Kucinich Requests Investigation into “Executive Assassination Ring”

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Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Washington, Mar 16, 2009

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) Friday sent a letter to Chairman Edolphus Towns of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee requesting an immediate investigation into allegations made by the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh that the White House operated an ‘executive assassination ring’ that circumvented Congressional oversight.

Kucinich explains in the letter that, “Mr. Hersh made the allegation before an audience at the University of Minnesota on Tuesday, March 10, 2009. He stated, ‘Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving… It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. . .Congress has no oversight of it.'”

America’s Search for the “Good Taliban” by Tom Burghardt

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by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, March 15, 2009
AntiFascist Calling…

Reminiscent of a casting call for “America’s Next Top Model,” the Obama administration has embarked on a search for the ever-elusive “good Taliban” with whom it can negotiate a partial military climb-down.

In an exclusive–and revealing–March 8 interview with The New York Times, President Barack Obama declared that the United States “was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.”

Reflecting desperation and ignorance when it comes to the war-scarred Central Asian nation, like its Republican predecessor, the Democratic administration has failed to come to grips with ubiquitous facts on the ground.

Turkey Hosts NATO military exercise (13-30 March)

compiled by Cem Ertür
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
16 March, 2009

1) Egemen 2009 NATO military exercises (*)

2) Taurus Navy Task Force sets sail

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http://turkishnavy.blogspot.com/2009/03/egemen-2009.html

excerpt from: Egemen 2009

Bosphorus Naval News, 15 March 2009

This week a multinational military exercise called Egemen-2009, will start in Turkey.

There is absolutely nothing on the Turkish news and defence portals about this exercise and about the participants except the fact that this exercise will happen. Therefore it is very difficult to determine the exact order of battle.

Among the participants are Taurus 2009 task force of Royal Navy, undisclosed Dutch, French and US warships.

10 of these warships, 5 Dutch, 4 US and 1 British, are in Aksaz Naval Base in Marmaris. HMS Bulwark is in town of Marmaris. HMS Ocean and RFA Mounts Bay are in Kusadasi. […]

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from the archives:

http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/MilitaryOperations/TaurusNavyTaskForceSetsSail.htm

excerpts from: Taurus Navy Task Force sets sail

UK Ministry of Defence website, 18 February 2009

The Taurus deployment […] aims to maintain the Royal Navy’s fighting capability as well as develop the UK’s capacity to operate with key partners and allies from NATO countries and other nations to enhance interoperability.

It will also demonstrate the UK’s commitment to the stability and security of the Mediterranean, Middle East and South East Asia. […]

The Taurus deployment will be split into two phases. Phase One will involve amphibious training with nations in the Mediterranean, culminating in a series of amphibious landings in Turkey as part of Exercise Egemen – a joint and combined exercise. […]

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(*) According to the website of the Turkish General Staff, Egemen 2009 military exercises occur from March 13 to 30.

see

Iran sought Turkey’s help to mend links with US, says Erdogan (updated)

Turkey prepares to assume a more significant role in Afghanistan

NATO

The Financial Sector: “A House Burning Down” by Prof. Michael Hudson

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by Prof. Michael Hudson
Global Research, March 16, 2009

Ben Bernanke’s False Analogy

On the March 15 CBS show “60 Minutes”, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke used a false analogy already popularized by President Obama in his quasi-State of the Union Speech. He likened the financial sector to a house burning down – fair enough, as it is destroying property values, leading to foreclosures, abandonments, stripping (for copper wire and anything else recoverable) and certainly a devastation of value. The problem with this analogy was just where this building was situated, and its relationship to “other houses” (e.g., the rest of the economy).

Mr. Bernanke asked what people should do if an irresponsible smoker let his bed catch fire so that the house burned down. Should the neighbor say, “it’s his fault, let the house burn”? That would threaten the whole neighborhood with fire, Mr. Bernanke explained. The implication, he spelled out, was that economic recovery required a strong banking and financial system. And this is just what he said: The economy cannot recover without yet more credit and debt. And that in turn requires trillions and trillions of dollars given by “the neighbors” to the bad irresponsible man who burned down his own house. This is where the analogy goes seriously off track.

Marc Faber: In Thailand we grow good stuff

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peacespeech

Marc Faber [when] asked about investing in farmland said that they have a farmland in New Zealand and there they don’t grow hashish but in northern Thailand “they” (people?) grow good stuff.

