House approves Patriot Act renewal - Approval sends measure to Bush's desk before expiration March 7, 2006 (excerpt) http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/07/patriot.act/ WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Congress on Tuesday renewed controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the 2001 law passed weeks after the September 11 attacks to help the government investigate and capture possible terrorists. The approval in the House of Representatives, by a vote of 280-138, sent the measure to President Bush for his signature. The Senate last week voted 89-10 to approve the compromise package, which covers 16 provisions in the act that are set to expire on March 10. clip.. ------- Bush Orders DHS to Create Center for Faith-Based Aid By Spencer S. Hsu March 8, 2006; Page A20 (excerpt) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030702065.html President Bush ordered the Department of Homeland Security yesterday to create a center for faith-based and community initiatives within 45 days to eliminate regulatory, contracting and programmatic barriers to providing federal funds to religious groups to deliver social services, the White House announced last night. clip.. -------- GOP House Panel Votes to Block Ports Deal By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060309/ap_on_go_co/ports_security&printer=1;_ylt=AhP14vbqP5VYum80S5eLxxuMwfIE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3MXN1bHE0BHNlYwN0bWE- In a congressional election-year repudiation of President Bush, a House panel dominated by Republicans voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to block a Dubai-owned firm from taking control of some U.S port operations. Democrats clamored for a vote in the Senate, too. By 62-2, the House Appropriations Committee voted to bar DP World, run by the government of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, from holding leases or contracts at U.S. ports. The landslide vote was the strongest signal yet that more than three weeks of White House efforts to stunt congressional opposition to the deal have not been successful. clip.. ------- Israel will have to act on Iran if UN can't Mar 8, 06 Louis Charbonneau (excerpt) http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyid=2006-03-08T142833Z_01_L08205988_RTRUKOC_0_US-NUCLEAR-IRAN-ISRAEL.xml BERLIN (Reuters) - If the U.N. Security Council is incapable of taking action to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Israel will have no choice but to defend itself, Israel's defense minister said on Wednesday. clip.. -------- Top Bush administration officials warn Iran - Three-pronged approach comes while IAEA discusses nuclear program MSNBC News Services March 7, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11681845/ (excerpt) WASHINGTON - Three top Bush administration officials issued harsh words against Iran on Tuesday, underscoring growing tension over the Middle East nationâs continued refusal to back down on its nuclear program. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both warned of dire consequences if Iran continued its nuclear fuel enrichment, while Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Iranian Revolutionary Guard elements had infiltrated Iraq to cause trouble. clip.. ------- The USS Ronald Reagan deployed in the Persian Gulf SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM February 21, 2006 ABU DHABI - The U.S. Navy has deployed its latest aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. Fifth Fleet said the USS Ronald Reagan has been deployed for maritime security operations in the Gulf region. The nuclear-powered surface vessel headed a carrier group that contains a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers and support ships. ---------- Steve's Note: This article is 6 months old, but pertains to the present, as the end of March is when Israel gave Iran until, to end their nuclear program, as well as the date when the Iranian oil brouse begins. Webster Tarpley: Staged attack to precede war the coming war against Iran 29Sept2005 http://www.daanspeak.com/IranAttack02Eng.html U.S. sends highly qualified units to Iraq Tarpley: In order to deploy to Iran With the demand rising from all sides to pull out the troops, the U.S. will be sending an additional 20,000 soldiers to Iraq any day now, a substantial number considering a total deployment of 153,000 G.I.'s. The 101st Airborne's assignment is described as 'numerous duties, including helping train Iraqi law enforcement", a task that would seem to underestimate this unit. 'The 3rd Brigade "Rakkasans" will be the first 101st Airborne Division combat troops to step into Iraq this fall. They begin flying out this week', reports The Leaf Chronicle of Clarksville, TN on September 16th. The Rakkasans define their mission as follows: 'Deploy within 36 hours worldwide as part of a joint multinational, or unilateral task force and destroy enemy forces or seize and retain terrain, to control land, people and resources.' And as GlobalSecurity confirms, the might of the 101st is not to be taken lightly: 'In August, 1990 the Iraqi Army invaded Kuwait. The US responded by deploying troops to Saudi Arabia. with one the first units to deploy being the 101st. The division fired the first shots of "Desert Storm" by taking out Iraqi radar sites on 17 January 1991. After the ground war began, the 101st was ordered to go deep into Iraq and set up a base of operations for further attacks. During the ground war phase of "Desert Storm," the 101st made the longest and largest Air Assault in history.' In addition, the 101st Airborne assisted in the killing of Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay. Put simply, how plausible is it that an Army unit of this stature