tagged w/ Bush owns oil companies
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Everyone needs to
join and give your input on the Obama site for the message to pursue charges against Bush and his administration.Everyone needs to
join and give your input on the Obama site for the message to... more
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On ABC Jan, 11,2009: President Bush said that he is planning to write a book, however the events after 9/11 are not clear
.....so is he saying that his journals will not be available in his prosecution?
And they can give that "new world order" ideal up now........On ABC Jan, 11,2009: President Bush said that he is planning to write a book, however... more
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Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has blamed the worsening gas crisis on the Ukrainian leadership Photo: REUTERS
Speaking in Moscow during the visit of the Czech prime minister Mirek Topolanek, Mr Putin blamed Ukraine for the crisis following the dispute over pricing of deliveries by the Russian energy giant Gazprom.
"Despite all the efforts that have been made, the crisis is worsening," said Mr Putin.
"It is the Ukrainian leadership that is making it worse," Putin said.
Mr Topalek, whose government holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, vowed not to leave the region until Russia and Ukraine had settled their differences and the gas Russia delivers through its neighbour's pipeline is turned on.
In Kiev, the Ukrainian president's office announced it would step in to help some of those countries suffering from the crisis. "Ukraine will supply the Republic of Bulgaria and the Republic of Moldova with two million cubic metres a day of Ukrainian natural gas from its own reserves starting from January 10," the presidency said in a statement.
While 18 European countries have been hit hit by the crisis, states across central Europe that are highly dependent on Russian gas supplies have been worst hit, closing factories, suspending schools and cutting heating to homes because of the gas supply cuts.
With much of Europe in the grip of a cold snap that has sent temperatures far below freezing and numerous countries heavily or completely dependent on Russian gas, the European Union has stepped in to broker a deal.
But the sticking point in negotiations to resolve the crisis appears to be a refusal by Ukraine to sign an agreement proposed by Russia for the deployment of EU, Russian and Ukrainian monitors to check gas flows through Ukraine.
Mr Putin appealed to Mr Topalek to convince Ukraine to give its permission to the monitoring mission.
Algeria, a powerhouse of energy production in North Africa, meanwhile said it was ready to step up deliveries to Europe. Algeria pumps gas through pipelines under the Mediterranean to Spain and Italy, and ships liquefied gas to other European countries, accounting in total for some 12 per cent of the EU's imports.Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has blamed the worsening gas crisis on the... more
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Bill Clinton Blames Others For 911. He talks about what he tried to do and the fact Bush and his lack of doing anything is never in question......
without 9/11, there would be no Iraq, without Iraq....there would be no oilBill Clinton Blames Others For 911. He talks about what he tried to do and the fact... more
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Presidents have long strived to centralize influence in the White House, often to the frustration of their Cabinet secretaries. But not since Richard M. Nixon tried to abolish the majority of his Cabinet has a president gone so far in attempting to build a West Wing-based clutch of advisers with a mandate to cut through -- or leapfrog -- the traditional bureaucracy.
Obama's emerging "super-Cabinet" is intended to ensure that his domestic priorities -- health reform, the environment and urban affairs -- don't get mired in agency red tape or brushed aside by the ongoing economic meltdown and international crises. Half a dozen new White House positions have been filled by well-known leaders with experience navigating Washington turf wars.
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But some see the potential for chaos within the administration.
"We're going to have so many czars," said Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It's going to be a lot of fun, seeing the czars and the regulators and the czars and the Cabinet secretaries debate."
Carol M. Browner, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration, is taking on a broad new portfolio with responsibility for Obama's ambitious agenda on the environment, energy and climate change.
Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion Jr. is expected to serve in another new White House post, implementing Obama's education and housing agenda for cities.
cont...Presidents have long strived to centralize influence in the White House, often to the... more
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The American view............?or just the inability to stand up as reporters and claim the same about Bush and his evil manipulations and pursuit of oil pipelines???????
Why wouldn't Russia want to compete against Untied States? after all Reagan showed them the democratic way to steal from the poor with their permission.
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Five months after sending Russian tanks into Georgia, Vladimir Putin has turned his sights to another pesky democratic neighbor, Ukraine. His weapon of choice this time is natural gas.
[Review & Outlook] AP
Try to ignore the noise about transit fees, back payments and market prices. Here's the salient fact about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over gas supplies: Russia's strongman is wielding the energy club to undermine the pro-Western government in Kiev and scare the European Union into submission. The strategic stakes are as great as in Georgia last summer.
