Rove: September 9th-11th, Faith & Freedom Conference and Strategy Briefing with Karl Rove, The Mayflower Renaissance Hotel, 1127 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington DC
https://secure.ffcoalition.com/civicrm/event/register?reset=1&id=1

Rove: September 14, 2010, 12:00pm, ACC PAC - Karl Rove Luncheon, Johnny's Half Shell, 400 North Capitol St., NW, Washington, DC
http://guest.cvent.com/EVENTS/Info/Agenda.aspx?e=ffd863d8-3f95-46b9-9eac...

Bush: September 24, 2010, Benefit for the Appalachian College of Pharmacy, Britstol, VA
http://www2.tricities.com/news/2010/aug/17/former-president-george-w-bus...

--from Susan Harman

I just listened to this interview and can now say what many, me included, have thought all along, not only about him but as to our own previous administration, he's certifiably crazy! I mean that in the so called World View, especially of righteousness, he just spoke. What's going on has Nothing to do with any religious ideology but does for those who want to use that as their excuse, boy do they got some splanin to do at the pearly gates. He seems to Not Understand that humans going into others countries and Destroying Them as that Kills and Maims Tens of Thousands plus and Millions of Refugees is Not going to create Rage and Hatred, not only in those countries but from others on the planet. He and like are beyond nuts, Way Beyond!!

Of course it's guilty of many, but Daphne Eviatar has in mind one in particular:

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that administration officials are "alarmed" by the military commission case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen seized as a 15-year-old by U.S. forces in Afghanistan who's now spent a third of his life in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. Trying an alleged child soldier based largely on confessions he made after being threatened with gang-rape and murder is not the case the Obama administration had hoped to showcase in its first military commission trial.

But the argument in a new paper published today by Loyola Law School professor David Glazier should give the administration even more cause for alarm. Glazier, an expert on international law and the laws of armed conflict, argues that the military commission trial of Omar Khadr is itself a war crime.

READ THE REST

Alabama judge sentences man to join military
The Associated Press
MONTGOMERY, Ala. - A judge sentenced a man to join the military for posting a provocative Facebook message about the mass killing at Virginia Tech, but the Army said it doesn't want him until he's off probation.

Originally charged with making a terrorist threat, 23-year-old Zachary Lambert of Montgomery pleaded guilty to a reduced, misdemeanor charge of harassing communications. Circuit Judge Tracey McCooey placed him on probation during a hearing Thursday and ordered him to perform community service, apologize to the community and join the military.

"Military is a good, good thing for you," the judge told Lambert.

Lambert said he thought he had a good chance of being accepted into the service. But Army Sgt. Michael Johnson, a recruiter in Montgomery, said Lambert can't enlist while he is on probation.

Sorry there Tony but it was known headed towards much more then a 'nightmare' with the first beat of the drums of war of choice and you will be remembered, and judged, as a Main Participant beating those drums!! Even millions of Brits were telling you so and you choose, as your masters cheney and bush labeled, to ignore the 'focus groups' who were not proven wrong!!

By Juan Cole

Here is the speech that I wish President Obama would give about the Iraq War, but which neither he nor any other president ever will.

Fellow Americans, and Iraqis who are watching this speech, I have come here this evening not to declare a victory or to mourn a defeat on the battlefield, but to apologize from the bottom of my heart for a series of illegal actions and grossly incompetent policies pursued by the government of the United States of America, in defiance of domestic US law, international treaty obligations, and both American and Iraqi public opinion.

The United Nations was established in 1945 in the wake of a series of aggressive wars of conquest and the response to them, in which over 60 million people perished. Its purpose was to forbid such unjustified attacks, and its charter specified that in future wars could only be launched on two grounds. One is clear self-defense, when a country has been attacked. The other is with the authorization of the United Nations Security Council.

It was because the French, British and Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956 contravened these provisions of the United Nations Charter that President Dwight D. Eisenhower condemned that war and forced the belligerents to withdraw. When Israel looked as though it might try to hang on to its ill-gotten spoils, the Sinai Peninsula, President Eisenhower went on television on February 21, 1957 and addressed the nation. These words have largely been suppressed and forgotten in the United States of today, but they should ring through the decades and centuries:

“If the United Nations once admits that international dispute can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the very foundation of the organization, and our best hope of establishing a real world order. That would be a disaster for us all . . .

[Referring to Israeli demands that certain conditions be met before it relinquished the Sinai, the president said that he] “would be untrue to the standards of the high office to which you have chosen me if I were to lend the influence of the United States to the proposition that a nation which invades another should be permitted to exact conditions for withdrawal . . .”

“If it [the United Nations Security Council] does nothing, if it accepts the ignoring of its repeated resolutions calling for the withdrawal of the invading forces, then it will have admitted failure. That failure would be a blow to the authority and influence of the United Nations in the world and to the hopes which humanity has placed in the United Nations as the means of achieving peace with justice.”

READ THE REST.

