Well just when you thought the Bush War Machine was winding down, news comes out of the ramp up for covert military/intelligence operations in Iran. What makes the matter so much more disgusting is that the Democratic Leadership has signed off on the funding for their project. The following interview with Seymour Hersh - the Pulitzer Prize winning dissident journalist - details the story which he just broke in the New Yorker Magazine....   more »

Using clues from stars and the Sun’s positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them. It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers said in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Experts have long debated whether the books of Homer reflect the actual history of the Trojan War and its aftermath. Marcelo O. Magnasco of Rockefeller University in New York and Constantino Baikouzis of the Astronomical Observatory in La Plata, Argentina, acknowledge they had to make some assumptions to determine the date Odysseus returned to his kingdom of Ithaca. But interpreting clues in Homer’s “Odyssey” as references to the positions of stars and a total eclipse of the Sun allowed them to determine when a particular set of conditions would have occurred. “What we’d like to achieve is to get the reader to pick up the ‘Odyssey’ and read it again, and ponder,” said Mr. Magnasco, adding: “And to realise that our understanding of these texts is quite imperfect, and even when entire libraries have been written about Homeric studies, there is still room for further investigation.” …    more »

Given the Supreme Court decision to grant rights of Habaes Corpus to prisoners at Guantanamo Bay was 5 to 4 it is not real comforting to know that here in America we are just one vote away from a full dictatorship.

If one wants to explore the devolution of a justice system founded on Enlightenment Values, the history of the US Supreme Court since Ronald Reagan's presidency would be a text book example. The original interpretation philosophy of the most conservative justices correlates well with fundamentalist interpretations of religion. Fortunately however ,this time the stench of totalitarianism was too much for the majority. Unfortunately, in this case both the executive branch and a democratic congress were also complicit in legislating high crimes against the justice system rc....

Congress, in turn, twice tried to eliminate habeas rights for detainees. The Supreme Court rejected the first attempt in 2006, ruling in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the legislation did not apply to pending cases. So Congress tried again with the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), which made explicit that the elimination of habeas rights applied to all Guantánamo cases, past, present and future. The issue before the Supreme Court in Boumediene was whether the MCA violated the constitutional guarantee of habeas corpus, known as the "Suspension Clause..."   more »

documented Iraqi civilian deaths (courtesy Iraq body count)

In one of the most cynical moments of recent political history General David Patraeus - the current Chief Operations Officer of the enterprise called: Occupation Iraq - in his recent testimony before the US Congress referred to the civil war in Iraq as ethno-sectarian competition.

For all of you who know your George Orwell, here is a fascinating look at the Patraeus testimony ...   more »

A gold-encrusted dagger belonging to Mughal emperor Shah Jahan is expected to fetch £500,000 when auctioned at Bonhams on Thursday. The dagger is part of the collection of Islamic and Indian art and artefacts of the late textile businessman, Jacques Desenfans. ...   more »

Hedges takes on both the Christian Right and The New Atheists, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris et al. and finds some striking neo-conservative similarities between the two. He also has some interesting things to say about the progressive utopian idealism the new atheists inherit from the Enlightenment tradition rc...

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right...   more »

Digging has resumed at a site in the southeastern German town of Deutschneudorf, where treasure hunters believe there are almost 2 tons of Nazi gold and possibly clues to the whereabouts of the legendary Amber Room, a prize taken from a Russian castle during World War II. Treasure hunters use modern technology to try to locate the lost Nazi gold. Heinz Peter Haustein, one of the two treasure hunters and a member of Germany's parliament, said: "We have already hit a hollow area under the surface, it's filled with water and we are not sure if it is the cave we are looking for." …   more »

...Few of his contemporaries think of George Walker Bush as a visionary American president, unless they are using the term to imply a touch of madness. Yet early in his second term Bush launched a bold initiative to try to establish closer American ties with India, the world’s biggest democracy, in what may eventually be judged by historians as a move of great strategic importance and imagination...

Bush... has managed to cast aside 40 years of hostility and suspicion between America and India – and even agreed to start collaborating over nuclear energy – in the hope of strengthening India and its economy. And all for a special reason: the rise of China. ...   more »

Picasso captured an intense scene reflecting the deeply unjust suffering, agony and despair experienced by the people of Guernica. And in doing so he produced one of the most iconic, powerful and affecting pieces of anti-war artwork ever put to canvas. It is little surprise then that a reproduction of the painting, which hangs outside the entrance to the UN Security Council, was covered while Colin Powell was attempting to sell the Iraq War to the world.

