Bush warned to keep book tour domestic

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- This blog will now have a MAJOR change in focus -

There are several points that need to be made.

(1) Those who induced me to attend the war crimes conference in Andover and helped me put this blog together have not been very supportive of me financially nor emotionally. This has been very disappointing to me. So has some of the underhanded behaviour that some people here in Toronto who disrupted my efforts for social change. I sold thousands of copies of Vincent Bugliosi's book and never even received a single dime or a copy of the book! I had wished to bring some of the people who are concerned about war crimes to Toronto to offset the financial losses my son and I incurred in the course of our blogging in the past two years. I would certainly appreciate any financial support any of those who are still dropping by to check out this blog would provide!, as noted below! I truly believe we deserved better treatment than this as I have no family to depend on at all. I have made effort to contact them over the past months and expected to meet them in Andover. Because of my chronically financial depression I have no hearing aids, bad eyewear, and must watch every penny I spend !! I overspent promoting the Town Hall that NEVER happened, thanx to the head of the Native American Centre here in Toronto. I did not get a job as I thought, really and truly, that I just might be actually on the International Criminal Court as alleged to me in private comments. But there is no evidence to support this notion at all.

(2) It is imperative that HONEST politicians get elected now at the local level as the Second Great Depression sets in - due to military keynesianISM - which means that we look at how real solutions for people have been ignored in favour of having a SECURITY (hahahhaha - Read: fascistic) society set in. Have you noticed it yourself?

(3) I have been the victim of a crack addict for 23 months because I am deaf and could not hear her enter my apartment repeatedly. She actually assaulted me December 1st. The cops came in and threatened me with violence if I did not quit calling the police department !! My son is repeatedly being arrested, but the dealer, the fence for stolen goods and the crack addict and her illegally occupying roommate NEVER get arrested !! What is the motive of the police department in all this ? Who knows? It is now February 3rd and she is STILL not arrested. This loss of property has turned my apartment into a real dump and is a horrible place to live. I had a housing tribunal on January 6th that refused to compensate me for my misery that was adjourned after they tried to arrest ME.

(4) My son was illegally incarcerated on a Form 30 (involuntary commission) and is even now being held in a mental asylum (5 months later !!) Meanwhile, the mental health establishment continues to harass me.

(5) I have applied to be a recipient of an award to be in something in Toronto called the Dream Team or Voices in the Street, and I have high hopes I will be selected for this incredible project.

and HENCE:

I will then run for Toronto City Council since the City Councillor should make certain that the police and the city public housing authority provides safe spaces for disabled seniors to live in !!

To effect this election, I have been melodramatic.

I read people's palms and tell people to remember my name

VIRGINIA

I was given the gift of palm reading by a Yogananda disciple in London, UK many, many years ago and am polishing that gift.

I give away angel cards, dog biscuits and chocolates to those I hope will remember my name.

My platform will consist of several points:

1. The need to rebuild all city housing with appropriate building materials - the idea I have been trying to sell for over a year using the Web Urbanist idea of using shipping crate containers and solar heating. I will also push the idea of gardens on roof tops of these buildings.

2. An overhaul of social service agencies so that the real needs of the unemployed get addressed. This includes new soup kitchens, more services for women and children, the disabled, the lonely.

3. A redress of the wrongs done those who suffer from a new Mental Health Act that puts more distress on families. Also, more focus on nutrition and orthomolecular therapies.

4. More education in schools about the need for Democracy in Action so that students learn/have access on DVD to the Canadian Charter, the US Constitution, tbe Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other important documents that are often overlooked.

And of course, putting focus on the need for people to take part in ensuring that NO MORE WAR CRIMES are committed.

Right now I have a need to write a book about all my experiences, which I intend to publish on this blog, using money I got by taking taxi cabs while my electricity was illegally shut off. I had earlier written a book called Earthlings Anonymous which was thrown away. I had hoped that my anonymous war crimes commentator would either help me assemble a new edition of this book with experts on depleted uranium, ecological architure, indigenous rights, and many other issues, but support was not forthcoming. Neither was further information on Infragard. I wish to high heaven I had a writer's grant, but I don't.