Plastic roses adorn an unmarked grave in the Cemetery of the Martyrs, built the day after Saddam Hussein’s fall on a park along the Tigris.

30 August 2010 - In a pastel-colored room at the Baghdad morgue known simply as the Missing, where faces of the thousands of unidentified dead of this war are projected onto four screens, Hamid Jassem came on a Sunday searching for answers.

In a blue plastic chair, he sat under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 8:58 and 44 seconds, no longer keeping time. With deference and patience, he stared at the screen, each corpse bearing four digits and the word “majhoul,” or unknown:

By Vince Warren, Center for Constitutional Rights

Will the U.S. government get away with the power to target and kill individuals, including U.S. citizens, far from any armed conflict and without charge, trial, or judicial process? This is the central question in Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, a lawsuit CCR and the ACLU filed today in federal court.

29 August 2010 - A $40 million prison sits in the desert north of Baghdad, empty. A $165 million children's hospital goes unused in the south. A $100 million waste water treatment system in Fallujah has cost three times more than projected, yet sewage still runs through the streets

As the U.S. draws down in Iraq, it is leaving behind hundreds of abandoned or incomplete projects. More than $5 billion in American taxpayer funds has been wasted — more than 10 percent of the some $50 billion the U.S. has spent on reconstruction in Iraq, according to audits from a U.S. watchdog agency.

Remind the beckers and hockey puck herds, Today, what they want to go back to is the Total Incompetence of the previous administration and the repub congresses then and before which brought the Example of Katrina's Devastation, in this Country, to the people of the Gulf!!

That they were blaming everyone else as they Supported that Incompetence, not only as to that but the emptying of our treasury, two wars and occupations of choice, tearing apart the constitutional rights of this country, the destruction of the economy {though that was coming with the con of trickle down capitalism anyway, the affore mentioned just hastened it and made it worse} and Oh So Much More.........................................!!

By David Swanson

Pretending to end a war and occupation, while stationing 50,000 soldiers, 18,000 mercenaries, and 84,000 support contractors in massive and permanent military bases in Iraq is a far cry from what candidate Barack Obama described as ending "the mind-set that got us into war in the first place." It fits better with Nobel Peace laureate Obama's description of war as "not only necessary but morally justified."

August 27, 2010 - WikiLeaks, an organization dedicated to anonymously publishing classified documents, has recently come under fire for publishing more than 90,000 Afghanistan war logs — logs that meticulously chronicle a long, secretive history of brutality, deception and corruption at the behest of American intervention.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has since been routinely harassed with a variety of threats, among these a false rape allegation purportedly initiated by the Pentagon to root out Assange during a stay in Sweden.

Therein lies the question: if the folks at the Pentagon are so afraid of Assange and his tiny donation-funded organization that they would start a smear campaign of death threats and baseless accusations, just how much are they hiding?

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of "After the Flag Has Been Folded" and "Will Jesus Buy Me a Doublewide?"

August 27, 2010 - In war, one family's story echoes the pain of another. I was reminded of that while watching Larry King interview Pat Tillman's parents last week.

Spc. Pat Tillman, who forfeited a multimillion-dollar football contract to serve his country, died in Afghanistan in 2004.

Some dead bodies were unidentified and buried in mass graves

27 August, 2010 - The Independent research organisation Iraq Body Count has called for a full judicial enquiry in Britain into the number of people killed and wounded in the Iraq War.

{read more}

Morphed with the help of the Neo-Cons in this Country, the U.S., and their supporters hate rhetoric which not only continues but has ramped up in condemnation still of a whole peoples as well as their religious beliefs, made by those who are no different then the extremists they should be condemning!

August 26, 2010 - THE likely independent MP Andrew Wilkie said the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, had apologised for the Howard government's vilification of him over his opposition to the Iraq War.

Snip

This week Mr Wilkie called for Australia to separate its Afghanistan war policy from the United States and get out.

By Robert Jensen

When the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division rolled out of Iraq last week, the colonel commanding the brigade told a reporter that his soldiers were “leaving as heroes.”

While we can understand the pride of professional soldiers and the emotion behind that statement, it’s time for Americans -- military and civilian -- to face a difficult reality: In seven years of the deceptively named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” and nine years of “Operation Enduring Freedom” in Afghanistan, no member of the U.S. has been a hero.

August 23, 2010 - In the earliest production stages of “Witness: Katrina,” filmmakers Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs culled a few home-video clips from the Internet to assemble a kind of pilot for their project.

 

This drug induced Country, the U.S., is one of the Main Suppliers of the weapons and ammunition being used across the border in the Mexican Drug Wars as well, and the middlemen gun runners aren't illegal aliens!!

'Straw' gun buyers leave a bloody trail

August 23, 2010 - Authorities are cracking down on those who buy guns for criminals who can't. Experts say "gray market" supplies 90 percent of guns used in crimes.

Give Mark Koscielski the slightest indication that the gun you want to buy from him may not be for you, and the sale's over.

