The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. December 10, 2007: “The Pakis could nuke India but our media would be far more interested in babbling about the political candidates to report it. I have never in all my life seen such a slate of useless pieces of shit but the media loves to keep the public’s eye on what this one is doing or what that one just said. Keeps us from seeing what the criminally stupid White House is doing, or not doing.

There is one story that I know is true that the media would never dare touch, along with never, never saying anything bad about Sainted Israel or Jesus, and that concerns Hillary. Lots of juicy stories around about her but stories you will never see anywhere in print. Some time ago, Hillary Rodham graduated from Yale Law School and went to California to work for the far-left law firm of Robert Treuhaft. He was a very left wing labor lawyer who was married to Jessica Mitford. Jessica’s sister, Unity, was Hitler’s mistress until the war broke out, she tried to shoot herself and was shipped home to die.

Anyway, Hillary was assigned to the very radical Black Panther groups who were, at that time, centered in Oakland, California. At one point, they all drove in a caravan to the state capitol in Sacramento and terrified the legislators with a large number of firearms.

After strutting their stuff, the Panthers holed up in various local cheap motels where the State Police duly routed them out. Hillary was, according to a California State Police report, found naked in bed with a black woman! Wonderful but not a surprise to those who know her.

This was written up, and published,  by San Francisco ‘Chronicle’ columnist, Herb Caen. When Bill became President, he sent the FBI to seize the report but copies had been made and circulated.

And among other issues, it seems that the family name of ‘Rodham’ was once “Rodomski” and her father’s family came from the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland and settled in England before emigrating to the Chicago area.

This is a subject that the domestic media will never talk about, mainly out of protection for their co-religionist but we hear that this will all come out in the wash before the convention. I personally knew about this ten years ago so it isn’t news to me or most of the people I know but our press knows who signs the paychecks so we hear nothing.

And if she’s elected, the Pentagon phone intercepts show that she plans to continue the’ Everything for Greater Israel’ program now in place in the Bush White House.  An executive from AIPAC told one of his backers that ‘Hillary says she’ll bomb Tehran back to the stone age…’

Controlling the News

New York City, December 9, 2007: “The most pressing Forbidden Topic in newsrooms across America  now is Vladimir Putin’s huge electoral victory in the latest elections. Putin is on the official blacklist here because Bush can’t push him around, because he took control of Russian natural resources away from U.S. firms and won’t give it back and because he is enormously popular in Russia, especially with younger people.  Our mandated theme is to tell Americans that Putin has to leave very soon and we hope someone interested in establishing Real Civil Rights will come into power, someone who will love to cooperate with the United States and do its bidding.

Putin is depicted as a nascent dictator ‘with no regard for human rights.’ Given that the U.S. eagerly supported Pinochet after our Navy special units murdered Allende and have supported many real dictators much worse than Putin ever could be and, not to forget, our Franklin Roosevelt loved Josef Stalin and let him have anything he wanted and turned a very blind eye to his massive slaughters, this hypocritical war is a huge joke with anyone with a better than community college education.  Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice always pays to virtue!

And there is Putin, as popular as Bush is loathed, sitting on all that oil we need so badly and a man who told Bush, in public no less, to keep his “snotty nose out of Russian affairs.”

Now we have to keep up with the New York Times and maintain a constant  drumfire on the “evil dictator Putin.” The Times is pissed off because Putin clipped the wings (and took the cash away from) the Oligarchs with whom, the Times ownership shares a common religious and ethnic background.

And we are supposed to support the official Israeli view that evil Iran needs to be bombed by the U.S. Airforce because of their fear of an attack on them. That subject is too sensitive even for us.

And our Russian bureau chief tells us that Putin is generally immensely popular in his own country, Times reporting to the contrary. The press could get away with such officially-instigated propaganda years ago but with the advent of the Internet, they are SOL and are losing subscribers at a terrifying rate.

No one but drunks in bars and sports fans watch the tube anymore and most American youth are too interested in trying to get laid on MyFace or YouTube to worry about anything other than their genitals.”

Iran: Bush Loses Even More Credibility

December 7, 2007

by Helen Thomas

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

We are still in the dark as to what evidence the U.S. turned up that has now convinced U.S. officials that Iran was on the level when it denied nuclear ambitions.

It was good news for the world — and bad news for hawkish neo-conservatives in the U.S. — when a new U.S. intelligence assessment concluded that Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003. President Bush says he learned about it week before last.

This blockbuster came from a National Intelligence Estimate that represents a consensus of all U.S. spy agencies.

Norman Podhoretz — one of the founding fathers of the neo-conservative movement — had urged Bush in a private meeting last September to bomb Iran rather than allow it to acquire nuclear weapons.

Whatever prompted the abrupt turnaround, it was enough to give Bush pause before he rushed to attack a third Muslim nation during his waning watch at the White House.

Without a handy enemy to spook the American public, the Bush administration seems forlorn. Perhaps we should be nervous.

Meanwhile, Iran, feeling vindicated, wants the U.S. to drop its hawkish moves and to refrain from imposing new economic sanctions against it.

