No Questions Asked

Preparations for the war with Iran has begun.

MOSCOW, March 27 - Russian military intelligence services are reporting a flurry of activity by U.S. Armed Forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said Tuesday.

“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened U.S. military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

He said the Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran “that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost.”

He also said the U.S. Naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Col.-Gen. Leonid Ivashov, vice president of the Academy of Geopolitical Sciences, said last week that the Pentagon is planning to deliver a massive air strike on Iran’s military infrastructure in the near future.

A new U.S. carrier battle group has been dispatched to the Gulf.

The USS John C. Stennis, with a crew of 3,200 and around 80 fixed-wing aircraft, including F/A-18 Hornet and Superhornet fighter-bombers, eight support ships and four nuclear submarines are heading for the Gulf, where a similar group led by the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower has been deployed since December 2006.

The U.S. is also sending Patriot anti-missile systems to the region.

Even those who spent years in prison because of Saddam Hussein’s brutality believe they were better off with him in power than with US and allied troops in Iraq.

A prominent figure in the Iraqi opposition movement that helped propel America and Britain to war in 2003 has said the country would be better off if Saddam Hussein was still in power.

	Saddam Hussein was executed in 2006

Lufti Saber, once a key lieutenant of the first post-Saddam Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, has a ringside seat on the new Baghdad regime as an aide to the American-led military coalition.

But the political manoeuvring and administrative incompetence he has witnessed on a daily basis has led the former political prisoner to radically revise his views of the invasion of Iraq.

“None of these people trust each other,” he said. “Everything comes down to that. The whole system is set up to ensure that nobody does anything that somebody else thinks is wrong.

“Saddam had a way of rising above that. As soon as he made a decision, it happened. People knew it had to be done. It didn’t matter where they were in the country, they knew the floor at work had to be cleaned, just in case Saddam turned up. Now the country is engulfed in chaos and nobody does anything because they all refuse to take responsibility.”

Iraq marks the fifth anniversary of the US-led invasion this week, plagued by problems seen only in failed states.

Many former supporters of the invasion share a bleak outlook on the country’s future prospects, though polls show general population retains hopes for the future.

Mr Saber spent eight years on death row during Saddam’s dictatorship before he was release in an eve of battle amnesty.

Red Cross: Iraq humanitarian situation one of the most desperate

Geneva - The humanitarian situation in Iraq five years after the US-led invasion is ‘one of the most critical in the world,’ the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said in a report issued Monday.

‘Better security in some parts of Iraq must not distract attention from the continuing plight of millions of people who have essentially been left to their own devices,’ said Beatrice Megevand Roggo, the ICRC’s head of operations for the Middle East and North Africa.

‘Among them are displaced and refugee families, and those who have returned to their homes, children, elderly people, disabled people, households headed by women and families of detainees,’ she said.

According to the report, millions of Iraqis have insufficient access to clean water, sanitation and health care because of the conflict. The current crisis is exacerbated by the lasting effects of previous armed conflicts and years of sanctions.

The ICRC also reported desperate conditions among health care provision. It said that currently there were 30,000 beds at the approximately 65 private and 172 public hospitals, but a further 80,000 were needed. The hospital buildings themselves are often in a poor condition.

Since 2003 more than 2,200 doctors and nurses have been killed and more than 250 kidnapped, the report said. Of the 34,000 doctors registered in 1990 at least 20,000 have left the country.

In addition, the water supply has continued to deteriorate over the past year. Millions of people have been forced to rely on insufficient supplies of poor-quality water as water and sewage systems suffer from a lack of maintenance and a shortage of engineers.

Wall Street is bracing itself for another week of roller-coaster trading after more than $300bn (£150bn) was wiped off the US equity markets on Friday following the emergency funding package put together by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase to rescue Bear Stearns.

One UK economist warned that the world is now close to a 1930s-like Great Depression, while New York traders said they had never experienced such fear. The Fed’s emergency funding procedure was first used in the Depression and has rarely been used since.

A Goldman Sachs trader in New York said: “Everyone is in a total state of shock, aghast at what is happening. No one wants to talk, let alone deal; we’re just standing by waiting. Everyone is nervous about what is going to emerge when trading starts tomorrow.”

