FAREWELL ZENITH...

An elite team of officers advising the US commander, General David Petraeus, in Baghdad has concluded that they have six months to win the war in Iraq - or face a Vietnam-style collapse in political and public support that could force the military into a hasty retreat.

If the Bush administration, for example, were to insist on a sure "success," then the "attack" would constitute nuclear war. The words in boldface are nuclear war, that's right, nuclear war — a first strike nuclear war.

A weekend of confusion among Democratic senators over possible action on Iraq was capped off by an announcement by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada that the Senate would wait on any Iraq-related legislation.

Take out the batteries !...

The following components to be retained:-

Two broadcast standard copies of all transmitted/published TV, Radio and BBCi output – one to be stored on a separate site as a master

One browse-quality version for research purposes, to protect the broadcast material

While you were being distracted by Anna Nichole Smith......

BBC responds to complaints about its WTC-7 "Prediction"...

One agent said in a sworn affidavit yesterday that Mr. Rust-Tierney has subscribed to various child-pornography Web sites over the past several years.

February 28 (Itar-Tass) - The leader of the Palestinian movement HAMAS, Khaled Meshaal, is finishing his visit to Moscow on Wednesday and planning to travel to Tehran for continuing the discussion of prospects for Middle East settlement.

Meshaal held working consultations and met Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and the Russian president’s representative for Middle East Alexander Saltanov.

The nation has three-quarters of a million homeless people, filling emergency shelters through the year and spilling into special seasonal shelters in the coldest months, the government said Wednesday.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated there were 754,000 homeless people in 2005, including those living in shelters, transitional housing and on the street. That's about 300,000 more people than available beds in shelters and transitional housing.

AP Entertainment Editor Institutes Ban on Paris Hilton Coverage...

The US Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal by a high school teacher from Arizona sentenced to 200 years in jail for possessing child pornography.

The BBC's 9/11 Conspiracy Files: Points Which Were Ignored - includes video...

The European Parliament accused Britain, Poland, Italy and other nations in mid-February of colluding with the CIA to transport terror suspects to clandestine prisons in third countries.

In a report that concluded a yearlong investigation, the parliament identified 1,254 secret CIA flights that entered the European airspace since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

Another Smoking Gun? Now CNN Jumps the Gun: On 911 CNN Announced WTC 7 "Has Either Collapsed or is Collapsing" Over an Hour Before it Fell...

I stand by my original assertion that the shipping version of this OS is late beta, at best. I realize that other enthusiasts are leaving Windows altogether (and leaping instead to Apple’s OS X), but there’s not yet enough momentum behind my willingness to do that. I’ll leave the installs of Vista 32 and 64 on this PC, but I’ll spend most (if not all) of my time back in tried-and-true Windows XP.

So far the BBC's response has been

a) the BBC couldn't have known and therefore they couldn't have reported it. This is a patent falsehood, as the BBC very clearly DID report on it before it happened, as shown by the video,

and

b) that the BBC has lost it's archive footage from that day and so of course they can make no comment.

Listen guys, you've posted the same thing time after time on Blairwatch. We do not believe the theories based on the evidence you present. We're also concerned that you also appear to get a lot of your 'evidence' from neo-nazi sites.

You are welcome to post here on other subjects, but we're bored of the same old story you're spamming us with.

Therefore we will delete any further posts by yourselves on 9/11 and 7/7.

JAPANESE health authorities are investigating a flu medicine that is also available in Australia after a teenager jumped 11 storeys to his death after taking the drug. It was the 18th juvenile fatality linked to Tamiflu in 17 months.

The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare has asked the Japanese importer of Tamiflu, an anti-viral drug regarded as the most important shield against bird flu in humans, to collect information about the conditions of patients who take the drug.

Ontario's fuel shortage spread to Quebec yesterday as efforts to refuel thirsty gasoline stations continued to encounter problems -- including Canadian environmental rules that block imports from a pool of available gasoline just across the U.S. border.

Sales of new homes plunged 16.6% in January to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 937,000, according to the Commerce Department. It is the the biggest percentage decline in 13 years.