But Bush has ruled out any softening of U.S. policy — and he apparently has the support of his allies.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak disputed the U.S. conclusions, saying Israel still believes Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

Israel is believed to have the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East but has never permitted the U.N. to inspect its weapons program and has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Nor has any U.S. president publicly pressured it to do so.

One casualty in the Iran-nuke, no-nuke episode is the credibility of the Bush administration. Bush recently evoked the frightening possibility of “World War III” and Vice President Dick Cheney warned Iran of “serious consequences” if it built a nuclear bomb.

For months Iran has been in the bull’s eye of American foreign policy as the pundits have focused on an impending attack on its military sites. It has not been a question of “if” but “when” among the experts in some Washington think tanks.

Some in the military establishment, including Adm. William, Fallon, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, have been urging the president to hold off from any precipitous action.

Iran had consistently denied it was developing nuclear weapons. But up to now it could not convince the U.S. or any of the Western Powers that its uranium enrichment program was for peaceful purposes.

Several weeks ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed U.S. claims against Iran and said there was “no evidence” that it was seeking a nuclear arsenal.

Among the vindicated is Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has been scorned by hawkish officials because his agency has been insisting that there was “no evidence” of an undeclared nuclear weapons project in Iran.

Of course there are many more questions. What intelligence led to this 180-degree reversal in U.S. foreign policy? Did the U.S. naval buildup in Iran’s backyard convince the mullahs that Bush was trigger happy? Or did Bush decide things were bad enough for Republican candidates without adding more U.S. military muscle in the Middle East?

Bush told a news conference: “One of the reasons why this is out in the public arena is because I wanted — and our administration believed that, one — it was important for the people to know the facts as we see them.”

Second, he said it was important for the American people to see that there has been a reevaluation of the Iranian issue.

How refreshing! The American people could have used such commendable candor and salvaged our national credibility before we invaded and occupied Iraq.

Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. E-mail: helent@hearstdc.com.

Letters to the editor

From: kkf_tk@t-online.de

To: tbrnews@hotmail.com

Subject: Homosexual Stauffenberg?

Date: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 11:45:38 +0100

German ministers say Scientology unconstitutional

December 7, 2007

by Louis Charbonneau

Reuters

Actor Tom Cruise, who plays the role of the homosexual Claus von Stauffenberg .

Hallo,strange, Mr. Charbonneau claims Herr Stauffenberg was a homosexual, my question is why did this "homesexual" Stauffenberg marry and have 5 children with his wife? This Charbonneau claim will come as some surprise to the Staufenberg widow and children and family, not to mention the reading public.

I wager Charbonneau has inserted some wishful thinking into his report about a "homo" Stauffenberg, but the facts of Stauffenberg's authenic life would rather refute the Charbonneau canard.

Thx so much Charbonneau for your fallacious swill at Christmas time, or do you prefer the term X-mas?

Good day!

ps TBR, do you print everything in this unverified manner?

Response:

After the 20. Juli attentat, Hitler had Heinrich Müller, Chef of Amt IV (Gestapo) of the RSHA set up a Sonderkommission to investigate the ramifications of the plot.

According to Müller's microfilmed official files, Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenberg, and his brother, Brethold, were both practicing homosexuals and earlier had been active and participating members of the 'Stefan George Kreise' which was entirely homosexual in nature.

Claus and his brother, who was in the Kreigsmarine as a Richter, lived in Berlin and after the failed attentat, the Gestapo raided their house. It was stuffed with blackmarket goods, all forbidden, many photo albums of naked young men and women's clothing and many  photographs also found in the house, showed clearly that Claus was a 175er without question.

The Müller files also contain pictures of Claus in women's underwear which, I assure you, is not appetizing.

Since Claus has been elevated to the political sainthood in Germany, any records concerning his perversions that might be in the Bundesarchiv are closed to pubic inspection.

It is fortunate for objective history that a full copy of Müller Sonderkommission papers survived the war although Müller ordered all Gestapo records destroyed before the war's end.

As you might not know, Heinrich Müller survived the war by going to Switzerland under the name of Schwartzer and in 1948, was recruited by his standing deputy, SS-Oberführer Willi Krichbaum (later head of the Geheime Feldpolizei) who was working down at Bad Reichenhall for U.S. Colonel James Critchfield's Gehlen Org, then located at Pullach.

I have boxes of documentation, and rolls of microfilms, that both the current German government, the CIA and members of the Stauffenberg family, not to mention the motion picture company now preparing a film on Stauffenberg's role in the attentat, would dearly like to redact, if not destroy.

Fortunately for objective truth, I do not agree with them and in the months to come, intend to publish some of the more interesting documents...and especially photographs...for the edification and education of the public.

As an antidote to Tom Cruise strutting around the sound stage (and I suspect he was type-cast for the role) we can see Claus in his step-ins and engaged in homoerotic activity with handsome young soldiers.

The brief mention of Claus' deviant activities in the last issue of tbrnews is the opening shot and I assure you, with great pleasure, there will be much more to come.

The really gratifying aspect of this entire scenario is that there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to prevent this.