Pepe Escobar: How the world pimps America

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TheRealNews

Bernanke’s Witness Protection Program By Mike Whitney

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By Mike Whitney
March 16, 2009 “Information Clearing House”

Welcome to the TALF

Fed chief Ben Bernanke’s new funding facility is a real doozy. In fact, if the Term Asset-Backed Loan Facility or TALF, which is set to launch on Thursday, doesn’t convince the American people that it’s time to take a wrecking ball to the Central Bank and start over, than nothing will. Bernanke and his co-conspirator at Treasury, Timothy Geithner, are planning to revive the shadow banking system by dumping $2 trillion into the same over-leveraged, derivatives-based garbage that blew up the financial system in the first place. All the blabbering about a “good bank-bad bank” remedy appears to have been a diversion. This is how Bloomberg sums it up:

“Geithner’s program has three main elements: Injecting fresh government capital into some of the country’s biggest financial institutions; establishing a public-private partnership to handle as much as $1 trillion of banks’ bad assets; and starting a credit facility with the Federal Reserve of as much as $1 trillion to promote lending to consumers and businesses.

The Treasury hopes to unfreeze credit markets by providing new incentives to banks and investors to resume trading in mortgage securities and other troubled assets. U.S. regulators are conducting a new series of examinations to make sure banks have enough capital to accept losses when selling these assets, while also planning to provide government financing to the investors who might buy them.” (Bloomberg News)

The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment By Robert Freeman

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By Robert Freeman
ICH
March 16, 2009 “Commondreams”

In early 1919, Germany put in place a new government to begin rebuilding the country after its crushing defeat in World War I. But the right-wing forces that had led the country into the War and lost the War conspired even before it was over to destroy the new government, the “Weimar Republic.” They succeeded.

The U.S. faces a similar “Weimar Moment.” The devastating collapse of the economy after eight years of Republican rule has left the leadership, policies, and ideology of the right utterly discredited. But, as was the case with Germany in 1919, Republicans do not intend to allow the new government to succeed. They will do everything they can to undermine it. If they are successful, the U.S. may yet go the way of Weimar Germany.

[…]

Thanks to Republican policies of massive debt and shipping jobs abroad, the U.S. has technically become a colony of China. It exports raw materials and imports finished goods, together with the capital to make up the difference. Should the Chinese decide not to lend the trillions of dollars the U.S. is begging for, the U.S. economy will implode, plummeting onto itself in a World Trade Center-like collapse that will leave dust clouds circling the planet for decades.

Notwithstanding the destruction inflicted on the economy by Republican policies, the most devastating breakdown is in the intellectual foundation on which right wing economic ideology itself is premised. Free market doctrine, the secular religion of right-wing America, is in utter, irretrievable shambles.

[…]

via The US Is Facing a Weimar Moment

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A Different Kind of Revolution: Obedience to Authority in America By Mike Whitney

Obama’s No Socialist. I Should Know. By Billy Wharton

Michael Parenti: Economic Crisis the Inevitable Result of “Capitalism’s Self-Inflicted Apocalypse”

“America’s Fiscal Collapse – Obama’s Budget Will Impoverish America” Radio Interview with Michel Chossudovsky

The Economy Sucks and or Collapse 2

The False Idol of Unfettered Capitalism by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
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Truthdig
March 16, 2009

When I returned to New York City after nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and the Balkans, I was unsure of where I was headed. I lacked the emotional and physical resiliency that had allowed me to cope as a war correspondent. I was plagued by memories I wanted to forget, waking suddenly in the middle of the night, my sleep shattered by visions of gunfire and death. I was alienated from those around me, unaccustomed to the common language and images imposed by consumer culture, unable to communicate the pain and suffering I had witnessed, not much interested in building a career.

Vigils For Rachel Corrie and Tristan Anderson (+ video)

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From an email from:

Vigils For Rachel Corrie and Tristan Anderson

On March 13, 2009, Tristan Anderson, a U.S. citizen from Oakland, CA, was critically injured when he was shot in the head by a high-velocity tear gas canister fired by the Israeli army.

Tristan was shot while photographing a weekly demonstration against the building of the Apartheid Wall in the West Bank village of Ni’lin. The Wall, which was declared to be illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004, cuts off Ni’lin from much of its agricultural lands. Since 2008, Israel has killed four unarmed Palestinians during these weekly protests: Yousef Amira (17), Ahmed Mousa (10), Arafat Rateb Khawaje (22), and Mohammed Khawaje (20).

