michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Mar 26, 2008 14:37:08 GMT 4
Special Peace and Democracy Vigil for Zimbabwe
What follows is a suggested Special Peace and Democracy Vigil for Zimbabwe, coinciding with the presidential elections to be held there next Saturday. Please keep in mind the situation in Zimbabwe whenever you meditate between now and March 29 so that democracy and sanity prevail there as well...MSuspense and fear in Zimbabwe (March 25, 2008) www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/25/africa/zimbabwe.php(...) Election time has again come to Zimbabwe - expectant days of hope and suspense, but also of fear, with the lining up at the polls customarily preceded by a campaign of state-supported intimidation and skullduggery. Voters go to the polls Saturday, with President Robert Mugabe, the iconic leader of a nation enduring catastrophic hardship, trying to retain the power he has held for 28 years. Here in Harare, there is the usual speculation about the political winds. In what provinces is the president's party strong? Where is it weak? But the more frequent conjecture involves the mechanics of an outcome that is presumed to be rigged. Even if Mugabe only gets one vote, the tabulated results are in the box and he has won," said Andrew Moyse, who coordinates a project that monitors coverage in the Zimbabwean news media.Echoing the sentiment, Noel Kututwa, the chairman of a coalition of civic groups dedicated to honest elections, said, "We will not have a free and fair election. There is desperation for change. But in the end I can't say that Mugabe won't win, because he probably will." The 84-year-old president - a hero of the liberation struggle and one of the last of Africa's ruthlessly autocratic "big men" - is often imputed here with mythic cunning. Certainly, great advantages have accrued to his incumbency. The state controls radio, television and the only daily newspaper, with the reporting of events reliably biased toward Mugabe, extolling his courage and generosity while depicting his opponents as little more than footmen for the British, who were once Zimbabwe's colonial masters.In a country suffering rampant hunger, the government bolsters its standing by giving out subsidized food, routinely favoring, critics allege, members of Mugabe's party, the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front. In a country enduring epic inflation of more than 100,000 percent, the campaigning president has been able to bestow tractors and plows to village chiefs whose gratitude is expected to be a reciprocal harvest of votes. CLIP Zimbabwe government intimidates opponents: report (March 19, 2008) news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080319/wl_nm/zimbabwe_election_dc_1HARARE (Reuters) - President Robert Mugabe's supporters have used violence to intimidate opponents in the run-up to next week's Zimbabwe election, undermining chances of a fair poll, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday. Mugabe faces the strongest challenge to his 28-year rule in presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections on March 29 because of defections by senior ruling ZANU-PF party officials and a deepening economic crisis. "As in previous elections, local government authorities, ZANU-PF supporters, and security forces including the police and central intelligence, are the main perpetrators of the violations ...," the U.S.-based rights group said in a report released in Johannesburg. Opposition groups have accused Mugabe, who has ruled since independence from Britain in 1980, of rigging previous elections, allegations he denies."Despite some improvements on paper to the election regulations, Zimbabweans aren't free to vote for the candidates of their choice," said Georgette Gagnon, Human Rights Watch's Africa director. "While there are four candidates running for president and many political parties involved, the election process itself is skewed." Mugabe hopes to fend off challenges from long-time rival Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the biggest faction of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and former finance minister Simba Makoni, who was expelled from ZANU-PF. Statements by two senior security officials that they would not accept an opposition victory have generated controversy in a largely peaceful campaign ahead of the election. Zimbabweans are suffering from the world's highest inflation rate -- officially put at over 100,000 percent -- and chronic shortages of food, fuel and foreign currency. The government has used state-subsidized food and farming equipment as a tool to gain political advantage, Human Rights Watch said, adding that the report was researched over seven weeks on visits to Zimbabwe's 10 provinces. Prices of some basic goods, including the staple maize meal, bread, cooking oil and soap, have risen by up to 300 percent since the start of this month. CLIP -- "Robert MUGABE, has been the country's only ruler (as president since 1987) and has dominated the country's political system since independence. His chaotic land redistribution campaign, which began in 2000, caused an exodus of white farmers, crippled the economy, and ushered in widespread shortages of basic commodities. Ignoring international condemnation, MUGABE rigged the 2002 presidential election to ensure his reelection. The ruling ZANU-PF party used fraud and intimidation to win a two-thirds majority in the March 2005 parliamentary election, allowing it to amend the constitution at will and recreate the Senate, which had been abolished in the late 1980s. In April 2005, Harare embarked on Operation Restore Order, ostensibly an urban rationalization program, which resulted in the destruction of the homes or businesses of 700,000 mostly poor supporters of the opposition, according to UN estimates. President Mugabe in June 2007 instituted price controls on all basic commodities causing panic buying and leaving store shelves empty for months. In October 2007, Constitutional Amendment 18 came into effect allowing for harmonized presidential and parliamentary elections, shortening the length of the presidential term to five years, and moving up the date for parliamentary elections. General elections are expected in March 2008." Economy - overview: The government of Zimbabwe faces a wide variety of difficult economic problems as it struggles with an unsustainable fiscal deficit, an overvalued official exchange rate, hyperinflation, and bare store shelves. Its 1998-2002 involvement in the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo drained hundreds of millions of dollars from the economy. The government's land reform program, characterized by chaos and violence, has badly damaged the commercial farming sector, the traditional source of exports and foreign exchange and the provider of 400,000 jobs, turning Zimbabwe into a net importer of food products. Badly needed support from the IMF has been suspended because of the government's arrears on past loans and the government's unwillingness to enact reforms that would stabilize the economy. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe routinely prints money to fund the budget deficit, causing the official annual inflation rate to rise from 32% in 1998, to 133% in 2004, 585% in 2005, passed 1000% in 2006, and 26,000% in November 2007. Private sector estimates of inflation in 2007 are well above 100,000%. Meanwhile, the official exchange rate fell from approximately 1 (revalued) Zimbabwean dollar per US dollar in 2003 to 30,000 per US dollar in 2007. Much more on the situation in Zimbabwe on the eve of these crucial elections throughnews.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=Zimbabwe+elections&c=
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 25, 2008 15:20:08 GMT 4
The incredible shrinking terror caseApr 16, 2008 04:30 AM Thomas Walkom Once labelled Canada's first homegrown, Islamist terror plot, the case of the so-called Toronto 18 is quietly melting away.With yesterday's decision to stay charges against four more of those that it had once labelled dangerous terrorists, the federal government is now admitting that it never had a serious case against almost half of the men and youths charged two years ago.So far, the Crown has stayed charges against seven of the 18 Toronto-area Muslim males. While technically, that means it could re-lay charges within a year, legal experts call such a move unlikely. This does not necessarily mean the Crown's case is entirely bogus. The government argues that some of the remaining 11 were involved in a scheme to obtain explosive material, while others participated in a terror training camp. Because of a judicial publication ban, whatever evidence – if any – that the government has produced in court to bolster these allegations cannot be reported. But what is becoming clear from material that can be revealed is that the alleged plot was never quite as advertised.Back in June 2006, the overriding sentiment in government and media was that a dangerous attack had been narrowly avoided. The allegations – that Canadian Muslim extremists were planning to behead Prime Minister Stephen Harper, seize MPs and blow up the CBC – seemed unbelievable. But in a post-9/11 world, the unbelievable had, for many, a ring of truth."We are a target because of who we are and how we live, our society, our diversity and our values – values such as freedom, democracy and the rule of law," Harper said. [Where have we heard this statement before?!....Michelle]Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day hinted darkly of more arrests to come. The media asked how homegrown terrorism could happen here, a not illegitimate question, but one that implicitly assumed the 18 were guilty. Coming at a time when Parliament was reviewing the 2002 anti-terror law, the arrests bolstered the arguments of those who wanted the more draconian aspects of that legislation kept in place.The arrests also stoked fears that Islamist radicals were motivating impressionable Muslim youths. In some press accounts, the eldest person arrested, a Mississauga bus driver named Qayyum Abdul Jamal, then 43, was painted as the Islamic firebrand behind the youthful plotters. This view was reinforced when then Liberal MP Wajid Khan (he's now a Conservative) told reporters that he had once heard Jamal at a mosque badmouthing Canada's troops in Afghanistan.Ironically, Jamal was one of the four who had his charges stayed yesterday. He may indeed be a critic of Canadian foreign policy. But it seems that he is not a terrorist ideologue. Other elements of the government's case did not stand up well under scrutiny. The alleged terror training camp turned out to be a hapless adventure in the rain, one where participants spent much of their time in a local doughnut shop and where the ammunition for target practice was apparently provided by one of two paid RCMP informers.As for the alleged plot to behead Harper, it was apparently derailed because the plotters didn't know how to get to Parliament Hill.
Nor, it seems (according to material released by the Crown), were they exactly sure who the Prime Minister was. Still, we are sure to learn more about the case against the rapidly shrinking Toronto 18 when the actual trials begin – if, by then, the Crown still has anyone left it wants to try. Thomas Walkom's column appears Wednesday and Saturday.Source: www.thestar.com/columnists/article/414859
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Apr 27, 2008 18:51:30 GMT 4
Video: Canadian Natives Used for Elite ExperimentsAs a citizen of the united States, I am well aware of my country's treatment of our indigenous peoples. I have also been reminded of this countless times in a myriad of articles about my country, some from US citizens themselves but also, from many who are not.
This is all well and good for duplicity in the treatment of individuals/races needs to be exposed. So, just to set the record straight, let's take a closer look at Canada's treatment of their Indians. I have Indian friends who moved from Canada and South America and they tell me the problem is the same in all countries. {yes, I use the word Indian; my friends do, however, some tell me they prefer the word Nation rather than Tribe. I give up on trying to be politically correct....it makes my head spin!}
Isn't it time we all begin to 'fess' up? White against white, whites against people of color, people of color turning on their own, or leaders selling their people out to white skinned money masters for their own benefit, all humanity is guilty of this; it has been a flaw in our civilization. I look forward to putting this behind us as each individual begins to realize that we are all one.....MichelleVideo: UNREPENTANT: KEVIN ANNETT AND CANADA'S GENOCIDE (documentary) (1 hour, 48 min, 56 sec.) ...This documentary reveals Canada's darkest secret - the deliberate extermination of indigenous (Native American) peoples and the theft of their land under the guise of religion. This never before told history as seen through the eyes of this former minister (Kevin Annett) who blew the whistle on his own church, after he learned of thousands of murders in its Indian Residential Schools..."Go to: tinyurl.com/4ecott
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 14, 2008 14:17:34 GMT 4
Burmese junta accused of hoarding food aid and handing out rotten riceWhy would Burmese military authorities hoard food during a time of such great need? Why would authorities censor information about the situation from its citizens and the outside world when so many wait, willing to step in and help? Two human qualities come to mind; we really shouldn't be so confounded; we all possess the ability to display these human traits: GREED and PRIDE, two human capabilities, in which, we would do well to drop or leave behind. In our minds, without judgment toward Burmese authorities, let us envision Light [or knowledge] shining on the following situations, so that aid may be delivered immediately....MichelleBurmese junta accused of hoarding food aid and handing out rotten riceBy Brian Rex in Rangoon Wednesday, 14 May 2008 Relief agencies have accused the Burmese military authorities of keeping the best-quality supplies donated for victims of Cyclone Nargis and handing out rotten and low-grade food. The United Nations says only a small portion of aid is getting through.Aid workers in the Irrawaddy delta region have reported that rotten rice is being given to survivors instead of the more nutritious supplies provided by the UN and other organisations. Brian Agland, the country director of Care Australia, said: "We were using food from the World Food Programme, which is very high quality. Certainly, we are concerned that poor-quality rice is being distributed. I have a small sample in my pocket, and it's some of the poorest-quality rice we've seen. It's affected by salt water and it's old." The allegation that the authorities are hoarding supplies meant for the estimated two million in desperate need adds a new dimension to the picture of indifference and incompetence that has emerged of the regime's response to the cyclone. Aid agencies warned from the outset that donors were concerned that rice and other supplies could be seized by the military. The UN said yesterday that because of bottle-necks and obstructions perhaps only 20 per cent of food aid was reaching the people in the cyclone-hit delta. "There is obviously still a lot of frustration that this aid effort hasn't picked up pace," Richard Horsey, spokesman for the UN's humanitarian operation, told the Associated Press. "That is a characterisation of the programme as a whole. We are not reaching enough people quickly enough."Guy Cave, deputy head of Save the Children in Burma, said his organisation was using boats to ship 100 tonnes of supplies at a time to the most remote communities in the delta. But he added: "We are doing everything we can but if this was any other country there would be tonnes more food getting in and aid workers running all over the place."He also warned that people were suffering from injuries such as "cyclone burns", caused when the wind blows so hard that the the dust and grit it picks up strips off layers of skin. Aid organisations believe that up to 100,000 people may have been killed by the storm, most drowned by a 12ft tidal surge that washed inland. The survivors are now in need of the most basic supplies including food, water and shelter. Experts are particularly concerned about the threat from disease. The hot, humid weather and frequent downpours are only adding to the danger. The junta has apparently set up official relief camps in four cities in the delta region but there are reports that they are forcing people to leave unofficial camps that have been set up in schools and monasteries.Aid workers say that even now it is unclear whether the authorities have reached the most remote parts of the delta and that they are refusing to tell relief workers exactly where they have been. "I think that part of it is connected with pride and a loss of face," said one relief worker, who asked not to be identified.A Burmese businessman who made a personal aid mission to Bogale, a delta town where up to 10,000 people are believed dead, said: "There are still some villages in the worst-hit areas that nobody has got to. Around Bogale, private donors are not allowed to distribute their assistance to the victims. We had to hand over what we had."The authorities are trying to ensure that the outside world, and its own citizens, do not see what has happened to the country. Journalists are refused entry visas and foreign aid workers are barred from relief camps. Police at checkpoints around Rangoon are sending foreigners back to the city, after their names and passport details are noted.Jean-Sebastien Matte, an emergency co-ordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières, said: "We can go for two days then we have to come back. We're able to do 100 or 200 consultations a day but we should be doing 1,000." Relief groups said aid supplies were piling up at Rangoon airport. The junta is insisting that only its handful of helicopters be used to deliver the supplies.Source: tinyurl.com/4y33ef
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on May 27, 2008 13:55:40 GMT 4
China's All-Seeing Eye With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export. NAOMI KLEIN Posted May 29, 2008 3:24 PM Rollingstone.com Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port — to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada's favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to "suggest and illustrate the process of the market." A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.
Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China's telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen's disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: "You call that a superstore?") McDonald's and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black Honda. "It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now," he says. "It's the crime — they are too easy to steal." He quickly adds, "Since the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease in crime in Shenzhen." After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns. This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished products. Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment has already paid off tenfold. That kind of growth isn't unusual in the field he has chosen: Zhang's factory makes digital surveillance cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in "homeland security." The other half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China's market for surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump of 24 percent from 2006. Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers, most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny cables and bulbs. At the end of each line is "quality control," which consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof, the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box. The workers at FSAN don't just make surveillance cameras; they are constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four, one every few yards. One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other "entertainment" venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a wider surveillance project known as "Safe Cities," the effort now encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen. But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. "The big picture," Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, "is integration." That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring. This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do. "The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole," Zhang says. "It's all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it's proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland." In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government's own measure, there were at least 87,000 "mass incidents" — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots. This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a halt. At the same time, the success of China's ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers. But while China's cities need these displaced laborers to work in factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, "The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don't want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!" With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country's elites? The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: "Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability." During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn't mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms. During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren't the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock. The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 "most wanted" Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive "streetlamp" view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China's major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others. The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a "nightmare" for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn't happen. Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government's high-tech web. Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test. In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. "It's called the 10-million-faces test," he tells me. Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government's massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao's, have been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for that now." The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: "It will happen next year." When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government. To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company's proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to "capture the image," Yao explains. Next is "finding the face." He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company's database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can "find a face" even when the face has changed significantly with time. " It took 1.1 milliseconds!" Yao exclaims. "Yeah, that's me!" In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao's programmers and engineers take each other's pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. "Everyone is preparing for the test," Yao explains. "If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China." Every couple of minutes Yao's phone beeps. Sometimes it's a work message, but most of the time it's a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. "Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!" He shrugs: "She likes designers." Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for regular safety." He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as "the internal-security people." They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of "some protesters, some dissidents." They wanted to know if Yao's facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos. Yao was sorry to disappoint them. "Honestly, the technology so far still can't meet their needs," he says. "The photos that they show us were just too blurry." That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government's goal is not repression: "If you're a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive," he says. "So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is." Until recently, Yao's photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid's birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH. When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition "should be the next dot-com." Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field. He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts. In 2006, Yao tells me, "I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail." For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company's proprietary software, allowing him to "build a lot of development software based on L-1's technology." Since then, L-1's partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn't really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: "We'll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China." Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company's research headquarters in New Jersey. ("Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It's such a historic place.") L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. "It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results." L-1's enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company's ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world. But here's the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1's Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to "some large international opportunities," not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou. After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1's involvement in China's homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company's head of research. "We have nothing in China," she tells me. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don't have any relationships at all." I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She'll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: "Absolutely, we've sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test." Yao's use of the technology, she said, is "within his license" purchased from L-1. The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment." That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the "detection instruments" that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents.