Photo found: 'Star of David' a Khazar symbol...

iisraelis disguised as Arabs kill 3 in West Bank...

I'm sure our boys in Iraq with rusted out equipment will be just as thrilled to hear this news as I am.

Despite what Mrs Bush may believe, the Brookings Institution Iraq Index, as of November 2006, states that there are approximately 185 insurgent and militia attacks every day. The fact that maybe only one gets reported on per day is not because there is only one bombing but due to the fact that there is not enough time to cover them all.

Attacks against coalition forces in Iraq averaged nearly 180 a day in January, the highest level since major combat operations ended and more than double the rate one year ago, according to intelligence officials.

The 31-year-old Egyptian-Canadian first planned to visit family in Egypt and then go to Ankara, Turkey, where he once lived and still owns a home. And maybe, he said, he would spend New Year's Eve in Tel Aviv.

But instead of being greeted by relatives after landing in Cairo, Attar was met by Egyptian officials and accused of being a gay Zionist who spied for the Israeli secret service.

A deadly daylight attack on the huge U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney underscores the diminishing American prospects for military success in the region, analysts said yesterday.

The suicide bomb attack at the base front gate - literally on the doorstep of the U.S. military command headquarters in Afghanistan - left the vice president unhurt. But the blast killed 23 people, including two U.S. soldiers, the Associated Press reported. The Taliban, which have mounted increasingly brazen attacks on U.S. and Afghan government troops and facilities, claimed responsibility.

The country is developing weapons of mass destruction; its leader is a new Hitler; he has connections with terrorists; time is running out; containment has failed; we must strike before it is too late.

If you think you have heard it all before, you have. The arguments for an attack on Iran are almost exactly the same as the arguments that were made for an attack on Iraq. The people making the case have not changed either.

The Pentagon is claiming -- again -- the the Iranian government supplied the deadly "explosively formed penetrators" (EFPs). But the more you study these devices -- which use an explosive charge to a convert disc-shaped metal 'lens' into a high-velocity slug capable of smashing through thick armor at an extended range –- the more likely they seem to be home-made in Iraq.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday to put off going to trial in more than 140 civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse by priests.

The petition was lodged with the federal bankruptcy court in San Diego at 11:55 p.m., just hours before the first trial was scheduled to go forward in a San Diego courtroom. A Chapter 11 filing automatically halts court proceedings.

San Diego is the fifth U.S. diocese to file for bankruptcy protection under the shadow of sex abuse claims. With nearly 1 million parishioners, it is also the largest.

Ashtray hardware and Radio Shack electronics. Yeah. This stuff had to come from Iran, all right.

Hypocrisy in the Middle East...

CIA: Bin Laden in Pakistan Establishing New Camps...

At a meeting with a bilateral entrepreneurial organization Tuesday, Mexican President Felipe Calderon criticized the 745-mile, 1.3 billion dollar border wall the US is building to prevent illegal immigration from Mexico.

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Israel’s leadership seems to have blinded itself lately with all sorts of bizarre and criminal behavior.

The United States and the Iraqi government are launching a new diplomatic initiative to invite Iran and Syria to a “neighbors meeting” on stabilizing Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

“We hope that all governments seize this opportunity to improve their relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region,” Rice said in remarks prepared for a Senate hearing.

Time Stamp Confirms BBC Reported WTC 7 Collapse 26 Minutes In Advance...

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Medical Hold Unit say they have been told they will wake up at 6 a.m. every morning and have their rooms ready for inspection at 7 a.m., and that they must not speak to the media.

“Some soldiers believe this is a form of punishment for the trouble soldiers caused by talking to the media,” one Medical Hold Unit soldier said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Some in Congress and others outside the Army are beginning to question the switch, which is not widely known. They wonder whether it means the Army is cutting corners in preparing soldiers for combat, since they are forgoing training in a desert setting that was designed specially to prepare them for the challenges of Iraq.

SE Asia stocks-Markets stage biggest falls since 1997 crisis...

The United States and the Iraqi government are launching a new diplomatic initiative to invite Iran and Syria to a “neighbors meeting” on stabilizing Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday.