Hochachtungsvoll!

Walter Storch

German translation:

Nach den 20. Juli attentat, Hitler hatte Heinrich Müller, der Chef von Amt IV (Gestapo) des RSHA stellt einen Sonderkommission auf, um die Implikationen des Anschlags zu untersuchen.

Gemäß auf Mikrofilm aufgenommenen offiziellen Dateien von Müller's übte Claus Schenck Graf von Stauffenberg, und sein Bruder, Brethold, Homosexuelle sowohl und war früher aktive und teilnehmende Mitglieder des 'Stefans Georges Kreise' gewesen, der in der Natur völlig homosexuell war.

Claus und sein Bruder, der im Kreigsmarine als ein Richter war, lebten in Berlin, und nachdem der erfolglose attentat, die Gestapo ihr Haus überfiel. Es wurde mit blackmarket Waren, allem Verbotenen, viele Foto-Alben von nackten jungen Männern und Frauenkleidung vollgestopft, und viele Fotographien fanden auch im Haus, gezeigt deutlich, dass Claus 175er ohne Frage war.

Die Müller Dateien enthalten auch Bilder von Claus in der Frauenunterkleidung, die ich Sie versichere, ist nicht appetitlich.

Seitdem Claus zur politischen Heiligkeit in Deutschland erhoben worden ist, werden irgendwelche Aufzeichnungen bezüglich seiner Verdrehungen, die im Bundesarchiv sein könnten, für die Schambesichtigung geschlossen.

Das ist für die objektive Geschichte glücklich, dass eine volle Kopie von Müller Sonderkommission Papiere den Krieg überlebte, obwohl Müller alle vor dem Ende des Krieges zerstörten Aufzeichnungen von Gestapo bestellte.

Wie Sie nicht wissen könnten, überlebte Heinrich Müller den Krieg, indem er nach der Schweiz unter dem Namen von Schwartzer und 1948 ging, wurde von seinem Stehabgeordneten, SS-Oberführer Willi Krichbaum rekrutiert (späteres Haupt vom Geheime Feldpolizei), wer unten an Schlechtem Reichenhall für den US-amerikanischen Obersten James Critchfield Gehlen Org, dann gelegt an Pullach arbeitete.

Ich habe Kästen der Dokumentation, und Rollen von Mikrofilmen, das sowohl die gegenwärtige deutsche Regierung, der CIA als auch Mitglieder der Stauffenberg Familie, ganz zu schweigen von der Film-Gesellschaft, die jetzt einen Film auf der Rolle von Stauffenberg im attentat vorbereitet, möchten wenn nicht d lieb redigieren  wenn nicht zerstören Sie.

Glücklich für die objektive Wahrheit stimme ich mit ihnen nicht überein und in den Monaten zu kommen, vorzuhaben, einige der interessanteren Dokumente ... zu veröffentlichen, und fotografiere besonders ... für die Errichtung und Ausbildung des Publikums.

Als ein Gegenmittel Tom Cruise strutting um die gesunde Bühne (und vermute ich, dass er für die Rolle festgelegt wurde), können wir Claus in seinem Stief-Ins und beschäftigt mit der homoerotic Tätigkeit mit hübschen jungen Soldaten sehen.

Die kurze Erwähnung der abweichenden Tätigkeiten von Claus in der letzten Ausgabe von tbrnews ist der sich öffnende Schuss, und ich versichere Sie von Herzen gern, es wird viel mehr geben, um zu kommen.

Der wirklich befriedigende Aspekt dieses kompletten Drehbuches ist, dass es absolut nichts gibt, kann irgendjemand tun, um das zu verhindern.

Hochachtungsvoll!

Walter Storch

MORTGAGE MELTDOWN

Interest rate 'freeze' - the real story is fraud

Bankers pay lip service to families while scurrying to avert suits, prison

December 9, 2007

by Sean Olender

San Francisco Chronicle

New proposals to ease our great mortgage meltdown keep rolling in. First the Treasury Department urged the creation of a new fund that would buy risky mortgage bonds as a tactic to hide what those bonds were really worth. (Not much.) Then the idea was to use Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy the risky loans, even if it was clear that U.S. taxpayers would eventually be stuck with the bill. But that plan went south after Fannie suffered a new accounting scandal, and Freddie's existing loan losses shot up more than expected.

Now, just unveiled Thursday, comes the "freeze," the brainchild of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. It sounds good: For five years, mortgage lenders will freeze interest rates on a limited number of "teaser" subprime loans. Other homeowners facing foreclosure will be offered assistance from the Federal Housing Administration.

But unfortunately, the "freeze" is just another fraud - and like the other bailout proposals, it has nothing to do with U.S. house prices, with "working families," keeping people in their homes or any of that nonsense.

The sole goal of the freeze is to prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value - right now almost 10 times their market worth.

The ticking time bomb in the U.S. banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process.

And, to be sure, fraud is everywhere. It's in the loan application documents, and it's in the appraisals. There are e-mails and memos floating around showing that many people in banks, investment banks and appraisal companies - all the way up to senior management - knew about it.