"The intent of that act," a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, "was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China."
Pixel's application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban's intent. By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1's software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone "every day" with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. "Because we are representing them," he says. "We took the test on their behalf."
In other words, this controversial U.S. "crime control" technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao's goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will "pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales."When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if "they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item." Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban. When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, "I don't know anything about that." Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, "I really don't want to comment, so there is no comment." Then she hangs up. You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security's massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department's "largest facial-recognition database system"; and produces driver's licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in "extremely general" terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company's CEO would only say, "Stay tuned."It is L-1's deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn't just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it's U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1's China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face. Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1's electronic fingerprinting tools are "banned from entering China" due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to "catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily." He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department's list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of "face prints" — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government. Whatever the legality of L-1's participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying "enormous pressure to open the floodgates." The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of China's powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?" Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying hardware for China's Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan protesters on their Chinese news portals. In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq. "We're at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending," according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor newsletter in Baltimore. "And just as we need to be aware of how to profit from the growth in China's commodity consumption, we need to be aware of companies that will profit from 'security consumption.' . . . There's big money to be made." While U.S. companies are eager to break into China's rapidly expanding market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of China's top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than 10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by 100 percent a year. When I meet the company's fidgety general manager, Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is "We are going public at the end of this year. On the Nasdaq." It also becomes clear why he has chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: "Help, help, help!" he begs me. "Help us promote our products!" Zheng, an MBA from one of China's top schools, proudly shows me the business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell's IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off the company's security cameras. Its pages are filled with American iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the Aebell logo. I ask Zheng whether China's surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng's deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. "If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways," he says, staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn't be afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid." One of the first people to sound the alarm on China's upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists. The paper he produced was called "China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China." It exposed how big-name tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese government to construct "a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and Internet surveillance technologies." When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute's staff to strategize about how to release his explosive findings. "We thought this information was going to shock the world," he recalls. In the midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the context of their work had changed forever. Walton's paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was "mined for ideas" by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a "virtual, centralized grand database" that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. "It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for," Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: "Operation Noble Shield." Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints," then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.Such efforts have provided China's rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with China's Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI's massive e-mail-mining operations. "It is clear that any country's legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information," he said. "We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front." Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. "Bush helped me get my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London. Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China's horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, "There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay."The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China. "I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy." Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could." China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush's America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale). What is most disconcerting about China's surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn't just check my passport but takes a scan of it. "Are you making a copy?" I ask. "No, no," he responds helpfully. "We're just sending a copy to the police." Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won't let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that "we not only know who you are, we also know where you are." Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives "this kind of data to government authorities" — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk. When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.[From Issue 1053 — May 29, 2008]Source:www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Aug 9, 2008 14:13:44 GMT 4
WAR IN GEORGIA 1,400 killed in conflict, Putin vows Russia will retaliate, and... How the Caucasus Erupted1,400 is a huge amount of people to die during one incident. Of course, ALL eyes are on the Olympics....Did someone think nobody would be paying attention? According to SPIEGEL ONLINE, one Abkhazian Web site quoted Gandhi, "What you gain by violence can only be held by violence," then the article states that it would be better said this way, "Only war can heal what no longer belongs together."
I reject that last statement; war heals nothing!
I would ask ALL who read here to envision a peaceful end without loss of life [all forms], where leaders step into spiritual adulthood and resolve this conflict. Shine your LIGHT on this area, Folks. You are capable of doing this. If every human being could turn around and face their enemy, competitor, whichever word you wish to use, with love in their hearts, with pure acknowledgement of the Divinity which is within every one of you, the world would transform. It cannot be done by one, or even a few, alone. You are needing to come together in one-ness and to truly honor this. It is up to every one of you to do this, as you create your community of oneness, so it is that you bring that to the world, and slowly, slowly people begin to respond and awaken to the great Light that is present within your world. After all, it is the reason you were born into this era.
MichelleSouth Ossettia leader says 1,400 killed in conflictReuters Friday, 8 August 2008 Georgia launched a major military offensive today to retake the breakaway province of South Ossetia. Rebel leaders said about 1,400 had been killed. The offensive prompted Moscow to send tanks into the region in a furious response that threatens to engulf Georgia, a staunch US ally, and Russia in all-out war. It was by far the worst outbreak of hostilities since the province won de-facto independence in a war against Georgia that ended in 1992. Witnesses said the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali was devastated. The president of the Georgian breakaway region, Eduard Kokoity, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying: "About 1,400 died. We will check these figures, but the order of the numbers is around this. We have this on the basis of reports from relatives." Lyudmila Ostayeva, 50, who had fled with her family to Dzhava, a village near the border with Russia, said: "I saw bodies lying on the streets, around ruined buildings, in cars. It's impossible to count them now. There is hardly a single building left undamaged." The fighting broke out as much of the world's attention was focused on the start of the Olympic Games and many leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and US President George Bush, were on their way to Beijing. The timing suggests Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili may have been counting on surprise to fulfill his longtime pledge to wrest back control of South Ossetia — a key to his hold on power. Saakashvili agreed the timing was not coincidental, but accused Russia of being the aggressor. "Most decision makers have gone for the holidays," he said in an interview with CNN. "Brilliant moment to attack a small country." South Ossetian separatist leader Eduard Kokoity claimed hundreds of civilians had been killed. Ten Russian peacekeepers were killed and 30 wounded when their barracks were hit in Georgian shelling, said Russian Ground Forces spokesman Col. Igor Konashenkov. Speaking earlier on Georgian television, Saakashvili accused Russia of sending aircraft to bomb Georgian territory, which Russia denied. Russia's Defense Ministry said it was sending reinforcements for its peacekeepers, and Russian state television and Georgian officials reported a convoy of tanks had crossed the border. The convoy was expected to reach the provincial capital, Tskhinvali, by evening, Channel One television said. Georgian State Minister for Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili said government troops were now in full control of the city. "We are facing Russian aggression," said Georgia's Security Council chief Kakha Lomaya. "They have sent in their troops and weapons and they are bombing our towns." Putin has warned that the Georgian attack will draw retaliation and the Defense Ministry pledged to protect South Ossetians, most of whom have Russian citizenship. Chairing a session of his Security Council in the Kremlin, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also vowed that Moscow will protect Russian citizens. "In accordance with the constitution and federal law, I, as president of Russia, am obliged to protect lives and dignity of Russian citizens wherever they are located," Medvedev said, according to Russian news reports. "We won't allow the death of our compatriots go unpunished." Georgia, which borders the Black Sea between Turkey and Russia, was ruled by Moscow for most of the two centuries preceding the breakup of the Soviet Union. The country has angered Russia by seeking NATO membership — a bid Moscow regards as part of a Western effort to weaken its influence in the region. An AP reporter saw tanks and other heavy weapons concentrating on the Russian side of the border with South Ossetia — supporting the Russian TV reports of an incursion. Some villagers were fleeing into Russia. "I saw them (the Georgians) shelling my village," said Maria, who gave only her first name. She looked shocked and was reluctant to speak. She said she and other villagers spent the night in a field and then fled toward the Russian border as the fighting escalated. Georgia declared a three-hour ceasefire to allow civilians to leave Tskhinvali. Georgian Interior Ministry spokesman Shota Utiashvili said troops were observing the ceasefire, which began at 3 p.m. local time (1100 GMT). Yakobashvili said Georgian forces have shot down four Russian combat planes over Georgian territory. He gave no details. Russia's Defense Ministry denied an earlier Georgia report about one Russian plane downed and has had no immediate comment on the latest claim. Yakobashvili said that one Russian plane had dropped a bomb on the Vaziani military base near the Georgian capital, but no one was hurt. More than 1,000 US Marines and soldiers were at the base last month to teach combat skills to Georgian troops. Georgia has about 2,000 troops in Iraq, making it the third-largest contributor to coalition forces after the US and Britain. NATO has called for an immediate end to fighting. NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said he is seriously concerned about the fighting and that the alliance is closely following the situation. The White House said Russia and Georgia should cease hostilities and hold talks to end the conflict. South Ossetia officials said Georgia attacked with aircraft, armor and heavy artillery. Georgian troops fired missiles at Tskhinvali, an official said, and many buildings were on fire. The city's main hospital was among the buildings hit by Georgian shelling, the Russian news agency Interfax said. The International Committee of the Red Cross said it is seeking to open a humanitarian corridor to guarantee safe access to Tskhinvali. Maia Kardova, ICRC spokeswoman in Tbilisi, said military vehicles are being given priority on the main road leading to the South Ossetia capital and this is making it difficult for rescue vehicles to get through. Saakashvili said Russian aircraft bombed several Georgian villages and other civilian facilities. "A full-scale aggression has been launched against Georgia," Saakashvili said in a televised statement. He also announced a full military mobilization with reservists being called into action. Seven civilians were wounded when three Russian Su-24 jet bombers flew into Georgia and bombed the town of Gori and the villages of Kareli and Variani, Deputy Interior Minister Eka Sguladze said at a briefing. She said that four Russian jets later bombed Gori, the hometown of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but that raid didn't cause any casualties. Saakashvili urged Russia to immediately stop bombing Georgian territory. "Georgia will not yield its territory or renounce its freedom," he said. A senior Russian diplomat in charge of the South Ossetian conflict, Yuri Popov, dismissed the Georgian claims of Russian bombings, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported. Russia's Defense Ministry denounced the Georgian attack as a "dirty adventure." "Blood shed in South Ossetia will weigh on their conscience," the ministry said in a statement posted on its Web site. "We will protect our peacekeepers and Russian citizens," it said without elaboration. Saakashvili long has pledged to restore Tbilisi's rule over South Ossetia and another breakaway province, Abkhazia. Both regions have run their own affairs without international recognition since splitting from Georgia in the early 1990s and built up ties with Moscow. Most residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia have Russian passports. An open war could prompt Russian to send in more forces under the claim of protecting its citizens. Putin, speaking in televised remarks Friday, said Georgia's military action causes "grave concern and it will certainly lead to retaliatory actions." Saakashvili said government troops have seized the outskirts of Tskhinvali and are fighting for control of the center. Georgian forces also have seized several villages around the capital. Gen. Mamuka Kurashvili, a Georgian military officer in charge of operations in the region, said on Rustavi 2 television that Georgian forces were moving to "establish constitutional order in the region." The leader of Russia's province of North Ossetia rushed to Tskhinvali. "We are jointly organizing defenses here," Teimuraz Mamsurov said in the city, according to the Interfax news agency. Mamsurov said hundreds of volunteers from North Ossetia were streaming across the border into South Ossetia, Interfax said. It also quoted the separatist leader of Abkhazia as saying that some 1,000 volunteers from his region were heading to South Ossetia. Georgian State Minister for Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili said Georgian officials were doing everything they could to avoid casualties and the destruction of property. But Boris Chochiyev, a minister in the South Ossetian government, said that Georgian troops shelled the center of Tskhinvali with truck-launched missiles. He asked the Russian government to defend South Ossetians. Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Boris Malakhov called on Tbilisi to commit itself to peaceful resolution of the conflict. Yakobashvili said Georgia was ready to negotiate, but claimed the South Ossetian officials were dragging their feet in starting talks. At the request of Russia, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency session in New York but failed to reach consensus early Friday on a Russian-drafted statement. The council concluded it was at a stalemate after the US, Britain and some other members backed the Georgians in rejecting a phrase in the three-sentence draft statement that would have required both sides "to renounce the use of force," council diplomats said. The Georgian attack came just hours after Saakashvili announced a unilateral cease-fire in a television broadcast late Thursday in which he also urged South Ossetian separatist leaders to enter talks on resolving the conflict. Georgian officials later blamed South Ossetian separatists for thwarting the cease-fire by shelling Georgian villages in the area. Source: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-strikes-as-georgia-moves-against-rebels-888487.html------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Vladimir Putin vows Russia will retaliate against Georgia
Vladimir Putin has said that Russia will retaliate against aggressive action taken by Georgia in its rebel region of South Ossetia, raising fears of a regional war. By Jon Swaine Last Updated: 12:44PM BST 08 Aug 2008 The Russian Prime Minister's threat came after Georgia, which is attempting to regain control of the breakaway enclave through military action, claimed Russian jets had bombed several of its villages. Speaking from the Chinese capital Beijing, Mr Putin, whose country supports the Ossetian separatists, said: "It is regrettable that on the day before the opening of the Olympic Games, the Georgian authorities have undertaken aggressive actions in South Ossetia. "They have in effect begun hostilities using tanks and artillery," he added. "It is sad, but this will provoke retaliatory measures." South Ossetian leaders said at least 15 civilians had been killed by the Georgian action so far. Russian peacekeepers intervening in the region said Georgian forces had shelled their positions, killing several servicemen and wounding others. The Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili, claims that Georgian civilians have been bombed in three attacks by Russian jets. "I call on the Russian Federation to stop bombing peaceful Georgian towns," he said in a televised address to the state. President Saakashvili added: "We have mobilised thousands of reservists - I ask you not to be afraid of the attacks." He has said "the greater part" of South Ossetia had been "liberated" by Georgian forces. However a Georgian Government spokesman denied Russian media reports that they had entered Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, claiming "we want to give time to the remaining civilians to leave Tskhinvali." But he added Georgian forces would enter the capital "if the need arises". Eduard Kokoity, South Ossetia's leader, told Russian media his troops were still in control of Tskhinvali. "We are in full control of the capital city. Fighting is on the city limits," he said. Earlier Georgian troops, backed by warplanes, pounded separatist forces on the outskirts of the South Ossetian capital hours after launching an assault on the breakaway region following a short-lived truce. Georgian artillery shelled Tskhinvali, where government and separatists envoys had been due to meet for Russia-mediated peace talks later, and many houses were ablaze. Russia, the main backer of the separatists who have controlled the region since a war in the early 1990s, accused Georgia of treachery and urged the world community to avert "massive bloodshed." Several Russian MPs have called for military retaliation to be taken against Tbilisi in response to the moves by Georgia. Konstantin Zatulin, a leading MP, said: "Russia must interfere in the conflict to stop the violence. Russia must consider a military operation because our peacekeeping contingent will not be enough to ensure peace in the region." The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, will chair an emergency meeting of the Russian Security Council in the next few hours to discuss the situation. His spokesman said: "The Security Council will consider as soon as possible proposals to settle the situation in the region." The UN Security Council failed early this morning to reach an agreement on the situation in an emergency meeting. It had been discussing a Russian-drafted statement that called on Georgia and the separatists to immediately halt hostilities. South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another tiny republic, broke away from Georgia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. After bloody conflicts they claimed independence, but this has always been disputed by Tblisi and is not officially recognised internationally. Georgian leaders have long vowed that they will bring the two states back under its control, and accuses Russia of trying to annex the regions for itself. Tensions had been mounting in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, another rebel province, ever since Nato promised Georgia that it would one day be allowed to join the alliance. Incensed by the idea of Nato expanding within the former Soviet Union, Russia stepped up its support for both regions. Mr Putin said that he had spoken about the situation with US President George Bush, who is also in Beijing for the opening of the Olympic Games, and with Chinese leaders. Source:www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/georgia/2521987/Vladimir-Putin-vows-Russia-will-retaliate-against-Georgia.htm------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How the Caucasus EruptedBy Carmen Eller in Moscow Firefights in South Ossetia and the danger of a second front in Abkhazia are the latest flare-ups in an old conflict. First the people in the breakaway regions lost their faith in the Georgian government, then they lost hope of any help from Europe."What you gain by violence can only be held by violence" is the quotation from Gandhi on one Abkhazian Web site. And the words of the Indian leader devoted to nonviolent resistance resonate with many residents of Georgia's breakaway provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But a peaceful society in a unified Georgia now seems like a utopian project, even to the most hardened optimists, and the tenor in the once-autonomous Georgian Republic is closer to: "Only war can heal what no longer belongs together." For days there have been skirmishes in South Ossetia, the worst since the region declared independence from Georgia in the 1990s. Who made the first moves, who started the first gunfight -- those arguments can be spun in various ways in Tbilisi and Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia. But Georgia has officially started a military offensive to win back the breakaway regions. Russian warplanes are also bombing targets in Georgia, according to reports from Tbilisi. The UN Security Council has still not agreed on how to react. It's a standoff with little hope for an easy solution. And it is one that, in the past, has repeatedly shone the spotlight on differences between Russia and the US. Russia does not want to lose its influence on the former Soviet Republic of Georgia wheras Washington -- which sees the country as a vital regional bridgehead and as an important transit country for gas and oil -- would like to see the country join NATO and has provided political and economic support. Since the "Rose Revolution" in November 2003, the US has become even more involved in the region. Washington provided Georgia with development assistance and is an important investor in Georgia. President Mikhail Saakashwili, who studied in the US, has made a number of state visits to Washington. The US and NATO also assisted Georgia in modernizing its army. President Saakashvili has said more than once that territorial integrity is enormously important for his small Caucasian republic. Europe has also supported Tbilisi so far in the long-simmering conflict over the breakway regions. Geopolitics play a role here: Georgia is an important transit nation for oil and natural gas from the Caspian Sea. If Western countries want to support Georgia, they also risk being dragged into a war. In a televised interview Mikhail Saakashvili has challenged the government in South Ossetia to enter negotiations with Tbilisi. The offer is that of broad autonomy under Russian oversight, but not total separation from Georgia. But such promises now seem counterproductive to the people in these breakaway regions. Their trust in the Georgian government has evaporated, and true independence is no longer truly negotiable. This is the most important reason why German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier saw his plan for Abkhazia rejected. According to Steinmeier's vision, the question of independence would come only at the end of negotiations. For the Abkhazian leadership this was unthinkable. Independence, for them, is the basis for any future steps. "We won't discuss the question of our status with anyone," said Sergei Shamba, Abkhazia's foreign minister in an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE (more...). "Our ties with Russia solve practically all of our problems." There is little hope for support from Europe. Faced with isolation, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia see no alternative but to turn to Russia as the only reliable partner available. Indeed, the two regions' so far unsuccessful efforts to wring diplomatic recognition from the international community plays into Moscow's hands. As long as Abkhazia and South Ossetia remain isolated, Russia can keep on strengthening its influence in the area. And if Georgia proves unable to re-establish territorial integrity, it won't be invited to join NATO any time soon -- also a development that would be to Moscow's liking. The Russian military has also done what it can to help the two provinces break from Georgia. Russia was first meant to act as mediator and peacemaker, stationing peacekeeping troops along its southern border. But it has slipped into the role of a protective big brother, even issuing Russian passports to the citizens of both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It has also built a gas pipeline there. If the situation deteriorates further, Georgia will soon face a war on two fronts. Abkhazia has signed a solidarity pact with South Ossetia. According to Sergey Shamba, troops from Abkhazia started moving toward the Georgian border on Friday morning. Help for both provinces is on the way from volunteers streaming into the region from the northern Caucasus. Source:www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,570875,00.html
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michelle
Administrator
I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Aug 10, 2008 14:59:28 GMT 4
....linked to yesterday's post:The War has Begun! War between Russia and Georgia orchestrated from USAWhat a hot spot this has become! Before you begin your reading, collect yourself and your thoughts and maintain a calm cool collective...the people of this area don't need any negative thoughtforms of fear, worry, and/or hatred dumped on them...they need your Light focused on the region. Focalize peace-fostering thoughtforms toward a world where such conflicts are unthinkable and where all nations live in the spirit of harmony and peaceful cooperation.
