from
No QuarterThis:
And not only that. It is as if Scooter Libby were back writing lead editorials for the Washington Post, the Pravda of this administration. The Post’s lead editorial on Aug. 21 regurgitated the allegations that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq;” that it is “waging war against the United States and trying to kill as many American soldiers as possible.” Designating Iran a “specially designated global terrorist” organization, said the Post, “seems to be the least the United States should be doing, giving the soaring number of Iranian-sponsored bomb attacks in Iraq.”
As for the news side of the Post, which is widely perceived as a bit freer from White House influence, its writers are hardly immune. For example, they know how many times the draft National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear program has been sent back for redrafting…and they know why. Have they been told not to write the story?
For good measure, the indomitable arch-neocon James Woolsey has again entered the fray. He was trotted out on August 14 to tell Lou Dobbs that the US may have no choice but to bomb Iran in order to halt its nuclear weapons program. Woolsey, who has described himself as the “anchor of the Presbyterian wing of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs,” knows what will scare. To Dobbs:
“I’m afraid within, well, at worst, a few months; at best, a few years; they could have the bomb.” As for what Bush is telling his counterparts among our allies, reporting on his recent meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy are disquieting, to say the least.
Reports circulating in European foreign ministries indicate that Sarkozy came away convinced that Bush “is serious about bombing Iran’s secret nuclear facilities,” according to well-connected journalist Arnauld De Borchgrave. the rest... and
this:
Day after day, almost hour by hour, fresh confirmation comes of the impending American attack on Iran. Yet the same surreal malaise that hung over public affairs before the war of aggression against Iraq has descended again. Everyone knows the war is coming and nothing will stop it, but the strange, ludicrous shadow play of sham “debate” goes on, as if there were some kind of political or diplomatic maneuver out there that could deflect the Bush-Cheney junta from its long-chosen course. But nothing will stop them, just as nothing — not even 10 million people in the streets around the world, the largest protest in human history — stopped them from the rape of Iraq. It’s what they want to do — and they will do it.
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I have no inside connections anywhere, but I do have a couple of friends who do. And one of them reported last week that one of his friends — with good sources among the Establishment, including the White House — also confirms that the attack on Iran is a done deal, “just a matter of time.” Awaiting, no doubt, that post-Labor Day “rollout of product.” Cole also points us to the story by Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane, who reported on the study by two respected British academics on the likely course of the coming war. According to Dr. Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and Martin Butcher, former Director of the British American Security Information Council, the war preparations now being made by the Bush Administration bespeak something far beyond a quick punitive strike on Iranian Guards positions or lightning raid on Iran’s nuclear power facilities. Instead, what the Bush-Cheney junta envision is the complete destruction of the Iranian state in an aerial blitzkrieg aimed at up to 10,000 targets inside Iran. The goal, says Plesch and Butcher, is to:
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The assault will most likely be made with conventional weapons, the authors say, as the political and environmental effects of a nuclear strike on Iran would not be worth the limited military value of such an attack. After all, the Bushists want to control Iran and milk it dry after they destroy the regime and slaughter a vast number of innocent people. Halliburton and Exxon wouldn’t be able to move right in and start gobbling up loot in a radiated land.This is what is coming. This is what the Bushists will be selling to us soon. (Glenn Greenwald has a useful roundup of the growing madness here.) One sees comments here and there to the effect that “the American people will never accept this,” that “Bush can’t get away with this kind of thing after Iraq,” or that “this isn’t 2002, with everyone still raw and dazed after 9/11,” etc., etc. But such declarations are pipe-dreams, foolish hopes. As we have pointed out here many times, Bush and Cheney are not interested in obtaining the “consent of the governed” for their militarist agenda — nor do they need it. Congress has already given its overwhelming approval to the specious reasons for war that Bush and his minions have advanced. The corporate media is doing its part again too; for example, the media’s flagship, the New York Times, has been “stovepiping” warmongering spin straight from the White House and Pentagon onto its front pages — exactly as it did in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, and even using the same reporter,Michael Gordon, who with his co-writer Judith Miller was reponsible for the dissemination of so many useful lies. The same system that fed the engines of aggressive war in 2002-03 — reporter gets spin from Bushists, paper prints spin, Bushists then cite the report as “confirmation” of the lies they themselves concocted — is in operation now.Unless the Bushists insBut let us bear witness to the truth while we can still speak the truth: this is murder. And all those who do not speak out against it — and against all those in high places who do nothing to stop it — are fully complicit in this abomination. No excuses, no mitigation, not this time. Speak out — or be damned with the criminals who thrive on your silence.
This is some scary shit people - why are there only 50,000 signatures on
this??