US debt could trigger dollar collapse, UN warns

The United States dollar is facing imminent collapse in the face of an unsustainable debt, the United Nations warned today.

United States debt, which had now deepened to well over $3 trillion, might turn out to be unsustainable in the rest of 2007 or next, putting further downward pressure on the United States dollar, Rob Vos, the Director of the Development Policy and Analysis Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), told correspondents at a Headquarters press conference.

Cindy Sheehan: Twin Towers’ Collapse Looked Like Controlled Demolition
Anti-war icon supports move for new investigation into 9/11

Prison Planet | May 31, 2007
Paul Joseph Watson

Anti-war icon Cindy Sheehan has gone public on her support for the 9/11 truth movement after she told a radio show that the collapse of the twin towers looked like a controlled demolition and that there should be a new investigation into the terrorist attacks.

Sheehan, who made headlines this week after she distanced herself from the Democratic party and the establishment left, joined Alex Jones to share her views on her skepticism towards the official 9/11 story.

Sheehan said her decision to desert the Democrats was sparked last week when the Iraq war funding bill was passed and it was at this point she realized the Democrats had co-opted her simply to help them regain Congress and that they had no interest in ending the war.

Sheehan attacked Hillary Clinton as a ‘warhawk and a ‘warmonger’ and said there was very little distinction between her and John McCain or Rudy Giuliani.

On 9/11, Sheehan expressed her support for the Jersey Girl’s petition, which calls for a new independent investigation of the terrorist attacks, slamming the 9/11 Commission Report as a ‘total travesty”

Neocon Godfather: Bush to Bomb Iran Before Leaving Office

by Kurt Nimmo
Monday May 28, 2007

In normal, non-Bushzarro times, a man calling for mass murder would be held in contempt, not held up as an example of the political mainstream and heralded as a “distinguished author.” However, as we are well astride of the Bushzarro era, Norman Podhoretz is provided with a venue—for the proper audience, of course—to advocate the destruction of Iran and the murder of possibly thousands of its citizens. “I believe,” Podhoretz told the Israel Broadcast Authority on May 24 (see video below), “contrary to what many people assume, that [Bush] will [attack Iran] before he leaves office, possibly shortly before he leaves office,” thus leaving the political fallout to the incoming president, more than likely a Democrat. “I think he agrees with the analysis that I offer that there is no alternative to military action.”

Of course, in order to sell this invasion of a sovereign nation, based on illusory claims the mullahs of Iran are in the process of building a nuclear bomb to use against Israel—a crackpot theory but one that remarkably has gained a degree of credence in the United States—Podhoretz and the neocons have erected an elaborate if preposterous edifice to support their Brothers Grimm fable about Iran.

“As the currently main center of the Islamofascist ideology against which we have been fighting since 9/11, and as (according to the State Department’s latest annual report on the subject) the main sponsor of the terrorism that is Islamofascism’s weapon of choice, Iran too is a front in World War IV. Moreover, its effort to build a nuclear arsenal makes it the potentially most dangerous one of all,” Podhoretz writes for the June issue of Commentary Magazine. “I call this new war World War IV, because I also believe that what is generally known as the cold war was actually World War III, and that this one bears a closer resemblance to that great conflict than it does to World War II. Like the cold war, as the military historian Eliot Cohen was the first to recognize, the one we are now in has ideological roots, pitting us against Islamofascism, yet another mutation of the totalitarian disease we defeated first in the shape of Nazism and fascism and then in the shape of Communism; it is global in scope; it is being fought with a variety of weapons, not all of them military; and it is likely to go on for decades.”

The Art of War for the Antiwar Movement
by Scott Ritter

…It is not enough to win a battle against the pro-war movement; the anti-war movement needs to win the war of ideologies. As such it must not only prepare to win a particular fight, but to exploit that victory, massing its forces against any developed weakness, and drive the pro-movement into the ground and off the American political map once and for all.

I have indicated my willingness to apply my training and experience as a warrior in a manner which helps teach the principles of the art of war to those who call themselves part of the anti-war movement. There seems to be not only a need for this sort of training, but also a desire among the myriad of individuals and groups who comprise the anti-war movement for an overall coordinated strategic direction, operational planning, and tactical execution of agreed upon mission objectives. One can be certain that the pro-war movement is conducting itself in full accordance with these very same organizational principles and methodologies. And let there be no doubt: the pro-war movement in America is prevailing. In order to gain the upper hand politically, and actually position itself to stop not only those wars already being fought (Iraq), but also prevent those being planned (Iran), the anti-war movement will need to re-examine in totality the way it does business. I for one am ready to assist. However, in writing this essay, I am constantly reminded of the old saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” One can only hope that the anti-war movement is thirsty…

Neo-Cons To Plot Iran Strategy Amid Caribbean Luxury
by Jim Lobe, lobelog.com

For those of you who may be visiting the Bahamas next week, you may want to check out a private, off-the-record meeting of Gulf and Middle East specialists of a rather narrow ideological bent at Westin’s luxurious Our Lucaya Resort on Grand Bahama Island. The meeting takes place May 30 to June 1.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neo-conservative group created two days after the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, is holding what it calls “a policy workshop” during Congress’ Memorial Day recess, no doubt to plot strategy for moving U.S. policy toward Iran in a direction compatible with its confrontational views.

