bush's Call To War

Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps the country's most famous whistleblower, fears that before the bush administration leaves office, it will try to attack Iran.

Indeed, Ellsberg's argument gained merit as bush increased his rhetoric against Iran when he delivered his final State of the Union Address. bush accused Iran of training militia extremists in Iraq and emphasized the United States will confront its enemies.

The recent announcement in December by the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) revealed, counter to the asshole president's claims, that Iran did not have an active nuclear program. This was unexpected, says Ellsberg.

The administration had said, weeks before this release, it had no intention of putting out NIE summaries, Ellsberg says. However, the information was released because, according to newspaper reports, there was a threat of leaks:

"As one news story put it, intelligence officials were lined up to go to jail if the administration did not release those findings," says Ellsberg, emphasizing his creed in the need to take risks for the sake of revealing truth.

"I wish I could say it made an attack on Iran zero, and it hasn't, but it has reduced it and confirms, in my opinion, the power of being willing to risk prosecution, willing to give up your career, your clearance, which these people would have done if they'd put that information out -- and the mere threat was enough to get it out in this case," emphasizes Ellsberg.

bush will simply find a different pretext from the nuclear program.

"After all, it was about a year ago that he really stopped pressing the nuclear program as the main reason to start attacking Iran and start talking about what they were doing against U.S. forces in Iraq," says Ellsberg, who claims people in the military have recently undercut this statement by saying there is no evidence of Iran's involvement against U.S. forces in Iraq.

bush could also use an incident that is blamed on Iran as a means to begin a war with them.

The recent incident involving Iran alleged serious threats were being made to U.S. ships by Iranian speedboats. Within days of the events in the Straight of Hormuz, information revealed the details of the entire event had been fabricated.

American Resolve

It is time that America return to its previous self to rediscover that "utmost reward of daring" and continue to dare against the storms of political malfeasance and subversion of the principles of our Constitution and Founding Fathers.

America is a trial by existence for democracy, a trial for the whole world to see, and now is the time to be daring and faithful to the American dream for the betterment of citizen and government alike.

But what about terrorism, you ask?

Terrorism is not a single identifiable enemy. Terrorism is an affliction of the human spirit, an evil malady of hopelessness and violence. Terrorism is the sickness of our age, a plague of the heart and soul whereby the few instill the fever of fear in the many and paralyze the very core of freedom and democracy.

And the cure for terrorism is American daring to refuse to buckle to fear by turning against our fellow citizens and spying on them and imbuing them with the stain of distrust as though We the people cannot be trusted except as we comply to the will and whim of government. We are the government. We must dare to refuse to turn our privacy into a corporate profit center for data mining and Orwellian guardianship; dare to embrace constitutional rights rather than shredding them as though the Constitution were nothing more than an inconvenient cluttered piece of paper.

So let us begin to reclaim the dream and the daring vision that is America.

Let us have the daring vision to enact universal healthcare for every citizen and child in America. We have been to the moon on a promise and a dream. Surely we have the means to ensure preventative healthcare for our children and each other.

Let us dare to care for our veterans. Suicide and PTSD are not acceptable collateral damage.

A nation that cannot care for its veterans or its children cannot face the world in good conscience.

We must hold fast to our Founders' vision of democracy. We must and will refuse to surrender our civil liberties and privacy to the fear-mongers who seek to line their pockets with our lives. A nation that spies on and fears its own citizens is not America; it is a totalitarian regime.

We must reclaim the vision of affordable education for our children. Surely we can see an imbalance just from the 2007 budget figures: $481 billion for defense, $100 billion supplemental spending for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and $56 billion for education. Has our vision become so frightened and distorted that we choose to put more money into war and the destruction of the world than into educating our children?

Let us dare to confront the control of the public airwaves. The hands of corporate conglomerates seek to strangle the very air that belongs to We the people and squeeze out every nickel possible. We must and shall fight the battle of the people's grassroots communication through support of Net Neutrality. The people's voice, our voice, must be heard, whether liberal or conservative, religious or atheist, the public forum must be held above the fray of profit and censorship. The benefits of technology cannot be controlled by the rich and powerful. It failed in 1776 and it will fail now if we dare it to be so.

We must restore faith in voting in America. One person, one vote - fully counted and fully enfranchised. Our election process must be restructured and made accessible for every citizen without intimidation, phone jamming or any of the other so-called political tactics that have become standard practice of the republicunt party. We must dare to restore sanity through reform to campaign finance in this country. No lobbyist or conglomerate should have more access or more rights than We the people.

So now we vote.

Our vote is not just the passivity of choice. but also a vote for our own action and participation in the American dream and in our own government. Activists and dissidents and great debate founded America. It was good enough for the Founding Fathers. it is good enough for us.

We are Americans. Daring and visionary. As we emerge from the darkness of the past 7+ years, we see the light of hope and promise and of course change.

bush Caught In Lies About Iran

The Bush administration has been caught red-handed in manufacturing evidence of a “provocation” off the Iranian coast on Jan. 6, in which five small Iranian open-air speedboats were alleged to have threatened three massive U.S. guided missile warships. The U.S. Navy now admits that audio and videotape given to the media and widely publicized had been spliced together.

What is most ominous in all this is that no major U.S. politician or institution, or any international body, has denounced this dangerous and deceptive move, nor have they called for an inquiry or investigation. Neither the U.S. Congress—now in session—nor any of its committees, all of them now controlled by the Democratic majority elected on an anti-war vote, took action.

With almost half the U.S. Navy hovering off the coast of Iran, this war provocation must be challenged and confronted.

The media is giving wall-to-wall coverage to both Democratic and Republican politicians campaigning in primary elections. Each of these politicians could and should be confronted on where they stand on this Pentagon fraud and what steps they personally plan to take to pursue the matter.

The corporate media in the U.S., which gave the story days of coverage, should also be challenged.

For three days before Bush departed on an eight-day trip to the Middle East, the media were full of denunciations of Iran by Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and top generals and Navy commanders, all denouncing Iran for a “dangerous provocation” and “a threat to world peace” based on this phony incident.

On arriving in Israel, even as the story was unraveling, Bush again threatened Iran and ominously warned that “all options are on the table to protect our assets.”

The U.S. Navy has now admitted that the video of the “incident” between the U.S. warships and the Iranian patrol boats was heavily edited and that the threatening voice on it warning “You may explode” may not have belonged to any Iranian sailors. Yet this video was the basis for the latest threats against Iran.

Who manufactured this video? Who spliced together completely different sound and video footage? Who signed off on it? Who distributed it to all the major media?

It was viewed and commented on at the highest levels of the bush administration.

This is hardly the first time that a manufactured U.S. crisis has launched a war.