The EVIL toastmaster person, Reginald Cottle, made sure I have no computer, so I must use computer spaces elsewhere than my home.

Trust that I shall endeavor to do the best that I can. I did not have enough money to enrol in an educational program and get a student grant to cover my expenses better !! And although I have several years of back US taxes owing me, I have yet to find someone who will help me collect them.

This is 2009; this is supposed to be my year !! I sincerely hope so.

But right now I am suffering extreme exhaustion and panic attacks;
I am so post-traumatically stressed out I have real burn out.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

If you are reading this; you can contact me by email to help me out financially and emotionally. If you know of someone who is a good speaker on any of the above platform items who I could publicize and get to speak publically for a fee, please let me know. I can arrange good venues for appearances !!

ladybroadoak@gmail.com

If you leave a number or an email address I will respond as promptly as I am able.

I need funding as my appeal to have my ex-husband censored by the bar in Minnesota of his unethical behaviour towards me in my refugee case was REFUSED !! Unfortunately, there goes $177,000 !! My exhusband and Senator Paul Wellstone colluded to get me thrown out back in 1994 in the State of Minnesota. (sigh) and I stood up for Leonard Pelletier to my demise.

Also, please PRAY that I get out of that horrid apartment as quickly as possible. It REALLY, REALLY sucks and I need companionship which is sorely lacking in the present circumstance and has been all along. I am a disabled, empty nester who needs daily contact with other other people !!

Activism - open letter to the Stop-SPP-digest: The US Government is now run by John Conyers !! SO ..

- Please circulate widely -

The US government is now in the hands of the US House Judiciary Committee, chaired by John Conyers.

Cheney will be impeached first, to make the point: TREASON DOES NOT PAY.

Canada has a present and at least one ex-Prime Minister who fit the bill, eh?

After Cheney, BuZh will be impeached.

War Crimes charges have been issued against Donald Rumsfield; War Crimes charges have also been issued against Australia's John Howard. There will be Canadian war crimes charges filed as well.

So I am taking the liberty to give any US Citizen who stops by the blog (run so far donation free), or gets my emails, the form they need to file complaints. Pick a random issue, ANY issue, and send in your complaints (gee, how many are there?) Just press the link !!

Unfortunately, the link is not applicable to US expats nor global citizens, but HEY! Send in those faxes, send him a registered letter, just keep up calling ..

Conyers' phone number:
p/202-225-3951

2138 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 p/202-225-3951

Remember: The impeachment hearings are on c-span!

Tune in, turn on, don't drop out!

I have been asked, by WAR CRIMES prosecutors,

to relay this message:

LAW SCHOOL TO ORGANIZE BUSH WAR CRIMES TRIAL

• Activism
• Criminal Prosecution

By Sherwood Ross

A conference to plan the prosecution of President Bush and other high administration officials for war crimes will be held September 13-14 at the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

"This is not intended to be a mere discussion of violations of law that have occurred," said convener Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the school. "It is, rather, intended to be a planning conference at which plans will be laid a

nd necessary organizational structures set up, to pursue the guilty as long as necessary and, if need be, to the ends of the Earth."

"We must try to hold Bush administration leaders accountable in courts of justice," Velvel said. "And we must insist on appropriate punishments, including, if guilt is found, the hangings visited upon top German and Japanese war-criminals in the 1940s."

Velvel said past practice has been to allow U.S. officials responsible for war crimes in Viet Nam and elsewhere to enjoy immunity from prosecution upon leaving office. "President Johnson retired to his Texas ranch and his Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was named to head the World Bank; Richard Nixon retired to San Clemente and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was allowed to grow richer and richer," Velvel said.

He noted in the years since the prosecution and punishment of German and Japanese leaders after World War Two those nation's leaders changed their countries' aggressor cultures. One cannot discount contributory cause and effect here, he said.

"For Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeild, and John Yoo to spend years in jail or go to the gallows for their crimes would be a powerful lesson to future American leaders," Velvel said.

