Ellsberg Says War With Iran Still on

Russian Yakhonts hyper-sonic anti-ship missile

Below is an email I just sent to Mike Malloy, host of the Mike Malloy show which you can listen to at www.mikemalloy.com. If you haven't heard of Mike, please tune in after the news at 9PM EST. Mike is one of the leading progressive voices out there and was named by FOX news as being one of the top 20 most dangerous Liberals in America.


Hi Mike

I've been talking about the attack on Iran for so long now, I'm into the boy who cried wolf zone. But time will tell, and time, my friend, is running out. If there is to be an American or Israeli attack on Iran, it must be soon - within the year. We will know soon.

Today we have Daniel Ellsberg warning about an attack on Iran. He is very worried. Ellsberg says that, "The American public and media have not picked up on the urgency surrounding a pending war with Iran... no matter how much time is left, impeachment is one thing that must happen for the sake of preserving American democracy."

The war plans are not just on the table Mike, Sy Hersh says they are being "updated by the minute".

I won't even bother to add that so called "case" against Iran is a thin, wet, dirty, tissue of lies and propaganda, without any basis in reality whatsoever.

Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the country's most famous whistleblower, fears that before the Bush administration leaves office, it will try to attack Iran.

Indeed, Ellsberg's argument gained merit as George W. Bush increased his rhetoric against Iran when he delivered his final State of the Union Address. Bush accused Iran of training militia extremists in Iraq and emphasized the United States will confront its enemies.

http://www.alternet.org/audits/76241/?page=entire

So what happens if Bush does attack Iran Mike? Please see this link to a shocking, yet truly superb article on Iranian military capabilities. The Iranians have an arsenal of hypersonic and unstoppable ship killer missiles like the Russian SS-NX-26 Yakhonts missiles, (speed: Mach 2.9; range: 180 miles) deployed by the Iranians along the Gulf's northern shore.The US Navy has no defense against these missiles. None. If and when the attack on Iran occurs, within hours the world will change again as the Iranians will almost certainly sink USN Nuclear Carriers, tankers, and capital ships.

There are really only three things that are important right now Mike: stopping the war, not starting a new one, and 9/11 justice.

Personally I would like to hear a show devoted to asking questions about the attack on Iran.

Keep up the great work. We appreciate it.

Super Tuesday. Super indeed. Tonight we will know who the nominee's are. Much is at stake tonight. I will be posting more later tonight as the results come in.

So the results are in, and they are... inconclusive. Unless you are Republican. The Democratic nomination could go either Hilary or Obama. I am not excited. Their policies are similar. I see little difference. I "like" Obama more, but right now, until I see some real promises on the table, I don't care who wins.

Update: Feb. 15

I changed my mind. I do care who wins. Obama is not going to make much of a dent in miles thick wall around the oligarchy, nor is he going to have much money to work worth given that the US has such massive deficits and debts. I have seen Obama and he is sincere I think, and unlike Hilary who is so indebted, so beholden and yes so corrupted by her ties to the oligarchy, at least Obama will try and he should be elected.

Hilary, Hilary, Hilary

Sen. Hillary Clinton said this:

"I believe that it is abundantly clear that the case that was outlined on behalf of going to the resolution -- not going to war, but going to the resolution -- was a credible case. I was told personally by the White House that they would use the resolution to put the inspectors in ... Some people now think that this was a very clear open-and-shut case. We bombed them for days in 1998 because Saddam Hussein threw out inspectors."

Does Everything go Down the Memory Hole Now?

Hans Blix and other inspectors said many many times that Saddam was cooperating with the inspectors! I remember! Saddam was in fact, extremely cooperative.

Why would Saddam have not cooperated? HE DID NOT HAVE WMD! Even though the US sold him the precursor chemicals for nerve gas. So logically he had nothing to lose by cooperating. He knew the gun was pointed at his head.

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml

All this was widely reported in what left of the free press at the time, and was certainly on the Internets.

And Hilary knew all that, and she knows the inspectors were not impeded when she voted for the war. This is not true, many of us knew that the WMD stories were lies, even at the time. If H. Clinton was not in possession of the facts then she is stupid and uninformed, if she actually accepted the story as told by Bush and Cheney - then she is dangerously naive. On the other hand if she knew the facts and voted to kill one million people, beggar the treasury, all the while making the United States the world's leading outlaw nation - then she is plain evil.

No one can hide something like a chemical weapons factory, not anymore. If Saddam had had anything the US would have the address, the telephone number, and the name of the guy running the plant.