This incident comes almost exactly six years after the death of U.S. peaceactivist Rachel Corrie. Rachel was killed by the Israeli military with a Caterpillar bulldozer as she was nonviolently trying to protect a Palestinian home from being destroyed on March 16, 2003.

Tristan’s family has released a statement informing supporters that Tristan’s condition has stabilized and that he has been moved from emergency care to specialized neurological intensive care unit in the Tel Hashomer hospital outside of Tel Aviv. The family is “deeply hopeful that Tristan will recover” and is “looking forward to when he is stable enough that he can return home to the care and comfort of his family and community.”

A Different Kind of Revolution: Obedience to Authority in America By Mike Whitney

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By Mike Whitney
My email exchange with Dr. Bede Vincent Curley
March 16, 2009 “Information Clearing House”

Mike Whitney: I have been beating the same dead horse for three or four years now and many people are getting tired of the endless iterations of collapsing markets, rising unemployment and growing pessimism. What’s needed is a vision of the future and a concrete plan of action, but I don’t have one. So, tell me, what is to be done?

Bede Vincent Curley: I do not know what is to be done in the US…. Thinking people can see that most Americans veer between manic-depression and paranoid-schizophrenia. While they know they are getting kicked around by the rich, there’s such a strong tradition of obedience to authority in America that most people just take it in stride and just get on with their lives. This is a population with an severe “abuse” problem. I compare it to the compulsive behavior among women and children who’ve lived in abusive relationships. The sickness passes from one generation to the next without interruption. It is a condition that has to be treated, which means creating a process where the person can see that the violence being done to them is violence and not love. America is a nation badly in need of therapy.

Feigned Indignation: Of marauding exploiters, their “ethical qualms,” and a new proposal by Jason Miller

by Jason Miller
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Thomas Paine’s Corner
March 16, 2009

[Graphic: Greed by ~Liol]

Since there was little appetite for my recent polemic in which I advocated including necro-cannibalism as an integral part of our strategy to combat ecocide and world hunger, because very few appeared to take note of the fact that it was not my intention to carefully craft an update of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (I was actually hurling a hunk of concrete into the placid waters of the indoctrinated readers’ minds in order to observe the resultant splash and subsequent ripples), and since despite the depth of Homo rapien moral depravity and their sheer indifference to the suffering, murder, mayhem, and destruction that the human collective causes in order to satiate our desires and perpetuate the disease we call civilization, reader response indicated that the thought of eating our “fellow man” was taking things a bit too far, I’m advancing yet another potential solution to the myriad and complex maladies we’ve inflicted upon nonhuman animals, the Earth and ourselves.

Homo rapiens, who, judging by the state of the world, outnumber Homo sapiens by a wide margin, are a self-centered, mean-spirited bunch. Maybe their swarming hordes can get behind an idea that saves their asses, eases what little conscience they have, requires little or no risk or effort on their part, and doesn’t involve the possibility of their cherished grandmas winding up as hotdogs rather than worm fodder or cinders.

Flesh, flesh everywhere, Nor any morsel to eat… by Jason Miller

by Jason Miller
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Thomas Paine’s Corner
March 16, 2009

“Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.” Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)

“Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink” Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Niger, a toddler’s mother shoos annoyingly persistent flies away from her precious child’s mouth and eyes in a futile attempt to ease his suffering in some way—his emaciated face and distended belly portend his imminent death. Even when she manages to find food or water and gives him a bit, he immediately vomits it back up. He will soon become another of the 15 million nameless, faceless children who will die of starvation this year.

Haitians lob Molotov cocktails, burn tires, smash windows, and pelt riot police with rocks in a desperate demand for something more than “mud cookies” to satiate their hunger. According to the World Health Organization, one third of the human population is well-fed, one third malnourished, and the other third is starving.

In the wealthiest nation on Earth, the mean-spirited “every man for himself” ethos forces lonely, forgotten grandmothers to face the grim choice of buying their medicine or putting meager amounts of food on their table and demands that single working mothers forego paying their utility bills so that their children can eat.

Such abject and profound suffering….and so unnecessary!

Obama’s No Socialist. I Should Know. By Billy Wharton

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By Billy Wharton
ICH
March 16, 2009 “Washington Post”

Charles Freeman: Israeli Lobby Has A Hammer Lock On Discussion & Policy

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VOTERSTHINKdotORG

http://earth2obama.org/

March 15, 2009 CNN

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