The conference will take up such issues as the nature of domestic and international crimes committed; which high-level Bush officials, including Federal judges and Members of Congress, are chargeable with war crimes; which foreign and domestic tribunals can be used to prosecute them; and the setting up of an umbrella coordinating committee with representatives of legal groups concerned about the war crimes such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, among others.

The Massachusetts School of Law at Andover was established in 1988 to provide an affordable, quality legal education to minorities, immigrants and students from low-income households that might otherwise be denied the opportunity to obtain a legal education and practice law. Its founder, Dean Velvel, has been honored by the National Law Journal and cited in various publications for his contributions to the reform of legal education. #

#

(To attend or for further information Jeff Demers at demers@msl.edu (978) 681-0800; or Sherwood Ross, media consultant to MSL, at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)

Sherwood Ross has worked as a publicist for the City of Chicago and public relations consultant to New York City. He served as news director for the National Urban League; and worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and wor

kplace columnist for Reuters. He has also been a media consultant to colleges, universities, law schools and more than 100 national magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Business Week, and Foreign Policy; as a speechwriter for mayors, governors and presidential candidates, and as a radio news reporter and talk show host at WOL, Washington, D.C. He holds an award for "best spot news coverage" for Chicago radio stations in 1963. His degree from the University of Miami was in race relations and he has written a book, "Gruening of Alaska," a number of national magazine articles and several plays, including "Baron Jiro," produced at Live Arts Theatre, Charlottesville, Va., and "Yam

amoto's Decision," read at the National Press Club, where he is a member. His favorite quotations are from the Sermon on The Mount.

This law school has been picked PARTICULARLY. A law suit has been filed against the ABA. This will legitimatize the attorneys it graduated, so ignore the ignorant comments at afterdowningstreet.

We who are interested in WAR CRIMES prosecutions are looking particularly for Canadian participants, so that Canadian WAR CRIMINALS are brought to justice !!

I have been asked by the WAR CRIMES prosecutor to stay here in Canada until that date and ORGANIZE, so any help is deeply appreciated over the summer. The relevant legal information has long been posted on my blog - under "Special Prosecutor Information" and is applicable to Canadian officials who have participated in GENOCIDE in Afghanistan.

All comments on Canadian WAR CRIMES are accepted on my blog. These are being vetted by WAR CRIMES prosecutors.

I would like to have a press pass to attend from Canada. If anyone on this list could accomodate me, I would be most appreciative.

Our Canadian segments of the WAR CRIMES prosecutions will be posted on my blog.

The relevant information on infowarfare, a term you will hear often used now, has also been posted on my blog under INFRAGARD.

Part One is to alert those of you in universities how to prepare for the next stage of liberation.

Any help getting up a Canadian WAR CRIMES site will be much appreciated. And all comments posted on my blog are being saved for historical purposes, so I urge you to post.

Sounds nearly "corny" to mention, but - there are

NO HUMAN RIGHTS without national sovereignty

and GENOCIDE is the Supreme International War Crime.


Time to take our Canadian TRAITORS to the woodshed.

Megweetch,

Virginia Simson
Many Rivers

impeach.to.end.war.crimes@gmail.com
freedetainees.org
www.ladybroadoak.blogspot.com
ladybroadoak@gmail.com
www.lowlevelradiation.blogspot.com

Don't forget as Canadians! - our fellow citizen, OMAR KHADR, is STILL not free!
Torture is torture no matter what you call it - and Canada is complicit in rendition, torture. And Omar Khadr is the Amistad of our generation.

The last blog, deals particularly with ONTARIO complicity in du, and other radiation-Canadian issues and could use some co-bloggers, if anyone is interested. This will help end Canadian complicity in du-related WAR CRIMES.

Happy summer everyone ;-)

We don't have to worry about the SPP anymore !!

I might mention: you might want to send thanks

to EFF Foundation

for the valuable work they did getting the

US Department of Defense emails released.

And please ..

continue to send letters of complaint to the ICC.

What “Freedom” Brought to Afghanistan

What “Freedom” Brought to Afghanistan

Women in Afghanistan have a 1 in 8 lifetime risk of maternal death. (By contrast: The rate in neighboring Pakistan is 1 in 74; the rate in Sweden is in in 17,400).