U.S. scientists have created a handheld sensing system they liken to Star Trek's "tricorder," used to analyze the chemical compounds of alien worlds.

The instrument is a miniature mass spectrometer combined with a technique called desorption electrospray ionization, or DESI. The device and technique were developed by a team of researchers led by Purdue Professor R. Graham Cooks.

Iran Plans To Nuke Europe, US - Sanctions Urged...

The Department of Defense's number two official appears to imply in a memo that the Global War on Terrorism will end just in time for the presidential election in November 2008. The contents of the document are outlined in a column in today's Washington Post.

Still smarting from Israel's defeat in the July war, the White House and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as well as their friends in the US Congress have been busy tightening the screws on Iran and the Lebanese Resistance. The Lebanese Resistance is led by Hezbollah which Iran, along with virtually the whole of the Middle East, admires for its military achievements in defending Lebanon against Israel, and perhaps equally, for its social, educational, health, housing and infrastructure achievements.

This latter fact alone is a big problem for AIPAC. With an annual budget of $55 million dollars, a paid membership of more than 125,000 and a full time paid staff of 122, with 12 satellite offices around the US, AIPAC is not happy these days. It is not enough for AIPAC that the recent Congressional elections, which increased the number of Zionist Jews in Congress from 26 to 31, is the largest pro-Israel contingent elected to Congress in American history. No, AIPAC is not satisfied.

Nor is AIPAC comforted by the fact that 7 of the 11 key subcommittees in Congress, on just the House side, dealing with the Middle East, Intelligence and Appropriations are now securely under Israel's control.

AIPAC wants more. Having failed in its recent 'hot' war in Lebanon, Israel has unleashed its agents in Congress to destroy Hezbollah with 'cold' war tactics including attacking its social institutions.

Washington University School of Medicine researchers in St. Louis gathered the most extensive evidence to date showing a gene that activates signaling pathways in the brain influences one kind of intelligence.

They report confirming a link between the gene CHRM2 and performance IQ, which involves a person's ability to organize things logically.

Asian stocks slid on Wednesday with Japan and South Korea down nearly 4 percent and Australia off about 3 percent with investors jolted by a tumble in global equity markets.

Asian stock markets have opened sharply lower after the biggest drop in Chinese stocks in a decade triggered a steep slide in global markets.

NIKKEI OPENS, DROPS 640...

401k BOOGA BOOGA!...

Motorists face a potential bill of more than £600 to fit a black box needed to make a full pay-as-you-drive road pricing system work, Whitehall documents have revealed.

Cocheo said he thinks Dow has agreed to enter the fray of the highly publicized case because "he sees it as an injustice that this happened. I think it's a moral issue for him."

Confusion over Iraq soccer explosion - US carried out blast - 18 children dead...

The attachment of American Jews to Israel has weakened measurably in the last two years, a recent survey demonstrates, continuing a long-term trend visible during the past decade and a half.

'You can never find a competent suicide bomber when you need one'

Team member Elizabeth Andre of Ely has been evacuated from the Global Warming 101 Expedition after she suffered frostbitten fingertips...

Virgin Mary on a Pizza Pan?...

Home Prices in Across the Board Decline...

BBC Response to the early report of the WTC7 collapse....

Wall Street takes a beating...

Central banks around the world are continuing to diversify their reserves by cutting their dollar holdings, according to a survey sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland Group.

"Central banks are open to saying they've been diversifying to improve returns and reduce exposure to any single currency," said Sean Callow, senior currency strategist at Westpac Banking in Singapore. "There's no doubt that when they say 'diversification' they mean selling dollars."

Orders for manufactured US durable goods sank 7.8 percent in January, as orders for transportation equipment fell heavily, the Commerce Department said Tuesday.

The sharp drop was more than double what most Wall Street analysts had forecast and suggested further weakness in the US industrial sector.

It is misleading for groups like the CJC to pretend that the Jewish community is united in support of Israel. A growing number of Jews around the world are joining the chorus of concern about the deteriorating condition of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories as well as the inferior social and economic status of Israel's own Palestinian population.