In the UK, Michael Taylor, a senior market strategist at Lombard, the economics consultancy, said on Friday night: “We have all been talking about a 1970s-style crisis but as each day goes by this looks more like the 1930s. No one has any clue as to where this is going to end; it’s a self-feeding disaster.” Mr Taylor, who had been relatively optimistic, has turned bearish: “It really does look as though the UK is now heading for a recession. The credit-crunch means that even if the Bank of England cuts rates again, the banks are in such a bad way they are unlikely to pass cuts on.”

Mr Taylor added that he expects a sharp downturn in the real UK economy as the public and companies stop borrowing. “We have never seen anything like this before. This is new territory for us. Liquidity is being pumped into the system but the banks are not taking any notice. This is all about confidence. The more the central banks do, the more the banks seem to ignore what’s going on.”

Mr Taylor added that the problems unravelling at Bear Stearns are just the beginning: “There will be more banks and hedge funds heading for collapse.”

One of the problems facing the markets is that, despite the Fed’s move last week to feed them another $200bn, the banks are still not lending to each other.

“This crisis is one of faith. We are going to see even more problems in the hedge funds as they face margin calls,” said Mark O’Sullivan, director of dealing at Currencies Direct in London. “What we are waiting for now is for the Fed to cut interest rates again this week. But that’s already been discounted by the market and is unlikely to help restore confidence.”

Mr O’Sullivan added that the dollar’s free-fall is set to continue and may need cuts in European interest rates to trim the euro’s recent strength against the dollar. “But the ECB doesn’t like cutting rates,” he said.

On Europe, Mr Taylor said that while the German economy remains strong, others such as Italy’s and Spain’s are weakening. “You could see a scenario where the eurozone breaks up if economies continue to be so worried about inflation.”

European financial markets were relatively unscathed by Wall Street’s crisis but traders expect there to be a backlash when stock markets open tomorrow.

The Fed’s plan will give 28 days of secured funding to Bear Stearns, which saw its value slashed over the week by more than a half to $3.7bn. JP Morgan will provide the funding, but the Fed will bear the risk if the loan is not repaid. Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, who pumped $200bn of loans to cash-strapped institutions last week, said more would be available to help others in distress.

 Horrible history repeats itself when we do not pay attention or refuse to learn from our mistakes. Survivors of My Lai have learned to forgive.

US veterans from the current wars are begging people to listen to them as they describe scenes eerily reminiscent of Vietnam. It’s time to listen and to bring our troops home. It’s time to really rebuild Iraq. It’s time to give the people in Afghanistan something other than opium to produce.

How many times can we commit horrendous war crimes and expect forgiveness?

MY LAI, Vietnam (AP) — Forty years after rampaging American soldiers slaughtered her family, Do Thi Tuyet returned to the place where her childhood was shattered.

“Everyone in my family was killed in the My Lai massacre — my mother, my father, my brother and three sisters,” said Tuyet, who was 8 years old at the time. “They threw me into a ditch full of dead bodies. I was covered with blood and brains.”

More than a thousand people turned out Sunday to remember the victims of one of the most notorious chapters of the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1968, members of Charlie Company killed as many as 504 villagers, nearly all of them unarmed children, women and elderly.

When the unprovoked attack was uncovered, it horrified Americans, prompted military investigations and badly undermined support for the war.

Sunday’s memorial drew the families of the victims, returning U.S. war veterans, peace activists and a delegation of atomic bombing survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“We are not harboring hatred,” said Nguyen Hoang Son, vice governor of Quang Ngai, the central Vietnamese province where the incident occurred. “We are calling for solidarity to defend peace, to defend life and to remind the world that it must never forget the massacre at My Lai.”

Although the occasion was somber, many visitors said they drew hope from it.

“So much positive energy has come from such a negative event,” said Richard Chamberlin, 63, a returning veteran from Madison, Wisconsin. “The people here have amazing resilience. I’m grateful that they’ve treated us as friends, not enemies.”

Chamberlin was part of a delegation called the Madison Quakers, a Wisconsin group that has built a peace park and three schools in My Lai, including a new one that was dedicated Sunday. The group’s leader, war veteran Mike Boehm, honored the dead by playing a mournful fiddle tune.

Boehm also arranged for a group of atomic bombing survivors from Japan to join his delegation.

Among them was Fujio Shimoharu, who was playing in a Nagasaki schoolyard on August 9, 1945, when the earth shook, a strong wind howled and the sky went dark as a mushroom cloud rose over the city.

“I’m very angry about the indiscriminate killing both here in My Lai and in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” said Shimoharu, 74. “I came here to send a message of peace to the world.”

