Sep 17 2007
Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to
“They are regarded as “accidents”. They are concealed in a criminal way by “the big circus of the information” which sends its correspondents to follow the tracks of this and that occidental vanished person, but doesn’t make a move or even turn its face to report what happens everyday in Afghanistan: dozens, hundreds of children like those burnt alive by our humanitarian operation.”
(Photo and caption source: http://www.rawa.org/nato_victim.htm)
By Jim Miles
9/17/07
NATO has recently had one of its regular meetings of the “Military Committee” in Victoria, B.C., Canada, with appropriate demonstrations against it for Canada’s role within NATO and Afghanistan. Phil Lyons, the organizer of the demonstration, which ended peacefully, says “NATO is now a weapon of American Imperialists.” Another demonstrator asks, “I don’t understand why NATO exists,” then answers his own question, perhaps without realizing it, that “NATO is a war tool the West uses to intimidate other nations into submission.” [1]
They are correct regardless of the high-sounding rhetoric that emanates from the government about international humanitarian rights and the war on terrorism.
NATO as it currently stands has a dual command structure, SACT and SACEUR.
SACT is the acronym for the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, the transformation being that of making NATO forces into a U.S. styled rapid deployment force anywhere in the world. SACT will be dual-hatted (meaning the same guy has both positions) as Commander, US Joint Forces Command. This one person is U.S. Air Force Gen. Lance L. Smith, who is headquartered in Norfolk Virginia. SACEUR is the acronym for Supreme Allied Command Europe and is be dual-hatted as Commander, US European Command, General John Craddock, United States Army who is appointed by the US President. His headquarters are in Mons, Belgium.
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Sep 16 2007
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By Peter Beaumont and Joanna Walters in New York
Sunday September 16, 2007
The Observer | GUARDIAN Unlimited [U.K.]
The man once regarded as the world’s most powerful banker has bluntly declared that the Iraq war was ‘largely’ about oil.
Appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and retired last year after serving four presidents, Alan Greenspan has been the leading Republican economist for a generation and his utterings instantly moved world markets.
In his long-awaited memoir - out tomorrow in the US - Greenspan, 81, who served as chairman of the US Federal Reserve for almost two decades, writes: ‘I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’
In The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, he is also crystal clear on his opinion of his last two bosses, harshly criticising George W Bush for ‘abandoning fiscal constraint’ and praising Bill Clinton’s anti-deficit policies during the Nineties as ‘an act of political courage’. He also speaks of Clinton’s sharp and ‘curious’ mind, and ‘old-fashioned’ caution about the dangers of debt.
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Sep 16 2007
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By Patrick Martin
World Socialist Website
9/15/07
As part of its campaign to justify a long-term US occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly resorted to warning of chaos and even genocide in the wake of a withdrawal of American troops. But a new report suggests that something akin to genocide is already taking place, under American auspices.
The British polling agency ORB reported Thursday that the death toll in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion has passed the one million mark.
According to ORB, US-occupied Iraq, with an estimated 1.2 million violent deaths, has “a murder rate that now exceeds the Rwanda genocide from 1994 (800,000 murdered),” with another one million wounded and millions more driven from their homes into internal or external exile.
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Sep 15 2007
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“Six years after September 11, 2001 what we do have is what might be expected when revenge is pursued rather than justice. Pain, death, grief and anger. Fear, reactionary decisions, and rhetoric aimed at factionalizing a nation.”
By Rowan Wolf
9/15/07
On September 11, 2001 a series of horrendous events happened. Planes brought down two buildings of the World trade Center complex in New York City; the Pentagon was hit; and another crashed in a Pennsylvania field. It was a shock to the systems and psyches of the people of the United States and the world. It has been repeated more times than I can count the “world changed forever.” Personally, I think that is a grandiose claim, but it set in motion a series of decisions and events that continue to the present.
Bush reportedly “joked” after 9/11 that he had “hit the trifecta.” His choices after that event have ruined the lives of millions, and drug the United States into the dubious honor of being a rogue nation.
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Sep 12 2007
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By Brian Bogart
9/12/07
You know your country’s “democratic” leadership and rationale for war are in trouble when the anointed most-evil enemy makes more sense than they do.
Although for all we know Bin Laden’s “annual message to Americans” originated below Dick Cheney’s office where Bin Laden is living in luxury chained to a pool table, its contents ring with refreshing logic relative to what usually passes for truth in and around the White House.
Analyzing his message alongside bipartisan excuses for war—and juxtaposed with President Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower’s keep-an-eye-on-the-defense-industry speech of January 1961—only Bin Laden’s words and Eisenhower’s warnings stand up to current United States Department of Defense statistics.
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Sep 08 2007
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By Ramzy Baroud
9/8/07
The decision made by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to halt his Mahdi Army’s attacks on occupation forces and Iraqi security is likely to be considered the single most promising breakthrough for the US military in Iraq. Although the move comes ahead of several reports to be presented to the US Congress later this month, the decision was ultimately an outcome of a long-brewing intersectarian conflict between Shiite Iraqis, which will further complicate the devastating American failure in Iraq,
Al-Sadr’s decision followed the widespread clashes at Karbala on August 26, during one of the holiest Shiite festivals. Despite various accusations of outside involvement, the clashes were apparently Shiite through and through, involving militant members of the Badr Brigade of the Islamic Supreme Council (led by Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a duel ally of the US and Iran) and al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.
