatreds.

The sorry state of contemporary conservatism shows that there is an innate danger to civil society in letting loose the dogs of "values" -- especially right-wing values. Because conservatives tend to believe more than liberals in good and evil, in a clear-cut, transcendental morality, a values-based politics for them quickly acquires not just an authoritarian cast, but an almost religious one. As we learned on 9/11, and observe every day in Iraq, religious zealotry is not conducive to reasoned discussions. When you have God, right and patriarchal authority on your side, anything goes. The result, among other things, is ugly psychosexual mudslinging like Coulter's. As my Salon colleague Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the right's strategy is "to feminize ... all male Democratic or liberal political leaders. For multiple reasons, nobody does that more effectively or audaciously than Coulter, which is why they need her so desperately and will never jettison her."

Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them. Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid, increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the message.

The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the garbage. Salon

Russian Court Throws Out Microsoft Piracy Case

A Russian court has dismissed a criminal case against a village school teacher accused of using pirated Microsoft software.

Aleksandr Ponosov, the headmaster at a school in the Perm region, went on trial after prosecutors accused him of violating Microsoft's intellectual property rights. Radio Free Europe

Growing concern about Russia leads to new defence thinking in Sweden

..."The strategic map has changed. We must now analyse what resources are needed here at home, if tension in the north of Europe were to grow", said Colonel Stefan Gustafsson in a recent interview with the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.
As Gustafsson sees it, Russia’s armed forces have passed their nadir, and Russia is now able to invest more in its military. According to Gustafsson, Russia also has new energy interests to protect in the Barents Sea, and in the Baltic Sea gas pipeline, which is a cause for concern in Sweden.
... Foreign Minister Carl Bildt noted in a foreign policy speech made on behalf of the government that development in Russia has taken a few backward steps. He said that the political system and the media atmosphere are not as free as before, human rights continue to be violated in Chechnya, and that the unsolved murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the circumstances surrounding the death of Aleksandr Litvinenko "cast dark shadows".
Bildt did not want to take an immediate stand on the new assessments from the military. "I have only read what the newspapers have written. I need to examine the situation better", Bildt said to journalists. HELSINGIN SANOMAT

Peterson/The Sun/Vancouver, Canada/CartoonArts International

A countdown to confrontation

THE streets of Iran are festooned this week with revolutionary bunting. Black and green banners commemorating the martyrdom of the third Shia imam, Hussein, still flutter from lamp-posts, even though the mournful Ashura rites of late January are over. They now hang beside flags looking forward to February 11th, when Iranians mark the anniversary of the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Such celebrations usually go unnoticed in America. But not this time. The two countries are moving slowly towards confrontation, both over Iraq—where Iran is meddling—and over Iran's nuclear programme. Its provocative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (above right), has hinted that February's celebrations will include “good news” about the progress of nuclear work. Iran says it is fiddling with uranium and plutonium to produce more electricity. But America and many other countries suspect it is building a bomb.

...Inside Iran a heated debate is now under way over how to respond to its growing isolation and the prospect of more sanctions to come. There are signs of rising popular discontent with Mr Ahmadinejad's firebrand rhetoric and his capricious management of the economy—as well as worries about sanctions, and how much the nuclear programme will cost Iran. More pragmatic politicians, such as Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, would prefer to re-open negotiations with the West to avoid open confrontation.

When Mr Ahmadinejad and his allies did badly in recent local elections, criticism came into the open. Last week, for the first time, a newspaper editorial even argued the case for suspending nuclear work, as the UN has demanded. Mr Ahmadinejad's wings have been clipped a little. But there is no sign yet that Iran's leaders will reconsider their nuclear ambitions. Economist

Suffer the children?

JUDGING by the loud howls of concern this week, the lot of children in Britain and America is a rather terrible one. On Wednesday February 14th Unicef published a report comparing the well-being of young people in 21 rich countries, and concluded that British and American youths endure the worst quality of life of any. In contrast, North European children, especially the Nordics, apparently have a lovely time. Cue hand-wringing from a lot of worried Anglo-American parents.
...there is much in the report that is worth noting. The authors drew on 40 different indicators of child welfare, divided into six general categories, and ranked the countries accordingly. Anglo-Americans with many single-parent families, greater household-income inequality and worse social habits consistently scored badly on almost every measure. What is particularly instructive, however, are the clues to why this is the case. ,a href=" Economist

The myth of Finnish incorruptibility

An often-repeated quotation believed to date back to the 1970s, and attributed to Nokia director Harry Mildh, states that "there is no person so insignificant as to not be worth bribing."
... For years, Finland has been at the top of the list maintained by Transparency International of the world's least corrupt countries. So we are incorruptible.
However, the problem with these comparisons is that corruption manifests itself in so many forms. The TI report mainly tells us that the Finnish civil service is no longer bribe-driven.
... The bribery scandal that emerged in Siemens not long ago was a rude awakening to many. Former and present employees of the prestigious German electronics manufacturer have spoken in police interrogations of systematic transfers of funds to bribe accounts - a practice that has continued for years. This was used to grease the palms of buyers of telecommunications networks - especially in developing countries.
Examples can be found closer to home as well. In one case that was made public, Wärtsilä and Instrumentarium have at the very least turned a blind eye to obvious bribery in their foreign dealings. HELSINGIN SANOMAT

Pierre Loti at the height of controversy

In much of Istanbul, place names come and place names go. But when the name change proposes replacing “Pierre Loti,” the famous French poet who etched Istanbul into the minds of generations of Europeans, well, that means controversy.