has been relegated to such routine duty? Author Webster Tarpley describes a similar situation in one of his articles, which are central to this series. In the article he cites an example from 'the August 18 edition of The Washington Post. Here we are informed by staff writer Bradley Graham that 700 members of the 1st battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division will be going to Iraq soon.' The troops are ostensibly being deployed so as to provide increased security in the wake of an expanding prison population in Iraq. Tarpley: 'To see the absurdity of this cover story, we need only recall that paratroopers are by definition among the most highly trained elite shock troops, whose main purpose is to carry out offensive operations behind the lines of an enemy. To use them for defensive operations is a waste. Unless the Pentagon generals have gone mad as hatters on the tactical plane as well as the strategic one, they would know that the many hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to train a paratrooper will be quickly lost if that trooper is required to act for any length of time as a prison guard, detainee convoy escort, or garrison soldier around a prison. Paratroopers must train as paratroopers or they soon cease to be paratroopers and become useless. These paratroopers and others being shipped to Iraq are earmarked for use in the upcoming attack on Iran, the only possible offensive use for such troops at the present time. The US press is now full of falsifications of this puerile character.' About the deployment of the 101st Airborne Division Tarpley writes DaanSpeak in an email: 'They are getting ready for the punitive expedition into Iran to go down into the bunker systems and blowup the nuclear and scientific capabilities with explosives in a pinpointed way which simply cannoty be done from the air.' Psychological conditioning for war in Iran similar to Iraq According to Western sources, Iran is still years away from the capability to produce a nuclear weapon. 'Iran Is Judged 10 Years From Nuclear Bomb', read the headline in the Washington Post early last month: 'The carefully hedged assessments, which represent consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies, contrast with forceful public statements by the White House.' As witnessed during the lead-up to the war in Iraq, a familiar pattern of exaggerating the military capacity of the enemy is beginning to repeat itself. Another pattern is the lack of evidence: 'Administration officials have asserted, but have not offered proof, that Tehran is moving determinedly toward a nuclear arsenal.' The Sunday Times reports that 'Israel has drawn up secret plans for a combined air and ground attack on targets in Iran if diplomacy fails to halt the Iranian nuclear programme.' The threat of using force in the event that diplomacy fails, is an act in a production on the world stage that we have seen before and are seeing once again. The Hindu, a national newspaper in India, researched the accusations leveled at Iran, including claims about its nuclear capability, for an article that begins with this sentence: 'Barely two years after the United States invaded Iraq in the name of weapons of mass destruction which never existed, the world is being pushed towards a confrontation with Iran on a similarly flawed premise.' Ex-Labour Minister Tony Benn writes: 'Some influential Americans appear to be convinced that the US will attack Iran. Whether they are right or not, the build-up to a new war is taking exactly the same form as it did in 2002. First we are being told that Iran poses a military threat, because it may be developing nuclear weapons. We are assured that the President is hoping that diplomacy might succeed through the European negotiations which have been in progress for some months. This is just what we were told when Hans Blix was in Baghdad talking to Saddam on behalf of the UN, but we now know, from a Downing Street memorandum leaked some months ago, that the decision to invade had been taken long before that. That may be the position now, and I fear that if a US attack does take place, the prime minister will give it his full support. And one of his reasons for doing so will be the same as in Iraq:Ã namely the fear that, if he alienates Bush, Britain's so-called independent deterrent might be taken away. For, as I also learned when I was energy secretary, Britain is entirely dependent on the US for the supply of our Trident warheads and associated technology. They cannot even be targeted unless the US switches on its global satellite system.' Cheney and Rumsfeld warn of second September 11th As we reported in part 1 of this series, the American Vice-President Dick Cheney has directed the Pentagon to draw up plans for a preemptive nuclear strike in the event of a 9-11-style incident. Webster Tarpley points to recent statements made by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld that were remarkably similar to those made by Cheney, though expressed somewhat differently: 'Think constantly and urgently about 10/12, he [Rumsfeld] reportedly tells Pentagon staffers in private meetings -- and what you will wish you had done to prevent it. [...] The 10/12 reference is Rumsfeld's epigrammatic way not of predicting the date of a new terror attack but of emphasizing that the horror of 9/11 is likely to be repeated and augmented. It is a chilling symbol of the broad challenge that Bush must now confront', writes Jim Hoagland in The Washington Post.' Webster Tarpley: Staged act of terrorism to motivate attack on Iran In part 1 of this series Webster Tarpley points to the phrase 'another 9/11-type terrorist attack' as it appears in an article by ex-CIA agent Philip Giraldi, who sees such an attack as a precondition