I can hear the hum of shredders working overtime, and maybe that is the new "hot" industry to invest in. There are lots of people who would like to muzzle subpoena-happy New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to buy time and make this all go away. Cuomo is just inches from getting what he needs to start putting a lot of people in prison. I bet some people are trying right now to make him an offer "he can't refuse."

Despite Thursday's ballyhooed new deal with mortgage lenders, does anyone really think that it can ultimately stop fraud lawsuits by mortgage bond investors, many of them spread out across the globe?

The catastrophic consequences of bond investors forcing originators to buy back loans at face value are beyond the current media discussion. The loans at issue dwarf the capital available at the largest U.S. banks combined, and investor lawsuits would raise stunning liability sufficient to cause even the largest U.S. banks to fail, resulting in massive taxpayer-funded bailouts of Fannie and Freddie, and even FDIC.

The problem isn't just subprime loans. It is the entire mortgage market. As home prices fall, defaults will rise sharply - period. And so will the patience of mortgage bondholders. Different classes of mortgage bonds from various risk pools are owned by different central banks, funds, pensions and investors all over the world. Even your pension or 401(k) might have some of these bonds in it.

Perhaps some U.S. government department can make veiled threats to foreign countries to suggest they will suffer unpleasant consequences if their largest holders (central banks and investment funds) don't go along with the plan, but how could it be possible to strong-arm everyone?

What would be prudent and logical is for the banks that sold this toxic waste to buy it back and for a lot of people to go to prison. If they knew about the fraud, they should have to buy the bonds back. The time to look into this is before the shredders have worked their magic - not five years from now.

Those selling the "freeze" have suggested that mortgage-backed securities investors will benefit because they lose more with rising foreclosures. But with fast-depreciating collateral, the last thing investors in mortgage bonds ought to do is put off foreclosures. Rate freezes are at best a tool for delaying the inevitable foreclosures when even the most optimistic forecasters expect home prices to fall. In October, Goldman Sachs issued a report forecasting an incredible 35 to 40 percent drop in California home prices in the coming few years. To minimize losses, a mortgage bondholder would obviously be better off foreclosing on a home before prices plunge.

The goal of the freeze may be to delay bond investors from suing by putting off the big foreclosure wave for several years. But it may also be to stop bond investors from suing. If the investors agreed to loan modifications with the "real" wage and asset information from refinancing borrowers, mortgage originators and bundlers would have an excuse once the foreclosure occurred. They could say, "Fraud? What fraud?! You knew the borrower's real income and asset information later when he refinanced!"

The key is to refinance borrowers whose current loans involved fraud in the origination process. And I assure you it was a minority of borrowers whose loans didn't involve fraud.

The government is trying to accomplish wide-scale refinancing by tricking bond investors, or by tricking U.S. taxpayers. Guess who will foot the bill now that the FHA is entering the fray?

Ultimately, the people in these secret Paulson meetings were probably less worried about saving the mortgage market than with saving themselves. Some might be looking at prison time.

As chief of Goldman Sachs, Paulson was involved, to degrees as yet unrevealed, in the mortgage securitization process during the halcyon days of mortgage fraud from 2004 to 2006.

Paulson became the U.S. Treasury secretary on July 10, 2006, after the extent of the debacle was coming into focus for those in the know. Goldman Sachs achieved recent accolades in the markets for having bet heavily against the housing market, while Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and others got hammered for failing to time the end of the credit bubble.

Goldman Sachs is the only major investment bank in the United States that has emerged as yet unscathed from this debacle. The success of its strategy must have resulted from fairly substantial bets against housing, mortgage banking and related industries, which also means that Goldman Sachs saw this coming at the same time they were bundling and selling these loans.

If a mortgage bond investor sues Goldman Sachs to force the institution to buy back loans, could Paulson be forced to testify as to whether Goldman Sachs knew or had reason to know about fraud in the origination process of the loans it was bundling?

It is truly amazing that right now everyone in the country is deferring to Paulson and the heads of Countrywide, JPMorgan, Bank of America and others as the best group to work out a solution to this problem. No one is talking about the fact that these people created the problem and profited to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars from it.

I suspect that such a group first sat down and tried to figure out how to protect their financial interests and avoid criminal liability. And then when they agreed on the plan, they decided to sell it as "helping working families stay in their homes." That's why these meetings were secret, and reporters and the public weren't invited.

The next time that Paulson is before the Senate Finance Committee, instead of asking, "How much money do you think we should give your banking buddies?" I'd like to see New York Sen. Chuck Schumer ask him what he knew about this staggering fraud at the time he was chief of Goldman Sachs.

The Goldman report in October suggests that rampant investor demand is to blame for origination fraud - even though these investors were misled by high credit ratings from bond rating agencies being paid billions by the U.S. investment banks, like Goldman, that were selling the bundled mortgages.

This logic is like saying shoppers seeking bargain-priced soup encourage the grocery store owner to steal it. I mean, we're talking about criminal fraud here. We are on the cusp of a mammoth financial crisis, and the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury are trying to limit the liability of their banking friends under the guise of trying to help borrowers. At stake is nothing short of the continued existence of the U.S. banking system.