Mr. Putin, who has no formal oversight role at Gazprom, nonetheless ordered a 15% cut in gas deliveries to Ukraine on New Year's Day, amid a contractual dispute over prices. Russia used the same crude pressure tactic in January 2006, when Gazprom first cut supplies and destroyed its once stellar reputation for reliability.
But the impact down the line on Europe, which gets a fifth of all its gas through Ukraine, appears more pronounced than three years ago. Amid freezing winter temperatures, six European countries yesterday reported a halt in gas supplies while five others saw significant reductions. Tens of thousands of people were left without heat, including two mid-sized cities in Bulgaria. Here in the U.S., heating oil prices jumped 3.3% on expectations that Europeans would switch from natural gas to warm their homes.
cont...The American view............?or just the inability to stand up as reporters and claim... more
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He said efforts were made to compromise and agree on a weaker press statement but there was no consensus. Palestinians carry the body of 4-year-old Lama Hamdan during her funeral in the town of Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mohammed Saber / EPA)
United Nations - The United States late Saturday blocked approval of a U.N. Security Council statement calling for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and southern Israel and expressing concern at the escalation of violence between Israel and Hamas.
U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff said the United States saw no prospect of Hamas abiding by last week's council call for an immediate end to the violence. Therefore, he said, a new statement at this time "would not be adhered to and would have no underpinning for success, would not do credit to the council."
France's U.N. Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert, the current council president, announced that there was no agreement among members on a statement. But he said there were "strong convergences" among the 15 members to express serious concern about the deteriorating situation in Gaza and the need for "an immediate, permanent and fully respected cease-fire."
Arab nations demanded that the council adopt a statement calling for an immediate cease-fire following Israel's launch of a ground offensive in Gaza earlier Saturday, a view echoed by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Libya's U.N. Ambassador Giadalla Ettalhi, the only Arab member of the council, said the United States objected to "any outcome" during the closed council discussions on the proposed statement.He said efforts were made to compromise and agree on a weaker press statement but... more
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GAZA CITY, 31 December 2008 (IRIN) - In Gaza’s main hospital, the director’s office is under virtual siege, according to an IRIN journalist in Gaza. Relatives of the injured are desperate to get their kin transferred to Egypt for emergency treatment. There is a fear here that the already overstretched healthcare system will collapse if Israel mounts a ground offensive into the tiny coastal strip, home to 1.5 million Palestinians.
As of the night of 30 December the death toll from the Israeli offensive had reached 380, with 1,800 wounded, according to the Gaza health ministry. The UN World Health Organization (WHO) said 30 children and nine women were among the dead and 250 children had been injured.
Fifteen medical patients passed through the Rafah border crossing into Egypt for emergency care on that day, said WHO.
Hospitals in the enclave have been overwhelmed by the trauma cases flowing into emergency rooms since the morning of 27 December.
An official from the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, Aed Yaghi, said at a press conference on 30 December that there were 2,053 hospital beds in Gaza, and warned it was not enough.
“One hundred and fifty patients were brought in at once,” said Khaled Abu-Najar, a staff nurse in Al-Shifa’s emergency room. “We lack beds, sterile gloves, sheets, scissors and gauze to treat patients.”
ShortagesGAZA CITY, 31 December 2008 (IRIN) - In Gaza’s main hospital, the... more
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wow .....10 yrs from now we will be giving them free oil.....
and (Un's= United nations pursuit of oil from poor countries.....no wonder they are pist!) sounds to me like someone needs to govern and do elections in the UN.
BAGHDAD, 4 January 2009 (IRIN) - An Iraqi government survey conducted late 2008 has found that 95 percent of Iraqi families would prefer to keep the state’s free food programme running rather than replace it with financial aid, a government spokesman said on 3 January.
“We interviewed 15,000 families all over Iraq and have already presented the outcomes to all concerned governmental parties for consideration when adopting new measures in this regard,” Abdul-Zahra al-Hindawi, spokesman for the Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation, which conducted the survey, told IRIN.
However, al-Hindawi said that his ministry, which oversees economic and human development projects, supports the government plan to withhold the programme from well-to-do people and provide food solely to poorer families.