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Sep 07 2007
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By Stephen Lendman
9/7/07
Administration rhetoric is heated and the dominant media keep trumpeting it. It signals war with Iran of the “shock and awe” kind - intensive, massive and maybe with nuclear weapons. Plans are one thing, action another, and how things play out, in fact, won’t be known until the fullness of time that may not be long in coming. For now, waiting and guessing games continue, and one surmise is as good as another. The more threatening they are, the less likely they’ll happen, or at least it can be hoped that’s so.
It’s not media critic, activist and distinguished professor emeritus Edward Herman’s view. He writes “the situation now is even more menacing than we faced in 2002-2003 when the Bush gang was readying us for the invasion (and) occupation of Iraq. There is strong evidence that Bush-Cheney and company are about to attack Iran (and) the groundwork is being set with a flood of propaganda, helped by the media and Democrats.” It may be “his last (crazed) hope for immortality” and possible attempt to revive “Republican strength through this classic maneuver of cornered-rat politicians.”
Most frightening is that the Bush administration doesn’t have enough of a bad thing and may want more of it. This time, however, the stakes are incalculable, the risks over the top, and the chance for success (from an American perspective) almost nil if post-WW II history is a good predictor. Distinguished historian Gabriel Kolko notes in all its conflicts since 1950, America never lost a battle and never won a war. It’s a world class bumbler, never learns from its mistakes, and only succeeds, in Kolko’s words, in making an “unstable world far more precarious” than if it left well enough alone.
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Sep 04 2007
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By Tony Dillon
9/4/07
The functional if chilling calculus of the Cold War has given way to the hot headed fundamentalist terror of a troika of gratuitous murderers, an obtuse triangle of Judeo-Christian-Muslim fanatics who are intent on destroying each other and the rest of us if we get in their way. That’s the standard menu anyway unless you’re an outsider with your own opinion, harboring a radical agenda beyond the memory hole of accepted conventional “wisdom”. In the Middle East where the dogma of a thousand eyes for an eye is practised by a punch drunk Amerika at an ever more frenetic pace as apartheid appendage Israel (with its Zionist master plan fist in glove with the Bush cabal’s hallucination of a permanent Amerikan Reich) revels with Amerika in the shredded flesh and blood of their victims as they blow their enemies to bits ad nauseam.
Bush the mentally handicapped “southern” craw thumper bashing his biblical road-map on his way to world disorder and hell with his sanctimonious and sacrilegious justification of the daily butchering of innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the name of “family values” and corporate profit for the bottom feeders that incited the Bush machine to this madness, he perpetually lies through teeth to keep his handlers’ machinery of war economics grinding, defiling the very idea of the God he hypocritically invokes. Amerika and its Straussian Machiavellian primitives mouth their “democratic” claptrap to a dumbed-down nation desecrating everything they touch as Bush the Lesser spews his fire and brimstone hate-filled cant direct from the Old Testament.
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Aug 31 2007
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By Pablo Ouziel
9/1/07
In an interview with The Washington Post on November 11, 2003, George Soros said that removing President George W. Bush from office was the “central focus of my life” and “a matter of life and death.” He said he would sacrifice his entire fortune to defeat President Bush, “if someone guaranteed it”.
Again in 2006, during an interview with Charlie Rose, when Charlie asked him about that particular statement, with the following question; “You would have gladly given away ninety percent of your fortune in a minute?” Soros replied; “One hundred percent, because I think it would have made a tremendous contribution to mankind.”
According to Forbes Magazine in March 2007, George Soros´s net worth stood at 8.5 billion U.S dollars and placed him as the 80th richest man in the world, surely this sum should be enough to creatively remove President Bush from office. I am surprised that in a country which prides itself on its entrepreneurship, intellect and creativity, where garage start-ups with tiny financial sums are part of the corporate culture and many have gone on to become world leading multinationals, there are no entrepreneurs available to draft a concise and effective strategy to guarantee George Bush’s removal from office, supported by Soros’s 8.5 billion dollar fund.
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Aug 29 2007
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By Jonathan Lenglain
8/29/07
Power and property is concentrating in ever fewer hands, and things are beginning to hurt us in a way that we seek to wrest that power from the bloodlines of the privileged few. Poor Americans are numb and discouraged. Everywhere they hear that they live in a free country where they call the shots, yet their political agenda never comes close to the president’s desk. Every day, Congress deals directly with the concerns of big business lobbyists camping on the floors of Congress, while the White House brokers deals with contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan. Never mind sweeping reforms improving the health care, housing, and tax systems, which are on the agenda of America’s poor. And now that we’ve witnessed the most flamboyant series of illegal activities committed by our government at home and abroad in the name of anti-terrorism, are we finally ready for action?
It seems that things are in such a state that even Alexander Hamilton, the great conservative antagonist to the men we love to quote so much (like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry,) would be on our side. He would be at the forefront of movements to tear things down, and rebuild something new.
Of course, this is the Hamilton credited with building the current economic system almost single-handedly. The man who wanted big government under the patronage of the wealthy, who thought a Bill of Rights was stupid, and whose last words were “Our real disease is DEMOCRACY.”
But Hamilton was a real Genius in a Mozartian sense, and so his flamboyant failings are colorful reminders that this master nation-builder was just human after all. Hamilton was also a slave-abolitionist, a prolific writer devoted to a free-press, and an honorable gentleman who hated corruption, greed, and especially incompetent government.
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