Sean Olender is a San Mateo attorney. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

SECRECY NEWS

from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2007, Issue No. 120

December 10, 2007

INTELLIGENCE OVERSIGHT FLEXES ONE NEW MUSCLE

The ability of Congress to provide an effective check on Bush Administration intelligence policy has been increasingly called into question by each succeeding departure from the norms of accepted intelligence conduct, including most recently the destruction of CIA interrogation videos.

Even the Intelligence Committee leadership has expressed a disconcerting degree of self-doubt and inadequacy.

"For seven years, I have witnessed first-hand how the Intelligence Committee has been continually frustrated in its efforts to understand and evaluate sensitive intelligence activities by an Administration

that responds to legislative oversight requests with indifference, if not out-right disdain," said Senate Intelligence Committee chair Sen. Jay Rockefeller at a hearing last month.

"For years, the White House and the Intelligence Community have repeatedly withheld information and documents -- even unclassifieddocuments -- from the Committee that we have asked for," he said.

So it is all the more remarkable that the intelligence oversight committees have finally dusted off and used one of the tools they have always had to compel executive branch cooperation -- the power of the purse.

Specifically, a provision of the new FY2008 intelligence authorization bill would prohibit expenditure of certain funds for an unidentified classified program unless and until every member of the oversight committees is briefed on intelligence about the September 6, 2007 Israeli strike on a Syrian facility.

See Section 328 ("Limitation on use of funds") of the Conference Report on the FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act completed last week:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_rpt/hrpt110-478.html

Although disputes over congressional access to information date back to the first months of the Bush Administration, a review of past legislation shows that the intelligence committees have not previously exercised their budget authorization power in this way to compel disclosure of information, or to penalize non-disclosure, under the current Administration.

In fact, a former staffer told Secrecy News he could not remember this approach ever having been used by the intelligence committees (though other committees have often made release of funds contingent on submission of required reports under their jurisdiction).

So why did they do it now?

The former staffer pointed to testimony last month by former Rep. Lee Hamilton at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in which he stressed the use of financial incentives to induce intelligence agencies to submit to oversight:

"Okay, they don't share information. What do you do about it? You'v only got one tool: 'If you don't give us this information, you're not going to get the money.' That's it," Mr. Hamilton told the Committee on November 13.

The scales seemed to fall from the members' eyes.

"I think you've given us a game-changing scenario," replied Sen. Ki Bond (R- MO) at the hearing.

The use of appropriations authority to elicit information from the executive branch actually dates back to the earliest days of the Republic, observed Louis Fisher in a 2001 Congressional Research Service report.

"Presidents may have to surrender documents they consider sensitive or confidential in order to obtain funds from Congress to implement programs important to the executive branch. This congressional leverage is evident in a number of early executive-legislative confrontations."

See "Congressional Access to Executive Branch Information: Legislative Tools," May 17, 2001:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/RL30966.pdf

SELECTED CRS REPORTS

Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following.

"Open Source Intelligence (OSINT): Issues for Congress," December 5, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL34270.pdf

"Medal of Honor Recipients: 1979-2007," updated November 13, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL30011.pdf

"Homeland Security Department: FY2008 Appropriations," updated August 20, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/RL34004.pdf

"Greece Update," updated October 16, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS21855.pdf

"The Republic of the Philippines: Background and U.S. Relations," updated August 10, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33233.pdf

Russian Warships to Dock in Syria. Russian military build-up in Mediterranean starts; linked to Iran?

December 8, 2007

by Margot Dudkevitch

Global Research,

In an effort to expand its military presence in the international arena and reestablish a naval presence in the Middle East, Russia has dispatched a naval fleet to the region, including a guided missile cruiser, two anti-submarine ships and 47 fighter planes. The fleet will dock at the Syrian port of Tartus where Russia maintains a technical base. At the same port, Iranian ships are also docked.

Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov told reporters that the expedition "is aimed at ensuring a naval presence and establishing conditions to secure Russian navigations." Serdyukov added that the fleet will conduct tactical exercises with real and simulated launches of sea and air based missiles and intends to call at a number of different ports in the region.

In the past, Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that Russia would respond in the event Iran was attacked by a foreign power. Boosting Russia's naval presence in the area could well be an attempt to signal to Israel and possibly America that if Iran is attacked, Russia will strike back.

The Russian President has stressed on numerous occasions that he strives to become more involved in the Middle East, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whether such a large Russian presence docked at the Syrian port, will hamper Israeli navy operations or intelligence gathering missions remains to be seen.

Lies Upon Lies

When Will Bush Come Clean?

December 9, 2007

by Paul Craig Roberts

The recent disclosure that the latest National Intelligence Estimate concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapon program several years ago, assuming Iran ever had such a program, has caused consternation among neoconservatives, right-wing Israeli government officials, and Bush regime ranks.