Her husband, obviously with her assent, since she is so "strong", attacked and destroyed what he said was a chemical weapons plant in the Sudan 3 days before the Monica hearings. Some of us, "knew" that it was in fact a pharmaceutical factory even at the time. Since Sudan was under American led sanctions at the time, they were unable to produce enough medicines to treat their sick, and thousands, perhaps 10's of thousands of the vulnerable, mostly the old, and the young died as result.

Here is the official bullshit line as it was reported then. http://www.cnn.com/US/9808/20/us.strikes.01/

And here is the truth as we now know it. http://www.workers.org/ww/1998/sudan0910.php

Even Bill now admits it was a mistake, would that his wife had his balls. And I don't mean in a jar.

If you want more war, more death, more hatred toward America, plus a completely deadlocked congress and senate, compounded by a screaming, raging, right wing noise machine, by all means vote for Hilary.

At least Obomba has no blood on his hands - yet. But we can always hope that he will follow through on his callow, cowardly and near insane threats to bomb Waziristan, that's in Pakistan, a country with real WMD.

US Ends Torture! Replaces it With "EIT Units"

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon is posting today about the American Attorney General Michael Mukasey's recent testimony before Congress.

Greenwald, inter alia, is upset because even extraordinary testimony from Mukasey about torture is now "ordinary".

Mukasey explicitly embraces the most extreme theories of presidential omnipotence and lawlessness and displays as much Cheney-ite contempt for the notion of Congressional oversight as the Vice President himself. He repeatedly endorsed patently illegal behavior -- including torture...

He went on to say..
Mukasey repeatedly insisted that even his most lawlessness-endorsing views are within our political mainstream, and he's right about that. It's now been seven years that our country has functioned under the radical executive power theories of the Bush administration, which include the right of the President to break the law. Congress long ago decided it would do nothing about any of it, would acquiesce to it, and thus -- as was predictable and predicted -- it has all become normalized.

No more "torture"

It's so simple I wish I had thought of it, all that is required to end torture in America is to change the name! It's not "torture", that has such a negative, even authentic ring to it, no let's call it "enhanced interrogation techniques", no wait, let's reduce it to some acronym with no unpleasant connotations. EIT, yeah that's it, EIT! We had to use a little EIT on the detainee, then we had some tea.

The Senators and Mukasey spoke all day long about torture with such dispassion that one would have thought it was nothing more than the latest bureaucratic HUD program. They don't even use the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" any more. That phrase has been so normalized that they now all know and use an abbreviation for it -- "EIT."

Glenn has long been an eloquent, careful and relentless opponent of the regime occupying the White House. Nevertheless he has always held out the hope and belief that America was still a functioning democracy. Just last December he blogged approvingly and hopefully about Chris Dodd's attempt to block the new FISA bill that is before Congress, a bill that will legalize warrantless surveillance, and provides retroactive immunity for the telecom companies that aided and abetted warrantless, and therefore illegal spying on Americans. Unfortunately for that sense of optimism, the democratic leadership is now actively blocking Dodd, and it looks like the authoritarian FISA bill will now pass - just the way Bush wants it. So where is the "democracy"?

Glenn goes on to say,
Congress does that (enables illegal activities) because we live in a system of lawlessness -- we have decided that the President has the power to break the law without consequences...

I am with Glenn up to this point, but then he loses me in an outbreak of optimism...

The Bush administration will be gone in 11 months, but -- in the absence of some meaningful accountability -- all of this will remain.

"Probably" Bush's last State of the Union Speech

Even that notorious organ of the state, The Washington Post, has said recently that this is "probably" Bush's last State of the Union speech. Probably? Probably?

It is sad to see someone like Glenn Greenwald, an American in the best sense, essentially admit that democracy in America has ended, and even sadder to have to agree with him. Sad... and terrifying.

Here is my comment at Salon on Glenn's latest blog.

Glenn Deklares a Diktatorship

Glenn has been building up to this for some time, as he said in his book, "How Would a Patriot Act?", two years ago, "we are a country in which the president has said -- expressly and repeatedly -- that he has the power to act without restraints, including the power to break the law."

More recently he has used the term "oligarchy" not once but many times. Over the last few months and years he has meticulously detailed the abuses of, not a President - but a dictator.

Glenn's latest post amounts to a declaration that democracy in America has ended, and that it has ended in the sad spectacle of the craven, obsequious, and beaten members of the Congressional Boyar Duma reduced to begging the Tzar's top secret policeman for favors.

Up to this point I agree with everything that Glenn said.