It’s like a perfect storm of right-wing policies: The War on Drugs, women’s liberation by way of imperialism, and “freedom” at the barrel of a gun.

Khalida’s father says she’s 9—or maybe 10. As much as Sayed Shah loves his 10 children, the functionally illiterate Afghan farmer can’t keep track of all their birth dates. Khalida huddles at his side, trying to hide beneath her chador and headscarf. They both know the family can’t keep her much longer. Khalida’s father has spent much of his life raising opium, as men like him have been doing for decades in the stony hillsides of eastern Afghanistan and on the dusty southern plains. It’s the only reliable cash crop most of those farmers ever had. Even so, Shah and his family barely got by: traffickers may prosper, but poor farmers like him only subsist. Now he’s losing far more than money. “I never imagined I’d have to pay for growing opium by giving up my daughter,” says Shah.

In the last six months alone, over 250 women have committed suicide in the country, according to Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). IRIN News, August 21, 2007

The vast majority of the world’s opiates originate in Afghanistan. To fight drug production, the solution has been to target individual farmers and destroy their crops — without offering them any other option for survival. And the U. S. keeps mucking it up. We offered farmers other crops (wheat, etc), but once it was grown there weren’t enough buyers (I guess we didn’t think that far ahead).

And it’s not just farmers who are suffering because of these policies — it’s girls.

Angiza Afridi, 28, has spent much of the past year interviewing more than 100 families about opium weddings in two of Nangarhar’s 22 districts. The schoolteacher and local TV reporter already had firsthand knowledge of the tragedy. Five years ago one of her younger aunts, then 16, was forced to marry a 55- year-old man to pay off an older uncle’s opium debt, and three years ago an 8-year-old cousin was also given in marriage to make good on a drug loan. “This practice of marrying daughters to cover debts is becoming a bad habit,” says Afridi.

Even so, the results of her survey shocked her. In the two districts she studied, approximately half the new brides had been given in marriage to repay opium debts. The new brides included children as young as 5 years old; until they’re old enough to consummate their marriages, they mostly work as household servants for their in-laws. “These poor girls have no future,” she says. The worst of it may be the suicides. Afridi learned of one 15-year-old opium bride who poisoned herself on her wedding day late last year and an 11-year-old who took a fatal dose of opium around the same time. Her new in-laws were refusing to let her visit her parents.

Gul Ghoti is on her first visit home since her wedding six months ago. She says it’s a relief to be back with her father and mother in their two-room mud-and- brick house, if only temporarily. “My heart is still with my parents, brothers and sisters,” she says. “Only my body is with my husband’s family.” She says she personally knows of two opium brides who killed themselves. “One of the girls had been badly beaten by her husband’s brother, the other by her husband,” she says. Ghoti says she’s considered suicide, too, but Islam stopped her. “I pray that God doesn’t give me a daughter if she ends up like me.”

The life expectancy for adults in Afghanistan is 43.

Almost half of all children are not enrolled in primary school.

Only eight percent of girls attend secondary school.

More than half of all children under 5 are suffering from moderate to severe stunting.

Only 34 percent of people in Afghanistan have access to adequate sanitation facilities.

For every 100 people in Afghanistan, 5 have a phone.

One has internet access.

Women in Afghanistan have a 1 in 8 lifetime risk of maternal death.

(By contrast:

The rate in neighboring Pakistan is 1 in 74;

the rate in Sweden is in in 17,400).

Sordid Details on ‘Black Site’ at Diego Garcia Island Come to Light

By Dazeylin

Share This! Categories: C.I.A., Detainee Abuse, Disappeared, Extraordinary Rendition, Ghost, Lies of the U.S. Administration, Torture and Torture flights Tags: No Tags.

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband issued an embarrassing apology to members of Parliament last month. Despite “earlier explicit assurances” to the contrary, he admitted, two planes carrying prisoners of the U.S. “war on terror” had landed on the British-owned island of Diego Garcia in 2002 before flying to foreign territory as part of the American extraordinary rendition program.

