Infinite Unknown

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.

This article is a must read.

President George W. Bush was in his stand-up comedian role when he declared that he wanted to be remembered as a fighter for human rights.

Seldom has a fighter for human rights amassed Bush’s death toll. According to Information Clearing House, Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq has resulted in 1,297,997 dead Iraqis. Millions more have been wounded, and millions are displaced. Bush’s legions have taken out weddings, funerals, kid’s soccer games, hospitals, and mosques.

And that’s before we come to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan “we don’t do body counts” declared a commander of Bush’s imperial legions. But the thousands of dead civilians and school children have rallied Afghans to the Taliban, whose lightly armed fighters have retaken most of the country from the Unipower.

The Taliban doesn’t have an air force, or cluster bombs, or drones, or “smart missiles,” or tanks, or satellite capability. The Taliban has Afghan resistance to occupation.

Bush was fighting for human rights in 2006 when he prevented for one month the civilized world from stopping Israel’s massive bombing of Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and civilian neighborhoods. Israel had intended to clear Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon in order to steal that part of the country for its water resources. When the vaunted Israeli Army was defeated and put to rout by a few lightly armed Hezbollah guerrillas, Israeli rage took the Israeli defeat out on Lebanon’s civilian population–from the air, of course. The murder of Lebanon’s civilian population was enabled by the American weapons with which Israel is flooded.

Now Israel is bombing civilians in Israel’s Gaza Ghetto. Nothing has been spared. Not the hospitals, the university, or the children. Again, President Bush, to America’s everlasting shame, is blocking the civilized world’s attempt to force a halt to the Israeli aggression against the civilian population in Gaza.

If only Bush were merely a stand-up comedian. In truth, he is a puppet. A puppet of Zionist Israel.

Continue reading »

Tags: Afghanistan, Civil liberties, Gaza, George Bush, Government, Hamas, Hezbollah, Human Rights, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Military, Politics, Taliban, U.S., War, War on Terror, warrantless wiretapping program, White House

Bush brought Texas to Washington, now Obama brings the Windy City

Barack Obama is back in Chicago after a 12-day holiday in Hawaii. But not for long. On Monday he begins his new life in Washington, temporarily housed in the Hay-Adams hotel until the White House becomes available on 20 January.

Even so, Chicago will never be too far away. Just as George Bush brought Texas to Washington and Bill Clinton brought Arkansas, so Obama too brings a blast of his home city.

The inner circle in the White House will be overwhelmingly Chicagoan. His two chief advisers, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, are both long-time associates from the city, and his White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is another.

But more than that, Obama brings with him the baggage of Chicago’s political culture - the roughest in the US. The small-scale bribes that older Chicagoans remember from visits to City Hall are a thing of the past but the sharp suits, naked ambition and political trading are much the same. So too is the large-scale corruption that has seen 50 elected officials from Illinois jailed over the past 30 years.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Government, Politics, White House

To: STATE EDITORS

Contact: Ilene Proctor PR, +1-310-858-6643

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Michael Connell, the Bush IT expert who has been directly implicated in the rigging of George Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, was killed last night when his single engine plane crashed three miles short of the Akron airport. Velvet Revolution (”VR”), a non-profit that has been investigating Mr. Connell’s activities for the past two years, can now reveal that a person close to Mr. Connell has recently been discussing with a VR investigator how he can tell all about his work for George Bush. Mr. Connell told a close associate that he was afraid that George Bush and Dick Cheney would “throw [him] under the bus.”

A tipster close to the McCain campaign disclosed to VR in July that Mr. Connell’s life was in jeopardy and that Karl Rove had threatened him and his wife, Heather. VR’s attorney, Cliff Arnebeck, notified the United States Attorney General , Ohio law enforcement and the federal court about these threats and insisted that Mr. Connell be placed in protective custody. VR also told a close associate of Mr. Connell’s not to fly his plane because of another tip that the plane could be sabotaged. Mr. Connell, a very experienced pilot, has had to abandon at least two flights in the past two months because of suspicious problems with his plane. On December 18, 2008, Mr. Connell flew to a small airport outside of Washington DC to meet some people. It was on his return flight the next day that he crashed.

