OpEdNews - Diary: Ray McGovern: SHOW ME THE INTELLIGENCE

..."Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any US intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October 2002. Why no intelligence justification this time around? Because there is none."

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DIANE'S NEWS CLIPS begins here :)~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~> Excerpted from: http://www.truthout.org Ray McGovern | Show Me the Intelligence http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012107D.shtml Ray McGovern writes: "Have you noticed? Neither President George W. Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney have cited any US intelligence assessments to support their fateful decision to send 21,500 more troops to referee the civil war in Iraq. This is a far cry from October 2002. Why no intelligence justification this time around? Because there is none." --- Help US Close Guantanamo, Say MPs http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012107C.shtml MPs who have visited Guantanamo Bay have called on the government to help the US find ways to close the camp. Seven Foreign Affairs Committee members visited the detention center for "enemy combatants" in Cuba in September. In a report they said many of the inmates posed a threat, but the conditions failed to meet even the most basic standards for British prisoners. --- Frank Rich | Lying Like It's 2003 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012107B.shtml "Those who forget history may be doomed to repeat it, but who could imagine we'd already be in danger of replaying that rotten year 2003?" asks Frank Rich. --- FOCUS | Nineteen US Soldiers Killed in Iraq Saturday http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012107Z.shtml At least 19 American service members were killed in military operations Saturday in the deadliest day for US forces in two years, including 12 who died in a helicopter crash and five slain in an attack by militia fighters in the holy city of Karbala, military officials said. Saturday's toll was the third-highest of any single day since the war began in March 2003, eclipsed only by 37 US deaths on January 26, 2005, and 28 on the third day of the US invasion. --- The Second Looting of New Orleans http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012107E.shtml A year and a half after New Orleans became an international symbol of governmental neglect and racism, the city remains in crisis. Students are still without books, health care is less available to poor people than ever, public housing is still closed, and infrastructure is still in desperate need of repair. [snip] --- Iran's Leader: UN Won't Stop Nuke Plan http://snipurl.com/17zku _________________________________ IMPEACH ALBERTO GONZALES!

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the nation's top law enforcement official, has authorized war crimes, dismissed the Geneva Conventions, redefined torture to allow most types of torture, helped establish military commissions that deny defendants the right to a fair trial, claimed the U.S. Constitution does not provide the right to habeas corpus, and defended violations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This week, leading bloggers >> http://snipurl.com/17zlf inspired by John Dean proposed impeaching Gonzales as the first step towards impeaching Bush and Cheney. Urge your Representatives to Impeach Alberto Gonzales: http://www.democrats.com/peoplesemailnetwork/94 [snip] _________________________________ Defense official says Pentagon hid unspent funds in accounts By Matt Kelley, USA TODAY WASHINGTON - The Pentagon has hidden at least $1.4 billion in other agencies' accounts instead of returning unspent money to the U.S. Treasury, the Defense Department's internal watchdog told Congress Wednesday. http://snipurl.com/180gg _________________________________ Excerpted from: http://www.smirkingchimp.com President Bush: Watching TV is Not Sacrifice ... by Cenk Uygur I should be used to it by now, but I am still flabbergasted every time I see yet another example of how painfully stupid our president is. This time it was during an interview with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Lehrer asked the president if he'd asked anyone but the troops to sacrifice for the Iraq War.

