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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

By Ramzy Baroud

7/20/07

The news of recent weeks emanating from Washington and Baghdad point to one clear, if not final, conclusion: The Bush administration’s adventures in Iraq have been a complete failure.

What the media have eagerly dubbed as the Republican Revolt is now reinforced by two of the most distinguished Republican senators: John Warner of Virginia and Richard Lugar of Indiana. Before the Democrats’ takeover of the two positions in Congress, Warner was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee whereas Lugar presided over the Foreign Relations Committee. Their significance in the party in national security and foreign policy issues is simply uncontested.

Both senators proposed a measure requiring troop redeployment from frontline combat as early as January 1, 2008. The measure, unveiled on July 13, 2007, would require the White House to come up with a plan for realignment by October 16, 2007.

One only needs to consider the timing of that proposed realignment to appreciate the seriousness of the proposal. The head of the US forces in Iraq, General David Petraeus, along with US ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, are expected to furnish a report to the Congress assessing how the war has progressed and whether the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki has lived up to the conditions imposed by the Congress and signed by Bush. If Al-Maliki and his circle, which many see as sectarian-based, fail to show competence, there will be an aid cut.

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By Ed Ciaccio

7/14/07

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”

—-“The Hollow Men” - T.S. Eliot

“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”

–Hannah Arendt

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is ‘not done.’ Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

–George Orwell

‘We face a dire reality. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue with no end in sight. A nuclear strike on Iran may occur at any moment, based on a “false flag” terrorist attack to be blamed on Iran, as noted by Brzezinski and others. The neoconservative mania of the White House breeds war and hatred abroad. Secret prisons and torture have become routine.”

–Cindy Sheehan, July 4, 2007

Among the many rare species endangered by the Cheney/Bush regime over the last six years, too often with the complicity not only of Congressional Republicans, but many Democrats as well, is one which too many of us take for granted: our Constitutional system.

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By Rand Clifford

7/16/07

Who are we? We’re the winners—America loves a winner. In America there are winners, and everybody else. Remember that old saying, “It’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”? Turns out that’s the motto for suckers, for losers. Winning is all that matters. Imagine if instead of glorifying lottery winners, the media paid homage to the losers? Be even more tedious than celebrity hijinks, eh, takes millions of losers to support one winner. Maybe that “how you play the game” motto is one reason you’ve lost your country, something to do with, perhaps, considering government a spectator sport. Remember the price of liberty being eternal vigilance? We know, that’s so history. One might think Americans are real history buffs; after all, the standard defense for having hundreds of moronic television channels remains: “There are good things, like the History Channel.” Well, for all of you spectators that actually watch the History Channel, instead of merely crowing about it, we’ve peppered it with propaganda, so the joke’s on you. Something else you might’ve snoozed away is the crucial truth: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” (George Orwell, from 1984)

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Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Peter Chamberlin

7/13/07

Bill Clinton seems to get blamed by this Neocon administration for many things, but most of all for “losing bin Laden.” The ugly truth is that, in this case, they are probably right. Clinton’s team probably had good information on Osama’s whereabouts most of the time, since they were playing on the same team for most of Clinton’s two terms. It is becoming clear from the accumulating evidence that Bill Clinton resurrected Ronald Reagan’s Afghan strategy of using Islamist guerillas as his own covert foreign policy in Europe and other intransigent hot spots that seemed to be immune to normal diplomacy. Clinton’s foolish toying with Islamist killers is probably the spark that ignited the international jihad against America.

Those of us who are diehard “Bush haters,” like to blame Bush senior for creating Al Qaida, when he abandoned Afghanistan. The problem is, even though Bush did abandon the Afghans, it fell to the next misled president to breathe life into Al Qaida. According to Gen. Hameed Gul (former head of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence-ISI- during the war against the Soviets), when Vice President George H. W. Bush became president in 1989, he threatened to “clip ISI’s wings.” (Gul now serves as an adviser to Pakistan’s extremist religious political parties. He may also be the source of the Al Qaida rumors that it was the Israeli Mossad, not bin Laden, that carried-out the 9/11 attacks, as well as the idea of creating an Islamic Caliphate, beginning with Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics.) After the withdrawal of the Soviets on February 15, 1989, Bush began to make good on that threat. According to author George Crile, in Charlie’s War, on September 30, 1991, the end of the fiscal year, the flow officially stopped (except for $200 million [matched by the Saudis] hidden within the defense authorizations bill for 1992). After the US abandoned Afghanistan, to attack Saddam Hussein, the ISI was left alone to manage the Afghan tribal bloodbath and civil war. Soon after the liberation of Kabul, their man, Hezb-i-Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (long the main recipient of CIA weaponry) started the civil war, by firing rockets at Kabul. (The ISI later created the Taliban regime and installed them in power in 1996.)