On October 31, Mr. Connell appeared before a federal judge in Ohio after being subpoenaed in a federal lawsuit investigating the rigging of the 2004 election under the direction of Karl Rove. The judge ordered Mr. Connell to testify under oath at a deposition on November 3rd, the day before the presidential election. Velvet Revolution received confidential information that the White House was extremely concerned about Mr. Connell talking about his illegal work for the White House and two Bush/Cheney 04 attorneys were dispatched to represent him.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bush administration, Dick Cheney, Dictators, Dictatorship, election, George Bush, Government, Karl Rove, Neoconservatives, Politics, White House

UPDATED BELOW (1, 2, and 3)

I don’t usually reveal sources, but I think this is incredibly important. Michael Connell died in a plane crash last night. He was a key witness in the Ohio election fraud case that I have been reporting on. More importantly, however, he had information that he was ready to share.

You see, Mike Connell set-up the alternate email and communications system for the White House. He was responsible for creating the system that hosted the infamous GWB43.com accounts that Karl Rove and others used. When asked by Congress to provide these emails, the White House said that they were destroyed. But in reality, what Connell is alleged to have done is move these files to other servers after having allegedly scrubbed the files from all “known” Karl Rove accounts.

In addition, I have reason to believe that the alternate accounts were used to communicate with US Attorneys involved in political prosecutions, like that of Don Siegelman. This is what I have been working on to prove for over a year. In fact, it was through following the Siegelman-Rove trail that I found evidence leading to Connell. That is how I became aware of him. Mike was getting ready to talk. He was frightened.

He has flown his private plane for years without incident. I know he was going to DC last night, but I don’t know why. He apparently (did not) ran out of gas, something I find hard to believe. (See Update 3 below). I am not saying that this was a hit nor am I resigned to this being simply an accident either. I am no expert on aviation and cannot provide an opinion on the matter. What I am saying, however, is that given the context, this event needs to be examined carefully. If you want to understand the context more broadly, I suggest you read this article I did a while back about the break-ins and arson cases that Siegelman and others have experienced.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bush administration, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Government, Politics, White House

As the departing Bush administration frantically attempts to shore up its place in history, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann stands ready to kick the props out from under it again. A renewed claim that “no one could have anticipated” the attacks of 9/11 attracted his scorn in particular on Thursday’s Countdown.

“This is a White House talking point still, even though your average three-year-old could disprove it using an etch-a-sketch.” Olbermann sneered on Thursday, over the heading, “Insult the Dead-gate.”

Olbermann’s specific target was White House press spokesman Tony Fratto, who responded to a Fox News interviewer’s suggestion on Wednesday that before 9/11, “nobody was thinking that there’d be terrorists flying 767s into buildings” by agreeing, “No one could have anticipated that kind of attack — or very few people.”

“Yeah, well, it ain’t true,” Olbermann remarked, with open contempt dripping from his words, “and out of respect for the people who died that day you damn well better stop saying it.”

Olbermann then ran through a list of pre-9/11 warnings of potential al Qaeda hijackings, noting, “A president’s daily brief as far back as December 1998 said bin Laden was ‘preparing to hijack US aircraft in hopes of trading hostages for jailed radicals.’ … The August 6, 2001 brief, of course, told President Bush — if he read it — that there were ‘patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings.’”

Olbermann did not mention either the use of airplanes as weapons by the Japanese kamikaze suicide pilots during World War II or the abortive al Qaeda plot of the 1990’s known as Project Bojinka, which would have involved both blowing up airliners and crashing a plane into CIA headquarters in Virginia and which may have been the inspiration for 9/11.

“That Mr. Fratto’s employers might not have been expected to know the exact hour of these attacks,” concluded Olbermann, “does not give him or anybody else the right to perpetuate the lie that 9/11 was impossible to conceive. Clearly, many inside this nation’s government anticipated it. It was Mr. Bush and his gang who chose to ignore them.”

This video is from MSNBC’s Countdown, broadcast Dec. 18, 2008.

Download video via RawReplay.com Continue reading »

Tags: 9/11, Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaida, Bush administration, George Bush, Government, Keith Olbermann, Politics, Terrorism, Terrorists, U.S., White House

Rahm Emanuel (Brian Kersey-Pool/Getty Images)

Since Rahm Emanuel was appointed the next White House chief of staff last month, we’ve been retracing his previous life as an investment banker, which earned him more than $18 million in less than three years.

Today the New York Times sheds new light on Emanuel’s Wall Street days — and how they helped send him to Congress.