He finishes however, by asserting that "Bush will be gone in 11 months", and wistfully hopes that the next boss will be better than the last boss. "It remains to be seen..." if the next putatively "democratic" President will prosecute any of this sanguinary regime's many crimes. This is where he loses me.

If Bush and his whole grisly gang are in fact planning on packing up and going on the lecture circuit, how to explain their apparent lack of any fear that those new and extraordinary powers of the "unitary executive" will not be used against them? After all the executive can now declare anyone an "enemy combatant", spirit them away to a secret prison and then administer all the EIT units that they care to apply.

But they are not worried. They keep committing crimes. The attack on Iran is still on, despite the latest NIE. They have no fear, no worries. Bush is a textbook extreme sociopath, and for people like him, consequences are an abstraction at best. But what about the rest of them - surely they must be worried? If they are, I see no evidence of that whatsoever.

Look for another attack on America. Wait for the deliberately unspecified "catastrophic emergency" that will trigger NSPD 51 - which gives Bush out-of-the-drawer dictatorial powers, with "legitimate" primacy over the Congress, the Senate and what's left of the Supreme court.

Glenn is right that Bush is now a functional dictator (a charge that has never before been seriously or credibly leveled at a sitting POTUS). Where he goes wrong is his sadly naive, but admirable, belief that there will be an election and perhaps... prosecutions.

There will be no election and if there is, it will be a Diebold affair. Either way it's more war, and no "freedoms", not in America anyway.

The only question is what are you going to do about it? There is only one answer, there must be impeachment, and it must be now.

Tragically, the quisling Pelosi, with the assistance of her erstwhile colleague and fellow sonderkommando, Reid, continue to keep impeachment "off the table".

Big Trouble in Gaza

Bush has left the region. Gaza is still short of everything. Sir Tony Blair is missing in action. But at least Hamas and Egypt are cooperating in closing the border. This after the starving hoardes of the Palestinian emptied the entire border region of foodstuffs, so much so that the locals are wondering what they will eat.

Of course none of this addresses any of the root problems in the region. Israel is still occupying Palestinian land. Still practicing collective punishment on the people of Gaza. All of this is a flagrant violation of international law.

Romney Gets Some Help

In the Jan 24th repub debate, Russert asks Romney the Robot if he would do what Ronald Reagan did for social security in 1983? It's a trick question - because to answer it of course you have to know what raygun did in 83. Just before the man in the magic underwear answers, you can clearly hear someone say, "he raised taxes, I'm not gonna".

Never mind it was not Ronald Reagan who raised taxes, it was congress - back in the day when there was a congress. Remember those days?

Obviously this was someone helping him using a wireless device.

For comparison here is a picture of the decider and his little transceiver that he wore the 2004 debates.

The analysis was done by one of the top NASA image specialists, and he concluded that shub was WIRED. More, proof as if we needed it, that Bush is a pawn, a "Mechanical Turk", only stupider.

Here is a little something from Raw Story about the 04 debate. Look at the transcript and tell me that Chimpsky wasn't hearing "the voices" again.

"In the second debate, Bush went off the rails, again in a way that suggests remote coaching. According to the rules, each candidate answers questions in turn. The one to whom the question is addressed gets two minutes to reply, and his opponent gets ninety seconds to rebut. At the moderator's discretion, there may be a one-minute extension, providing each candidate an additional thirty seconds on each question.

At one point, when Bush had taken a question, and Kerry had delivered a spirited rebuttal, moderator Charlie Gibson decided to extend the session. But he had trouble getting the words out, as Bush leapt up and leaned into his face, repeatedly demanding the very extension that Gibson was attempting, without success, to offer him.

Kerry: "We're gonna build alliances; we're not gonna go unilaterally [into war]; we're not gonna go alone, like this President did."

Gibson: "Mr. President, let's extend for one minute..."

Bush: "Lemme just one question; I, I gotta answer this."

Gibson: "Exactly, and with reservists being held on duty..."

Bush: "Let, let me just answer this, what he said about goin' alone."

Gibson: "Well, I wanted to get into the issue."

Bush: "You tell Tony Blair we're goin' alone. Tell Tony Blair we're goin' alone. Tell Servio Belisconi we're goin' alone..."

A fair reading of the scene would have Bush's remote coach urging him to respond at that moment, with enough vehemence to distract the President from what was happening right before his eyes. "You've got to respond to that - you can't let it go. He's insulting our allies," we can imagine the coach saying. And we can imagine Bush getting flustered to the point that he failed to grasp what the moderator was trying to tell him."

Of course there is a Rational explanation for the voices. It was Jesus.