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by Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)

7/11/07

in memory of all the soldiers and civilians, on all sides,
who have disembodied during Operation Iraqi Freedom
and other such 21st Century atrocities

No fireworks were delivered to Baghdad
to celebrate their Iraqi Freedom,
their Shia and Sunni and Kurd,
their Islamic and Christian
and Jewish and Yazdân and Zoroastrian
and Mandaean and atheistic and Sufi and Mystical
freedom of choice.

No sparklers arrived in Kirkuk
for Independence Day.

No pinwheels in Basra
for their liberation.

No roman candles in Mosul
on behalf of the Senate.

No multi-color fountains in Tikrit
for democracy courtesy of the House of Representatives.

No bottle rockets in Samarra
for brotherhood with a signed card from the Executive branch
and the Supreme Court.

No fireworks in Fallujah, Kabul or Gaza either
from We The People.

And no flares in Sadr City…
though there have been barrages
of mortar attacks,
car bombs
and missiles.

Mankh is a poet, essayist, small press publisher, and Turtle Islander.
His website: www.allbook-books.com

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By William Blum

7/10/07

Who do you think said this on June 20?

a)Rudy Giuliani; b)Hillary Clinton; c)George Bush; d)Mitt Romney;
or e)Barack Obama?

“The American military has done its job. Look what they accomplished. They got rid of Saddam Hussein. They gave the Iraqis a chance for free and fair elections. They gave the Iraqi government the chance to begin to demonstrate that it understood its responsibilities to make the hard political decisions necessary to give the people of Iraq a better future. So the American military has succeeded. It is the Iraqi government which has failed to make the tough decisions which are important for their own people.”[1]

Right, it was the woman who wants to be president because … because she wants to be president … because she thinks it would be nice to be president … no other reason, no burning cause, no heartfelt desire for basic change in American society or to make a better world … she just thinks it would be nice, even great, to be president. And keep the American Empire in business, its routine generating of horror and misery being no problem; she wouldn’t want to be known as the president that hastened the decline of the empire.

And she spoke the above words at the “Take Back America” conference; she was speaking to liberals, committed liberal Democrats. She didn’t have to cater to them with any flag-waving pro-war rhetoric; they wanted to hear anti-war rhetoric (and she of course gave them a bit of that as well out of the other side of her mouth), so we can assume that this is how she really feels, if indeed the woman feels anything.

Think of why you are opposed to the war. Is it not largely because of all the unspeakable suffering brought down upon the heads and souls of the poor people of Iraq by the American military? Hillary Clinton couldn’t care less about that, literally. She thinks the American military has “succeeded”. Has she ever unequivocally labeled the war “illegal” or “immoral”? I used to think that Tony Blair was a member of the right wing or conservative wing of the British Labour Party. I finally realized one day that that was an incorrect description of his ideology. Blair is a conservative, a bloody Tory. How he wound up in the Labour Party is a matter I haven’t studied. Hillary Clinton, however, I’ve long known is a conservative; going back to at least the 1980s, while the wife of the Arkansas governor, she strongly supported the death squad torturers known as the Contras, who were the empire’s proxy army in Nicaragua.[2]

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Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

6/27/07

George W. Bush!?! The Most Successful American President?!? “How can you, Steve Jonas, give him that appellation,” you might ask? “Awhile back didn’t you say that he was the ‘Worst American President?’ ” And I would say, “indeed I did, but one thing has nothing to do with the other. In fact, I began my TPJ column of Sept. 14, 2006 with the following text (edited slightly here):”

“George Bush is the worst President the United States has ever had. Notice that I did not use the word ‘arguably.’ He is simply is. For one reason. He is the first President ever to have as his primary goal the destruction of the Constitutional, Democratic, system under which he took power (notice that I did not say ‘elected’), and under which our country has been successfully governed in the 215-plus years since its founding. This is for him the absolutely primary goal. For the nation as a whole his achievement of it would obviously be an unmitigated disaster.

“There have been, to be sure, other bad Presidents. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan essentially stood by as the nation slid towards civil war. Andrew Johnson established the basis for what became the South’s long-term victory in that Civil War in every element other than preserving the legal institution of slavery (see my column, “How the South Won the (1st US) Civil War,” Sunday, November 06, 2005, at http://www.planetarymovement.org/ [archive] ).