Members of the right-wing Israeli government have denounced the NIE finding as contrary to Israel’s interests. Former Bush regime official John Bolton accused America’s intelligence agencies with conspiring to discredit President Bush with politicized intelligence. According to Bolton, it is US intelligence agencies, not the neoconservatives, who have their “own agenda.” President Bush has promised to continue his threats against Iran regardless of the NIE finding.

The NIE finding puts Bush on the spot by bringing US intelligence up to speed with the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose director has repeatedly reported, as he did on December 4, that “the agency has no concrete evidence of an ongoing nuclear weapons program or undeclared nuclear facilities in Iran.”

Bush has been trying to work up an attack on Iran based on a non-existent nuclear weapon program. When asked how he could be threatening World War III with a nuclear-armed Iran when US intelligence (and the International Atomic Energy Agency) cannot find evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, Bush said that “nobody told me” about the new finding.

Absurd say intelligence officials. The White House has known about the finding for six months while Dick Cheney tried to suppress the NIE finding. Neocon National Security Advisor Steve Hadley even lied to the press that the NIE finding was new and that’s why Bush didn’t know about it.

The unasked question is: What is the real reason the Bush Regime is so determined to attack Iran? We now know for certain that the reason has nothing whatsoever to do with Iranian nukes any more than the US invasion of Iraq had to do with Iraqi nukes. What is the real reason that is driving the Bush Regime to seek to overthrow with military invasions the only MIddle Eastern states that are not US puppets or dependents?

Until we have the answer to this question, we cannot know why the Bush regime wasted two administrations and $1 trillion at the minimum in order to kill and maim civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush’s insane wars have seen the US dollar plummet in value, the price of oil skyrocket, American’s soft power destroyed, and the hardening of opposition to the US worldwide.

What has been gained by these extraordinary sacrifices?

How can the American people and their representatives in the two parties in Congress tolerate a criminal executive branch that uses lies and deceit to lead them into illegal wars for secret reasons?

Surely, no one believes that Bush invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or that Bush and Cheney were working up an attack on Iran because the executive branch did not know of the intelligence findings of its own agencies.

The invasion of Afghanistan also remains unexplained. The Taliban are not Al Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11 even in the official version of that event. Bush clearly did not invade Afghanistan in order to capture Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who escaped scot free. The Bin Laden/Sept. 11 rationale for Bush’s wars has completely disappeared.

Osama and 9/11 were never more than public excuses for a pre-determined agenda.

Why do the US media and the investigative committees of Congress have no interest whatsoever in finding the agenda behind Bush’s wars?

How can Americans be a free people living under a rule of law when the president can commit the country to catastrophic wars on the basis of deception and escape all accountability?

And Bush has the chutzpah to call on Iran to “come clean” about its nuclear program or face diplomatic isolation. When is Bush going to “come clean” and tell us the real agenda behind his lies, deceptions, and wars?

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. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

The Perfect Storm of Campaign 2008

War, Depression, and Turning-Point Elections

December 9, 2007

by Steve Fraser

TomDispatch

Will the presidential election of 2008 mark a turning point in American political history? Will it terminate with extreme prejudice the conservative ascendancy that has dominated the country for the last generation? No matter the haplessness of the Democratic opposition, the answer is yes.

With Richard Nixon's victory in the 1968 presidential election, a new political order first triumphed over New Deal liberalism. It was an historic victory that one-time Republican strategist and now political critic Kevin Phillips memorably anointed the "emerging Republican majority." Now, that Republican "majority" finds itself in a systemic crisis from which there is no escape.

Only at moments of profound shock to the old order of things -- the Great Depression of the 1930s or the coming together of imperial war, racial confrontation, and de-industrialization in the late 1960s and 1970s -- does this kind of upheaval become possible in a political universe renowned for its stability, banality, and extraordinary capacity to duck things that matter. The trauma must be real and it must be perceived by people as traumatic. Both conditions now apply.

War, economic collapse, and the political implosion of the Republican Party will make 2008 a year to remember.

The Politics of Fear in Reverse

Iraq is an albatross that, all by itself, could sink the ship of state. At this point, there's no need to rehearse the polling numbers that register the no-looking-back abandonment of this colossal misadventure by most Americans. No cosmetic fix, like the "surge," can, in the end, make a difference -- because large majorities decided long ago that the invasion was a fiasco, and because the geopolitical and geo-economic objectives of the Bush administration leave no room for a genuine Iraqi nationalism which would be the only way out of this mess.

The fatal impact of the President's adventure in Iraq, however, runs far deeper than that. It has undermined the politics of fear which, above all else, had sustained the Bush administration. According to the latest polls, the Democrats who rate national security a key concern has shrunk to a percentage bordering on the statistically irrelevant. Independents display a similar "been there, done that" attitude. Republicans do express significantly greater levels of alarm, but far lower than a year or two ago.

In fact, the politics of fear may now be operating in reverse. The chronic belligerence of the Bush administration, especially in the last year with respect to Iran, and the cartoonish saber-rattling of Republican presidential candidates (whether genuine or because they believe themselves captives of the Bush legacy) is scary. Its only promise seems to be endless war for purposes few understand or are ready to salute. To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for many people now, the only thing to fear is the politics of fear itself.