One flight went on to Guantánamo, one to Morocco. The identities of the detainees remain classified, but one of them has since been set free. According to the CIA, neither was tortured. But — Miliband would have the public believe — the CIA didn’t bother to tell the British government that its territory was being used as a landing pad for American torture taxis.

Human rights attorneys and a handful of British MPs have long raised the possibility that Diego Garcia, a small island in the Indian Ocean that is home to a massive American military base, has played a role in extraordinary rendition — and that it is among the United States’ “black sites” — secret CIA-run prisons, the existence of which President Bush himself confirmed in 2006. Even loose-lipped American officials have acknowledged it. As London-based human rights attorney Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal organization Reprieve (which, over a year ago, unearthed flight logs recording the arrival and departure of a CIA rendition plane at Diego Garcia), wrote in the Guardian last January:

British denials are difficult to square with the words of U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey … recently retired from running Southcom, the military command that oversees Guantánamo. He was asked in May 2004 where the thousands of ghost prisoners were being held. “You know, Bagram Air Field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” he replied.

Yet the Blair and Brown administrations continually denied it. Until now.

“We have just been informed by the United States of America about what has actually happened,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters lamely on Feb. 21. “The U.S. has expressed regret for us not knowing about this issue. We share the disappointment that everybody has about what’s actually happened.”

In the States, the controversy has gotten little press — in no small part because Americans have known for years that their elected officials are in the kidnap/torture business. But in Britain, where the government has denied any role in their ally’s unsavory program, officials are pleading ignorance, offering insipid excuses and, ultimately, trying to reduce proof of their complicity with the U.S. torture/detention machinery to a mere bureaucratic oversight. As Brown tells it, this was simply a case where an “error in the earlier U.S. records search meant that these cases did not come to light.”

Nevertheless, the Guardian reported on Monday, “Ministers are coming under growing pressure as officials made it clear they still could not be certain of the extent to which U.S. aircraft made use of British facilities when taking alleged terrorists to prisons where they were likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment.”

Regardless of what comes to light, the case of Diego Garcia is uniquely instructive in what it has revealed of American and British collusion in the past. Long before the “war on terror,” the story of Diego Garcia was a tragic symbol of imperial aggression.

As the British journalist John Pilger wrote in his book Freedom Next Time, “The story of Diego Garcia is shocking, almost incredible.”

A British colony lying midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean, the island is one of 64 unique coral islands that form the Chagos Archipelago, a phenomenon of natural beauty and once of peace. Newsreaders refer to it in passing: “American B-52 and stealth bombers last night took off from the uninhabited British island of Diego Garcia to bomb Iraq (or Afghanistan).” It is the word “uninhabited” that turns the key on the horror of what was done there. In the 1970s, the Ministry of Defense in London produced this epic lie: “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation.”

Pilger tells the awful story of an island that, at the height of the Cold War, was seized by the British, and with the help of the American government, “swept” and “sanitized.” This involved taking a population of natives and, retroactively, reclassifying them as “short-term, temporary residents” that were “returned” to the island of Mauritius, about 1,000 miles away. “In fact,” writes Pilger, “many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, as their cemeteries bore witness.”

Rendered disposable, the population of 2,000 was forcibly removed and eventually replaced by American troops: Diego Garcia was leased to the United States free of charge following a secret pact between British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. They inhabit a military base that’s now one of the world’s largest. The name: “Camp Justice.”

Years later, the start of the “war on terror” coincided with a number of significant — and hideously overdue — developments for the people of Diego Garcia. In 2000, the British high court ruled the forced removal of the islanders illegal. But, reported Pilger, “within hours of the judgment, the Foreign Office announced that it would not be possible for them to return to Diego Garcia because of a ‘treaty’ with Washington — in truth, a deal concealed from Parliament and the U.S. Congress.”

In 2003, at the same time that extraordinary rendition flights were carrying detainees to be tortured, a second ruling denied compensation for the former residents of Diego Garcia. Adding brutal insult to injury, the Blair government invoked the “royal prerogative” — special executive powers that belong only to the king or queen — to dispense with the earlier ruling — and “a decree was issued that the islanders were banned forever from returning home.”