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By Ivor Hughes

6/19/07

That question is soon answered … Democracy is not Democracy if one votes for the wrong party… for the one… that the manipulating parties refused to deal with.

A case in point was the political victory of Hamas… that told the story… that rang the Palestinian bell. But it is sure that the sound it made was not to Israeli taste… Since that time Britain… America and Israel have funded Fatah with money and arms via the Egyptian back door… this under American duress… Look at the murderous assault on Lebanon backed by Britain and the U.S. .. It is this double dealing and its historical injustices that are rooted in the foundation of Israel as a Nation with their apartheid and megalomaniac attitude that counts a non Jewish life as inconsequential.

There has been 60 years of brutality and genocidal behavior toward the Palestinians… and the Palestinian Christians… Bethlehem is a virtual no-go area. The arrogance that persuades the Israeli’s to ignore U.N. directives… the arrogance that persuades them to kill their allies (USS Liberty) and shell and kill troops of the U.N. peace keeping force… it is this contempt for International law which has led to this current political configuration.

Symbolically the Israelis have been sowing dragons teeth for 60 years or more… the violence has spawned yet more violence… but this time it is not randomly sporadic… it is organized violence .. well-versed in guerrilla tactics violence… well armed with surveillance drone capability.. There is a new air in Gaza… The People have Spoken! ….that is real Democracy my Friend.

Politics is a dirty mangy pack of dogs guarding their corporate masters… since when do they truly speak for the people? How many shamelessly lie against the interests of those who placed them in power? Higher up… where there are dangerous levels of Methane afflatus in the air… they are playing mega-bucks at so many dollars per life… not to mention the cost of equipping that life… to kill another life… it is we that are the fodder in this evil game. It is we the people that pay for this insanity with our children’s bodies and the taxes that support the madness.

Is it not time? …that those that fail to obey the wishes of an electorate should be pursued into the Justice System… Breach of Contract .. you write the charge… The Palestinians of Gaza have spoken… they have had enough of the brutal feudal despotism that has been inflicted on them… they have had enough of the land theft and the apartheid and the Gulags… they have had enough of the Israeli brutality and the collective punishment such as the bombing of Gaza’s Electricity Supply and the crippling of the water and sewage systems.

Israel must wake up and see … the bogey man is under the bed … Hamas has espoused the same philosophy toward the Jews in Palestine… as the Israeli philosophy directed at the Arabs in Israel… they both have hard line positions… both of those positions revolve around one word … ‘Hegemony’ .. Israelis ‘Nuclear Option’… is not on the table because it would suicide a lot of Jewish lives … Hamas have already demonstrated their mettle in South Lebanon and the ability to cripple an Israeli Gun Boat.

This situation has come about because of the very clearly defined policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians… it is all well documented… unspoken bestiality whilst Britain and America pointedly look the other way… Iraq is the living proof of a war that Israel cannot win even with the direct intervention of Britain and the U.S… Again Iraq is proof of that… It is time for some serious talking because If Democracy is not the will of the people… then what the hell is Democracy?

By Steven Jonas

6/12/07

Originally published at Buzzflash

It was a rebuke that was little noticed, nor will it be long remembered. But last week George W. (I call the Pope “Sir”) Bush had some interesting things to say to Russian President Vladimir (in the past Bush has called him “Vlad”) Putin (June 6, The New York Times, “Chastising Putin, Bush Says Russia Derails Reform,” S. G. Stolberg).

Among other things, Bush told Vlad that: “In Russia, reforms that were once promised to empower citizens have been derailed, with troubling implications for democratic development. . . . The most powerful weapon in the struggle against extremism is not bullets or bombs - it is the universal appeal of freedom. . . . Freedom is the design of our maker, and the longing of every soul. . . Freedom is the best way to unleash the creativity and economic potential of a nation. Freedom is the only ordering of a society that leads to justice. And human freedom is the only way to achieve human rights.”

Wow. What a statement. What a ringing endorsement of the whole concept of human freedom, of inalienable rights, of the striving of each and every human being for freedom. Why he even relates freedom to “our maker” (by which George, and since he calls Vlad “Vlad” I guess it’s alright to call him “George,” presumably means the “God” to which he has referred so many times in so many speeches). And by “ordering of a society,” one could be so bold as to infer that he is referring to the Rule of Law and Constitutional Democracy. By golly.

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