for war against Iran. Tarpley writes: 'It is evident that such a determined warmonger as Cheney is hardly likely to leave the coming of that indispensable terrorist provocation to chance: the terror event that provides the pretext for war must be an integral part of the plan being pushed through the US bureaucracy by the secret government, their spokesmen Bush and Cheney, and the neocon faction in general. We are dealing in short with state sponsored terrorism.' Giraldi writes: 'Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing?that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack? but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.' Tarpley: 'The synthetic terror event required by the Bush-Cheney clique and its masters is likely to be conducted through the US military and intelligence apparatus under the cover of a terror drill or a war exercise. [...] If we catalogue each coup d'etat, high-level political assassination, destabilization, war provocation, and spectacular terrorist event on a world scale over the past 50 years, we will find that almost all of them have been conducted or conduited in whole or in part through the military/intelligence apparatus of the state involved. In many cases, the cover story which has allowed this to be done has taken the form of a military or terrorism maneuver or exercise which closely resembled the actual event which followed, but which masqueraded as a mere drill up to the very last moment.' The war games conducted on September 11th, along with the mock terror drills performed in London on 7/7, are the most obvious examples of this strategy. clip.. ---------- Peoplenomics 3/8/06 www.halfpasthuman.com Bulk ammunition and MRE shortages have apparently arrived in the USA. We expect this will become become a huge story in coming months - one that the future predicting web bot project (www.halfpasthuman.com) has been alluding to for more than a year in a software "entity" called "encounter with scarcity" due to arrive in full force this summer.The military (and not just the US military, I was told) is indeed buying up huge amounts of ammunition. Not the kind of thing I would expect if the war in Iraq was going at all well. I read the ammo part of the story as "more war - bigger war - to come." Iran Nuke Talks - The UN agency charged with overseeing such matters is debating the Iran issue today. The US has made it clear that Iranian enrichment is not an option as far as we're concerned. Speaking of the Fed: You might want to hop on over to the Federal Reserve's web site and download their M-3 data. The report, currently part of the H.6 Money Stock Measures reported weekly is due to "disappear" later this month. Why? Oh, because it shows monetary inflation running double digits. Maybe the Fed has lost control of money? Wanna bet on whether the report will give out preliminary February M-3 numbers before going bye-bye for good? ---------- Shock And Awe II The sequel By Mike Whitney www.informationclearinghouse.com 03/08/06 The Bush administration has unilaterally repealed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by demanding that Iran cease all uranium enrichment. This action overturns the central principle of the treaty which provides states with the âinalienable rightâ (NPT phrase) to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. Two years of intrusive inspections by the UN watchdog agency (IAEA) have not produced âany evidence of nuclear weapons programsâ or any diversion of nuclear material. Nevertheless, the US insists that Iran be deprived of the same right that is afforded to every other signatory of the NPT. clip.. ---------- Retirement Fund Tapped to Avoid National Debt Limit By Stephen Barr March 8, 2006; Page D04 (excerpt) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/07/AR2006030701736.html The Treasury Department has started drawing from the civil service pension fund to avoid hitting the $8.2 trillion national debt limit. The move to tap the pension fund follows last month's decision to suspend investments in a retirement savings plan held by Governmental employees. -------- Republicans propose bill on spy program 3/7/2006 KATHERINE SHRADER (excerpt) http://www.oregonlive.com/newsflash/washington/index.ssf?/base/politics-9/1141770577300310.xml&storylist=washington WASHINGTON (AP) â Several moderate Senate Republicans are coalescing around legislation that would give President Bush's much-discussed domestic surveillance program the force of law, more than four years after the program was secretly initiated. clip.. ------- Senate Republicans block investigation into eavesdropping BY JAMES KUHNHENN Mar. 07, 2006 (excerpt) Knight Ridder Newspapers http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/14041674.htm WASHINGTON -Senate Republicans blocked an investigation into President Bush's secret domestic spying program on Tuesday, but agreed to expand congressional oversight of the surveillance system in the future. At the same time, a group of four Senate Republicans began circulating legislation that would restrict the administration's ability to eavesdrop on U.S. residents without court approval. The legislation would require the administration to obtain warrants to eavesdrop on U.S. residents unless the attorney general certified to House and Senate intelligence subcommittees that seeking court approval would hurt intelligence gathering. Clip.. Steve Note: Notice that they are now suggesting giving Gonzales the same privileges as the FISA Courts. Gonzales as the guardian of the privacy of people is a rubberstamp of all requests. -------- Industry plan would raise power rates 12% - Increase is intended as incentive to spur plant construction By Peter J. Howe, March 7, 2006 