Panic has begun to sweep the sub-prime mortgage sector in the United States after the bankruptcy of 22 lenders over the past two months, setting off mass liquidation of housing loans packaged as securities.

The rapid deterioration could not come at a worse time for British bank HSBC, which has set aside $10.5bn (£5.4bn) to cover bad loans in the US.

The cost of insuring against default on these loans has rocketed in recent weeks, from 50 basis points over Libor to 1,200, raising fears that a credit crunch could spread to the rest of the property market.

A former Army scientist named by investigators as a "person of interest" in the 2001 anthrax attacks, Dr. Steven Hatfill, has settled his $10 million libel suit against Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest after the two magazines agreed to retract any implication that the bioweapons specialist was behind the deadly anthrax mailings.

American Jewish organizations have organized a massive nationwide campaign to call the White House every afternoon for the next two months and request/demand freedom for Pollard. The campaign is to last, if it does not succeed in attaining its goal beforehand, until after Passover, the holiday of freedom.

In this episode, Alive in Baghdad takes you to the children’s ward of Baghdad Hospital, to make visible the plight of some very sick children, stricken with cancer by the presence of Depleted Uranium munitions, left over from the last to US wars in Iraq.

The old greenback has dropped nearly 35% in the last 6 years while gold has just about tripled. In 2000 the dollar was a trim, sinewy pillar of strength. It entered the ring like a young Mohammed Ali; darting to and fro while pummeling his prey with quick laser-like blows that were barely visible. Now, the greenback plods along like a 60 year old Rocky Balboa, wheezing heavily and reeling with every punch; waiting for the one roundhouse that will leave him staring up from the canvas, spitting up broken teeth and blood.

As we noted here a few weeks ago, an oil law giving Bush's crony conquistadors a dominant hold on Iraq's oil has always been the true "benchmark" of victory for the White House. And now it is within reach; the Iraqi parliament will vote on the law next month – with 140,000 American troops parked all around the country, and American bombs falling on the capital.

Gee, wonder which way the vote will go?

"Rent-a-Wife" service draws variety of responses...

The National Security Advisor to former President Carter testified before the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on 1 Feb 2007. Dr.Zbigniew Brzezinski delivered a scathing assessment of the core mistakes made by the Bush administration in the Middle East. Just before describing what he termed the mythical historical narrative of the policy, he offered a scenario that the Bush administration might use as a convenient invitation to attack Iran.

9-11 Accountability Conference...

A high-level Israeli economic delegation led by Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer and Finance Ministry Director General Yarom Ariav will meet with an American team in Washington this week.

The present package, which ends this year, covers $2.4 billion in annual military aid.

Israel's request comes due to the military challenges and restraints it will have to face in the upcoming years and the weakening dollar.

The amount of margin debt, which is how brokers define this kind of borrowing, hit a record $285.6 billion in January on the New York Stock Exchange. Such a robust appetite, amid a backdrop of complacent market conditions, could leave investors badly exposed if major indexes are snagged by a market decline. Some could find themselves forced to sell stock or other assets to meet what's known as a margin call -- when a broker in effect calls in the loan.

The decree allows Venezuela's state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, (PDVSA) to take a 60 per cent stake on May 1 in four projects which process crude oil into 600,000 barrels of synthetic oil a day in the country's eastern Orinoco River basin.

The companies affected by the decree are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips from the US, Total SA from France, British Petroleum and Norway's Statoil ASA.

After This Fiasco, How Can We Trust Anything They Told Us About 9/11?...

In a televised exchange during a cabinet meeting, Vladimir Putin was told by his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that "predictions that strikes will be conducted against Iran have become more common, and this causes concern"

In off-screen comments captured by the ITAR-Tass news agency, Mr Putin later asked Mr Lavrov: "What kind of strikes are we talking about – without UN Security Council sanctions?"