Watch his pathetic response here >> http://tinyurl.com/36tat3 George Bush explains to Jim Lehrer his distorted, silver-spoon understanding of how Americans are sacrificing for the War in Iraq. [snip] Read more >> http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/4911 _________________________________ Submitted by: http://eddiestinson@gmail.com BUSH, IRAN AND ARMAGEDDON Excerpt: "Since when does a small nation of less than 7 million people that doesn't even have internationally recognized borders threaten to "take military action" against a much larger nation with ten times as many people? Iran has not attacked any of its neighbors in 250 years. It has good relations with the European Union and with Russia and China. It is part of an ancient civilization with established frontiers. In 1918, the thought of a tiny state attacking a large one was considered a joke; in 2007, it might not be so funny." http://snipurl.com/17z7q _________________________________ http://jablankfort@earthlink.net CP: Cockburn: First Bomb Carter; Then Nuke Iran! THE ISRAEL LOBBY TRIPS AND TILTS By Alexander Cockburn Suppose the movers and shakers in the Israel lobby here -- Abe Foxman, Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the crew -- had simply decided to leave Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid alone. How long before the book would have been gathering dust on the remainder shelves? Suppose even that Dershowitz had rounded up his unacknowledged co-authors in all their tens of thousands and sallied forth to buy up every copy of Carter's book and toss each one into the Charles River, would not that have been a more successful suppressor than the blitzkrieg strategy they did adopt? Of course it would. For weeks now the lobby has hurled its legions into battle against Carter. He has been stigmatized as an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, a patron of former concentration camp killers, a Christian madman, a pawn of the Arabs who "flatly condones mass murder" of Israeli Jews. (This last was from Murdoch's New York Post editorial, relayed to its mailing list by the Zionist Organization of America.) Any day now I expect some janitors at the Carter Center to resign, declaring that they can no longer in all conscience mop bathrooms that might have been used by the former President, their letter of protest duly front-paged by the New York Times, just like the famous fourteen members of the Carter Center's Board of Councilors. Actually there were, at the time of resignations, 224 people on this board, where membership is mostly a thank you for a financial donation to the center. So the headlines could be saying, "Nearly 95 per cent of Carter Center Board Members Back Former President." But the assault on Carter is all to no avail. With each gust of abuse, Carter's book soars higher and higher on the bestseller lists, reaching number 4 on Amazon itself. This doesn't prove the lobby has no power. It proves the lobby can be dumb. Adroit lobbying consists in preventing unpleasing material reaching the light of day. Lobbying thrives in furtive darkness: slipping language into a bill at the last moment, threatening to back a campaign opponent, making quiet phone calls to the Polish embassy. Pressure is now being exerted on Farrar, Straus and Giroux to abandon its impending publication of Mearsheimer and Walt's attack on the lobby. The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it's starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why? You can't brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents. In the old days, Mearsheimer and Walt's tract would have been deep-sixed by the University of Chicago and the Kennedy School long before it reached its final draft, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux wouldn't have considered offering a six-figure advance for it. Simon & Schuster would have told President Carter that his manuscript had run into insurmountable objections from a distinguished board of internal reviewers. But once a book by a former president with weighty humanitarian credentials makes it into bookstores, it's hard to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse. [snip] Continued: http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn01202007.html ----- GROUPS HEAD TO EMIRATES, AS WORRIES GROW OVER IRAN http://www.forward.com/articles/groups-head-to-emirates-as-worries-grow-over-iran/ The Conference of Presidents includes the 52 most important Jewish organizations that make up the Jewish lobby and its role, historically, has been to lobby the White House while AIPAC is focusing on keeping Congress in thrall. Back in 1995 the conference's perennial director, Malcolm Hoenlein, bragged about his contribution to the writing of the Effective Death Penalty and Counter Terrorism Act during the Clinton administration, the first such act proposed in the US Congress. When one reads and realizes the implications of this act, which added 28 new federal death penalty provisions to US law, one comes to understand that the lobby is not just the enemy of the Palestinian people and Arab peoples, in general, but objectively a contributor to the destruction of US civil liberties. Of course, it is clear what these fifth columnists were doing over there, and it wasn't to get the UAE to call Iran and ask to press the flesh.- JB http://www.forward.com/articles/groups-head-to-emirates-as-worries-grow-over-iran/ _________________________________ Excerpted from: http://onlinejournal.com Housing bubble bloodbath ... By Mike Whitney | Online Journal Contributing Writer I wonder if Alan Greenspan takes a copy of the business page along with him on the chairlift at Aspen, so he can read about the plummeting housing market before swooshing down the well-groomed bunny-slopes at his favorite ski resort. After all, no one played a larger role in inflating what the "Economist" called the "biggest equity bubble in history" than the retired Fed-master. His low interest-rate bonanza triggered a stampede of speculation in the real estate market sending prices through the stratosphere and setting the stage for the biggest economic bust in American history. http://snipurl.com/17wje --- Military order adds another layer of segregation between Israelis and Palestinians, even in vehicles ... By Mohammed Mar'i | Online Journal Contributing Writer (Ramallah, Occupied Palestine) -- On 19 January 2007, the Palestinians in the West Bank will have more suffering added to their lives by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Beside the Separation Wall that shatters the West Bank and more than 400 roadblocks, the (IOF) will implement the discriminatory Israeli order which prohibits Israelis and tourists from using their vehicles to transport Palestinians in the West Bank without an army permit. http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1643.shtml --- Why the US is not leaving Iraq By Ismael Hossein-zadeh | Online Journal Contributing Writer Neither the Iraq Study Group (ISG) nor other establishment critics of the Iraq war are calling for the withdrawal of US troops from that country. To the extent that the ISG or the new Congress purport to inject some "realism" into the Iraq policy, such projected modifications do not seem to amount to more than changing the drivers of the US war machine without changing its destination, or objectives: control of Iraq's political and economic policies. http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_1649.shtml _________________________________ How Congress Can Stop the Iran Attack or be Complicit in Nuclear War Crimes by Prof. Jorge Hirsch President Bush is invoking his "commander in chief" authority to escalate the war in Iraq, and he will likely also invoke it to launch an aerial attack against Iran. Congress has long ago abdicated and delegated to the President its constitutional responsibility to initiate wars. Yet Congress still has one surefire way to influence events: it has the constitutional authority to make the "nuclear option" against Iran illegal. In so doing, it would stop the relentless drive to war against Iran dead in its tracks. Continued: http://snipurl.com/180fs _________________________________ Submitted by: http://eddiestinson@gmail.com CLEAN COAL, FOREST BIOFUEL AND OTHER FAIRY TALES The history of global heating has largely been written by coal and forest loss, now wrongly hailed as climate change solutions Earth Meanders by Dr. Glen Barry http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/ 1.21.07 Two of the biggest, most dangerous lies being promoted in response to global warming are that clean coal exists and theworld's forests are adequate to provide biofuel. Dirty coal and industrial forest harvest for energy only accelerates the rootcauses of looming Doomsday for the Earth - that is destruction of the biosphere's atmospheric and terrestrial ecosystems. Coal burning and forest loss have been the leading culprit inclimate change to date, and should their continued use at any scale be pursued as the solution to climate change and energy security, it will prove the death-knell for the Planet. We need less fossil fuel use and more forest regeneration, not the reverse. http://earthmeanders.blogspot.com/ _________________________________ NOTE from Diane: McCain on Meet The Press Sunday wasn't a deer in the headlights, more like a deer on downers in the headlights. I think he's so done, well, you know, where's the fork. He's becoming, if not already, an afterthought in the presidential race in my opinion. Hillary, V.P. Obama? should thank the powers that be for the Republican 'favored' opponent. _________________________________ Brooklyn, NY-based BrooklynTransplant.com was recently developed as a tool to connect relocated customers and small business owners. It features products such as extra virgin olive oil, tomato sauces, Italian cookies, as well as other niche products. Full Story http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/1/prweb498585.htm _________________________________ http://www.chinaview.cn | http://www.zajel.org | http://davidsirota.com _________________________________ JUST A LITTLE TOUCHUP Photoshop is a difficult program to use. There are so many features that novices often get confused. But experienced users can do incredible things with the software. Today's Cool Site shows you what an expert can do with a photograph. This step-by-step tutorial will amaze you. You'll pick up some good tips for working with your own photos. But there is something more important to be learned. You can't believe the pictures you see in fashion magazines (or any magazines, for that matter). These days, it is standard practice to "touch up" photos before they're published. Unfortunately, they set an unattainable standard for impressionable youths. If you have children, show them this site. It will enlighten them. TO VISIT TODAY'S COOL SITE, GO HERE: http://tinyurl.com/8vnmq Be sure to listen to me Monday through Friday. Use my map to find me near you http://www.komando.com/listen/index.aspx _________________________________ eHEALTHY NEWS Feds Approve Unnecessary Cervical Cancer Vaccine That Will Make Drug Company Billions - The decision to approve this unnecessary, potentially dangerous and outrageously expensive ($360) vaccine will further pad the drug company's pockets. http://snipurl.com/17vov ----- Beating Diabetes With Too Much Decaf Coffee - Another highly irresponsible study comes up with the ludicrous recommendation of using decaf coffee to prevent diabetes. http://snipurl.com/17vp2 ----- Everything You've Been Told About Exercise Might be Wrong, Part III - Getting better at aerobic exercise may actually make your health goal harder to reach. http://tinyurl.com/2ry7lm _________________________________ VIDEO: Bottom of the 9th | United States | 3:10 | Mark Nelson This fun computer animated short really puts the bottom in bottom of the ninth. A man in a port-o-john at a ball game discovers there's no toilet paper. Uh-oh. And then realizes he holds a winning ticket stub. Double uh-oh. Can he find relief and claim his winnings? http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/bottom9th _________________________________ NationalGeographic.com http://lava.nationalgeographic.com/pod/ _________________________________ NASA Astronomy picture of the day http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html _________________________________ To find out a girl's faults, praise her to her girlfriends. ~ Benjamin Franklin _________________________________ Link to: http://Diane's News Clips http://www.opednews.com/author/author2300.html?entry=diary