"Say a couple comes in, and the male is looking at guns while the female doesn't do anything, and finally he says, 'I will take this gun,'" said the owner of Koscielski's Guns and Ammo in south Minneapolis. "We hand him the federal form, and he will hand it to his girlfriend or wife. Can't do that."

August 18, 2010 - Seeking to uncover information about the U.S. government’s 2008 overseas “proxy detention” of American citizen Naji Hamdan, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California filed a lawsuit in federal district court here today. The suit asks the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence agencies to turn over records about their surveillance of Mr. Hamdan in the United States, and their involvement in his detention and torture in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. {read more}

 

Related

* Watch an interview between Hamdan and Pasquarella.

By Shashank Bengali

From McClatchy

WASHINGTON — In June, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of a Canadian man who contends that U.S. authorities mistook him for an al Qaida operative in 2002 and shipped him to a secret prison in Syria, where he was beaten with electrical cables and held in a grave-like cell for 10 months.

Four years earlier, however, the Canadian government had concluded an exhaustive inquiry and found that the former prisoner, Maher Arar, was telling the truth. Canada cleared Arar of all ties to terrorism and paid him $10 million in damages, and his lawyers say he's cooperating with an investigation into the role of U.S. and Syrian officials in his imprisonment and reported torture.

READ MORE AT:

http://warcriminalswatch.org/index.php/news/40-recent-news/646-8-18-10-o...

August 20, 2010 - After handing down its first verdict in July, the international war crimes tribunal in Cambodia will next year hear the second - and possibly final - case against a former senior Khmer Rouge leader. But some people are looking beyond all of this - to a time when the tribunal has left Cambodia - and a need for learning centres and other legacy projects. {read more}

Will this Country, the United States, wait, if ever, years to do what we should already be doing and the World Awaits same?

optimism from The Times

An editorial published the day the war started in 2003 expressed confidence that the superior U.S. and British forces would bring fighting to an end quickly.

August 20, 2010
After more than seven years and 4,000 lives, the final U.S. combat soldiers are on their way out of Iraq. Below is an editorial from March 20, 2003, the day the war started. In the piece, The Times' editorial board expressed some confidence that the war would end quickly and with few casualties.

The Beginnings of War
U.S. troops are better equipped and trained than their foes, and this should help them in combat.

ACLU Lawsuit Charges Feds With Hiding Information On Torture Of US Citizen

Aug. 18, 2010 - Naji Hamdan Was Held in Secret Arab Prison For Months, Alleges US Involvement

Naji Hamdan, an American of Lebanese origin, looks from the balcony of his home, in Beirut, Lebanon, in this Nov. 2009 file photo. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit in federal court in California today to force the CIA, the FBI and other federal agencies to tell what they know about the alleged torture and detention of Hamdan, who was held in a secret prison in the UAE for months.(Bilal Hussein/AP Photo)

August 19, 2010 - "I do hope this memory will also work on the case of Iran. In the case of Iraq, it was a case launched against the eradication of weapons of mass destruction that turns out didn’t exist. In the case of Iran, we are seeing people calling for armed action against alleged intentions." — Hans Martin Blix

 

Ambassador Hans Blix, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, led a team of UN inspectors into Iraq before the 2003 invasion, searching for weapons of mass destruction. They found none, but the invasion went ahead as planned. {read more}

Read a full transcript.

Our symbolic transfer from combat during 'Nam was when we were sent over no longer as labeled 'combat' but as 'advisors' once again.

That started just before I left CI/SERE in early 1970 and headed into country, we were given military beanies, i.e. berets, with the operations patch on them and called 'advisors', never did meet my supposed 'counterpart' the whole year I was there.

Other countries probing Bush-era torture — Why aren't we?

18 August 2010 - In June, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case of a Canadian man who contends that U.S. authorities mistook him for an al Qaida operative in 2002 and shipped him to a secret prison in Syria, where he was beaten with electrical cables and held in a grave-like cell for 10 months.

Four years earlier, however, the Canadian government had concluded an exhaustive inquiry and found that the former prisoner, Maher Arar, was telling the truth. Canada cleared Arar of all ties to terrorism and paid him $10 million in damages, and his lawyers say he's cooperating with an investigation into the role of U.S. and Syrian officials in his imprisonment and reported torture.

Aug. 17: Amir Bar-Lev, director of "The Tillman Story" talks with Chris Hayes about what he learned in the three years he spent producing his documentary.

Accountability must also be brought, but that just minimizes what may come from all the destruction carried out, and so far the Brits and a few others have seen that need!

The UK can only gain by helping Iraqi refugees

August 17, 2010 - On July 20 Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director general of the United Kingdom’s MI5 Security Service from 2002 to 2007, spoke before the Iraq inquiry committee set up by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and chaired by Sir John Chilcot to examine the lessons learnt from the Iraq conflict. Manningham-Buller stated that the Iraq war “was a highly significant factor in how ‘home-grown’ extremists justified their [violent] actions.”