Mr Lavrov replied that "nobody who is discussing this is referring to such sanctions" but added that Russia would "do everything it can to achieve a negotiated solution"

In a speech in 2004, then Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said: "It is difficult to imagine that we can continue indefinitely to borrow savings from abroad at a rate equivalent to 5% of U.S. gross domestic product." Well, by the third quarter of 2006, the U.S. was dependent on foreign lending to the tune of more than $860 billion, or about 6.5% of gdp, and the need for foreign money will most likely hang above 6% through 2007. The big question: Can the U.S. continue to count on this massive amount of foreign capital to fund its overseas obligations and finance its economic growth?

THE dollar retreated to a two-month low against the euro on Monday as the US currency came under pressure on renewed worries about Iran's nuclear programme.

The number of Americans living in severe poverty has expanded dramatically under the Bush administration, with nearly 16 million people now living on an individual income of less than $5,000 (£2,500) a year or a family income of less than $10,000, according to an analysis of 2005 official census data.

The analysis, by the McClatchy group of newspapers, showed that the number of people living in extreme poverty had grown by 26 per cent since 2000. Poverty as a whole has worsened, too, but the number of severe poor is growing 56 per cent faster than the overall segment of the population characterised as poor - about 37 million people in all according to the census data. That represents more than 10 per cent of the US population, which recently surpassed the 300 million mark.

The federal agency that’s been front and center in warning the public about tainted spinach and contaminated peanut butter is conducting just half the food safety inspections it did three years ago.

Between 2003 and 2006, FDA food safety inspections dropped 47 percent, according to a database analysis of federal records by The Associated Press.

Cheney OK After Blast Outside Afghan Base...

9-11: THE CONTROLLED COLLAPSE OF WTC 7...

Aaron Brown CNN 4:10PM 20010911 WTC 7 Foreknowledge -...

Have you ever thought how peaceful and prosperous we would be if our national leaders had followed the advice of George Washington in his "Farewell Address"?

For starters, we would not be hopelessly in debt, and there would not be so many Americans buried in national cemeteries and in distant lands. Nor would we be as hated as we are today in so many countries, where new polls show people not only dislike American foreign policy and the American government, but are now deciding they don't like the American people.

The Arab League said three Arab Gulf countries have denied Israel use of their air space to strike Iran.

Arab League Secretary-General Amr Mousa told reporters in Cairo the foreign ministers of Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates said there is no agreement allowing Israeli jets to use their air space to reach Iran.

Korean comic author: Jews rule U.S....

The Indiana Republican Party asked a man who hinted that Jews were pushing for war with Iran not to file as its candidate for Indianapolis mayor.

Smoking Gun of WTC 7 (w/tags)...

AIPAC is also pressuring the US to support the Iranian Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) for use against Iran's mullahs.

MEK has been legally designated a terrorist organization since 1997 for killing US citizens, for its role in the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran and for attacking coalition troops in Iraq. Human Rights Watch recently condemned them for use of torture, bombings and assassinations. Nevertheless, 150 congressmen have petitioned Bush to remove them from the terrorism list, and several lawmakers spoke at their 2005 convention in Washington, DC.

Underscoring growing alarm in the West at how militants have regained ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday sought Pakistani aid to help counter al-Qaida's efforts to regroup, officials said.

However, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf insisted his forces have already "done the maximum" possible against extremists in their territory — and insisted that other allies also shoulder responsibility in the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

A one-time chief of staff to former Rep. Bob Ney pleaded guilty Monday to a federal conspiracy charge stemming from a congressional bribery scandal.

"Heaton and Ney solicited and accepted a stream of things of value from Abramoff and his lobbyists, including overseas and domestic trips, meals and drinks, golf, tickets to professional sporting events and concerts, and monetary and in-kind campaign contributions from Abramoff," prosecutors wrote.

Panic has begun to sweep the sub-prime mortgage sector in the United States after the bankruptcy of 22 lenders over the past two months, setting off mass liquidation of housing loans packaged as securities.

THE SMOKING GUN WTC7, BBC JUMPS THE GUN !!!...

On September 11, 2001, Jerome Hauer advised the White House to begin taking Cipro, an antibiotic which is effective against anthrax.