And then there is the war on the Constitution. Randolph Bourne, a public intellectual writing around the time of World War I, is remembered today for one trenchant observation: that war is the health of the state. Mobilizing for war invites the cancerous growth of the bureaucratic state apparatus and its power over everyday life. Like some over-ripe fruit this kind of war-borne "healthiness" is today visibly morphing into its opposite -- what we might call the "sickness of the state."

The constitutional transgressions of the executive branch and its abrogation of the powers reserved to the other two branches of government are, by now, reasonably well known. Most of this aggressive over-reaching has been encouraged by the imperial hubris exemplified by the invasion of Iraq. It would be short-sighted to think that this only disturbs the equanimity of a small circle of civil libertarians. There is a long-lived and robust tradition in American political life always resentful of this kind of statism. In part, this helps account for wholesale defections from the Republican Party by those who believe it has been kidnapped by political elites masquerading as down-home, "live free or die" conservatives.

Now, add potential economic collapse to this witches' brew. Even the soberest economy watchers, pundits with PhDs -- whose dismal record in predicting anything tempts me not to mention this -- are prophesying dark times ahead. Depression -- or a slump so deep it's not worth quibbling about the difference -- is evidently on the way; indeed is already underway. The economics of militarism have been a mainstay of business stability for more than half century; but now, as in the Vietnam era, deficits incurred to finance invasion only exacerbate a much more embracing dilemma.

Start with the confidence game being run out of Wall Street; after all, the subprime mortgage debacle now occupies newspaper front pages day after outrageous day. Certainly, these tales of greed and financial malfeasance are numbingly familiar. Yet, precisely that sense of déjà vu all over again, of Enron revisited, of an endless cascade of scandalous, irrational behavior affecting the central financial institutions of our world suggests just how dire things have become.

Enronization as Normal Life

Once upon a time, all through the nineteenth century, financial panics -- often precipitating more widespread economic slumps -- were a commonly accepted, if dreaded, part of "normal" economic life. Then the Crash of 1929, followed by the New Deal Keynesian regulatory state called into being to prevent its recurrence, made these cyclical extremes rare.

Beginning with the stock market crash of 1987, however, they have become ever more common again, most notoriously -- until now, that is -- with the dot.com implosion of 2000 and the Enronization that followed. Enron seems like only yesterday because, in fact, it was only yesterday, which strongly suggests that the financial sector is now increasingly out of control. At least three factors lurk behind this new reality.

Thanks to the Reagan counterrevolution, there is precious little left of the regulatory state -- and what remains is effectively run by those who most need to be regulated. (Despite bitter complaints in the business community, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, passed after the dot.com bubble burst, has proven weak tea indeed when it comes to preventing financial high jinks, as the current financial meltdown indicates.)

More significantly, for at least the last quarter-century, the whole U.S. economic system has lived off the speculations generated by the financial sector -- sometimes given the acronym FIRE for finance, insurance, and real estate). It has grown exponentially while, in the country's industrial heartland in particular, much of the rest of the economy has withered away. FIRE carries enormous weight and the capacity to do great harm. Its growth, moreover, has fed a proliferation of financial activities and assets so complex and arcane that even their designers don't fully understand how they operate.

One might call this the sorcerer's apprentice effect. In such an environment, the likelihood and frequency of financial panics grows, so much so that they become "normal accidents" -- an oxymoron first applied to highly sophisticated technological systems like nuclear power plants by the sociologist Charles Perrow. Such systems are inherently subject to breakdowns for reasons those operating them can't fully anticipate, or correctly respond to, once they're underway. This is so precisely because they never fully understood the labyrinthine intricacies and ramifying effects of the way they worked in the first place.

Likening the current subprime implosion to such a "normal accident" is more than metaphorical. Today's Wall Street fabricators of avant-garde financial instruments are actually called "financial engineers." They got their training in "labs," much like Dr. Frankenstein's, located at Wharton, Princeton, Harvard, and Berkeley. Each time one of their confections goes south, they scratch their heads in bewilderment -- always making sure, of course, that they have financial life-rafts handy, while investors, employees, suppliers, and whole communities go down with the ship.

What makes Wall Street's latest "normal accident" so portentous, however, is the way it is interacting with, and infecting, healthier parts of the economy. When the dot.com bubble burst, many innocents were hurt, not just denizens of the Street. Still, its impact turned out to be limited. Now, via the subprime mortgage meltdown, Main Street is under the gun.

It is not only a matter of mass foreclosures. It is not merely a question of collapsing home prices. It is not simply the shutting down of large portions of the construction industry (inspiring some of those doom-and-gloom prognostications). It is not just the born-again skittishness of financial institutions which have, all of sudden, gotten religion, rediscovered the word "prudence," and won't lend to anybody. It is all of this, taken together, which points ominously to a general collapse of the credit structure that has shored up consumer capitalism for decades.