According to Russian officials, the war between Russia and Georgia has been orchestrated from the USA. This could turn out to be a ploy to divert Russia's attention while the US, Israel and their allies are massing one of the largest multi-national naval armadas since the First and Second Gulf Wars, allegedly in an attempt to create a US/EU naval blockade around Iran. Whatever the possible far-reaching consequences of this military conflict in Georgia, it appears that peacemakers from around the world urgently need to focus their attention on this situation in a collective effort to deviate the course of events so that no further escalation of this conflict occur, thus allowing a cease-fire to take place as soon as possible. Similarly, the growing tensions between Iran and the countries that oppose its enrichment of uranium claimed to be for peaceful purpose need to cool off so as to prevent any plan hatched by the same people responsible for the invasion and destruction of much of Iraq and Afghanistan to be executed.
Here's a collection of informative articles. Ending the series are some damning evidence that the US of A is up to no good "with the intent to create a US/EU naval blockade (which is an Act of War under international law) around Iran (with supporting air and land elements) to prevent the shipment of benzene and certain other refined oil products headed to Iranian ports."....MRussian forces mass against Georgia, says official (10 Aug 2008) www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/LA423150.htmTBILISI, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Russia has brought 6,000 troops into Georgia and a further 4,000 troops by sea and is preparing to attack Georgia at dawn, a Georgian Interior Ministry official said early on Sunday."All of them are waiting for dawn to start active actions. Georgia faces a humanitarian catastrophe," Shota Utiashvili, the head of the Georgian Interior Ministry's information department, told Reuters. Humanitarian impacten.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_South_Ossetia_(2008)#Humanitarian_impactInternational Red Cross urged the combatant sides to make a humanitarian corridor to evacuate the wounded and civilians from Tskhinvali. The main city hospital is reported to be non-functional, and ambulances cannot reach the wounded. According to South Ossetia, Georgia continues to bomb the hospital. Twenty-two wounded remain in the building, which has only two storeys left. International Red Cross spokeswoman Anna Nelson said it had received reports that hospitals in Tskhinvali were "overflowing" with casualties. The UN refugee agency said that thousands of refugees are leaving South Ossetia, mostly for North Ossetia. About 140 buses carrying thousands of refugees have already arrived the North Ossetia on Friday evening, according to Reuters. More refugees are said to be expected to arrive on Saturday. The Russian Emergency Ministry has sent a mobile hospital to North Ossetia. The Russian President has ordered the government to take urgent measures to provide humanitarian aid to those leaving the conflict zone. CLIP Fighting with Russia spreads to cities across Georgia (August 8, 2008)edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/08/georgia.ossetia/index.htmlTBLISI, Georgia (CNN) -- Bombs rocked Tbilisi early Saturday morning as the fight between Georgia and Russia over a breakaway region intensified and moved into the Georgian capital. A warplane drops bombs near the Georgian city of Gori on Friday as Russian and Georgian forces battle. 1 of 3 Government buildings, including the Parliament, were evacuated when the bombs fell. Heavy casualties have reported on both sides since Russian forces moved Friday into South Ossetia, a pro-Russian autonomous region of Georgia. Russian bombers were targeting Georgia's economic infrastructure, National Security Council secretary Alexander Lomaia said, including the country's largest Black Sea port, Poti, and the main road connecting the southern part of Georgia with the east and the airport. Georgian television reported that the port had been destroyed. US faults Russia for rising violence in Georgia (August 9, 2008) ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gQYe039zkquHxitiI6u4M_TRr_BAD92F4I300WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia's use of overwhelming military force against Georgia, including strategic bombers and ballistic missiles, is disproportionate to any threat from the former Soviet state and could escalate tensions in the volatile region, a senior U.S. official said Saturday. The Bush administration official, who briefed reporters on condition his name not be used because of the sensitive nature of the situation, said Russia has attacked areas in Georgia that are far away from the separatist province of South Ossetia, where the fighting has centered. The official also said the Russian military is striking civilian targets. "They have employed strategic bombers — the most potent air weaponry that is in the Russian arsenal .... They actually launched ballistic missile attacks on Georgian territory," the official said. He also said Russia has sent more than 1,000 paratroopers and armor into the region. Russian bombing has also taken place in Abkhazia, a separate breakaway region of Georgia, far from South Ossetia, the official said."This is a dangerous escalation in the crisis," the official said. Russia's military response "marks a severe escalation and is being conducted in areas far, far from the South Ossetia zone of conflict, which is where the Russian side has said it needed to protect its citizens and peacekeepers. So the response has been far disproportionate to whatever threat Russia had been citing." The U.S. official also scolded Moscow for stymieing attempts at mediation and refusing a cease-fire offer from Georgia. "The Georgians have offered a cease-fire. The response by the Russians has been to step up the attacks, continue bombing civilians with strategic air assets and then to reject the notion of any international mediation at all — it's very difficult for us to understand that," the official said. "It is simply not acceptable that anyone would reject an offer of a cease-fire and a plea for international mediation." The official criticized Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin for suggesting Georgia was conducting "genocide" in South Ossetia. "Those are some pretty powerful words that are really not helping us to end the violence and bring together a new process that can resolve the conflict," the official said. "The line we're hearing right now (from Russia) is quite tough." CLIP War between Russia and Georgia orchestrated from USA (09/08/08 "Pravda")www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20469.htmThe US administration urged for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the unrecognized republic of South Ossetia. In the meantime, Russian officials believe that it was the USA that orchestrated the current conflict. The chairman of the State Duma Committee for Security, Vladimir Vasilyev, believes that the current conflict is South Ossetia is very reminiscent to the wars in Iraq and Kosovo. “The things that were happening in Kosovo, the things that were happening in Iraq – we are now following the same path. The further the situation unfolds, the more the world will understand that Georgia would never be able to do all this without America. South Ossetian defense officials used to make statements about imminent aggression from Georgia, but the latter denied everything, whereas the US Department of State released no comments on the matter. In essence, they have prepared the force, which destroys everything in South Ossetia, attacks civilians and hospitals. They are responsible for this. The world community will learn about it,” the official said. In the meantime, it became known that the Georgian troops conducted volley-fire cleansings of several South Ossetian settlements, where people’s houses were simply leveled.“The number of victims with women, children and elderly people among them, can be counted in hundreds and even thousands,” a source from South Ossetian government in the capital of Tskhinvali said. (...) "Civilians, including women, children and elderly people, are dying in South Ossetia. In addition to that, Georgia conducts ethnic scouring in South Ossetian villages. The situation in South Ossetia continues to worsen every hour. Georgia uses military hardware and heavy arms against people. They shell residential quarters of Tskhinvali [the capital] and other settlements. They bomb the humanitarian convoys. The number of refugees continues to rise – the people try to save their lives, the lives of their children and relatives. A humanitarian catastrophe is gathering pace,” Russia’s Foreign Minister said. CLIP U.S. Attacks Russia Through Client State Georgia (August 8, 2008)www.prisonplanet.com/us-attacks-russia-through-client-state-georgia.htmlGeorgian forces, trained and equipped by the Pentagon and the U.S. government, killed 10 Russian peacekeepers early this morning in a provocation attack that has escalated into military conflict, but the subsequent corporate media coverage would have us believe that the U.S. and NATO-backed client state Georgia is a helpless victim, when in actual fact a far more nuanced geopolitical strategy is being played out. Original reports early this morning detailed how Georgian forces had killed 10 Russian peacekeepers and wounded 30 others, which was the provocation for Russian forces to begin military operations, but the fact that Georgian forces were responsible for starting the conflagration has been completely buried in subsequent media coverage. “Georgia and the Pentagon cooperate closely,” reports MSNBC, “Georgia has a 2,000-strong contingent supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and Washington provides training and equipment to the Georgian military.” The latest exercise, Immediate Response 2008, which took place last month, involved no less than one thousand U.S. troops working with Georgian troops in a war game scenario. Moreover, the very “Rose Revolution” that brought the Harvard trained pro-US Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvilli to power in 2003 was wholly aided and abetted by the Central Intelligence Agency. Russian fury at U.S. support for Georgia and Georgia’s aspirations of becoming a NATO member have flared regularly in recent months, with tensions also rising following U.S. attempts to place missile defense shield technology in Poland and the Czech Republic, which most observers agree has nothing to do with Iran and is in fact aimed at countering Russian military superiority in the region. (...) Former Treasury Secretary under Ronald Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, told The Alex Jones Show today that the entire scenario smacked of a maneuver on behalf of the Neo-Con faction controlling the White House, led by Dick Cheney. Roberts said the date was precisely picked due to the distraction of the Olympics and Bush being out of the country. Both Condoleezza Rice and John McCain have today demanded Russia withdraw its forces from Georgia immediately. Meanwhile, the U.S. media networks are seemingly more interested in the complete non-story of John Edwards having an affair, while a conflict that could have devastating and thunderous geopolitical consequences fizzes on the verge of explosion. CLIP Q&A: Violence in South Ossetianews.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7549736.stm(...) Why do Ossetians want to break away? The Ossetians are a distinct ethnic group originally from the Russian plains just south of the Don river. In the 13th Century, they were pushed southwards by Mongol invasions into the Caucasus mountains, settling along the border with Georgia. South Ossetians want to join up with their ethnic brethren in North Ossetia, which is an autonomous republic within the Russian Federation. Ethnic Georgians are a minority in South Ossetia, accounting for less than one-third of the population. But Georgia rejects even the name, South Ossetia, preferring to call it by the ancient name of Samachablo, or Tskhinvali, after its main city. (...) What about Georgia's links to Nato? President Saakashvili has made membership of Nato one of his main goals. Georgia has a close relationship with the United States and has been cultivating ties with Western Europe. There are those who believe that Mr Saakashvili may be hoping to draw Nato into a conflict with Moscow, making their alliance a formal one. But analysts say it is difficult to imagine Nato allowing itself to be drawn into a direct conflict with its Cold War rival after managing to avoid that for so long. Questions answered on Russia, Georgia conflictwww.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-08-08-question-answer_N.htm(...) Q: How bad could hostilities get? A: It depends on how large a response Russia wants to muster. Russia has an active and equipped armed force of 1.02 million, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies of London. The institute numbers Georgia's active servicemen and women at 21,150. Q: How have the United States and the rest of the world reacted? A: The United States, NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have called for a halt in hostilities and for Georgia, Russia and South Ossetia to sit down and talk. The U.S. State Department says it supports Georgia's territorial integrity, while calling for an immediate cease-fire. The White House says President Bush and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin have talked about the situation while both are attending the Olympics. Q: Is there a chance that the United States and the West could be drawn into a confrontation with Russia over this? A: Georgia is not a member of NATO, so there are no obligations to come to its defense. Georgia so far has asked for diplomatic, not military, assistance from the West. The Pentagon says it has only 125 defense personnel and contractors in Georgia that provide military training for Georgian forces deployed in Iraq. Q: Could hostilities here affect U.S. military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan? A: Georgia's president said Friday he is bringing home the 2,000 troops it had stationed in Iraq. That is a significant blow to coalition forces because Georgia was the third-largest contributor of troops behind Britain and the U.S. Apart from that, direct U.S. military involvement seems unlikely. Although Georgia may look close to Iraq and Afghanistan, it has little in common. Like Russians, Georgians and Ossetians are largely Orthodox Christian. Analysis: South Ossetian Conflict Will Cost Russia Dearly (08.08.2008)www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3548662,00.html The escalating conflict between Georgia and Russia over the former's breakaway province South Ossetia has far-reaching consequences and might become a major problem for Moscow, according to experts. (...) But analysts point out that Russian policy was not all war-mongering, and Moscow, having lost a dangerous political double game, may find itself trapped in a war that, if prolonged, could prove immensely costly. Just before April, Russia ended a 16-month blockade and resumed air and postal links to Georgia, holding out the possibility of dropping economic sanctions as well. Russia's special envoy Yuri Popov arrived in Tbilisi to mediate peace talks between the two sides on Thursday, even as the fighting escalated out of control with both sides returning heavy artillery shelling and making bomber sorties with Sukhoi SU-27 fighter jets. Now, Felgenhauer said, Russia has made a choice that will drag it into a prolonged and difficult war because mountains form a barrier between the region and Russia, leaving only a one-road pass, closed off in the winter. "It's a logistical nightmare to try to take South Ossetia back from Georgia's quite good military," Felgenhauer said. "Massive Russian intervention may turn out to be costly, not only in terms of human costs ... it could be politically devastating for Russia's standing and economy." Russian-Western rift likely Georgia, whose army numbers around 18,000 soldiers, had surrounded the South Ossetia capital on Friday. Such a war could swiftly create a political rift between Russia and the West, whose support remains with Georgia for the present, other Russian observers said. The United States sent its envoy to the region on Friday. "We support Georgia's territorial integrity and we call for an immediate ceasefire," State Department spokesperson Amanda Harper told DPA. South Ossetia: The War has Begun! (August 8, 2008)www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9772The night of August 7, Georgian forces launched an attack on Tskhinvali, which Tbilisi cynically described as an effort to restore the constitutional order. Just hours earlier, Saakashvili declared a ceasefire in the conflict zone, but the move was only a propaganda maneuver disguising the plan for a large-scale offensive. The timing is carefully chosen — the attention worldwide is focused on the opening of the Olympic Games, Russian Prime Minister V. Putin is in Beijing, and Russian President D. Medvedev is on a short vacation. Georgian forces are acting with extreme ferocity. A total devastation of the Tskhinvali downtown which came under Grad missile, artillery, mortar, and machinegun fire has been reported. Dozens of blasts shatter the city every minute. Tens of armored vehicles and thousands of soldiers moved into the conflict zone. Russian Peacekeeping Force Deputy Commander V. Ivanov said that the positions of the peacekeepers were not directly targeted or hit and that they continue to watch the situation in the region. However, the Ossetian side and Russian journalists say that the peacekeepers' headquarters came under fire. The offensive has already left tens if not hundreds of people dead. Nevertheless, it appears that the activity of the peacekeepers remains limited to monitoring the situation. Their inaction helps the aggressor — the Georgian side states that the Russian peacekeepers are not intervening in the conflict. The army of South Ossetia returned fire, but it has no potential comparable to that of the Georgian forces. Several Ossetian villages have already been seized and there is a possibility that the Zar highway linking the Republic to Russia will be blocked. The statement made by Mathew Bryza in connection with the events is remarkably cynical — cunningly siding with Georgia and interpreting Moscow's position in the manner of a downright hooligan, he blamed the escalation on South Ossetia. Earlier C. Rice said in Tbilisi that the US was entirely on Georgia's side in the conflict, thus leaving no doubts concerning the US position. US State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos says the US demands that Moscow exert pressure on the leadership of South Ossetia in order to achieve a ceasefire in the conflict zone. At the same time, the Georgian side is no more than advised to exercise restraint.It is symbolic that Tbilisi launched the aggression on the anniversary of the fall of the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Its demise became a prologue to the next phase of the Balkan war - to the war in Kosovo, the NATO strikes on Serbia, and the humiliation and partition of the country. It has been said many times that the West is reusing the Balkan scenario in the Caucasus, and that this time Russia is planned to play the role of Serbia. Belgrade politicians who said 13 years ago that selling their countrymen in Croatia and Bosnia would preclude the Western aggression now pretend they were unaware that Serbia's turn would come after the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia. CLIP NATO encouraged Georgia – Russian envoy (August 8, 2008)www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9774Russia’s envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has sent an official note to representatives of all member countries in Brussels in connection with Georgia’s military actions against South Ossetia. He’s calling on them not to support Mikhail Saakashvili.