http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2006/03/07/industry_plan_would_raise_power_rates_12/ New Englanders would face electric bill increases of 12 percent for the next four years, and undetermined increases after that, under a plan endorsed late yesterday to promote construction of power plants, officials said. The higher payments are intended to strengthen economic incentives for companies to build or expand power plants by 2010, but don't guarantee new construction. clip.. Steve's Note: Big Business Under Bush ='s no holds barred. -------- 3/6/2006 Abortion battle gains new intensity with ban in S.D. By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-06-sd-abortion-ban_x.htm The near-total ban on abortion signed into law Monday in South Dakota sets the stage for renewed battles over abortion rights in courts, legislatures and political campaigns. The new law bans all abortions in the state except to save a woman's life. Under any other circumstances, including rape or incest, performing an abortion would be a crime. clip.. ------- George W. Bush - The man was lost and then he was found and now he's more lost than ever - and he's taking us into the darkness with him. It's time to remove him. By Garrison Keillor (excerpt) http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/03/01/keillor/ The peaceful lagoon that is the White House is designed for the comfort of a vulnerable man. Perfectly understandable, but not what is needed now. The U.S. Constitution provides a simple ultimate way to hold him to account for war crimes and the failure to attend to the country's defense. Impeach him and let the Senate hear the evidence. (Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" can be heard Saturday nights on public radio stations across the country.) --------- Vermont towns want Bush impeached - Towns direct stateâs congressman to file articles over Iraq, spying March 8, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11724797/ NEWFANE, Vt. An impeachment article, approved by a paper ballot 121-29 in Newfane Tuesday, calls on Vermontâs lone member of the U.S. House, independent Rep. Bernie Sanders, to file articles of impeachment against President Bush, alleging he misled the nation into the Iraq war and engaged in illegal domestic spying. -- -- -- FROM THE GREEN MOUNTAINS COMES THE CRY, "IMPEACH HIM!" by Randolph T. Holhut March 8, 2006 http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_randolph_060308_from_the_green_mount.htm In the southern Vermont towns of Newfane, Marlboro, Putney and my hometown of Dummerston, and in the central Vermont town of Brookfield, town meeting voters approved a measure to demand that our Congressman, independent Bernie Sanders, file articles of impeachment to remove Bush from office. clip.. --------- New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson signs legislation requiring paper ballots in elections http://www.wingsofjustice.com/06/03/woj06010.html The sleeper issue of continued GOP one-party rule over America has been the issue of privatized voting machines. New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who served in the Clinton administration, gave hope to Americans who believe that every vote count should be publicly accessible. Last week, he signed a bill that will require the restoration of paper ballots in his state. According to a New Mexico publication, "Richardson has said the new paper ballot system will provide more accountability to the election process and will give voters' confidence that their votes will be correctly recorded." --------- MARCH 2, 2006, AND THEREAFTER Molly Ivins (excerpt) http://www.creators.com/opinion_show.cfm?columnsName=miv AUSTIN, Texas -- The Army announced this week it has decided to reimburse Halliburton for nearly all of the disputed costs in the more than $250 million in charges the Pentagon's own auditors had identified as excessive or unjustified. The Pentagon normally withholds an average of 66 percent of what the auditors recommend. In this case, the Pentagon wound up paying all but 3.8 percent of the disputed costs, a figure so far outside the norm it was noticed immediately. Center for Strategic and International Studies told the New York Times, "To think that it's that near zero is ridiculous when you're talking these kinds of numbers." You may recall Bunnatine Greenhouse, a senior civilian contracting official with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who said the Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) contract was "the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed during the course of my professional career." (Greenhouse was later demoted for her honesty.) Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus." The Army, also awarded the company additional profits and bonuses provided in the no-bid contract. Now comes a new contract for KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, for establishing temporary detention and processing, "in the event of an emergency influx of immigrants into the United States." Canadians drowning from global warming? Mexicans feeling the return of PRI? The detention centers are to "support the rapid development of new programs." New programs? Far be it from me to speculate. How forethoughtful of them to have something in place in case ... a lot of citizens need to be rounded up or something. clip.. ------- PLEASE SIGN THIS 9-11 PETITION March 7, 2006 Scholars for 9-11 Truth. Its purpose is to obtain the release by the government of pertinent 9-11 evidence such as Pentagon surveillance video and tapes seized by the FBI from businesses nearby the Pentagon immediately following the strike. http://st911.org or http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org
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