In late 1998, Emanuel left the Clinton White House to work for Wasserstein Perella, a now defunct investment bank run by Bruce Wasserstein, a major Democratic donor.

“I had this idea that this could work and that it had upside,” Wasserstein told the Times. “It worked out better than I could have hoped.”

Indeed, as we previously noted, Emanuel used his political connections to broker major deals while at the firm. (One deal was a $16 billion merger that created Exelon Corp., now one of the nation’s largest electric utilities. Another involved SBC Communications, the telecommunications company run by William Daley, Clinton’s commerce secretary and the brother of Chicago’s mayor.)

After leaving the bank in 2001 to run for Congress, Emanuel benefited from the sale of Wasserstein Perella, which gave him an unusually large payout. Russ Gerson, global head of financial markets for A.T. Kearney Executive Search, told the Chicago Tribune in 2003 that Emanuel’s compensation would put him “in the top 3 to 5 percent” of investment bankers at that time.

The cash proved helpful when Emanuel found himself in a tough fight for a seat in Congress. He contributed $450,000 out of his own pocket to the primary campaign, and his leading rival accused him of trying to buy his seat, the Times reports.

The financial industry also heavily financed Emanuel’s campaign. From the Times: Continue reading »

Tags: Economy, Government, Politics, Rahm Emanuel, Wall Street, White House

More change!
___________________________________________________________________________

President-elect Barack Obama stands with Secretary of State-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., right, and Vice President-elect Joe Biden, left, at a news conference about his new cabinet appointments, in Chicago, Monday, Dec. 1, 2008. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

CHICAGO (AP) - President-elect Barack Obama named former campaign rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as his secretary of statae on Monday, and announced Robert Gates would remain as defense secretary, making President Bush’s Pentagon chief his own in the drive to wind down the U.S. role in Iraq.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Government, Joe Biden, Politics, Robert Gates, U.S., White House

As many as 4 million people are expected to attend Obama’s inauguration at the Mall.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Law enforcement officials bracing for the largest crowds in inaugural history are preparing far-reaching security - thousands of video cameras, sharpshooters, air patrols - to safeguard President-elect Barack Obama’s swearing-in.

People attending the ceremony and parade on Jan. 20 can expect to be searched by machines, security personnel or both. Precautions will range from the routine - magnetometers like those used at airports - to countersnipers trained to hit a target the size of a teacup saucer from 1,000 yards away. Plus undercover officers, bomb sniffing dogs and air patrols.

The Secret Service - the agency coordinating the security - also has assigned trained officials to identify and prevent cyber security risks. And, as it does at every inauguration, the service has mapped out escape routes for the 44th president.

In addition Washington’s 5,265 surveillance cameras, spread around the city, are expected to be fed into a multi-agency command center.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Politics, Secret Service, security, Surveillance, U.S., video surveillance, White House

Obama’s choice of White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel

In strikingly racist remarks, the father of Rahm Emanuel has said Israel will benefit from Obama’s choice of White House chief of staff.

“Obviously he will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he be? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to clean the floors of the White House,” Benjamin Emanuel, father of Rahm Emanuel, told the Israeli Ma’ariv daily.

In a Thursday statement, US president-elect Barack Obama announced that Rahm Emanuel had accepted his offer to serve as the next White House chief of staff, the highest-ranking member of the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

News of Benjamin Emanuel’s comments came as Israeli newspapers rejoiced over Obama’s choice of the Illinois Congressman to become ‘the second-most powerful man in Washington’.

According to the Israeli Ha’aretz paper, Benjamin Emanuel ‘is a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel or IZL), a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948.’

Rahm Emanuel, who is named after a Zionist combatant, also served for the Israeli military during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Government, Israel, Politics, Rahm Emanuel, White House, Zionism

A paper trail on the use of waterboarding and other controversial interrogation techniques by the CIA is emerging in the US

The Bush administration sent two secret memos endorsing the use of waterboarding against al-Qaida suspects, according to today’s Washington Post. They were prompted by worries within the CIA that the administration might later distance itself from the way suspects were interrogated, the paper reports.

Officials told the paper that the then CIA director George Tenet asked for written approval for secret interrogations, in June 2003. A few days later he got a “brief memo conveying the administration’s approval for the CIA’s interrogation methods”.

Continue reading »

Tags: Abu Ghraib, Bush administration, CIA, Condoleezza Rice, George Bush, George Tenet, Government, Interrogation, Politics, U.S., White House