Shimoharu feels connected to My Lai survivors such as Tuyet, who returned to a replica of her home and wept after Sunday’s service ended. U.S. troops torched the original thatch-roofed house; the new one is part of a museum dedicated to the victims.

On that morning 40 years ago, Tuyet and her family were getting ready to go to work in the fields when members of Charlie Company burst into their house and herded them outside at gunpoint.

They were pushed into a ditch where more than 100 people were sprayed with bullets, one of which hit Tuyet in the back, paralyzing the right side of her body.

Her parents, three sisters and a brother were slaughtered. The oldest child was 10, the youngest just 4.

“I was here when the shooting started,” Tuyet said, sitting by a family altar in the replica of her simple two-room home. “The troops rounded us up and took us to the ditch.”

Her 4-year-old brother, who was eating breakfast when the troops came, died with his mouth full of rice, Tuyet said.

Four decades later, she is still overcome by grief. But Tuyet has managed to build a life for herself. She became a pharmacist, married and had two children.

When they arrived in the hamlet 40 years ago, the frustrated and angry members of Charlie Company were on a “search and destroy” mission, trying to track down elusive Vietcong guerrillas whose tactics had depleted the company’s ranks.

The soldiers began shooting in My Lai that day even though they hadn’t come under attack. The violence quickly escalated into an orgy of killing.

The young troops had found themselves in a bewildering war where it was impossible to distinguish friend from foe, said Stanley Karnow, an American historian who wrote “Vietnam: A History.”

Their actions shocked the American public, who had preferred to think of U.S. troops as heroes making the world safe for democracy, Karnow said.

“But there is a human capacity for committing atrocities,” Karnow said.

Do Ba, another My Lai survivor, lost his mother, his brother and his sister in the massacre. But he, too, has managed to build a new life for himself.

He now lives Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, with his new wife and their 14-month-old daughter. He has a job in an electronics factory.

Ba had a chance reunion this weekend with Larry Colburn, who saved him from the rampaging American troops 40 years ago. Colburn was a member of a three-man U.S. Army helicopter crew that landed in the midst of the massacre and intervened to stop the killing.

Colburn returned for this year’s ceremony, as he did 10 years ago for the 30th. He came the first time with Hugh Thompson, the pilot who landed their helicopter, who has since died.

“Today I see Do Ba with a wife and a baby,” Colburn said. “He’s transformed himself from being a broken, lonely man. Now he’s complete. He’s a perfect example of the human spirit, of the will to survive.”

Boehm, whose Wisconsin group helped plan Sunday’s ceremony, takes solace from such stories.

“If hope can rise from the ashes of My Lai,” he said, “it can rise from anywhere.”

If you get caught trying to have sex (or lying about it) — impeachement.

If you commit war crimes and lie to a nation about the need to go to war — unimpeded in your attempt to trample the Constitution.

GOP Wants Spitzer Impeached
State Republicans threatened on Tuesday to impeach New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer if he does not quit over a sex scandal that has raised questions over whether he could face criminal charges.

The threat added to pressure on Spitzer, a Democrat and former state chief prosecutor who made his name fighting white-collar crime on Wall Street, to step down after a report that he hired a high-priced prostitute.

The Wall Street Journal quoted a person close to Spitzer, who is 48 and married, as saying he could resign as early as Tuesday but he wanted to deal with his family crisis first.

“If he does not resign within the next 24 to 48 hours, we will prepare articles of impeachment to remove him,” said Assembly Republican Minority Leader James Tedisco.

“We need a leader in place that has the support of people on both sides of the aisle,” Tedisco told Reuters.

I covered the Congressional hearings back in the early 1990s when Persian Gulf war vets tearfully pleaded for help with their many physical ailments only to be told that it was all in their heads. It was obvious then that they were suffering from something very physical but they were repeatedly told it was psychological. Why can’t we take better care of our vets and listen to them when they tell us they are sick. The reasoning back then was there was no proof that they had been exposed to any chemicals.

Why did we make them wait nearly 20 years to tell them what they already knew? We should have been providing them with help.

Gulf War illness ‘chemical link’

There is evidence linking chronic health problems suffered by Gulf War veterans to exposure to pesticides and nerve agents, US research has found.

A third of veterans of the 1991 war experienced fatigue, muscle or joint pain, sleeping problems, rashes and breathing troubles, the research found.