Today, with Diego Garcia in the spotlight, official reports have tried to continue the fiction that the island never belonged to anyone. “Once uninhabited, it was turned into an air base to protect oil supplies to the West during the Cold War,” wrote a reporter in the Gulf Times the day after Miliband’s apology.

For their part, U.S. officials are taking responsibility for failing to tell the British about the flights in and out of Diego Garcia. “That we found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government, in no way changes or excuses the reality that we were in the wrong,” CIA Director Michael Hayden said. “An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and to learn from them.”

Perhaps. But if Diego Garcia’s role in the war on terror is any indication, neither the U.S. nor the British government have learned from their mistakes. It is only the latest chapter in an epic story of imperial injustice.

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer.

© 2008 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79273/

ACTIVISM: London on Iraq War Anniversary

JUDGES LEAD HANDCUFFED TONY BLAIR THROUGH CENTRAL LONDON ON IRAQ WAR ANNIVERSARY War Crimes Prosecutions Demanded for Blair and Brown

A repentent Blair? Press Release Tuesday 18 March 2008 Judges for Justice 10.30am, 20 March 2008, Royal Courts of Justice, The Strand: To mark the 5th anniversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, ten 'Judges for Justice' will frog-march a handcuffed Tony Blair through central London this Thursday, demanding war crimes prosecutions for the former PM and his successor. The procession – which will start at 10.30am outside the High Court – will pass through some of the busiest areas of central London before terminating at Tony Blair's office in Grosvenor Square [1]. The judges – dressed in their wigs and robes – will also be displaying a 'Justice for Iraq' banner, picturing Blair and Brown behind bars, clutching blood-spattered bank-notes. Justice Gabriel Carlyle said, "Five years ago today, the US and Britain invaded Iraq, in an illegal [2] war of aggression, based on lies [3]. Since then over a million Iraqis have been killed, and a further 3 million forced to flee their homes [4]. "In 1946 the Nuremberg Tribunal set up to try Nazi war criminals, concluded that '[T]o initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' [5]. "Yet today, the Iraq war's primary British architects – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – remain at large. Indeed, Brown – who financed the war – has become Prime Minister, and Blair 'is well on course to becoming the richest former prime minister in [British] history' [6]. "Today, as we mark the 5th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, justice demands accountability – and prosecutions - for the 'supreme crime'." NOTES [1] 'Blair to move to Grosvenor Sq as peace envoy', The Telegraph, 24/10/07, http://tinyurl.com/3bz96x [2] 'Iraq War Was Illegal, Says Annan', BBC, 24/09/04, http://tinyurl.com/4ndcw [2] In July 2002 in a secret memo subsequently leaked to the press, the head of MI6 noted that, 'Military action was now seen as inevitable' and that in Washington 'the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy' ('Blair planned war from the start', Times, 01/05/07, http://tinyurl.com/2klag5). [3] 'New analysis 'confirms' 1 million+ Iraq casualties', ORB Survey, 28/01/08, http://tinyurl.com/yozd8j. 'Statistics on displaced Iraqis around the world', UNHCR, 09/07, http://tinyurl.com/24g3ny. [4] 'The Trial of German Major War Criminals Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany', The Judgement, p.13, HMSO 1946, http://tinyurl.com/2b65ov [5] 'Tony Blair to earn £2mn as J.P Morgan adviser', Telegraph, 11/01/08, http://tinyurl.com/3742gf. However, according to a 'source close to the couple', Cherie Blair – a QC with the human rights lawyers Matrix Churchill – 'has private fears that her husband could face a war crimes trial over the invasion of Iraq.' "[S]he still thinks it is a real possibility," a friend explained ('Blairs at a loss as sun sets on their decade', Sunday Telegraph, 10/07/07, http://tinyurl.com/36op9c). Blair is held at the High Court Blair tries to use some of his ill-gotten gains to get out of the situation The Judges pronounce Blair guilty of war crimes outside his old Downing Street office where his corruption took hold The Judges knock for the real Tony Blair to come out and stand trial at 9 Grosvenor Square - where Blair has rented offices.

voices uk - working in solidarity with ordinary families in iraq 5 Caledonian Road, King's Cross, London N1 9DX telephone: 0845 458 2564 or 020 7837 0561 email : voices@viwuk.freeserve.co.uk

Torturegate AND - Sex HAS diverted our attention this week

There were more important things than the Spitzer spectacle going on last week

By ERIC MARGOLIS

There are few more riveting spectacles than the public exposure and humiliation of a major hypocrite. So it was with New York State's fallen governor, Eliot Spitzer.