“Let Pierre Loti's name may become Eyüp Sultan,” read the headline in Tuesday's mass daily Vatan, telling the story of a name change that quickly migrated to television news reports. The name change has divided locals who live or work around the historic hilltop site and even pitted the mayor of Istanbul's greater municipality against the mayor of the smaller sub-municipality who ordered the change. Turkish Daily News

FBI loose 160 laptop computers and have 160 missing weapons The FBI lost 160 laptop computers in less than four years, including at least 10 that contained highly sensitive classified information and one that held "personal identifying information on FBI personnel," according to a new report released today.

The bureau, which has struggled for years to get a handle on sloppy inventory procedures, also reported 160 missing weapons during the same time period, from February 2002 to September 2005, according to the report by the Justice Department inspector general's office.

In addition to the 10 or more laptops that were confirmed to contain classified information, the FBI could not say whether another 51 computers might also contain secret data, the report said. Seven were assigned to the counterintelligence or counterterrorism divisions, which routinely handle classified information. Washington Post

How the US is doing Iran's killing in Iraq

New evidence is emerging on the ground of an Iranian hand in growing violence within Iraq, but not necessarily as the US claims Tehran is involved, that is, by providing arms to Shi'ite Muslim militants.

The massacre in Najaf last month indicates that Iran could be working through the Iraqi government, local leaders in Najaf say. The killing of 263 people in Najaf by Iraqi and US forces on January 29 provoked outrage and vows of revenge among residents in and around the sacred Shi'ite city in the south.
.... most people in the area believe the US military was told by Iraqi security forces loyal to the pro-Iranian government in Baghdad that "terrorists" or the "messianic cult" were attacking Najaf. They say the misinformation was intended to mislead occupation forces into attacking the tribe.

Many Shi'ites in the southern parts of the country and in Baghdad now say they had been fooled earlier by US promises to help them, but that the Najaf massacre has dramatically changed their views. Asia Times

Return of Somalia's Warlords "This has blown up in our face, frankly." This blunt assessment by John Prendergast—a former adviser to the National Security Council and the State Department who is currently working for the International Crisis Group—wasn't about the January bombing of villages in southern Somalia by the United States. Prendergast was speaking some eight months ago about the clandestine American project of funding the warlords to try to quell the rise of radical Islamist forces in the northeastern African country.

He told the June 8, 2006, New York Times that through the C.I.A.'s program of helping to fund weapons for Somali warlords the United States had "strengthened the hand of the people whose presence we were most worried about"—the I.C.U.

Since the 22-year dictatorship of Mohamed Said Barre was ended in 1991, Somalia has been a country without a state. The transitional government, formed in late 2004, is the 14th attempt to create a government since the Barre regime collapsed. Throughout the period after Barre's fall, factions of the former national army have formed into rival warlord-controlled militias. The warlords split the capital into fiefdoms and have waged bloody battles for control of the country.

Officially, Washington denies funding the warlords, although aid workers with the Red Cross and other organizations in Mogadishu told the June 5, 2006, Newsweek that they had seen "many Americans with thick necks and short haircuts moving around carrying big suitcases." Worldpress Org

Korea nuclear talks 'make progress' ...South Korea's envoy to the negotiations, Chun Yung-woo, said: "We have confirmed that there is a consensus among the countries that there must be an agreement on the early steps on implementing the September 19 joint statement at this round [of negotiations]."

He was referring to the North's agreement with the five other countries in September 2005, so far not implemented, to stop its nuclear weapons programme in return for economic and security concessions.

Christopher Hill, the US chief delegate, said the six parties were "coalescing around some of the themes" that would be part of an initial agreement, and also said China may start circulating something "either later tonight or tomorrow morning".

"We hope we can achieve some sort of joint statement," he said. Aljazeera

The caricatures of Mahomet carry out “Charlie Hebdo” in front of justice The lawsuit of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo opens, Wednesday February 7 in front of the correctional court of Paris. The newspaper and its director of the publication, Philippe Valley, are continued by the Union of the Islamic organizations of France (UOIF) and the Large Mosque of Paris (GMP) to have published caricatures of Mahomet in February 2006. The weekly magazine wanted to thus answer the vagueness of violent demonstrations which had burst, at the end of 2005, in the Moslem world after the publication of drawings discussed in the Danish press, of the monk having judged these drawings blasphématoires or racists. Among the three drawings blamed, two had already been published in Denmark in the Jyllands-Posten newspaper in September 2005. Third is signed of the French caricaturist Cabu. Le Monde

Abbas: Dig near Al-Aqsa Mosque likely to endanger peace efforts Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday said that Israeli excavation works near the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem were likely to endanger regional peace efforts, Israel Radio reported.