“Russia has already begun consultations with the ambassadors of the NATO countries and consultations with NATO military representatives will be held tomorrow," Rogozin said. "We will caution them against continuing to further support of Saakashvili."Rogozin says Georgian aggression against South Ossetia is obvious.“It is an undisguised aggression accompanied by a mass propaganda war,” he said.Rogozin has linked Friday’s onslaught to the support given to Saakashvili at the recent NATO summit in Bucharest. At the meeting, Rogozin says, it “was hinted Georgia has prospects in NATO.” South Ossetia close to humanitarian disaster – Russian FM Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says he hopes Georgia’s Western partners take note of what has happened in South Ossetia and draw conclusions.“It all confirms our numerous warnings addressed to the international community that it is necessary to pay attention to massive arms purchasing by Georgia during several years. Now we see how these arms and Georgian special troops who had been trained by foreign specialists are used,” he said. The FM also accused the Georgian authorities of ignoring the UN Security Council’s call to observe a ceasefire during the Olympic Games in Beijing. CLIP Israel backs Georgia in Caspian Oil Pipeline Battle with Russia (August 8, 2008)www.prisonplanet.com/israel-backs-georgia-in-caspian-oil-pipeline-battle-with-russia.htmlGeorgian tanks and infantry, aided by Israeli military advisers, captured the capital of breakaway South Ossetia, Tskhinvali, early Friday, Aug. 8, bringing the Georgian-Russian conflict over the province to a military climax. (...) DEBKAfile’s geopolitical experts note that on the surface level, the Russians are backing the separatists of S. Ossetia and neighboring Abkhazia as payback for the strengthening of American influence in tiny Georgia and its 4.5 million inhabitants. However, more immediately, the conflict has been sparked by the race for control over the pipelines carrying oil and gas out of the Caspian region.The Russians may just bear with the pro-US Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili’s ambition to bring his country into NATO. But they draw a heavy line against his plans and those of Western oil companies, including Israeli firms, to route the oil routes from Azerbaijan and the gas lines from Turkmenistan, which transit Georgia, through Turkey instead of hooking them up to Russian pipelines. Saakashvili need only back away from this plan for Moscow to ditch the two provinces’ revolt against Tbilisi. As long as he sticks to his guns, South Ossetia and Abkhazia will wage separatist wars. DEBKAfile discloses Israel’s interest in the conflict from its exclusive military sources:Jerusalem owns a strong interest in Caspian oil and gas pipelines reach the Turkish terminal port of Ceyhan, rather than the Russian network. Intense negotiations are afoot between Israel Turkey, Georgia, Turkmenistan and Azarbaijan for pipelines to reach Turkey and thence to Israel’s oil terminal at Ashkelon and on to its Red Sea port of Eilat. From there, supertankers can carry the gas and oil to the Far East through the Indian Ocean.Aware of Moscow’s sensitivity on the oil question, Israel offered Russia a stake in the project but was rejected. In photos: 'Georgia South Ossetia Conflicttinyurl.com/5o42r82008 South Ossetia Waren.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_South_Ossetia_(2008)This article documents ongoing warfare: Information may change rapidly, and might initially be unconfirmed, as the conflict evolves. Full Coverage: Georgianews.yahoo.com/fc/World/Georgia;_ylt=AqLqrNbbwyuSp.kZfJ85udJ2y14AThe Special Maneuvers:'2 US aircraft carriers headed for Gulf' (Aug 7, 2008)www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1218104233164&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFullTwo additional United States naval aircraft carriers are heading to the Gulf and the Red Sea, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Kuwait Times. Kuwait began finalizing its "emergency war plan" on being told the vessels were bound for the region.The US Navy would neither confirm nor deny that carriers were en route. US Fifth Fleet Combined Maritime Command located in Bahrain said it could not comment due to what a spokesman termed "force-protection policy."While the Kuwaiti daily did not name the ships it believed were heading for the Middle East, The Media Line's defense analyst said they could be the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Ronald Reagan. (...) Currently there are two US naval battle groups operating in the Gulf: one is an aircraft carrier group, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln, which carries some 65 fighter aircraft. The other group is headed by the USS Peleliu which maintains a variety of planes and strike helicopters.The ship movements coincide with the latest downturn in relations between Washington and Teheran. The US and Iran are at odds over Iran's nuclear program, which the Bush administration claims is aimed at producing material for nuclear weapons; however, Teheran argues it is only for power generation.Kuwait, like other Arab countries in the Gulf, fears it will be caught in the middle should the US decide to launch an air strike against Iran if negotiations fail. The Kuwaitis are finalizing details of their security, humanitarian and vital services, the newspaper reported. The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) - Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Oman - lie just across the Gulf from Iran. Generals in the Iranian military have repeatedly warned that American interests in the region would be targeted if Iran is subjected to any military strike by the US or its Western allies. CLIP Massive US Naval Armada Heads For Iran (AUGUST 7, 2008)europebusines.blogspot.com/2008/08/massive-us-naval-armada-heads-for-iran.htmlOperation Brimstone ended only one week ago. This was the joint US/UK/French naval war games in the Atlantic Ocean preparing for a naval blockade of Iran and the likely resulting war in the Persian Gulf area. (...) These ships took part in the just completed Operation Brimstone. The build up of naval forces in the Gulf will be one of the largest multi-national naval armadas since the First and Second Gulf Wars. The intent is to create a US/EU naval blockade (which is an Act of War under international law) around Iran (with supporting air and land elements) to prevent the shipment of benzene and certain other refined oil products headed to Iranian ports. Iran has limited domestic oil refining capacity and imports 40% of its benzene. Cutting off benzene and other key products would cripple the Iranian economy. The neo-cons are counting on such a blockade launching a war with Iran. The US Naval forces being assembled include the following: (...) The large and very advanced nature of the US Naval warships is not only directed at Iran. There is a great fear that Russia and China may oppose the naval and air/land blockade of Iran. If Russian and perhaps Chinese naval warships escort commercial tankers to Iran in violation of the blockade it could be the most dangerous at-sea confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The US and allied Navies, by front loading a Naval blockade force with very powerful guided missile warships and strike carriers is attempting to have a force so powerful that Russia and China will not be tempted to mess with. This is a most serious game of military brinkmanship with major nuclear armed powers that have profound objections to the neo-con grand strategy and to western control of all of the Middle East's oil supply. (...) A strategic diversion has been created for Russia. The Republic of Georgia, with US backing, is actively preparing for war on South Ossetia. The South Ossetia capital has been shelled and a large Georgian tank force has been heading towards the border. Russia has stated that it will not sit by and allow the Georgians to attack South Ossetia. The Russians are great chess players and this game may not turn out so well for the neo-cons. (...) Kuwait has activated its "Emergency War Plan" as it and other Gulf nations prepare for the likelihood of a major regional war in the Middle East involving weapons of mass destruction. CLIP US: Iran stalling on nukes, new penalties likely (August 6) news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_iran_nuclear;_ylt=ApJ1ZPNIUY5cFirh96_Ho49Sw60AWASHINGTON - Major world powers agreed Wednesday to pursue new sanctions against Iran, even though the watered-down penalties already levied by the U.N. have only made Iran rush faster to perfect nuclear expertise. Iran vows no nuclear concessions (23 July 2008)news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7520854.stmIran will not "retreat one iota" in its nuclear activities, its president says, in his first reaction to a new call for Tehran to end uranium enrichment. Full Coverage: Irannews.yahoo.com/fc/World/Iran;_ylt=Aky_3lRA5RGWwpngiziTAq92y14AA War of Self-Destruction (August 9, 2008 Chris Hedges)www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080804_a_war_of_self_destruction/An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted, would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic collapse and political upheaval in the US. Chicago University Prof. William R. Polk, a member of the Policy Planning Council under President Kennedy predicts: “Industries would fail, banks would collapse, government revenues would dry up, universities would close, health care would virtually cease.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Georgia, Washington and Moscow: a Nuclear Geopolitical Poker Gameby F. William Engdahl Global Research, July 12, 2008 The Caucasus Republic of Georgia as nations go does not appear to be a major global player. Yet Washington has invested huge sums and organized to put its own despot, Mikhail Saakashvili, in the Presidency in order to close a nuclear NATO iron ring around Russia. Now US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is in Tbilisi making sharp statements against Moscow for supporting the independent neighbor states of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, in essence blaming Moscow for an imminent war Washington has incited in order to bring Georgia into NATO by the December NATO Summit. The Western media has either ignored the growing tensions in the strategic Caucasus region or has intimated, as suggested by Condoleeza Rice, that the entire conflict is being caused by Moscow’s silly support of "breakaway" republics Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In reality, a quite different chess game is being played in the region, one which has the potential to detonate a major escalation of tensions between Moscow and NATO. Since the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991, one after another, former members as well as former states of the USSR have been coaxed and in many cases bribed with false promises by Washington into joining the counter organization, NATO. Rather than initiate discussions after the 1991 dissolution of the Warsaw Pact about a systematic dissolution of NATO, Washington has systematically converted NATO into what can only be called the military vehicle of an American global imperial rule, linked by a network of military bases from Kosovo to Poland to Turkey to Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1999, former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic joined NATO. Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Slovakia followed suit in March 2004. Now Washington is putting immense pressure on the EU members of NATO, especially Germany and France, that they vote in December to admit Georgia and Ukraine. The Georgia-Abkhazia military picture The present escalation of tensions in the region began in May when Abkhazia said it had shot down two Georgian drones over its airspace. The announcement came two weeks after Georgia accused Russia of shooting down an unmanned drone over Abkhazia, which Tbilisi considers its sovereign territory. Moscow has denied involvement. Russia has administered a peacekeeping contingent in Abkhazia and South Ossetia since bloody conflicts in the 1990s, and sent additional troops to Abkhazia recently to deter what it calls a planned Georgian military offensive. The two sides, Georgia and Abkhazia, have been in a state of suspended conflict since 1993, when Abkhaz separatists, backed by Russian forces, succeeded in driving the Georgians out of the province. Tbilisi claims sovereignty over Abkhazia and South Ossetia and refers to both as "breakaway republics." In 2001 Georgian troops joined with anti-Moscow Mujahadeen-trained Chechyn soldiers from neighboring Russian muslim province of Chechnya to mount a military attack, unsuccessfully, against Abkhazia. CLIP "Regardless of the motivation, whoever is stoking the conflict must realize that they are playing with fire. This brinkmanship can lead to a full-fledged war. Georgia would probably lose a war if Russia backed Abkhazia, while Russia would lose its hope of becoming a benign global player and would risk seriously straining its ties with the European Union and the United States." Rice adds gasoline to the fire The Bush Administration is adding gasoline to the fire in the Caucasus. In Tbilisi on July 10 the US Secretary of State, Rice, told the press, "Russia needs to be a part of resolving the problem and solving the problem and not contributing to it. I have said it to the Russians publicly. I have said it privately." The effect of her comments, blaming Moscow for the escalating tensions, is to signal US support for the Georgia side in their efforts to force Russian troops form South Ossetia and Abkhazia. This past May Abkhaz President Sergei Bagapsh said he was willing to conclude a military treaty with Moscow similar to that between USA and Taiwan. "Abkhazia will propose to Russia the signing of a military treaty that would guarantee security to our republic," Bagapsh stated. "We are also prepared to host Russian military bases on our territory within the framework of this treaty. I would like to emphasize that this would not go against the precedents already existing in international practice. For instance, this treaty could be analogous to the treaty between the US and Taiwan." Just as Moscow refuses to recognize the sovereignty of Kosovo, so Washington refuses to admit the sovereignty of Abkhazia. In May a senior US State Department delegation was in Abkhazia meeting with local Non Governmental Organizations there as well as the President. In the past, from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine, Washington intelligence agencies have used various NGOs, the US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA-linked Freedom House and Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution to steer a wave of regime changes which became known as "Color Revolutions." In each case the new regime was pro-Washington and anti-Moscow as in the case of Saakashvili in Georgia and Viktor Yushchenko in Ukraine. Both countries begin seeking NATO entry after the success of the US-financed Color Revolutions. In all this Washington is definitely playing with potential nuclear fire by escalating pressure to push Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. The Foreign Minister of the Czech Republic, Karl Schwarzenberg on July 8 signed an agreement allowing US deployment of special radar facilities on Czech soil as part of the top secret US "missile defense" it alleges is aimed at rogue missile threats from Iran. As even former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recently pointed out, the Bush Administration’s categorical refusal to pursue the 2007 counter-offer of then-President Vladimir Putin to station US radar at the Russian leased reconnaissance facility in Azerbaijan instead, was a provocative mistake. It makes abundantly clear that Washington is aiming its military strategy at the dismantling of Russia as a potential adversary. That, as I have written previously, is a recipe for a possible nuclear war by mis-calculation. Rice’s latest Caucasus and Czech visit only added to that growing danger. * F. William Engdahl is author of the book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order and is finishing a book, provisionally titled, The New Cold War: Behind the US Drive for Full Spectrum Dominance. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.netFrom: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9564
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Aug 14, 2008 3:59:05 GMT 4
I also posted the following at Expose the Media thread, but if any are following the war between Russia and Georgia, posted here, you need to see this...MReuters caught with 'fake' pictures from Georgia --Media war against Russia 10 Aug 2008 Reuters agency posted horrible pictures of Russian bombardments of allegedly civilian residential buildings. But what if you take a closer look? [See: A Georgian man cries next to his brother's body in the town of Gori, 80 km (50 miles) from Tbilisi, August 9, 2008. REUTERS/David Mdzinarishvili. Here he is again, alone still with some clothes on, or may be he got changed. The man in the checkered shirt keeps returning!]