Campaigning Through a Perfect Storm of Economic Disaster

The equity built up during the long housing boom has been the main resource for ordinary people financing their big-ticket-item expenses -- from college educations to consumer durables, from trading-up on the housing market to vacationing abroad. Much of that equity, that consumer wherewithal, has suddenly vanished, and more of it soon will. So, too, the life-lines of credit that allow all sorts of small and medium-sized businesses to function and hire people are drying up fast. Whole communities, industries, and regional economies are in jeopardy.

All of that might be considered enough, but there's more. Oil, of course. Here, the connection to Iraq is clear; but, arguably, the wild escalation of petroleum prices might have happened anyway. Certainly, the energy price explosion exacerbates the general economic crisis, in part by raising the costs of production all across the economy, and so abetting the forces of economic contraction. In the same way, each increase in the price of oil further contributes to what most now agree is a nearly insupportable level in the U.S. balance of payments deficit. That, in turn, is contributing to the steady withering away of the value of the dollar, a devaluation which then further ratchets up the price of oil (partially to compensate holders of those petrodollars who find themselves in possession of an increasingly worthless currency). As strategic countries in the Middle East and Asia grow increasingly more comfortable converting their holdings into euros or other more reliable -- which is to say, more profitable -- currencies, a speculative run on the dollar becomes a real, if scary, possibility for everyone.

Finally, it is vital to recall that this tsunami of bad business is about to wash over an already very sick economy. While the old regime, the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution, has lived off the heady vapors of the FIRE sector, it has left in its wake a de-industrialized nation, full of super-exploited immigrants and millions of families whose earnings have suffered steady erosion. Two wage-earners, working longer hours, are now needed to (barely) sustain a standard of living once earned by one. And that doesn't count the melting away of health insurance, pensions, and other forms of protection against the vicissitudes of the free market or natural calamities. This, too, is the enduring hallmark of a political economy about to go belly-up.

This perfect storm will be upon us just as the election season heats up. It will inevitably hasten the already well-advanced implosion of the Republican Party, which is the definitive reason 2008 will indeed qualify as a turning-point election. Reports of defections from the conservative ascendancy have been emerging from all points on the political compass. The Congressional elections of 2006 registered the first seismic shock of this change. Since then, independents and moderate Republicans continue to indicate, in growing numbers in the polls, that they are leaving the Grand Old Party. The Wall Street Journal reports on a growing loss of faith among important circles of business and finance. Hard core religious right-wingers are airing their doubts in public. Libertarians delight in the apostate candidacy of Ron Paul. Conservative populist resentment of immigration runs head on into corporate elite determination to enlarge a sizeable pool of cheap labor, while Hispanics head back to the Democratic Party in droves. Even the Republican Party's own elected officials are engaged in a mass movement to retire.

All signs are ominous. The credibility and legitimacy of the old order operate now at a steep discount. Most telling and fatal perhaps is the paralysis spreading into the inner councils at the top. Faced with dire predicaments both at home and abroad, they essentially do nothing except rattle those sabers, captives of their own now-bankrupt ideology. Anything, many will decide, is better than this.

Or will they? What if the opposition is vacillating, incoherent, and weak-willed -- labels critics have reasonably pinned on the Democrats? Bad as that undoubtedly is, I don't think it will matter, not in the short run at least.

Take the presidential campaign of 1932 as an instructive example. The crisis of the Great Depression was systemic, but the response of the Democratic Party and its candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- though few remember this now -- was hardly daring. In many ways, it was not very different from that of Republican President Herbert Hoover; nor was there a great deal of militant opposition in the streets, not in 1932 anyway, hardly more than the woeful degree of organized mass resistance we see today despite all the Bush administration's provocations.

Yet the New Deal followed. And not only the New Deal, but an era of social protest, including labor, racial, and farmer insurgencies, without which there would have been no New Deal or Great Society. May something analogous happen in the years ahead? No one can know. But a door is about to open

Steve Fraser is a writer and editor, as well as the co-founder of the American Empire Project. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. His latest book, Wall Street: America's Dream Palace, will be published by Yale University Press in March 2008.

Rocket attack causes huge fire in Baghdad oil refinery

December 10, 2007

Xinhua/Reuters

BAGHDAD, A rocket attack struck an oil refinery in southern Baghdad early on Monday, sparking a huge fire, an Oil Ministry spokesman said.

"A Katyusha rocket hit a fuel storage tank in the Doura refinery at about 6:00 a.m. (0300 GMT), breaking out a fire that sending a large plume of black smoke into the sky," Asim Jihad, the spokesman of the ministry told Xinhua.

The refinery firefighters have been working to isolate the fire and will extinguish it within hours, Jihad said.

"There was no human casualties by the attack, only material damages," he said.

Separately, a police source said that another rocket struck the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses the Iraqi government offices and many foreign embassies, including the U.S. one.

It was unknown whether the attack caused any casualty, as the area in central Baghdad is under the control of U.S. troops, the source said.

The U.S. military had no immediate comment on the incident.

Another rocket hit the al-Sharikah Intersection in Karadah neighborhood in central Baghdad, causing no casualties, he added.

Violence continues in Baghdad despite the fact that the U.S. and Iraqi security forces have staged a security plan in the capital since Feb. 14 aimed at putting rampant violence under control.