A US Congress-appointed committee on Gulf War illnesses analysed more than 100 studies in the research.

It found evidence linking the problems to a particular class of chemicals.

These were an anti-nerve gas agent given to troops, pesticides used to control sand-flies, and the nerve-gas sarin that troops may have been exposed to during the demolition of a weapons depot.

‘Excess illness’

Dr Beatrice Golomb, the committee’s chief scientist, said that genetic variants make some people more susceptible to such chemicals.

When exposed, these people ran a higher risk of illness, she said.

“Convergent evidence now strongly links a class of chemicals - acetyl cholinesterase inhibitors - to illness in Gulf War veterans,” Dr Golomb told Reuters.

Dr Golomb said a lot of attention had been given to psychological factors in illness among Gulf War veterans.

News roundup: We are screwed!

 AP Probe Finds Drugs in Drinking Water

A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

…the presence of so many prescription drugs — and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen — in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

In the course of a five-month inquiry, the AP discovered that drugs have been detected in the drinking water supplies of 24 major metropolitan areas — from Southern California to Northern New Jersey, from Detroit to Louisville, Ky.

AP: Water Makes US Troops in Iraq Sick

Dozens of U.S. troops in Iraq fell sick at bases using “unmonitored and potentially unsafe” water supplied by the military and a contractor once owned by Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company, the Pentagon’s internal watchdog says.

A report obtained by The Associated Press said soldiers experienced skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses after using discolored, smelly water for personal hygiene and laundry at five U.S. military sites in Iraq.

Studies: Iraq Costs US $12 Billion Per month

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion — or more — by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.

US Housing Market Crash To Result in Second Geat Depression 

This week’s data on the sagging real estate market leaves no doubt that the housing bubble is quickly crashing to earth and that hard times are on the way. “The slump in home prices from the end of 2005 to the end of 2006 was the biggest year over year drop since the National Association of Realtors started keeping track in 1982.” (New York Times) The Commerce Dept announced that the construction of new homes fell in January by a whopping 14.3%. Prices fell in half of the nation’s major markets and “existing home sales declined in 40 states”. Arizona, Florida, California, and Virginia have seen precipitous drops in sales.

The Commerce Department also reported that “the number of vacant homes increased by 34% in 2006 to 2.1 million at the end of the year, nearly double the long-term vacancy rate.” (Marketwatch)

“The US economy is in danger of a recession that will prove unusually long and severe. By any measure it is in far worse shape than in 2001-02 and the unraveling of the housing bubble is clearly at hand. It seems that the continuous buoyancy of the financial markets is again deluding many people about the gravity of the economic situation.” Dr. Kurt Richebacher

Fed Report Signals Weakness in Variety of Industries

The economic downturn, which started in the handful of states where the housing market was in the worst shape, is spreading to almost every corner of the country and to a wide variety of industries, according to a Federal Reserve report released yesterday.The trouble is showing up in such disparate ways as weaker demand for staffing services in New England, lower trucking volume in Ohio and surrounding states, and a resistance to spending money on capital projects by financial institutions on the West Coast.

That assessment is based on the “beige book,” a compilation of anecdotes from businesses around the country gathered by the Fed’s 12 regional banks. The previous report, in the middle of January, found signs of weakness in certain states and industries but described a U.S. economy that was generally holding up.

This time, two-thirds of the Fed’s districts described a softening or weakening in the pace of business activity, and the others all referred to subdued, slow, or modest growth.

“The slowing is broad-based,” said Julia Coronado, a senior U.S. economist at Barclays Capital. “It’s definitely not just a regional issue anymore.”

 Bush: US Is Not Heading Into a Recession

President Bush said Thursday that the country is not headed into a recession and, despite expressing concern about slowing economic growth, rejected for now any additional stimulus efforts. “We’ve acted robustly,” he said.”We’ll see the effects of this pro-growth package,” Bush told reporters at a White House news conference. “I know there’s a lot of, here in Washington people are trying to — stimulus package two — and all that stuff. Why don’t we let stimulus package one, which seemed like a good idea at the time, have a chance to kick in?”

Bush’s view of the economy was decidely rosier than that of many economists, who say the country is nearing recession territory or may already be there.

The centerpiece of government efforts to brace the wobbly economy is a package Congress passed and Bush signed last month. It will rush rebates ranging from $300 to $1,200 to millions of people and give tax incentives to businesses.

GOD HELP US ALL. 

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