Mr. Hauer's advice was not made public. Its value may have been underestimated at the time, but it was clearly demonstrated a week later, when the first anthrax letters appeared, and again three weeks after that, when anthrax appeared in letters to Democratic Senators Daschle and Leahy.

The obvious question is: Did Jerome Hauer know about the anthrax attacks in advance?

Berkshares were created to stimulate the local economy by giving people incentive to shop in their own neighborhood, rather than drive the distance to large chain stores.

REBUTTAL TO BBC'S 9-11 SHOW...

Most of the poems, including the lament by Al Hela which first sparked Falkoff's interest, are unlikely to ever see the light of day. Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format". In a memo sent on September 18 2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and their clients explains that they do not "maintain the requisite subject matter expertise" and says that poems "should continue to be considered presumptively classified".

I've found the coffin of Jesus, says film director...

"We have nothing to fear from the Iranians," Amiram Levi told me. "If they become too much of a threat we can deal with them just as we dealt with the Iraqis when they tried to build a nuclear bomb."

According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, funding for non-defence research and development will shrink for the fourth consecutive year in fiscal 2008. The National Institutes of Health’s R&D budget will fall $325m (£166m, €247m) or 1.1 per cent, next year. “Funding conditions are forcing researchers to look outside their traditional boxes at places that they might not have looked at before – such as the Department of Homeland Security,” said Kei Koizumi, a director at the AAAS.

There are some strange facts about the asset and trade positions of the US economy in the globalizing economy. The United States runs massive and growing trade deficits, is borrowing at a clip that would arouse the suspicions of a casino pit boss, and has been selling its assets to anyone who will buy. In the past 24 months, the US balance on goods and services comes in just shy of negative-$1.5 trillion. Across the same period, the US has sunk further into debt to the rest of the world.

A sportsmanship and outdoor living magazine has ended a regular column by one of its online bloggers after a posting in which the writer said he considers high-powered AK and AR rifles "terrorist" weapons that "have no place in hunting."

A juror was dismissed from the trial of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby on Monday after court officials learned she had been exposed to information about the case over the weekend.

Hersh says the U.S. has been “pumping money, a great deal of money, without congressional authority, without any congressional oversight” for covert operations in the Middle East where it wants to “stop the Shiite spread or the Shiite influence.” Hersh says these funds have ended up in the hands of “three Sunni jihadist groups” who are “connected to al Qaeda” but “want to take on Hezbollah.”

Glimmers of Hope in Iran Report?...

Not ONE Member of the Bush Extended Family Has Served in Iraq! Not One! Take a Look....

DNA tests proved the dead man found in the River Seine near Rouen on Wednesday was David Dahan, head of the Israeli Defence Ministry Mission to Europe, a police official said.

The gulf between rich and poor in the United States is yawning wider than ever, and the number of extremely impoverished is at a three-decade high, a report out Saturday found.

New Horizons is already the fastest spacecraft ever to leave Earth, but it needs even more speed to catch Pluto, which is receding from the sun. Winter is coming to Pluto, and researchers want New Horizons to arrive before Pluto's thin atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground. (It's so much easier to study an atmosphere when it's up in the air.)

According to Juan Cole:

This is a rout, there should be no mistake. The fractious Shiite militias and tribes of Iraq's South have made it impossible for the British to stay. They already left Dhi Qar province, as well as sleepy Muthanna. They moved the British consulate to the airport because they couldn't protect it in Basra. They are taking mortar and rocket fire at their bases every night. Raiding militia HQs has not resulted in any permanent change in the situation. Basra is dominated by 4 paramilitaries, who are fighting turf wars with one another and with the Iraqi government over oil smuggling rights.

The charming puppet government we've installed in Iraq has been an abject, bungling failure from the get-go and, in the intervening years of bloodshed and chaos, it has only become weaker and more ineffectual than it was before. Forget insurgency, forget civil war — Iraq is now, for all intents and purposes, in anarchy. There is no central government, there is no order — only chaos and death. How can we extract our forces if we know the region will completely implode the moment we do?

Because it already has. We passed the point of no return long ago.