Abbas added that the excavations demonstrated Israel's intentions to destroy holy Islamic sites, according to the radio.

Jordan's King Abdullah II on Tuesday said the excavation has led to a dangerous rise in Middle East tensions and could derail the revival of Arab-Israeli peace talks.
... Jerusalem area Archaeologist Yuval Baruch stated that there is no intention to dig underneath the Temple Mount or to cause any damage to the Western Wall of the Mount. A source at the Israel Antiquities Authority stated today that "The incitement occurring in the Muslim world over the excavations is merely an attempt to twist a non-political act into something religious and divisive."

"The excavations are being carried out according to procedure by a team of professional archaeologists and experts," the source added.

In recent weeks, militant Islamic leaders have warned that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is under threat from the excavation. They have urged followers to mobilize to block Israeli work near the compound. Haaretz

Palestinians arrive for Mecca talks Palestinian leaders have arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks aimed at ending months of factional fighting in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah.

However as they convened in Jeddah ahead of the talks on Tuesday a commander from the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, was shot dead in Gaza City.
Meanwhile Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said on Tuesday that he was to hold trilateral talks with Condoleeza Rice, the US secretary of state, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, on February 19.
Saudi King Abdullah met separately with Abbas, head of the Fatah movement and Khaled Meshaal, a senior Hamas leader, in Jeddah before open-ended discussions aimed at ending the power struggle in Gaza and the West Bank begin in the holy city of Mecca on Wednesday. Aljazeera

Bush's Iran madness You wouldn't think that the masterminds who dreamed up the Iraq war could possibly match that grand plan, but they have. The ignorant ideologues who brought us Iraq have learned nothing. They are still reading from the same delusional neoconservative script. So, with Iraq a bloody nightmare, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process dead, Lebanon and Gaza on the brink of civil war, the entire Middle East dangerously unstable, and America's standing in the Arab/Muslim world at an all-time low, the Bush administration geniuses have come up with another grand plan: demonize Iran, push it to the brink of war, strong-arm U.S. allies into confronting it, and whip up sectarian hatred in the region.

In his State of the Union address, Bush singled out Iran as a hostile troublemaker in Iraq and promised to attack its "networks," which U.S. officials have claimed are supplying advanced weaponry to Shia militias who kill American soldiers. He then threatened to "kill or capture" any Iranian intelligence agents found in Iraq. American aircraft carriers have moved menacingly into the Gulf. U.S. troops seized six Iranian officials in northern Iraq, accusing them of spying. U.S. officials darkly conjectured that Iran was responsible for the abduction and killing of five U.S. soldiers in Karbala. At the same time, the Bush administration is twisting the arms of its "moderate" Sunni allies to take a hard line against Iran.

Some see this gambit as representing a welcome return to coldblooded, "Great Game" realism after the wishful thinking that led to the Iraq debacle. But this is a superficial misreading. Bush's Iran ploy reeks of desperation and shortsightedness; it is no more "realistic" than his Iraq strategy. It may briefly postpone the day of reckoning by diverting Americans' attention and providing a temporary bad guy, one Bush is sure to blame when his Iraq venture completely falls apart. But it flies in the face of a historical shift, the rise of Shia and Iranian power, that Bush himself rashly set in motion, and cannot now be undone. It could lead to a shooting war, which would be utterly disastrous for U.S. interests and would set back the cause of reform in Iran by years. And by further exacerbating sectarian and ethnic tensions in the Middle East while denying, in time-honored neocon fashion, that there are actual causes for what Bush simplistically labels "extremism," it is likely to further destabilize an already-chaotic region -- and empower al-Qaida, which thrives on hatred and chaos. Salon

Deal ends Beatles' Apple battle Technology giant Apple has reached a deal with the Beatles to end the dispute over the use of the Apple name. Apple Inc will now take full control of the Apple brand and license certain trademarks back to the Beatles' record company Apple Corps for continued use.

The two companies have been wrangling over the use of the Apple name and logo for more than 25 years. The legal battle over the trademark will now end.




Apple Inc boss Steve Jobs said the court dispute had been "painful".

The Beatles' songs are still not available on any legal download service, but this truce could pave the way for their anticipated appearance on the iTunes download store. BBC News

Gaza abductions on eve of talks A series of tit-for-tat kidnappings of Hamas and Fatah members have taken place ahead of crucial talks due to be held between Fatah and Hamas in Mecca on Tuesday.

Gunmen in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun have stormed the headquarters of Force 17, which is loyal to Fatah, and abducted six members.
Fatah officials blamed Hamas for the abductions. Aljazeera