Well, well, well, just goes to show you that nothing is as it appears....Gosh, the PTBs are getting sloppy; maybe it's all the pressure on them now, or fighting amongst different fractions...who cares anyway....It's just great to see someone caught fudging pictures...MichelleMedia war against RussiaAug. 10th, 2008 at 9:42 AM In the modern world you cant wage a war just with your tanks and planes. You have to use media. In Germany during WWII they would say "Truth is not what happened, truth is what we tell people".Yesterday Russian military aircrafts bombed several Georgian military bases. It worth mentioning that military men are located in the a five-storied buildings which look exactly alike residential. The reason for this is simple, they were built in the Soviet Union times and there was not much diversity in architecture. This morning (its 7 a.m. Moscow time right now) one can read on the BBC news site. Russia deaf to Western voices, Reuters agency posts a horrible pictures of Russian bombardments of allegedly civilian residential buildings. But what if you take a closer look? Warning: the pictures contain scenes with blood and allegedly injured people.For instance on this picture you can see one obviously dead body of a person in a checkered shirt. The other body is carried by medics, carried as if it was a dead body, but you can notice that the hand of a person is holding a woman medic's sleeve. Well so far everything looks pretty real, except maybe for one guy in black who doesn't look anyhow concerned. CLIP See/Read more: russia-insider.livejournal.com/25329.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Aug 15, 2008 13:50:50 GMT 4
Neocon Fantasy, Demonizing Russia, A Nightmare
Three essays for you to read. How they are linked is best described by David Michael Green's intro to his newest [end post here]:Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water again, another shark from George’s Excellent Adventure in Mesopotamia has been loosed. This week, Bush tried taking the high moral ground, admonishing Russia about invading sovereign states (is that why they call it “George-a”?), only to find himself standing well below sea level. Remember how we all were hopeful following the Cold War that the Great Game of international plunder had finally gone to the history books? Can you say ‘Iraq’? ‘Georgia’? ‘Bummer’? Speaking of the the now defunct Project for a New American Century, he goes on to say:Of course, people like this absolutely never admit to being wrong, even (especially?) when they are at their most egregiously erroneous, and it probably doesn’t help that the American media continues to feature them on broadcasts as experts of some sort, as if they have any clue whatsoever of what they’re talking about. But the truth is that the Georgia episode demonstrates nothing more clearly than just how seriously these hypernationalists have actually damaged American military power and world security. Read on....MichelleBig Bad Russkies and Nasty NeoconsThursday 14 August 2008 by: Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t | Perspective When Soviet troops marched into Hungary and Poland in 1956, I remember watching the agony unfold on black and white television, a young infomaniac in the making. One night, I watched with my father's uncle Jack, an old Hungarian Jew who had no love for the Eastern Europe he had left behind nearly 50 years before. "I hate to see the Russians invade," he smiled. "But if they have to invade anywhere, they picked the right countries." When Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968, I had just returned from a week in Prague writing a story about the Czech reformers. I remember speaking at a campus rally in Berkeley, where I compared the Soviet Union's invasion of Czechoslovakia to America's war in Vietnam. How could anyone in good conscience condemn one and not the other? When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve of 1979, I remember jetting off to Pakistan and from there to Kabul, where the BBC sent me to organize filming for a prime-time Panorama documentary. I was the lowly advance man on the team, working under one of our most senior producers, who knew from the start the story the film should tell. Just as in the days of Czarist Russia, he insisted that the Soviets were looking for a warm-water port on the Indian Ocean from which to challenge "the West." Years later, former CIA Director Robert Gates and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski revealed the Carter administration had begun funding the anti-Soviet mujahedeen six months before the Soviets invaded. Even more sobering, Brzezinski had warned Carter at the time, "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." Also see: U.S. Played Big Role in Ukraine's Orange Revolution: www.truthout.org/article/us-played-big-role-ukraines-orange-revolutionUncle Santa and Ukraine's Orange-Colored Elves: www.truthout.org/article/steve-weissman-uncle-santa-and-ukraines-orange-colored-elves Now, in response to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sending troops into the breakaway region of South Ossetia, the Russians have sent bombers, ships, tanks and troops against Georgia. The Europeans then tried to make a clumsy cease-fire work, while the Bush administration throws fuel on the fire by sending in American troops on a "vigorous and ongoing" humanitarian mission "to show to Russia that we can come to the aid of a European ally, and that we can do it at will, whenever and wherever we want." It's déjà vu all over again, and none have taken greater comfort in the still-escalating crisis than John McCain, his foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann (whose firm lobbied for the Georgians) and the same neoconservatives who pushed Americans to flex our great power muscles in Iraq in even more disgusting ways than Vladimir Putin has done in Georgia. Robert Kagan set the tone in The Washington Post, charging that Putin had "reestablished a virtual czarist rule in Russia and is trying to restore the country to its once-dominant role in Eurasia and the world." Wholeheartedly siding with "my friend Misha Saakashvili," McCain then announced on behalf of every American, "We are all Georgians now" and called for NATO to step in to "stabilize this dangerous situation." He also repeated his long-standing demand to bring Georgia into NATO, a position that the less bellicose Obama is also taking. NATO membership would commit the United States and its allies to defend the Georgians against Russia with military force. This is a life-and-death commitment few Americans would want to make if anyone took the time to explain it to them. More sensibly, the French, Germans, and other Europeans have never been eager to go along with American efforts to extend NATO membership into the unruly Caucasus, remembering all too well how the First World War began in the similarly chaotic Balkans. The Europeans will hardly change their minds now, having just seen how reckless Saakashvili and his American supporters can be. McCain talks grandly of "a moral commitment" to defend "Georgian democracy." It's heady stuff, echoing back to November 2003, when Washington helped stage Georgia's Rose Revolution. The National Endowment for Democracy, which took over much of American covert funding from the CIA in 1983, supplied a good part of the cash and used many of the same nonviolent activists, youth groups and "civil society" fronts it would subsequently employ in Ukraine. Sadly, Misha Saakashvili turned out to be just about as democratic as Putin, manipulating elections, using force against his opponents and greatly restricting press freedom during a state of emergency in November 2007. Under his leadership, Georgia remains famously corrupt, and he has proved every bit as warm and compassionate toward the breakaway Ossetians and Abkhasians as Putin has been toward the Georgians. As for Washington, it continues to pursue more material interests (especially the multi-billion dollar oil and natural gas pipelines that use Georgia to bypass both Russia and nearby Iran), while American hotheads like John McCain continue to give Saakashvili the impression we will back him even as he baits the Russian bear. The Pentagon supplies and trains the Georgian military, which sent 2,000 troops to fight in Iraq until Washington flew them home after the recent hostilities began. And, now, the Georgians are begging Washington to include them in the new anti-missile system the Bush administration is building in Poland and Czechoslovakia, a supposedly defensive system that could give the Pentagon a first-strike nuclear capability against Russia. Needless to say, the Russians see all this much as Americans would view Cuban revolutionary agitators, a Russian anti-missile system and Chinese military trainers in Mexico and Canada. But, hey, who cares? We're the only remaining superpower and we don't have to worry about how the Russians feel until it's much too late. A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.Source: www.truthout.org/article/big-bad-russkies-and-nasty-neocons------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?Posted on Aug 12, 2008 By Robert Scheer Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election? Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government who ended his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser. Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, an invasion that clearly was expected to produce a Russian counterreaction? It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain’s presidential campaign. In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia’s membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate’s foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new Cold War, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, it was Putin’s Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill. Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate’s demonization of Russian leader Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Saddam to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs. McCain gets to look tough with a new Cold War to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy that McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, will be provided with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined. What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that expands its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Josef Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a “revanchist Russia” that should once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people. How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori they would have found a museum still honoring the local boy, who made good by seizing control of the Russian revolution. Indeed five Russian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori’s Stalin Square on Tuesday. It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the United States, which championed Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, now is ignoring Georgia’s invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces. For McCain to so fervently embrace Scheunemann’s neoconservative line of demonizing Russia in the interest of appearing tough during an election campaign is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly irresponsible. Source: www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080812_georgia_war_a_neocon_election_ploy/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ My Army Went To Iraq And All I Got Was This Lousy Airlift: The Bush Doctrine Meets Reality. Reality Wins.The thing about Katrina was that you could see the results right away, so that even famously ignorant and deluded Americans finally began the process of understanding their president. The thing about Iraq is that it’s taken a bit longer. True, some of it began to be painfully obvious, even relatively early on. For example, when an absurdly arrogant president, whose preening was matched only by his gross incompetence, stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to declare victory in a war which essentially hadn’t even begun yet. It wasn’t long before people began to notice that the mission wasn’t exactly, er, accomplished. But even today, five years later, we are only beginning to take stock of the consequences of neocon hubris. For anyone paying sufficient attention to make the connections, we got a whopping dose of that reality this week as Maximum Leader Putin did his Vlad the Impaler trick on the tiny neighboring republic of Georgia. Surely this will be seen by almost everyone as a wholly separate affair from the Iraq invasion. And, indeed, idiotic neocon commentators – the same people, mind you, who brought us the Iraq debacle – are already haplessly foaming at the mouth about Russian aggression in the Caucuses, demonstrating as always, but now more emphatically than ever, how irony and hypocrisy coexist so comfortably in the (puffed out) regressive chest. In fact, Iraq and the Georgia war are joined at the hip in too many ways to recount, and must be understood as just such. Altogether, we are now beginning to see the consequences of the Bush Doctrine of foreign policy in all its full glory. And if you liked Katrina, you’re really gonna dig this. It was, to start with, remarkably jaw-dropping to see the buffoon-in-chief fulminating this week about Russia’s transgressions in violating the prime directive of modern international law and politics: Thou shalt not invade another sovereign state’s territory. Um, excuse me? Are you freaking joking? Do you mean like, Iraq, for instance? Only George W. Bush could be so practiced in the art of deception so as to say this with a straight face. It’s not clear that he any longer even knows when he’s lying these days, so routine has it become. In fact, the two incidents are nearly identical in concept, with the minor exception that Putin’s war was slightly more justified by the semi-reckless quasi-provocations of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was likely egged on by the Bush loonies and other neocons, including one of John McCain’s top advisors. Iraq, alas, was even more of a false pretext. The country had no weapons of mass destruction (and so what if they did, anyhow? – dozens of countries possess these), Bush knew they didn’t, knew that the case for war was “thin”, knew that Saddam had not attacked nor threatened us, and therefore just plain lied the US into the war. Your average American is going to have a hard time seeing the Iraq war as morally equivalent to the one in Georgia (let alone even less justified), but that is simply because he or she is American. The rest of the world has no such problem, and never has. An invasion of a sovereign state is an invasion of a sovereign state, pure and simple. It was just that when Hitler invaded Poland and France, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, when Saddam invaded Iran (with US encouragement and assistance) and Kuwait, when Bush invaded Iraq, and when Putin invaded Georgia. Of course aggressors are going to make up some bullshit about terrorism or WMD or democracy! My god, what would we expect them to say? Everyone understands that you can’t say you’re going in for oil or money or real estate anymore. Especially when you are in fact going in for oil or money or real estate. What the Georgia invasion has demonstrated is how much moral authority has been sacrificed on the altar of neocon lies and state-sponsored violence in Iraq. Today, when such soft power might have the capacity to make a difference in leading a global response to Russian aggression, Bush would be lucky to have zero credits in his account. In fact, there’s about as much in there as there is in the national treasury, now rapidly approaching $10 trillion in the red (a doubling, by the way, during the Bush years, of all the debt accrued by all 42 of his predecessors – combined – over more than two centuries). All that is over and kaput, at least until America gets a new president and, hopefully, as well, the kind graces of an international society that has every right to be outraged at our violent petulance. Even if we get that lucky, what has been lost in the normative sense is far larger than just American respect and soft power influence. For the decade or two following the end of the Cold War, people might have been excused for believing that a new phase in the evolution of the international political system had been realized, one in which, while plenty of injustices would remain, at least the worst excesses of great power aggression seemed a vestige of twentieth century practice and eighteenth century mentality. That fantasy has now been put violently to rest, as the two greatest powers on the planet have returned to playing the great game with a vengeance, preying on lesser powers in pursuit of resources, strategic positioning or just plain national pride. Now America learns that there is a cost to playing the game of international politics unilaterally, and with contempt for other countries. That cost is that they will return the favor. When you want help as your military bogs down in some insane quagmire, you find that they tend to remember when you yourself simply blew off the Security Council because you couldn’t get the votes. When you’re seeking to uphold a general principle such as nonaggression, you shouldn’t be surprised that they remember you calling them all “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” when they were busy trying to block your aggression. But it’s not just soft power that has been squandered either. Theoretically, the US and its allies could be checking Russian aggression and its breach of the peace and of international law right now by deploying forces to defend one of America’s (or at least Bush’s) most devoted allies, and a rare outpost of something approximating democracy in that part of the world. Theoretically, American forces could be defending George W. Bush Boulevard in downtown Tblisi from the invading northern armies right now. Theoretically. In the cold, hard reality of the real world, no such forces exist. Now we find out that those who argued that putting 160,000 American soldiers in a completely unnecessary war in Iraq, while already fighting a tenacious enemy in Afghanistan would, among other grave concerns, potentially diminish American and world security should a real emergency come along, weren’t just making it up. In fact, it’s very likely that this disastrous scenario goes considerably deeper than that. Bush didn’t just create a power vacuum that would be there in the event some sort of spontaneous emergency might simultaneously occur. Very likely, the American military impotence which emerged from his grand blunder in Mesopotamia may well have actually invited just such an episode. It’s hard to imagine that it didn’t occur to Putin, presiding over a renascent Russia, that he could run wild wherever he wanted while the world’s only superpower was tied down in a useless war, and its public exhausted with the prospect of taking on any other such projects. It’s equally hard to imagine that Putin was quaking in his boots when the pathetic excuse for an American Secretary of State tried to lecture him by announcing that “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.” My guess is that he thought to himself, “Da. Things have indeed changed, Condoleeza Phukupalot. You Yankees have foolishly squandered your military power in Iraq and now I can do whatever I want with total impunity.” Yo, Condi – have you heard? The road to Tbilisi runs right through Baghdad. Certainly the Georgians appreciate this. They had more troops in Iraq supporting Bush’s Folly than any country besides the US and the UK. The administration at least had the good graces to airlift these forces back to somewhere where there was a real war going on, over real security issues, where their presence would really matter. But pity the poor Georgians, nevertheless, who bet on the wrong horse. They could have learned a lot by talking to the Kurds and Shiites of Iraq, who rose up on the instructions of the last Bush in the White House, only to be slaughtered by Saddam while American forces literally stood by watching, under command from the White House not to save those chess pieces, er, I mean, lives. And, quite possibly, Georgia is just the beginning. Russia is now feeling its oats, just as the toxic combination of nationalist pride and rage at perceived prior humiliation goes coursing through its veins. What do you suppose they’re thinking in Ukraine or Kazakhstan or the Baltic states right now? I don’t know, but I’d bet it’s not dissimilar to what the Poles were thinking when Hitler swallowed up Czechoslovakia. There is no disincentive now on the table to prevent the Russians from reannexing their ‘near abroad’, and there will be no American rescue if they do, just as there wasn’t for Poland. In this respect, it was only slightly less laughable and slightly less ironic to hear neocon par excellence and Iraq war architect Robert Kagan on the radio this week arguing for punishing the Russians by tossing them out of the meaningless G-8 talk shop and the similarly nearly worthless cooperative institutions set-up for Russian relations with NATO and the EU. Wow, Bobby, that will really peel them back, won’t it? That’s right, Bro – ya gotta sting ‘em hard, man! How about a ban on caviar next, eh? Let’s hit ‘em where it really hurts! If you ever needed a sign of how far the US has fallen under neocon stewardship, this is it. Kagan was one of the principals in the now (very) defunct Project for a New American Century, an organization whose name tells you just about everything you ever needed to know about these clowns. Why they didn’t just go with Project for Imperial Sickness and Subjugation, I’ll never know, but maybe the resulting acronym would have been too obnoxious even for these walking personifications of Yankee arrogance. Anyhow, PNAC was an attempt to demonstrate just how bullying America could be, by advocating for the invasion of Iraq, going all the way back to the Clinton era. Once they finally found a president who would actually do the deed, it then became a successful attempt at demonstrating how stupid the country could be, as well. Of course, people like this absolutely never admit to being wrong, even (especially?) when they are at their most egregiously erroneous, and it probably doesn’t help that the American media continues to feature them on broadcasts as experts of some sort, as if they have any clue whatsoever of what they’re talking about. But the truth is that the Georgia episode demonstrates nothing more clearly than just how seriously these hypernationalists have actually damaged American military power and world security. These are the same sort of people, mind you, who derided the conservative ‘realists’ of the previous century for their timidity in merely containing the Russian bear, rather than launching World War III in order to roll back Soviet territorial gains in Eastern Europe and beyond. The kind of folks who thought they were hot shit because they got Reagan to ‘liberate’ Grenada, that vast and strategically crucial chunk of the Soviet empire. The kind of people who don’t have to bother doing their homework because they just govern from the gut, allowing them to look into someone’s eyes and see right down to his soul. Now look what they’ve wrought. Iraq is an open wound that shows little sign of healing anytime soon. It was supposed to be a kick-ass little blowout that would easily secure a slew of bases in the region, buckets of oil, Bush’s domestic agenda (along the lines of selling off Social Security, etc.), and put the fear of a real god into the hearts of heathen Iranians, Syrians and Palestinians, as well as perhaps your odd Cuban or Venezuelan to boot. Instead, Colin Powell has described the US Army as “broken”, and that was years ago. It’s certainly that, plus stuck, plus completely maxed-out, short of a draft, which neither Bush nor McCain would dare attempt. American soft power – the ability to lead, to persuade, to appeal to higher moral convictions of others – is now similarly in the toilet. And thus it is that the neocons of the world have traded a disaster in Iraq for the inability to even do that which they once derided as inappropriately minimalist in the past – protect allies from Russian imperialism. Of course, that’s only the beginning of the stupidity. How is it, by the by, that Russia went from being a former superpower on the way toward becoming a third world country – so severely flattened that the very life span of its citizens had decreased by some ten years or so – to now racing back toward becoming a global great power again, and a very pissed off one at that? Well, one good explanation would certainly have to do with how the US reacted as the country was imploding in the 1990s. Rather than reaching out with Marshall Plan type assistance, we sent an army of right-wing economists instead, who advised privatizing everything in sight. Which they largely did, and largely to disastrous consequences. One of Putin’s achievements has been to regain the primacy of the state, and bring the hammer down on the latter-day robber barons who were formerly carting it off, piece by petro piece. In doing so, he has restored a measure of Russian dignity following the humiliation of the triumphalist US fire-sale treatment, and along with that comes no small degree of national pride at humbling exploitive and supremely arrogant Americans. These sentiments were only further exacerbated by the expansion of NATO deep into the traditional Russian sphere of influence, and the unilateral American scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue the military-industrial complex’s greatest boondoggle ever, a missile ‘defense’ system, now being deployed in Eastern Europe. Lastly, as if antagonizing a potential enemy wasn’t stupid enough, the bright candles in charge of American foreign policy have done so while completely failing to significantly wean the country off of our petroleum addiction, all while driving up prices dramatically. Hey, guess who’s got a whole ocean of oil at their disposal? Guess which country is growing rich and powerful because of that? Guess who is able to throw its political weight around based on this economic power? If you were wondering a week ago how the buffoons in charge of American foreign policy could possibly screw it up any worse than they already had, now you know. If you were pondering whether the results of America’s invasion of Iraq could conceivably get more disastrous than they have been for the last five and a half years, look no further. For the neocon fantasy has now not only wrecked Iraq and wrecked America and wrecked US relations with longtime allies and destroyed the reputation of America abroad. It has also torn a gaping hole in the power and significance of international law and the hopeful notion that wars of territorial acquisition were a thing of the past. And it opened the door for the Russians to do precisely the same thing, further exacerbating those tendencies. The post-Cold War moment of hopefulness regarding a more peaceful world has now been crushed, and it wasn’t the supposed black hats who originally kicked down that door. It was us nice, peace-loving, god-fearing, law-abiding folks here in good old ‘Murica who did it. With apologies to Churchill (who owes an apology or two of his own), it may be said of our time, and of the those in charge of running the world’s only superpower, that never have so many been so damaged by the insanely stupid actions of so few. Source: www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/My_Army_Went_To_Iraq_And_All_I_Got.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
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Post by michelle on Aug 26, 2008 16:38:28 GMT 4
What are we, living in the nineteen century; where every ruler wants to be Emperor, King, Tsar, or Kaiser of the world?