“It will benefit the Iraqi economy when money goes only to buy food for those who need it,” al-Hindawi told IRIN.
Iraq’s food rationing system, known as the Public Distribution System (PDS), was set up in 1995 as part of the UN’s oil-for-food programme following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait 17 years ago. However, it has been crumbling since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 due to insecurity, poor management and corruption.wow .....10 yrs from now we will be giving them free oil.....
and (Un's=... more
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The U.S. government’s torture of detainees in the “war on terror” can be traced directly to a Feb. 7, 2002, memo signed by President George W. Bush.
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This was conclusion #1 of the recently released final report of the Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.
Thanks primarily to this document, debate concerning one of the most shameful aspects of the “war on terror” has entered the mainstream debate after years on the edges of public discourse. [For more on the report, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Torture Trail Seen Starting with Bush.”]
Torture, however, is only one of the crimes associated with the “war on terror.” A few prominent examples of other crimes waiting to be “sourced” are:
Extraordinary rendition, illegal detention, loss of habeas corpus, abuse and murder of civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, and the creation of millions of impoverished refugees.
With these crimes, the need to find the origin is every bit as imperative as with torture. But we don’t need to ask the Senate Armed Services Committee to initiate 18-month investigations for each of these as well.
The question of responsibility for these and all other war crimes, including torture, was answered over 60 years ago at Nuremberg when high-ranking Nazis were brought to account for their atrocities in World War II.
On Sept. 30, 1946, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, president of the International Military Tribunal, read the judgment of the first Nuremberg trial, which included these memorable words:
“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
Torture, rendition, loss of liberties, unnecessary death and destruction are just some of the trees. Aggression is the forest.
And there can be no doubt that President George W. Bush and members of his inner circle have committed "the supreme international crime."
The invasion of Iraq is the clearest example of American aggression associated with the “war on terror.” The invasion – launched on March 19, 2003 – violated the Nuremberg Charter (Article VI(a)), as well as the United Nations Charter (Article 2, Sec. 4 and Article 39) and U.N. Security Council Resolution #1441.The U.S. government’s torture of detainees in the “war on terror”... more
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All of you that are following the Hamas and Israel ordeal, this is an excellent article, Parry tells it like it is always......
How Hypocrisy on 'Terrorism' Kills
By Robert Parry
December 30, 2008
Yet, with that moral ambiguity excluded from the debate, the justification for the Israeli attacks, which have killed at least 364 people, is the righteous fight against “terrorism,” since Gaza is ruled by the militant Palestinian group, Hamas.
Israel, a nation that was born out of Zionist terrorism, has launched massive airstrikes against targets in Gaza using high-tech weapons produced by the United States, a country that often has aided and abetted terrorism by its client military forces, such as Chile’s Operation Condor and the Nicaraguan contras, and even today harbors right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in blowing up a civilian airliner.
Hamas rose to power in January 2006 through Palestinian elections, which ironically the Bush administration had demanded. However, after Hamas won a parliamentary majority, Israel and the United States denounced the outcome because they deem Hamas a “terrorist organization.”
Hamas then wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, a rival group that once was considered “terrorist” but is now viewed as a U.S.-Israeli partner, so it has been cleansed of the “terrorist” label.
Unwilling to negotiate seriously with Hamas because of its acts of terrorism – which have included firing indiscriminate short-range missiles into southern Israel – the United States and Israel sat back as the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza worsened, with 1.5 million impoverished Palestinians packed into what amounts to a giant open-air prison.
When Hamas ended a temporary cease-fire on Dec. 19 because of a lack of progress in those negotiations and began lobbing its little missiles into Israel once more, the Israeli government reacted on Saturday with its lethal “shock and awe” firepower – even though no Israelis had been killed by the post-cease-fire missiles launched from Gaza. [Since Saturday, four Israelis have died in more intensive Hamas missile attacks.]
cont....All of you that are following the Hamas and Israel ordeal, this is an excellent... more
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Monday Dec 29, 2008
Posted by Martin Kramer
Comments: 11
It was December of an election year, and President Bush was winding up his term. The newly elected Democrat was waiting in the wings. In Israel, a prime minister who seemed committed to the "peace process" decided to put an end, once and for all, to the threat posed by Hamas to Israel's citizens. The prime minister took a bold move, and entrusted Ehud Barak to do the job.