The people of Iraq are suffering what amounts to the similar unjust brutality inflicted on the people of Guernica Iraq, except it's practically on a daily basis. A more accurate comparison would be to imagine having the London Tube and Bus bombings everyday. And have them happen so often that they become a predictable daily occurrence and part of life."

Guernica was the product of a fascist Spanish-German alliance between Franco and Hitler, and the corportist sponsors of the Luftwaffe. The following collage of images come to us trough the efforts of the Anglo-American alliance of Blair and Bush and through the courtesy of Boeing, Haliburton, Blackwater et al....    more »

On the five year anniversary week of the Iraq war what can one say? Hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, a nation in civil war, and no real end in sight. A war that even former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan concedes was fought over oil. One can only turn to images and here is Picasso whose depiction of the slaughter at Guernica Spain as a result of German bombing, is considered one of his most important paintings. I will post a link to U tube video by the same title which unfortunately subjects Guernica to the eternal return of the same.

Here is a bit of History ...   more »

The Pentagon counted down Wednesday toward an unprecedented effort to shoot down a dying and potentially deadly U.S. spy satellite, using a souped-up missile fired from a ship in the Pacific.

The timing was tricky. For the best chance to succeed, the military awaited a combination of favorable factors: steady seas around the Navy cruiser that would fire the missile, optimum positioning of the satellite as it passed in polar orbit and the readiness of an array of space- and ground-based sensors to help cue the missile and track the results.

The operation was so extraordinary, with such intense international publicity and political ramifications, that Defense Secretary Robert Gates — not a military commander — was to make the final decision to pull the trigger.

The government organized hazardous materials teams, under the code name "Burnt Frost," to be flown to the site of any dangerous or otherwise sensitive debris that might land in the United States or elsewhere. ...   more »

A B-52 with six armed nuclear missiles flew over the U.S. for 3-1/2 hours..

Confirming an article first published in Army Times on September 5 ("B-52 mistakenly flies with nukes aboard," Michael Hoffman, September 5, 2007), the U.S. Air Force has admitted that on August 30, 2007, a B-52 bomber took off from Minot AFB in North Dakota loaded with six nuclear weapons – Advanced Cruise Missiles designed to be launched from B-52 bombers - and landed three and a half hours later at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. ...   more »

American officers call them the Kit Carson Scouts: Sunni military units prowling the desert to hunt down Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other extremist jihadi groups. The original Kit Carson fought ruthlessly to repress the Navajo on their reservations by employing rival tribes like the Ute in one of the American military's first counterinsurgency campaigns. Even today, America's favorite weapons--the Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Black Hawks and Tomahawks-- testify to the military's most formative memories.

Now counterinsurgency is back in favor, the cure for Iraq as implemented by Gen. David Petraeus and an assortment of Ivy League advisers. By enlisting Sunni Iraqi insurgents to turn their guns against jihadis, Petraeus is claiming tactical progress in the "surge." The Bush Administration is using that claim in its campaign to continue the surge for another six months, and the war itself for a few years longer. There may also be a high-stakes internal coup against Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which could be coupled with US appeals to allow more time for political progress. August was spent on feverish promotion of the Petraeus plan, with several dozen members of Congress wined, dined and personally briefed in Baghdad's Green Zone. Pundits Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack, who promoted the 2003 invasion, wrote a widely circulated New York Times op-ed piece titled "A War We Just Might Win" after a recent trip to Baghdad. Fox News then featured O'Hanlon in an up-beat hourlong special about Petraeus and counterinsurgency. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave O'Hanlon an appreciative audience as well. (The PR campaign is having some effect: In late August 29 percent of Americans believed the surge was "making the situation better in Iraq," up ten points from July. And $15 million is now being spent on Republican television spots to shore up support for the war.) ...   more »

Sweltering flight deck crews couldn’t launch Navy jets for extended periods of time. U.S. ground troops would find themselves splitting time between humanitarian relief operations and fighting insurgents bent on winning over desperate third-world peoples. Low-lying logistics hub Diego Garcia would be swallowed up by the Indian Ocean.

Global warming isn’t often thought of as a matter of interest for the U.S. military. But it should be, an advisory board of 11 retired flag officers concluded in a report issued Monday under the auspices of the Center for Naval Analyses, a non-profit national security analysis group. Climate change is happening, the blue-ribbon panel concluded, and is a “serious national security threat.” ...   more »