OK, first, I have to run a retraction on the "Operation Brimstone" that was announced as a training mission for the blockade of Iran; a fun little war game STORY we were spoon fed where the Bush Administration, who with the Brits and French and others, completed a massive naval war game. I commented on and posted it in this compilation: The War has Begun! War between Russia and Georgia orchestrated from USA airdance.proboards50.com/index.cgi?board=generalworldaffairs&action=display&thread=148&page=4#3028
I don't even want to attempt to think on what that was all about!
Following that article, is one where, after that yarn was retracted, the the Middle East Times still referred to this naval build up.
Ending this post, there's one which explains that Iran is grumbling about Russia's imperial intentions which is apparently a sore spot with them for well over some hundred years because of their 'humiliating defeats at the hands of tsarist Russia in the early 19th century, culminating in the Russia-Iran Treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmanchai in 1828. Under these, about a third of Iranian territory was ceded to Russia, including Georgia and Armenia.'
Recently, I've been going over in my son's lessons about how how Hitler came to power...To understand this, one must go back to events before during and after WWI. The Treaty of Versailles laid down some heavy repercussions on Germany and its people. The doctrine of nationality so much on the lips of the 'peacemakers' of 1919, often allied with a spurious profession of faith in democracy, brought to Europe a 'Balkanization' of spirit and interest which boded ill for the future. One has to recognize that the very principle of 'self-determination of nations,' appealing as it was in theory, was no more capable of bringing peace and prosperity to Europe than had the analogous slogans of 'squatter sovereignty' and 'states rights' been able to assure those same attributes to the united States six decades earlier!...Enter WWII....You know, in all these post war dealings, the seeds were being sown for generations of deadly division in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Indochina!
Could we PLEASE get over the the Imperialistic Wet-dreams, gentlemen???!!!.........
MichelleStop the presses: no naval armada has sailed to blockade Iran!By Fabius Maximus August 20, 2008 Summary: For a week rumors about a US armada sailing to the Gulf circulated around the Internet and in Middle Eastern media, despite having almost no supporting evidence. One of the two major sources for the "US fleet sailing to blockade Iran" story now has admitted his error. No word yet from the other (and more high-profile) source, Debkafile (does Debkafile post retractions?) or the blogs which promoted the rumors. Along with Debkafile, Timothy Alexander ignited the Internet firestorm on 7 August (GOOGLE to see the resulting posts and news stories) with "Massive US Naval Armada Heads For Iran" posted at his blog Europe. On 18 August he posted a long article "Wars and Rumors of War", containing the following retraction (bold emphasis added): We have a Bush Administration, who with the Brits and French and others, just completed a massive naval war game named "Operation Brimstone" that was announced as a training mission for the blockade of Iran. While two resolutions are pending before Congress (one in the House; the other in the Senate) "demanding" a blockade on Iran. And then the high level leaks that the battle groups were headed to Iran (yes, I know, I was taken in like UPI, DEBKA, and several major and minor news organizations). This was not really the case, but it laid the ground work in preparing the public for the next step. In the meantime the European Union has authorized a blockade in everything but name So we can close this folder and file it under "The Internet can make us dumber." This is evidence of almost total lack of sourcing by blogs, too many of which print rumors without any semblance of research. While these rumors were ignored by the mainstream media, they were passed on by high-profile geopolitical blogs. For example, by M. Simon at Classical Values, to which the Instapundit linked. No retractions yet at those sites (so far as I see). The Internet can be a powerful tool, making us smarter and faster. But only if writers and readers take more care with its contents. Otherwise it can make us dumber. More At:www.uruknet.de/?p=m46542&hd=&size=1&l=e------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let's keep adding fuel to the fire, true or not:How Far Can Power Stretch?By MIDDLE EAST TIMES Published: August 20, 2008 The United States is the world's hyper-power -- since the collapse of communism, there has been no debate about that: Serbia, Iraq -- twice, and Afghanistan have all proven no match for the awesome high tech power of the U.S. armed forces: But as President George W. Bush concentrates U.S. naval forces ominously close to the shores of Iran, we feel we have to ask: How far can that power stretch? The United States still has 150,000 troops in Iraq, although Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made clear publicly on July 7 that he wants them out -- and soon. Another 36,000 U.S. troops are fighting the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan, and really not doing a very good job of it. Even Sen. Barack Obama, D.-Ill., the Democratic Party's standard bearer for the fall presidential election, has said he wants to increase U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan by at least another 10,000 troops. And the collapse of the Georgian army, on whom Washington has lavished so much military aid over the past eight years has sent a shiver of fear running down the spines of every Eastern and Central European country that thought since the collapse of communism, it could shelter with impunity beneath the great U.S. military umbrella and thumb its nose at Russia. One would assume that the growing complexities of Iraq and frustrations in Afghanistan, followed by the humiliation last week in Georgia of a favored ally, would have taught Bush some caution at last, but it is far from clear that it has done so. U.S. leaders have certainly made reassuring noises about responsibility and restraint over taking preemptive action against Iran, but the massing of U.S. naval forces, backed even by significant British and French units, belies those soothing words. We therefore recommend that Bush for his late summer reading abandons for once the endless hagiographies of Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln he is said to favor and read English historian Correlli Barnett's classic 1970 work "The Collapse of British Power." Barnett documents how Britain's position as the world's hyper-power in the 1920s and 1930s could not be sustained, because she took on far too many security burdens scattered around the world when she no longer had the financial, industrial and military resources to carry all of them. Bush appears oblivious to these lessons: We think Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Republican Party's presumptive presidential candidate, is blind to them as well. Even Sen. Obama acts as if U.S. global military and financial dominance is something he can take for granted when he is president, and that he will be free to rapidly increase the number of U.S. troops operating in Afghanistan, whatever happens in different parts of the world. However, in Georgia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dimitry Medvedev called the bluff of U.S. global power. When will Bush and his would-be successors finally wake up and realize that the world is no longer a checker board for their moralistic crusades any more? Source:www.metimes.com/Editorial/2008/08/20/how_far_can_power_stretch/9153/------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Past Imperialistic Wet-dreams: Iran gambles over Georgia's crisis By Kaveh L Afrasiabi Aug 16, 2008 Georgia is one of Iran's "near neighbors" and as a result of geographical proximity and important political and geostrategic considerations, the current Russia-Georgia conflict is closely watched by Tehran, itself under threat of military action by the US and or Israel, which may now feel less constrained about attacking Iran in light of Russia's war with Georgia. So far, Tehran has not adopted an official position, limiting itself to a telephone conference between Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, expressing Iran's desire to see a speedy end of the conflict for the sake of "peace and stability in the region". Tehran's dailies have likewise refrained from in-depth analyses of the crisis and from providing editorial perspectives, and the government-owned media have stayed clear of any coverage that might raise Moscow's objection. Behind Iran's official silence is a combination of factors. These range from Iran's common cause with Moscow against expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), interpreting this crisis as a major setback for NATO's "eastward expansion" in light of the unabashed pro-West predilections of Tbilisi's government, to Iran's sensitivity to Russia's national security concerns. The latter are heightened by the US's plans to install anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe, not to overlook Iran's concern as not to give the Kremlin any ammunition that could be used against it in Tehran's standoff over its nuclear program. Representing a serious new rift in US-Russia relations, the conflict in the Caucasus, paralyzing the UN Security Council and igniting Cold War-type rhetoric between the two military superpowers, is simultaneously a major distraction from the Iran nuclear crisis and may even spell doom for the multilateralist "Iran Six" diplomacy. This involves the US, Britain, Russia, France, China and Germany in negotiations over Iran's uranium-enrichment program, which some believed is aimed at making nuclear weapons. Much depends on the scope and duration of the Georgia crisis and, yet, there is also the obverse possibility that Moscow, intent on polishing its tarnished image - as a rogue power coercing its smaller neighbors and violating their territorial sovereignty - may even double its efforts on other fronts to compensate for the damage to its international standing, given the US's threat of kicking Russia out of the Group of Eight. As far as Iran is concerned, the Georgia crisis is not confined to South Caucasus and has broader implications for region, including Central Asia and the Caspian area, that are both positive and negative. That is, it is a mixed blessing, one that is both an ominous development signaling a new level of Russian militarism as well as a crisis of opportunity, to forge closer ties with Russia and enhance its chance of membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the grouping dominated by Russia and China. Yet, the immediate gains for Iran may not exceed the net losses in the long run and Tehran may have blundered by not forcefully criticizing Moscow's violation of Georgia's sovereignty. Iran and Georgia have strong historical connections: Iran was in possession of Georgia for some 400 years until the humiliating defeats at the hands of tsarist Russia in the early 19th century, culminating in the Russia-Iran Treaties of Gulistan in 1813 and Turkmanchai in 1828. Under these, about a third of Iranian territory was ceded to Russia, including Georgia and Armenia. Then and now, Iran remains weary of Russia's imperial intentions and, more recently, this was evident seven years ago when in the aftermath of a failed summit on the division of Caspian Sea, the then-president Vladimir Putin ordered a massive naval maneuver in the Caspian Sea as a stern message to Iran. Should Putin, now premier, succeed with his "splendid little war" in South Caucasus, Russia's neighbors to the east must expect to see more samples of Russian power projection, again a prospect that simultaneously entices and yet terrifies Iran and is bound to have contradictory policy ramifications for Tehran's decision-makers. Thus, on the one hand, no matter how cordial present Iran-Russia relations may be, the big neighbor's power and increasing militarism impacts Iran's national security calculus and may strengthen the arguments of those who are in favor of a nuclear defense strategy. On the other hand, there is no doubt Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's statement that the world "can forget about Georgia's territorial integrity" is unacceptable to Tehran, which has recently submitted a package of proposals focusing on international cooperation. Russia's exercise of power is substantively the same as the US's illegal post-September 11, 2001, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and, naturally, Iran cannot adopt one set of standards for one and another for the other, irrespective of Moscow's legitimate grievances about the US's and NATO's intentions and actions around it. Rather, Tehran must demonstrate consistency with its own foreign policy criteria, otherwise its international prestige and regional standing will suffer, no matter how the Kremlin may be displeased with a bold, yet principled, Iranian stance on this neighboring crisis. What is more, whereas Iran during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami offered to play a mediating role in the Chechen crisis, today there is a conspicuous absence of any similar gesture on Tehran's part. This is unfortunate since Iran can indeed play an effective role in "third-party" mediation. Mediation in international conflicts requires skilled negotiation and facilitation of dialogue between the hostile parties and, in this case, Iran could take advantage of its impartiality and proximity to the warring sides to act as a successful mediator, perhaps in tandem with other actors, such as the UN and the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), in light of past Iran-OSCE collaboration with respect to the civil war in Tajikistan and the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Instead of adopting such proactive steps, Tehran has settled for a quiet diplomacy, as a passive bystander, thus causing an attrition of its image as a regional player, which it can remedy by a timely intervention as a mediator in line with its own foreign policy principles and standards. Russia's action against Georgia violates the UN charter and causes collateral damage on the integrity and security of the sovereign rights of Russia's other neighbors, including Iran, which a mere half a century ago was threatened by partition when the Soviet red army refused to leave northern Iran at the end of World War II. Clearly, as with the collapse of the Doha rounds of negotiations on world trade, the crisis in South Caucasus reflects a serious erosion of international law and growing anarchy in international affairs, a sliding back toward the Cold War bifurcations and the renewal of the big power sphere of influence politics, albeit rationalized as Russia's own "Monroe doctrine", precisely when such bifurcations and seemingly defunct doctrines and cliches appear a relic of a bygone era. The new post-Cold War era still remains a largely unfulfilled premise, or rather promise on the part of the big powers, which need to give up their propensity to use hard power to pursue their imperial intentions. But, old habits die hard and the US's NATO-led intervention in Russia's backyard has elicited in essence today's Russia's military gambit inside Georgian territory. This is a sobering lesson of how that premise still remains simply a potential, a wishful dream. Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. For his Wikipedia entry, click here. Source:www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JH16Ak01.html
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michelle
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I have broken any attachments I had to the Ascended Masters and their teachings; drains your chi!