No, this scenario isn't December 2008. It's December 1992. The outgoing president was George H.W. Bush; the incoming one, Bill Clinton. The Israeli prime minister was Yitzhak Rabin; Ehud Barak held the position of IDF Chief of Staff. The bold move? The deportation of 415 Hamas activists from the West Bank and Gaza to south Lebanon, following Hamas's killing of four Israeli soldiers, and its abduction-murder of a border policeman. Those expelled included Ismail Haniyeh, now the Hamas "prime minister," and Mahmud az-Zahar, today its "foreign minister." Israel announced that the deportation would be "temporary," for two years, and that it was required by the "state of emergency" engendered by Hamas attacks.
Israel's action caused an international uproar. The Palestinians claimed that Israel had violated the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the images from south Lebanon, where the deportees camped out in tents in a winter landscape, boomeranged on Israel. Even the United States wouldn't stand by Rabin. The UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution which "strongly condemns the action taken by Israel, the occupying power, to deport hundreds of Palestinian civilians." US Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger said the deportation would raise "a lot of serious problems for the peace process," which the Bush administration wanted to keep "in as a good a shape as we can between now and when Clinton comes in." Israel soon found itself capitulating - offering to take back some of the deportees, and eventually, within less than a year, all of them. By all reckonings, Israel was defeated politically; Hamas emerged strengthened.
Time and again, Hamas has been saved by the West's (uneven) application of its principles, only to terrorize another day. It happened again during the George W. Bush administration which, in the name of the vaunted ideals of democracy, allowed Hamas to participate in Palestinian legislative elections - without requiring it to dismantle its terrorist apparatus or accept Israel. Hamas then turned its unexpected electoral victory into a coup in Gaza, acquiring a territorial foothold. Its leaders, who once stood in the freezing rain on a hill in Lebanon, have become rulers of an Islamist principality, where firing indiscriminately into Israel is a sacred ritual that affirms the Palestinian so-called "right of resistance."
A lot has changed since 1992, and this Bush administration, having waged its own "war on terror," seems to understand the obvious: that this is the last chance to reduce Hamas to its true proportions, lest the "peace process" finally become the lost cause it's often appeared to be. But will the United States hold the line alone? Already the British foreign secretary, David Milliband, a kid think-tanker back in 1992, has decided that the level of civilian casualties in Israel's operation is "unacceptable." (More precisely, he said that "any innocent loss of life is unacceptable," which sets a new standard for modern warfare - one that Britain has never once upheld.) The West is forming a line to throw yet another life preserver to a terrorist gang that has become a terrorist entity, and that needs just a little more indulgence to become a terrorist state.
cont...Monday Dec 29, 2008
Posted by Martin Kramer
Comments: 11
It was December of an... more
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The British newspaper the Times has accused the ISAF, or NATO’s mission to Afghanistan, of indirectly helping the Taliban in Afghanistan.
After an investigation, the Times claims truckers operating the NATO supply convoys have been paying off the Taliban to stop them attacking. The paper says the situation has been going on for 14 months.
But the alleged bribes have not been totally effective. Earlier this month, Pakistani drivers went on strike because of the increased number of Taliban attacks.
“What we've seen is the dramatic deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan and especially in Kabul with regard to the Taliban advance and presence in the country. A year ago our last research showed that the Taliban has a permanent presence on 54% of Afghanistan. Now, this figure has risen to 72%,” said Emmanuel Reinert, Executive Director of the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS).
At the moment there are more than 70,000 international troops on the ground, and the US might send 20,000 more next year. But it takes tonnes of food and fuel every day to keep the ISAF mission going.
“We use two European-based companies to supply food and fuel, though it is not prudent for us to name them. They provide their own security as part of the contract. Such companies are free to subcontract to whomsoever they wish,” said NATO spokesman, Lieutenant-Commander James Gater.
Other than flying in supplies, the only overland route is through Pakistan and Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.
The Times's sources estimate the cost of security for every truck on roads south of Kabul is about $US 1,000, and reportedly up to 25 per cent of that could go to the local militia. With a typical allied convoy consisting of from 40 to 100 vehicles, the Taliban appear to have a steady revenue stream.
Solving the problem of Afghanistan will be anything but fast and easy. It will take years of hard work, humanitarian aid and winning over the locals before peace can be restored to the troubled land.The British newspaper the Times has accused the ISAF, or NATO’s mission to... more
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