Lt. Watada-an American Hero...

Astounding revelations on behalf of Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, including Timothy McVeigh's connection to government provocateurs and the fact that the bomb he helped McVeigh build was completely different to the one described by official accounts, have been uniformly ignored by the corporate media as the story enters its sixth day.

Most passengers asked to submit to a full-body X-ray at Security Checkpoint B didn't bat an eyelash. Nine in 10 gamely stepped up to a scanner about the size of a vending machine, placed their feet on the red footprints painted on the carpet, and raised their arms – all in the name of airport security.

Israel receives about $2.4 billion a year in mostly military aid from the United States. Most of that is spent on U.S. military equipment.

On a careful reading of our president's latest speeches and statements, Michael Klare has noted that an actual list of charges against Iran, a case for war, has already essentially been drawn up, making it easy enough to imagine that at 10:16 p.m. on some night not so very distant from this one, from that same desk in the Oval Office, the president of the United States might again begin, "My fellow citizens, at this hour…"

Those who invaded Iraq claiming it had weapons of mass destruction and have been blaming Iran and Syria for the murderous mess in Iraq, are also the same people now blaming Pakistan for the mess in Afghanistan.

A TV cameraman is getting an inside view of life at Guantanamo Bay prison - only he is unable to get out and tell the story.

Sami al-Hajj, of the Al-Jazeera TV network, was stopped at the Afghanistan border by Pakistani authorities in December 2001, turned over to U.S. forces and hauled in chains six months later to Guantanamo, where about 390 men are held on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

His colleagues at Al-Jazeera claim his detention is American harassment of an Arabic TV network whose coverage has long angered U.S. officials. Near the entrance to the network's Khartoum bureau a banner saying ``Free Sami al-Hajj'' hangs alongside his photo.

The number of families receiving cash benefits from welfare has plummeted since the government imposed time limits on the payments a decade ago. But other programs for the poor, including Medicaid and food stamps, are bursting with new enrollees.

The result, according to an Associated Press analysis: Nearly one in six people relies on some form of public assistance, a larger share than at any time since the government started measuring two decades ago.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday ordered the IDF to actively prepare for war with Syria, despite buying in to assessments that such a conflagration is unlikely in the coming year.

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice urged the Democratic-controlled US Congress not to interfere in the conduct of the Iraq war and suggested President George Bush would defy troop withdrawal legislation.

The dollar traded near the lowest in almost two months against the euro on speculation reports will show a housing slump is slowing the U.S. economy.

The U.S. dollar declined against 13 of the 16 most-active currencies before reports this week that may show fourth-quarter growth was less than previously estimated, new home sales dropped and durable goods orders slipped. The difference in yield between benchmark 10-year U.S. and German debt last week narrowed to the least in almost two years.

Governors concerned about the demands the war in Iraq is placing on their National Guard forces met with a top Guard official Sunday and said they were closely monitoring deployment of their troops, worn-out equipment and how ready they would be for domestic emergencies.

The January update was based on new data supplied to the Government Accountability Office by the Congressional Budget Office, and identified spiraling national health care costs as the main culprit for the country's budgetary woes. The report also challenged a key assumption about the nation's fiscal future made by President George W. Bush in his release of the 2008 budget.

The bounty hunters from Hawaii used a Samoan knot – which proved too much for Angel. He has challenged DOG and his posse to a rematch in Hawaii, which the Chapmans accepted, causing Dog to quip, “So, that’s Hawaiian bounty hunters ONE, magic guy NONE!”

In a startlingly blunt speech at a Munich security conference, Russia's president accused Washington of seeking world domination, undermining the UN and other international institutions, monopolizing world energy resources, destabilizing the Mideast by its bungled occupation of Iraq, and unleashing a new nuclear arms race by planning to deploy anti-missile systems in Eastern Europe.

This column has long maintained that while one sympathizes with the desire of Eastern European states to take shelter from old foe Russia by joining NATO, pushing the alliance to Russia's doorstep was dangerously provocative and militarily ill-advised.