As a former prosecutor Spitzer relentlessly crusaded against financial, political and moral malefactors, including those involved in prostitution cases. Some saw him as a future presidential candidate.

Watching this modern Savonarola exposed dallying with outrageously priced call girls suggests there is indeed natural justice -- except, of course, for the humiliation inflicted on his brave, loyal wife.

U.S. media has overflowed with silly commentary by feminists and shrinks about "why did he do it." He did it because he was a typical man, genetically programmed to lust after multiple sexual partners. As the old saying goes, if a man isn't thinking about sex, his mind is wandering.

Too many Americans still have adolescent views of sex and marriage.

Europeans, by contrast, shrug off men's need to stray as normal and acceptable, provided it is done discreetly. Powerful, busy men such as Spitzer who have no time to court and romance women resort to prostitutes for simple physical release.

However ruthless, self-serving and hypocritical Spitzer was about prostitution, he was doing one good thing: Going after Wall Street's crooks and fraudsters largely responsible for the current financial crisis.

Spitzer's downfall this week unfortunately obscured two far more important events.

SADDAM AND AL-QAIDA

First, the White House refused to release an exhaustive Pentagon review of 600,000 Iraqi documents that found no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any links with al-Qaida.

This al-Qaida connection was the second big lie propagated by the Bush White House to justify invading Iraq. So successfully was it spread by the administration and tame media, that on the eve of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, 80% of Americans blamed Saddam for 9/11.

A small, al-Qaida affiliate appeared in Iraq only as a result of the U.S. invasion. But most misled Americans still believe they are fighting Osama bin Laden's men in Iraq. No wonder the White House is trying to suppress the Pentagon study.

Spitzer's pillorying also masked another profoundly shameful act. On Tuesday, 188 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to uphold President George Bush's veto of a Democratic-sponsored bill to ban the CIA from using torture to interrogate enemy detainees. Their party-line vote was strong enough to prevent the 225 Democrats who voted to overturn the president's veto from achieving the required two-thirds majority.

Republicans now have become the party of torture. Never has the Grand Old Party sunk so low. Those great Republicans, Lincoln, Eisenhower and Reagan, must be weeping in their graves.

Among tortures America now routinely inflicts on captives: Water torture, near suffocation, beatings, confinement in cramped positions, sleep and sensory deprivation, freezing rooms, ear-splitting noise, mock executions, psychotropic drugs, food laced with excrement and, of course, water-boarding.

CONDONING TORTURE

The White House and Republicans claim none of these is really torture. Republicans just love euphemisms. These tortures are merely "enhanced interrogation." Overthrowing foreign governments is "regime change;" assassination, "taking them out." George Orwell warned such double-talk was the hallmark of totalitarian regimes. Even the KGB did not use all these tortures.

The president and his party are violating American and international law, and UN agreements against torture.

Their sanction of torture, and its apotheosis in the Guantanamo gulag, have disgraced America's name around the globe and will continue to haunt the United States for decades to come. Captured American soldiers now know what to expect.

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain -- the latter a torture victim -- all properly condemn the White House for promoting torture. But McCain, who should know better, fudges, saying he won't restrict the CIA to interrogations in the Army Field Manual, which bans most forms of real torture. That is ominous.

The Spitzer follies should not distract us from the Bush administration's continuing violations of American and international law, and the values America used to hold dear. Nor ally Ottawa's slide in the same illegal direction.


Posted by CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS mparent7777 Marc Parent CCNWON at 2:46 PM
Labels: Bush, governor, New York, Orwellian, President 2008, scandal, totalitarianism

ACTIVISM!!