The Republican Plan For 2008 Begins Today
by Thom Hartmann

It’s difficult to watch Democrats play checkers while Republicans play chess with Iraq. It’s particularly difficult on Memorial Day as more Americans and Iraqis die. But the Republican Party has been playing politics with Iraq since the day after the Supreme Court installed George W. Bush in office in 2001, and they have no intention of stopping now. They may have borrowed some techniques from Richard Nixon, but they have no intention of repeating his mistakes.

The political calculus being pursued by Karl Rove and the Republican Party with regard to Iraq and the 2008 elections is a simple four-step process:

1. Shift “ownership” of the downside of the “war” and occupation of Iraq to the Democrats.
2. Begin to wind down American involvement in the occupation of Iraq no later than mid-2008.
3. “Claim victory and get out” of direct combat in Iraq by the early fall of 2008.
4. Win big in the 2008 elections by having “won” a “war.”

CENTCOM Commander’s Veto Sank Bush’s Threatening Gulf Buildup – CommonDreams.org – Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON – Admiral William Fallon, then President George W. Bush’s nominee to head the Central Command (CENTCOM), expressed strong opposition in February to an administration plan to increase the number of carrier strike groups in the Persian Gulf from two to three and vowed privately there would be no war against Iran as long as he was chief of CENTCOM, according to sources with access to his thinking.

Fallon’s resistance to the proposed deployment of a third aircraft carrier was followed by a shift in the Bush administration’s Iran policy in February and March away from increased military threats and toward diplomatic engagement with Iran. That shift, for which no credible explanation has been offered by administration officials, suggests that Fallon’s resistance to a crucial deployment was a major factor in the intra-administration struggle over policy toward Iran.”

“Dick Cheney: Visions of Mushroom Clouds
by Jeff Huber, zenhuber.blogspot.com
Dick Cheney is still up to his old tricks. Two Sundays ago, in an interview with Bob Schieffer, old Last Throes said:

The fact is that the threat to the United States now of a 9/11 occurring with a group of terrorists armed not with airline tickets and box cutters, but with a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our own cities, is the greatest threat we face. It’s a very real threat. It’s something that we have to worry about and defeat every single day.

This rhetoric hearkens back to the boo noise administration hawks made during the run up to the Iraq invasion when then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said, ‘We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.’ The mushroom cloud trick is as much of a canard now as it was then, and most Americans have caught on to it. But the administration’s propaganda target isn’t ‘most’ Americans. The inheritors of the Party of Abraham Lincoln don’t aim to fool all of he people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time. They just want to fool enough of the people enough of the time to keep Congress from blocking their agenda.”

Pen and Sword: Iraq, Fred Kagan and the “Krazies”

“Whether the surge succeeds, fails or fall somewhere in between, there’s no need to plan ahead to the next step because it’s too soon to tell what that next step might need to be. We can’t predict now what things will look like in the fall, when U.S. commander in Iraq General David Petraeus is scheduled to report on the surge progress to Congress. So there’s no sense revisiting alternate plans proposed in late 2006–they’ll be irrelevant in 2007. Kagan tells us we especially don’t want to revert to that darn old Iraq Study Group (ISG) proposal. It won’t make any sense at all come this fall, according to Kagan.”

Israeli Dissident and Political Refugee Reuven Schossen Seeks Asylum in US

It’s all very cloak and dagger, regrettably. Last summer, I got into a public debate with fellow members of the American Jewish Community. (I’m half Jewish by birth.) I argued that it was foolish for us to pretend that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other powerful Zionist organizations are any less fundamentalist or supremacist than the Christian and Muslim strains of the same racist and theocratic disease plaguing Earth. One of the many responses to my long critique of Jewish Fundamentalism came from Israeli dissident Reuven Schossen, a recognized Israeli political refugee living in Bolivia. His was a voice crying in the wilderness:

‘Your article has been forwarded to me and I have read it with interest and fear. Interest because of its connection to my work; fear because it was given to me by people belonging to organizations who tried to wrong me in the past due to my open anti-Israeli ideas.

I am an Israeli citizen, Jewish by ethnic group, Christian by religion. As far as I know, I am as well the first Jewish-Israeli refugee recognized by a sovereign country. I guess the others (like Mordecai Vanunu) were less lucky or less resourceful when the Moment of Truth arrived. Unlike Vanunu, I did not violate Israeli laws; I have been persecuted due to my ideas…

4. … My country, Israel, does not have a constitution and thus its many discriminatory laws are legal. I would like to see a change here.
5. The USA has a beautiful Constitution. Please explain to me – or better to the American citizens – how can you be giving away six billion dollars per year to a country which doesn’t secure even the most basic rights to its citizens. That means one thousand dollars per head per year. Should I add that the money goes mainly to the fifty families running the state?’”