So now, the Israeli war advocates aver, the U.S. president needs to be helped to do the right thing and attack Iran by lobbyists who will use their power to force the fools in the Democratic Party, especially presidential candidates. Because Americans don't understand and have to be shaken out of their current skeptical mode.

By who? By AIPAC, of course! The confidence expressed by these gentlemen (in the second most powerful political action committee in the country) is quite extraordinary. But alas, maybe it's warranted

Edwards: Israel not a threat to world peace...

Hands up any soldiers who know that another of Britain's great military defeats took place in the very sands in which your colleagues are now fighting the Taliban. Yes, the Battle of Maiwand - on 27 July, 1880 - destroyed an entire British brigade, overrun by thousands of armed Afghan tribesmen, some of whom the official enquiry into the disaster would later describe as "Talibs". The Brits had been trying to secure Helmand province. Sound familiar?

The widening probe linking dozens of political allies of Colombia's president, Álvaro Uribe, to the country's right-wing death squads and drug traffickers has started to erode support on Capitol Hill for Colombia, the biggest recipient of US aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Iraq President Falls Ill, Flies to Amman...

PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUE ON DISPLAY...

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

YouTube - Rabbi Makes Racist Comparison...

In addition, the inherent redshift z values of quasars seem to be quantized! Unusually tight groupings of those calculated values occur centered around values of z = 0.061, 0.3, 0.6, 0.96, 1.41, 1.96, etc... such that (1+z2) = 1.23(1+z1). [For example, 1.23(1+0.3) = 1.60]. The very existence of this quantization alone, is sufficient proof of the failure of the idea that redshift is only an indicator of recessional speed (and therefore distance). This quantization means (under the redshift equals distance interpretation) that quasars all must lie in a series of concentric shells with Earth at the center of the entire arrangement. Copernicus found out a long time ago that Earth isn't at the center of anything!

I remember asking why the Bible, a book which had to know better since it was written by God himself, said Joshua raised his hands and the "sun stopped for the space of about a day," when clearly it would be the earth that stopped rotating? I asked him how oceans would not slop out of their basins in such a scenario and drown the whole world? I asked him if humans would not be cast into space by such a sudden stop of the entire planet? I even asked if this really happened, why did no one else on the whole planet notice it, or write about it? I got that dumb look again.

The “Ice Age” hoax of the late 1970s took advantage of the general population’s unfamiliarity with climate. A massive climatic change, like an ice age, normally taking centuries to develop, can be encapsulated in seconds by computers into a form that may be interpreted as short-term as weather. The marketing ploy is based on fear — not the type of fear generated by such incidents as 9/11 but a distant fear of “we’re all going to die.”

Buy your own "Star Wars" Satellite!...

Now, as Israeli calls for a U.S. attack on Iran become more shrill by the day, AIPAC recognizes that the American people profoundly distrust Vice President Cheney and the nest of neocon liars he has sheltered. The Bush-Cheney war machine has been pretty well exposed, and that must worry the warmongers within the group. Israeli Defense Force chief artillery officer Gen. Oded Tira has griped that "President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran," adding that since "an American strike in Iran is essential for [Israel's] existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors. We need to do this in order to turn the Iran issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure."

Iraqi police recently caught two terrorists with a car full of explosives. Would it surprise you to learn they were British Special Forces?

Car bomb kills dozens; mystery blasts rock Baghdad...

The order states that when hijackings occur the military’s operational commanders at the pentagon and at the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) must contact the secretary of defense for approval and further instruction. At that time, of course, this was Donald Rumsfeld. Was the new order, therefore, evidence of a policy change made for the purpose of engineering a stand-down on 9/11?

Cartels grip a border city...

U.N. calls U.S. data on Iran's nuclear aims unreliable...

"Experts on new religious movements say De Jesus' opposition to other religions, and his claim to be the only legitimate spiritual authority, resemble the teachings of some cults."

The BBC's 9/11 Conspiracy Files: Points Which Were Ignored - includes video...

Osama bin Laden - A Weapon of Mass Convenience...

General: Eliminating bin Laden not priority...

In a related story, an over hyped flap that