Posts: 2,100
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Post by michelle on Sept 6, 2008 6:41:37 GMT 4
Interesting Times..Talk of Another Cold WarMissile Defense: Washington and Poland just moved the World closer to War (August 15, 2008)www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9836The signing on August 14 of an agreement between the governments of the United States and Poland to deploy on Polish soil US 'interceptor missiles' is the most dangerous move towards nuclear war the world has seen since the 1962 Cuba Missile crisis. Far from a defensive move to protect European NATO states from a Russian nuclear attack, as military strategists have pointed out, the US missiles in Poland pose a total existential threat to the future existence of the Russian nation. The Russian Government has repeatedly warned of this since US plans were first unveiled in early 2007. Now, despite repeated diplomatic attempts by Russia to come to an agreement with Washington, the Bush Administration, in the wake of a humiliating US defeat in Georgia, has pressured the Government of Poland to finally sign the pact. The consequences could be unthinkable for Europe and the planet. CLIP Cold War tension rises as Putin talks of Black Sea confrontation (August 28, 2008)www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4622422.eceA new Cold War between Russia and the West grew steadily closer yesterday after the Kremlin gave a warning about "direct confrontation" between American and Russian warships in the Black Sea. Dmitri Peskov, a spokesman for Vladimir Putin, the Prime Minister, declared that Russia was taking "measures of precaution" against American and Nato naval ships. "Let's hope we do not see any direct confrontation in that," he said. Any attempt by countries in the West to isolate Russia would "definitely harm the economic interests of those states", he said. A day after the Kremlin said that it was ready to fight a new Cold War, both sides gave the impression that they were preparing for a protracted stand-off. Foreign ministers of the G7 leading industrialised nations condemned Russia's excessive use of force and the decision to recognise the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, while the US and Russia shelved a key nuclear agreement that would have given the Americans access to Russian nuclear technologies and Russia help from the US in establishing an international nuclear fuel storage facility for spent fuel. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, also flew to Ukraine to assemble the "widest possible coalition against Russian aggression", while Georgia downgraded its diplomatic relations with Russia, recalling all but two of its diplomats from Moscow in protest at the continuing occupation of its country. Russia criticised the US for using naval ships to deliver aid to Georgia. The US Coast Guard cutter Dallas delivered supplies to the Georgian port of Batumi yesterday, three days after the guided-missile destroyer USS McFaul docked in the port. The US sailors were greeted with chants of "USA! USA!" CLIP Russia threatens to supply Iran with top new missile system as 'cold war' escalates (31 Aug 2008)www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/2651516/Russia-threatens-to-supply-Iran-with-top-new-missile-system-as-cold-war-escalates.htmlRussia is deploying the threat to sell a "game changing" air defence system to Iran as a high stakes bargaining chip in its new "cold war" with America, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. -- US intelligence fears the Kremlin will supply the sophisticated S-300 system to Tehran if Washington pushes through Nato membership for its pro-Western neighbours Georgia and Ukraine.The proposed deal is causing huge alarm in the US and Israel as the S-300 can track 100 targets at once and fire on planes up to 75 miles away.That would make it a "game-changer", greatly improving Iranian defences against any air strike on its nuclear sites, according to Pentagon adviser Dan Goure. "This is a system that scares every Western air force," he said.Senior US intelligence operatives believe that Russia is planning to use a stand-off over the S-300 to create a foreign policy showdown that would test the mettle of a new US president.Republican candidate John McCain has taken a strongly anti-Kremlin line on a series of international issues and backed Georgia's desire to join Nato. His Democratic rival Barack Obama has also indicated he supports Nato membership for Georgia."The message from Moscow is very clear," said George Friedman, director of Stratfor, a leading US private intelligence agency. "They are saying if you don't stop meddling in our sphere of influence, this is what we are going to do."Back Georgia and Ukraine for Nato membership and you'll see the S-300 to Iran. It is a very powerful bargaining chip and a major deterrent to US actions in the region. Moscow is playing very strategically on America's obsession with Iran."Moscow has been infuriated by the steady encroachment of Nato into the former Soviet bloc and the recent granting of independence to the ex-Serbian province of Kosovo against its wishes.After American condemnation of Russia's foray into Georgia, Moscow invited Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad, a long-time US foe, to discuss military deals in a deliberate signal of how it could cause trouble for Washington. A senior US intelligence operative who recently returned from the Middle East said Russia is believed to have struck a tentative deal to sell the S-300 to the Islamic regime. There are reports that Russia has already moved some basic components for the system to its close ally Belarus, ready for possible transfer to Iran. "Moscow cannot simply threaten to strike the deal," the official told The Sunday Telegraph. "Iran certainly thinks it has a deal. And the Israelis believe that a deal has been reached but that they can still block it."The outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is expected to pass that message on to his counterpart Vladimir Putin and President Dmitri Medvedev when he visits Moscow next month. Israel has already ended military assistance to Georgia in an effort to placate Russia. CLIP US gearing up to attack Iran - report (September 01, 2008)www.jnewswire.com/article/2517The United States is preparing to launch an attack on the Iranian nuclear program with something expected to happen "in the coming weeks." (...) In a classic power play, the regime in Tehran has escalated its rhetoric amid increasing reports that either Israel or the United States plans to strike. A top Iranian official, Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, warned at the weekend that an attack on the rogue state's nuclear facilities would trigger another world war. Israel has meanwhile reiterated that it will never allow the Iranians to acquire an atomic bomb. As the war talk spirals, Israeli officials voiced the belief Iran has purchased advanced anti-aircraft defenses from Russia that would severely hamper efforts to hit the Iranian facilities. CLIP Putin blames US for war (August 29, 2008)www.smh.com.au/news/world/putin-blames-us-for-war/2008/08/29/1219516709057.htmlThe Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, has shocked Europe by using the giant American broadcaster, CNN, to accuse his US counterpart, George Bush, of creating the war in Georgia as a plot to install John McCain as his successor. In the most outrageous and inflammatory claim since the crisis in South Ossetia erupted earlier this month, Putin accused the US of provoking the conflict to help the Republican candidate - an outspoken critic of the Kremlin in the race for the Presidency. "It is not just that the American side could not restrain the Georgian leadership from this criminal act. The American side in effect armed and trained the Georgian army," Mr Putin told CNN. "Why spend years holding difficult negotiations and looking for complicated compromises in ethnic conflicts? It's easier to arm one of the parties and push it to kill the other party, and the job is done." The suspicion arises that someone in the United States especially created this conflict with the aim of making the situation more tense and creating a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US President." While Mr Putin carefully did not name Mr Bush directly, White House officials quickly denounced his accusations broadcast both on CNN and Russian television. His claims had been widely aired in Russia last week too.. CLIP NATO sends more ships into Black Seaen.rian.ru/world/20080823/116233036.htmlNATO has sent a Polish frigate and a U.S. destroyer through the Bosporus to boost its presence in the Black Sea, where it is delivering humanitarian cargoes to Georgia, a source in the Turkish navy said. Why was Cheney's guy in Georgia before the war?latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/08/georgia-war.htmlWhat was a top national security aide to Vice President Dick Cheney doing in Georgia shortly before Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili's troops engaged in what became a disastrous fight with South Ossetian rebels -- and then Russian troops? Not, according to the vice president's office, what you might think -- if your thinking takes you into the realm of Cheney giving his blessing to the Georgian's military operation. To be sure, Cheney has been a leader of the hardliners in the administration when it comes to standing up to Russia -- to the point that the man who ran the Pentagon as the Cold War came to an end during the administration of the first President Bush has been seen as ready to renew that face-off with Moscow. It was Cheney who visited the Georgian embassy in Washington last week to sign a remembrance book as a demonstration of the administration's support. And yes, Joseph R. Wood, Cheney's deputy assistant for national security affairs, was in Georgia shortly before the war began. But, the vice president's office says, he was there as part of a team setting up the vice president's just-announced visit to Georgia. (...) The White House disclosed on Monday that Cheney would hurry over to Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine and Italy next week, almost immediately after addressing the Republican National Convention on Labor Day.And so it was that a team from the vice president's office, U.S. security officials and others were in Georgia several days before the war began. It had nothing to do, the vice president's office said, with a military operation that some have said suggests a renewal of the Cold War. Russian general criticizes US Black Sea presencearticles.lancasteronline.com/ap/4/georgia_russiaThe deputy chief of Russia's general staff suggested the arrival of the McFaul and other U.S. and NATO ships would increase tensions: Russia shares the sea with NATO members Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria as well as Georgia and Ukraine, whose pro-Western presidents are leading drives for NATO membership. Medvedev says Russia ready to cut ties with NATOen.rian.ru/russia/20080825/116266781.htmlIf NATO is not willing to cooperate with Moscow, "we will take any decision, up to terminating relations entirely," Medvedev told Russia's envoy to the alliance, Dmitry Rogozin. "Cooperation is above all in the interests of NATO, not Russia," he said (DART) Cheney (VADER) to visit war-torn Georgiawww.informationclearinghouse.info/article20611.htmThe White House announced Monday that Cheney will head abroad on Sept. 2 for stops in three former Soviet Republics - Azerbaijan, Georgia and Ukraine - plus Italy. Russia may cut off oil flow to the West (29/08/2008)www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/29/cnrussia129.xmlFears are mounting that Russia may restrict oil deliveries to Western Europe over coming days, in response to the threat of EU sanctions and Nato naval actions in the Black Sea. Any such move would be a dramatic escalation of the Georgia crisis and play havoc with the oil markets. Reports have begun to circulate in Moscow that Russian oil companies are under orders from the Kremlin to prepare for a supply cut to Germany and Poland through the Druzhba (Friendship) pipeline. It is believed that executives from lead-producer LUKoil have been put on weekend alert. "They have been told to be ready to cut off supplies as soon as Monday," claimed a high-level business source, speaking to The Daily Telegraph. Any move would be timed to coincide with an emergency EU summit in Brussels, where possible sanctions against Russia are on the agenda. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev may use the oil weapon -- Any evidence that the Kremlin is planning to use the oil weapon to intimidate the West could inflame global energy markets. US crude prices jumped to $119 a barrel yesterday on reports of hurricane warnings in the Gulf of Mexico, before falling back slightly. Global supplies remain tight despite the economic downturn engulfing North America, Europe and Japan. A supply cut at this delicate juncture could drive crude prices much higher, possibly to record levels of $150 or even $200 a barrel. With US and European credit spreads already trading at levels of extreme stress, a fresh oil spike would rock financial markets. The Kremlin is undoubtedly aware that it exercises extraordinary leverage, if it strikes right now. Such action would be seen as economic warfare but Russia has been infuriated by Nato meddling in its "backyard" and threats of punitive measures by the EU. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov yesterday accused EU diplomats of a "sick imagination". Armed with $580bn of foreign reserves (the world's third largest), Russia appears willing to risk its reputation as a reliable actor on the international stage in order to pursue geo-strategic ambitions."We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War," said President Dmitry Medvedev. CLIP
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Sept 11, 2008 17:47:02 GMT 4
Chevron Plays the VictimSep 03, 2008 Source: East Bay Business Times (California, sub req'd), August 29, 2008The second-largest U.S. oil company sees itself as a victim, and it's going on a PR offensive to explain why. In an "unusual move," Chevron "has approached the media to offer a briefing" on an upcoming civil trial, "in which it faces charges of wrongful death, civil conspiracy, torture and negligence." The case, Bowoto versus Chevron, was brought by Nigerian villagers and stems from a 1998 incident where the Nigerian military shot at protesters on one of Chevron's offshore platforms. The soldiers were paid by Chevron and flown to the platform in Chevron helicopters, according to EarthRights International. A U.S. district court judge recently concluded that Chevron personnel "were directly involved" in and approved of the attack. Chevron denies the charges, saying the protesters "took Chevron workers hostage and attacked law enforcement when it arrived." Chevron has hired Singer Associates, the San Francisco PR firm that defended the city zoo after one of its tigers escaped its enclosure and killed one person. Chevron's PR push is part of a trend of companies doing more media work around legal cases. The traditional "'no comment' approach" yields "the entire dialog to the other side," explained PR executive Erin Powers. From: www.prwatch.org/node/7716------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Bowoto v. ChevronTexaco Case Overview Written by Rick Herz and Marco Simons In fall 2008, a landmark human rights case is set for trial in federal court in San Francisco. Chevron has been charged with gross human rights abuses arising from its use of the notorious Nigerian military and "kill and go" mobile police against those who protest the environmental and other harm caused by Chevron's oil production activities in the Niger Delta. The lawsuit is based on a 1998 incident in which Nigerian soldiers shot nonviolent protesters at Chevron's Parabe offshore platform. The soldiers, who were paid by Chevron, were ferried to the platform in Chevron-leased helicopters and supervised by Chevron personnel. Two protesters were killed in the brutal attack and others were injured. Another protester brings claims based on the subsequent torture inflicted on him by the Nigerian authorities after Chevron claimed that he was a pirate.
In a recent ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston found evidence that Chevron's personnel "were directly involved" in this attack, transporting the soldiers despite knowing that they were "prone to use excessive force," and concluded that the evidence would allow a jury to find not only that Chevron assisted the soldiers knowing that they would attack the protestors, but also that Chevron actually agreed to the militarys plan. A jury trial is scheduled in the federal case for September 2008. Chevron is also facing a California state court trial set for September 2009, which seeks a court order to end the practices that led to the 1998 attack and to other incidents of abuse involving the Nigerian security forces in the service of Chevron. The federal trial is likely to bring over 20 Nigerian villagers to the Bay Area to testify. Bowoto v. Chevron is a flagship lawsuit using the tools of the U.S. litigation process, including the Alien Tort Statute, to create corporate accountability for serious human rights violations by American-based companies. The case has already applied important rules supporting accountability of parent corporations for actions taken nominally by their foreign subsidiaries. After ten long years, the trials will finally give the Nigerian villagers their day in court to confront the oil giant and demand public accountability for the company's involvement in gross human rights abuses. The plaintiffs are seeking compensation for the murders and the injuries suffered, as well as ongoing transparency by Chevron about its use of the notorious Nigerian police and military. Factsheets What Happened at Parabe Case History and Status Bowoto v. Chevron Human Rights Litigation Chevron Pays, Houses, Transports, Schedules and Directs the Nigerian Police and Military Dead Fish, Dead Trees, No Water to Drink First They Poisoned Our Land, When We Protested, They Shot Us Chevron's Misleading Public Statements Chevron U.S. Has Unclean Hands Chevron Knew The Nigerian Kill and Go Police Would Deliver Chevron’s Message to Protesting Villagers What Should Chevron Do? Legal Documents Bowoto v. Chevron State Court Original Complaint Bowoto v. Chevron Federal Court Original Complaint State Court - Order Regarding Injunctive Relief Class Action State Court - Order Regarding Extraterritoriality State Court - Order Regarding Availability of Injunctive Relief State Court - Order Regarding Act of State Doctrine Federal Court - 2007 Opinion on Aiding and Abetting Liability Federal Court - 2007 Opinion on the Act of State Doctrine Rulings on Chevron's Summary Judgment Motions Current Federal Complaint Decision Denying Chevron's Motion for Summary Judgement Current State Complaint Order Granting Leave to File Current Federal Complaint Opening Brief in Support of Current Federal Complaint Oral Argument on Chevron's Motion to Dismiss Plaintiff's Motion for Leave to Amend Complaint Transcript of Oral Argument on Chevron's Motion for Dismissal Based on Forum Non Conveniens Source and read factsheets/documents: www.earthrights.org/site_blurbs/bowoto_v_chevrontexaco_case_overview.html------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Is the Nigerian government paranoid, or is someone pressuring them to hurt the case and/or censor information to US citizens? You decide...MichelleNigeria Deports Oil FilmmakerSeptember 10, 2008 Aaron Glantz, OneWorld US SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 10 (OneWorld) - An award-winning American filmmaker arrested and imprisoned on spying charges was freed by the Nigerian State Security Service Tuesday, after an international campaign pressed authorities for his release. His translator continues to be interrogated. Andrew Berends, a recipient of the International Documentary Association's Courage Under Fire award for his work in Iraq, had been living in Nigeria since April making a film about daily life in the oil-rich Niger Delta, where the activities of multinational corporations like Chevron and Shell Oil have provoked the ire of human rights groups. In the last 10 years, military factions acting on behalf of multinational oil companies have killed more than 2,000 people in the Niger Delta, says the San Francisco-based nonprofit group Global Exchange, whose "Freedom from Oil" campaign aims to expose the negative consequences of Americans' oil consumption. It is unclear if Berends will now be able to complete work on his film. According to Berends' co-producer Aaron Soffin, Berends and his translator, Sam George, were arrested in the Delta's main city, Port Harcourt, Friday as they filmed "fishing boats coming in and women walking with their products to market." Soffin said the two were imprisoned and interrogated by Nigerian police, military, and state security officers for 36 hours straight without food, water, or sleep. Their incarceration drew an immediate condemnation from international press freedom groups Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists and from Berends' home-state senators, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer. Four days after his arrest, Berends was transferred to the Nigerian capital Abuja and turned over to the custody of the U.S. Embassy, but was forced to report to the Nigerian State Security Service for additional interrogation. On Tuesday night local time, Berends was on a plane out of the country after receiving deportation papers. At the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, officials defended their government's treatment of Berends and George. "We all believe in freedom of speech," a member of the Ambassador's staff told OneWorld, "but you can't prevent law enforcement from doing their job. If they have any reason to question anybody in the normal course of their duties, that's part of what their job entails. It's just like any other part of the world." Press freedom groups disagree. "Now that Andrew's case is settled, we expect his translator and the businessman who was arrested at the same time to be freed unconditionally as soon as possible," Reporters Without Borders said in a statement. "We hope the Nigerian authorities have learned from this episode that it is absurd to arrest reporters in the Delta region and accuse them of spying when they are simply reporting, with permission, on economic and political situations in that country." Human rights and media freedom groups note Berends and George's arrests are just the latest in a series of detentions and deportations of foreign journalists working in Nigeria. In April, a team of documentary filmmakers were arrested and deported in the same oil-rich region while working on a film called "Sweet Crude." Last October, two independent filmmakers and an American peace activist were arrested and deported while taking pictures of Nigeria's oil infrastructure. The crackdown also comes as a landmark federal court case over Chevron's behavior in Nigeria lurches toward trial in San Francisco. The case, Bowoto vs. Chevron, was filed eight years ago by Nigerian civilians who were injured or killed in violent crackdowns by Nigerian security forces paid by the California-based oil giant. After eight years of motions, the case was to go to trial this month, but the Bush administration refused to grant the Nigerian villagers visas to enter the United States. "We the American public are not allowed to see footage about the way American oil companies operate around the world," said Antonia Juhasz, author of the upcoming book, The Tyranny of Oil. "Over the last eight years there has been an increasing U.S. military presence in West Africa to support these oil companies. The Bush administration and the oil companies don't want the American people to know this." A crackdown on the media, Juhasz said, is also in the interests of the Nigerian government. "The Nigerian government wants the United States and the oil companies to think it has everything under control, and the more it is shown that it is a war zone and the more it is shown that the people of Nigeria are resisting these oil companies, the more the Nigerian government cracks down." As of press time, it was unclear whether Berends was able to leave Nigeria with the material he collected over his months of filming. If he was, Americans are likely to learn a lot more about daily life in the oil-rich Niger Delta. If Berends' material was lost, another opportunity to broadcast the local effects of the world's thirst for petroleum will have been lost with it. Source: us.oneworld.net/article/357406-nigeria-deports-oil-filmmaker
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Sept 12, 2008 19:03:35 GMT 4
Whoa! Check this out:Bolivian Political Clashes Spark Diplomatic CrisisFriday 12 September 2008 by: Carlos Valdez, The Associated Press Eight people were killed and 20 injured during protests in eastern Bolivia over President Morales's proposal for constitutional reforms and redistribution of natural gas revenues. Bolivia has accused the US of inciting the opposition and expelled US Ambassador Philip Goldberg. In retaliation, the US has declared Bolivia's ambassador, Gustavo Guzman, "persona non grata" and given him 72 hours to leave the United States.
Venezuela, meanwhile, kicked out its top U.S. diplomat and the South American allies demanded that Washington stay out of their affairs. Anti-government protesters fought backers of President Evo Morales in Bolivia's pro-autonomy east with clubs, machetes and guns Thursday, killing at least eight people and injuring 20, authorities reported. The demonstrators also seized natural gas fields, halting half of Bolivia's gas exports to Brazil, its No. 1 customer, for nearly seven hours, according to the affected Transierra pipeline company. "We're going to tolerate only so much. Patience has its limits," Morales told supporters on Thursday. The Aymara Indian and former coca growers' union leader has so far hesitated to mobilize the military, fearing major bloodshed. Vice President Alvaro Garcia announced a day of national mourning. Meanwhile, U.S. officials angered by Morales' decision to expel Washington's ambassador for allegedly inciting opposition protesters responded Thursday by kicking out Bolivia's envoy to the United States.
"In response to unwarranted actions and in accordance with the Vienna Convention (on diplomatic protocol), we have officially informed the government of Bolivia of our decision to declare Ambassador Gustavo Guzman persona non grata," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said. Diplomats declared "persona non grata" are generally given 72 hours to depart.
Earlier on Thursday, Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca told reporters that he had requested U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg's expulsion but added that he also wrote Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to say Bolivia "wishes to maintain bilateral relations."
Morales had accused Goldberg of conspiring with Bolivia's conservative opposition. Goldberg met last week with Santa Cruz Gov. Ruben Costas, one of the Bolivian president's most virulent opponents.
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, in a show of solidarity with his ally Morales, gave the U.S. ambassador to his country, Patrick Duddy, 72 hours to leave and announced the recall of Venezuela's ambassador to Washington. Chavez also once again accused the United States of backing a coup to overthrow him, a claim the U.S. has repeatedly denied. "That's enough ... from you, Yankees," Chavez said during a televised rally, using an expletive. Waving his fists in the air, he added: "I hold the government of the United States responsible for being behind all the conspiracies against our nations!" The conflict in Bolivia centers on Morales' plans to redo the constitution and redirect gas revenues. Bolivia's conservative, energy-rich eastern provinces oppose those plans, and on Thursday two weeks of protests turned violent as demonstrators stormed public offices, blocked roads and seized the gas fields. Eight people were killed in a clash between pro- and anti-government bands outside Cobija, capital of the eastern province of Pando, said Sacha Llorenti, a deputy minister for social movements. Presidential spokeswoman Nancy Teixera said at least 20 people were injured. Radio reports said the groups fought with clubs, machetes and shotguns. Interior Minister Alfredo Rada confirmed the use of firearms. The protests forced the closure of various regional airports, and American Airlines canceled all flights to Bolivia. Company spokeswoman Martha Pantin said it expected flights to resume beginning Sunday. Bolivia's finance minister, meanwhile, said gas deliveries to Brazil would be curtailed by 10 percent for up to two weeks as workers fix a pipeline ruptured by protesters on Wednesday. Bolivia supplies Brazil with 50 percent of its natural gas. Brazilian state energy company Petrobras said it has adopted a contingency plan to decrease natural gas use in its units and replace gas with other fuels. Protesters also stormed Bolivia's Pocitos gas installation, which supplies neighboring Argentina. Plant technicians shut off gas to the country as a precautionary measure, an engineer at Pocitos told The Associated Press. An executive with Transportadora Gas del Norte, the Argentine pipeline company that receives the Bolivian gas, said the gas flow was unaffected, however. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not authorized to comment on the matter. Opposition groups also are demanding that Morales cancel a Dec. 7 nationwide vote on a new constitution that would help him centralize power, run for a second consecutive term and transfer fallow terrain to landless peasants from Bolivia's poor indigenous majority. A top aide to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said high-ranking members of his government and that of Argentina are ready to go to Bolivia to try to negotiate a deal between Morales and his opponents. Also on Thursday, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega announced his support for Bolivia's decision to expel Goldberg, while Chavez threatened military intervention if Morales were to be overthrown. "It would give us a green light to begin whatever operations are necessary to restore the people's power," he said. -------- Associated Press writers Marco Sibaja in Brasilia, Brazil; Bradley Brooks in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Alan Clendenning in Sao Paulo, Brazil; Frank Bajak in Bogota, Colombia; Ian James in Caracas, Venezuela; and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this reportSource: www.truthout.org/article/dispute-over-bolivias-natural-gas-resources-sparks-diplomatic-crisis
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Oct 1, 2008 16:03:09 GMT 4
The Pentagon's new Africa command raises suspicions about U.S. motivesOne can't help but feel immense sorrow for the peoples of Africa. The uprisings in many locations and the violence associated with them have always, one way or another, been sparked and fueled by outside interests from developed countries who have their eyes on the richness of Africa's mineral resources. They secretly incite chaos and mayhem in order to setup conditions favorable to the plundering of African nations. I look toward the time when the continent of Africa throws off the shackles of controlling interests and takes her rightful place as a free and beautiful spot on our globe where her children live happy and creative lives...Michelle The Pentagon's new Africa command raises suspicions about U.S. motivesBy Shashank Bengali | McClatchy Newspapers Monday, September 29, 2008 NAIROBI, Kenya — The U.S. Africa Command, the Pentagon's first effort to unite its counterterrorism, training and humanitarian operations on the continent, launches Wednesday amid questions at home about its mission and deep suspicions in Africa about its intentions. U.S. officials have billed the new command, known as Africom, as a sign of Africa's strategic importance, but many in Africa see it as an unwelcome expansion of the U.S.-led war on terrorism and a bid to secure greater access to the continent's vast oil resources. Several countries have refused to host the command, and officials say Africom will be based in Stuttgart, Germany, for the foreseeable future. U.S.-based aid groups and some in Congress have expressed worries that Africom will tilt U.S policy in Africa away from democracy-building and economic development and toward security objectives such as stemming the growth of militant Islamist groups in Somalia and North Africa, some of which have ties to al Qaida. U.S. covert operations in Somalia and elsewhere have fueled the controversy. In late 2006, the U.S. military provided intelligence to help Ethiopia topple a fundamentalist Islamic regime in Somalia, an invasion that's fueled a violent Islamist insurgency. U.S. forces have since launched several strikes on suspected terrorist targets in Somalia. While one of the strikes killed a top militant commander, Aden Hashi Ayro, in May, Somalis say the attacks also killed and badly wounded civilians. Underlining the skepticism in Washington, the House of Representatives voted last week to provide $266 million to fund Africom's first year of operations — $123 million less than President Bush had requested. The House Appropriations Committee said the reduction was due partly to "the failure to establish an Africom presence on the continent." The fledgling command's image problem, at home and abroad, is cause for concern because of Africa's growing importance to the United States. The Department of Energy says that 17 percent of U.S. crude oil imports now come from Africa, more than the U.S. gets from Persian Gulf countries. But rising powers such as China have strengthened their ties with Africa and become a powerful counterweight to American influence. Pentagon officials reject claims that Africom is about oil or China, but those perceptions remain strong in Africa. "Obviously the U.S. is concerned about China's influence, security, oil, counterterrorism, hunting down al Qaida suspects," said Erin Weir of Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group that's opposed Africom. "Africans read the newspaper just the same as we do, and they know what drives U.S. interests now." Witney Schneidman, who served as deputy assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton administration, said: "In many parts of Africa it is perceived as the U.S. bringing its war on terror to Africa. That is not what Africom is about, but that is how it has been seen." While the public face of the U.S. military in Africa has been that of a benign partner, human rights activists say that the Bush administration's focus on terrorism has fueled suspicion of Africom. "Anything to do with the U.S. military evokes some level of anxiety," said Hassan Omar, a member of the independent Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. "There is a strong feeling that America would overlook a crisis within a government or violations by certain governments if only they could secure more cooperation on matters of security."After Bush announced the creation of Africom in February 2007, the Pentagon began issuing mixed messages about its mission, with some officials suggesting that the new command would help "coordinate" U.S. policy in the region. Experts immediately questioned whether U.S. troops would participate in humanitarian programs and other non-combat operations that have long been run by the State Department and U.S. embassies. Pentagon officials have acknowledged mistakes in marketing Africom, and they no longer list humanitarian projects as part of its mission. Instead, they say that Africom will support other U.S. government agencies and focus on helping bolster African militaries."Africom will support, not shape, U.S. foreign policy on the continent," Teresa Whelan, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs, told a congressional hearing in July. About 1,300 people, divided roughly evenly between civilian and military positions, are expected to staff the Germany headquarters, but no additional soldiers will be deployed in Africa yet. Instead, Africom will take charge of small U.S. military teams that are already on the continent training national militaries and maritime agencies, providing immunizations, drilling wells, rebuilding schools and conducting other projects. Africom will assume control over the largest U.S. military base in the region, the 1,500-strong Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa, housed at a former French Foreign Legion facility in the tiny eastern nation of Djibouti. Despite the questions about its mission, experts say that Africom will raise Africa's profile in the Pentagon. Currently, three separate regional "combatant commands," which manage overseas U.S. military operations, share responsibility for Africa. The U.S. Central Command oversees seven countries in East Africa, Pacific Command has three Indian Ocean island nations and European Command handles 42 other African countries from Morocco to South Africa. Now all the countries — except Egypt, which will continue to be grouped with Middle Eastern nations under the Central Command — will fall under Africom's jurisdiction. As with the other regional commands, Africom's commander, four-star Army Gen. William E. "Kip" Ward, reports to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. "One of the basic problems of U.S. engagement with Africa historically is there's been a lack of a long-term, sustained and steady commitment," said Abiodun Williams, a Sierra Leonean who's vice president of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington. "One of the positive things about Africom is this might finally be changing." Source: www.mcclatchydc.com/117/story/53234.html
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michelle
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Post by michelle on Oct 25, 2008 14:06:32 GMT 4
A global showing of the concept of Oneness [see: airdance.proboards50.com/index.cgi?board=oneness&action=display&thread=207&page=1#3165 ]I would have liked to seen a better showing from the Americas and Europe but those positioned the best are usually the last to fall in line....MDEVELOPMENT: Now Sit Up and ListenAnalysis by Sanjay Suri LONDON, Oct 23 (IPS) - For every one in 50 people around the world to make a point of standing up somewhere on the planet to say the same kind of thing adds up to a lot of people. More than any mass mobilisation on any issue ever before. And now that they have, it should follow for leaders, if only for their own sake, to sit up and listen. The official figure for the campaign to 'Stand Up and Take Action against Poverty and for the Millennium Development Goals' Oct. 17-19 has been declared at 116,993,629. The call came from the Global Call for Action Against Poverty (GCAP), an alliance of about 100 social movements, non-government organisations and community and faith groups. This was considerably more than the 43 million recorded last year. But the actual number is almost certainly higher than this official figure, says Salil Shetty, director of the U.N. Millennium Campaign. The official total was announced while results, after due verification, were still coming in, he said, adding that the number that actually stood up would be about twice the 67 million estimated before the weekend event. Organisers say two percent of the world population physically stood up to make a point against poverty. Actions ranged from standing up to deliver petitions to presidents or at local events where city mayors and other officials were invited to listen, to protest marches and meetings where everyone stood up to make a point. The protest gave quite vivid truth to the old cliché about local actions, carried out globally -- this time about similar matters, simultaneously. The added support for the campaign against poverty might just have been provoked by the global financial crisis, that has seen thousands of billions of dollars go into financial institutions brought down by dubious dabblers, after the leaders who sanctioned this money denied a fraction of that to feed the world's hungry. "If the rich countries kept their promise of 0.7 percent of their GNP for aid, that would generate more than 200 billion dollars, more than enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and is still much, much less than we've seen available for the banking bailout," Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and former U.N. high commissioner for human rights declared as the results came in Wednesday. "The money is there. But it's the political will. Leaders must listen to more than 116 million people," she said. "We have shattered all previous records for mass mobilisation. People really want to stand up against poverty, and say we need change." The highest number of people who stood up, 73 million, was recorded in Asia, with 13 million reported in Bangladesh alone. Africa recorded about 24.5 million, and less expectedly, what was declared the 'Arab region' recorded close to 18 million. Europe recorded close to a million, but Latin America only about 211,000. North America seems not to have drawn a significant response at all -- though the movement was led and coordinated from New York. The initiative is not just about numbers, but a way to make protest possible. "We've created an opportunity for ordinary people to have a voice and to participate and to feel that they are not just objects of change but really the drivers of change," said Kumi Naidoo, co-chair of GCAP and honorary president of CIVICUS, a leading global NGO campaigning for rights and development. "We've created a global event which is fundamentally local in nature," he said at a press conference after the attendance count. "My sense of why there was such an overwhelming turnout is that there is deep concern that the global economic crisis must not detract from meeting the MDGs, and exceeding them." The attention to the money market crisis rather than to the MDGs clearly spurred a good deal of the protest action. For the food crisis the leaders struggled to pledge eight billion dollars, for the financial crisis they found 3,000 billion dollars, said Sylvia Borren, former head of Oxfam Novib and co-chair of Worldconnectors, an NGO building links among people. "There is an ethical question here. If we had used that money at the bottom of the pyramid we would have achieved the MDGs by now." In this protest, "the urgency is the message." The participation in the protest, she said, is "a democratic challenge for local governments, for national governments, but particularly also for the global governance we have, that says we the people do not understand that this kind of money can be spent on the Wall Street problem when children are dying every three seconds and women are dying at childbirth unnecessarily every minute." Source: ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44421
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