White House Forced to Reveal It Destroyed Computer Hard Drives

Older White House computer hard drives have been destroyed, the White House disclosed to a federal court Friday in a controversy over millions of possibly missing e-mails from 2003 to 2005. The White House is tap dancing in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed. Is WH admitting it violated the Presidential Records Act?
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Republicans for Obama

LinkTo Video

Merci McCain

http://www.silencedmajority.blogs.com/

He said:
America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

I seriously misjudged Bush's sense of morality.

"TO SEE WHAT IS IN FRONT OF ONE'S NOSE NEEDS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE"

GEORGE ORWELL

How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?

I think I committed four cardinal sins.

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TV Media's Willful Misunderstanding of Barack Obama's Race Speech

Iraqi Official: 6 Killed By US Helicopter Were Allies

Three US Soldiers Killed By Roadside Bomb, Death Toll Approaches 4,000

Truthless People

Olbermann highlights RAW exchange with Perino

FOX 'News' Selected to be Official Press Pool Broadcaster at the Democratic Convention!

Air America that is just like letting Republicans Foley and Craig babysit your baby.

Just heard Mike Rogers of blogactive.com , on the John Elliot's Air America Show, break and confirm this. The press office of the Democratic National Convention confirmed this, by phone, with Rogers. They've apparently known this since last September.

720-DNC-2008 (362-2008)
Email:
info@demconvention.com .
Office Location:
Democratic National Convention Committee, Inc.1560 Broadway, Suite 400Denver, Colorado 80202

Let's give them (and our Congress-peeps/DNC) a call and NOT let FOX/Murdoch edit and control the Convention feed.

FOX NEWS managing the video/audio feed and output from our convention???!!! WTF is wrong with the Democratic Leadership?Don't let this happen, please.

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Richardson: I Resent Clinton Suggestion That "Only Value" Is Swaying Hispanics

DNC: Taxpayers Picked Up Tab For McCain's London Fundraiser

Another Bill Moment On The Trail: Calls Hillary, McCain The Candidates "Who Love This Country"

Pregnant mother, tortured, dies in Ill.

What amazes me is, why when you have Georgie as your Commander and Chief, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, why would you expect any more from these psychos.

Investigator Calls Pregnant Mother's Torture, Death in Illinois 'Heartbreaking'

Mar 21, 2008 14:25 EST
Banished to the basement, the 29-year-old mother with a childlike mind and another baby on the way had little more than a thin rug and a mattress to call her own on the chilly concrete floor. Dorothy Dixon ate what she could forage from the refrigerator upstairs, where housemates used her for target practice with BBs, burned her with a glue gun and doused her with scalding liquid that peeled away her skin.
They torched what few clothes she had, so she walked around naked. They often pummeled her with an aluminum bat or metal handle.
Dixon — six months pregnant — died after weeks of abuse. Police have charged two adults, three teenagers and a 12-year-old boy with murder in the case that has repulsed many in this Mississippi River town.
"This is heartbreaking," police Lt. David Hayes said. "It was almost as though they were making fun of the abuse they were administering. This woman was almost like living in a prison."
Investigators put much of the blame on Michelle Riley, 35, who they said befriended Dixon but pocketed monthly Social Security checks she got because of her developmental delays.
Dixon saw little, if any, of the money, Hayes said. For months she weathered the torment to keep a roof over her head and that of her year-old son, who weighed just 15 pounds when taken into state custody after his mom's death.
"I've never seen an almost conspiratorial effort by a group of people to continuously torture someone until she finally died, then not really show any remorse," Hayes said. "It was just a slow, torturous, tragic way to die. I highly doubt Dorothy Dixon even knew she was dying."

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Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

Jon Stewart's

"Obama dared to speak to Americans as adults"

Views: 2,591,401

Barack Obama: On Iraq and National Security

Politico: Clinton's Chance At Nomination Is Media Make-Believe

By JIM VANDEHEI & MIKE ALLEN 3/21/08 1:32 PM EST
One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning. Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency. Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.
People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet. As it happens, many people inside Clinton’s campaign live right here on Earth. One important Clinton adviser estimated to Politico privately that she has no more than a 10 percent chance of winning her race against Barack Obama, an appraisal that was echoed by other operatives. In other words: The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe.
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Maura Harty: State Department Official In Charge During Breaches Was An Ambassador Under Clinton

McCain Spiritual Guide Accused Gov't Of Enabling 'Black Genocide'

This past week, Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright has come under heavy fire in part over comments that suggested the U.S. government had introduced AIDS into black communities.
But it turns out he's not the only religious confidant to a presidential candidate who thinks the state has targeted black populations with death and disease.
Reverend Rod Parsley of the World Harvest Church of Columbus, Ohio -- whom Sen. John McCain hails as a spiritual adviser -- has suggested on several occasions that the U.S. government was complicit in facilitating black genocide.
In speeches that have gone largely unnoticed, Parsley (who is white) compares Planned Parenthood, the reproductive care and family planning group, to the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis, and describes the American government as enablers of murder for supporting the organization.
"If I were call for the sterilization or the elimination of an entire segment of society, I'd be labeled a racists or a murderer, or at very best a Nazi," says Parsley. "That every single year, millions of our tax dollars are funding a national organization built upon that very goal -- their target: African Americans. That's right, the death toll: nearly fifteen hundred African Americans a day. The shocking truth of black genocide."
He goes on.
"Right now our own government is allowing organizations like Planned Parenthood to legally take the innocent lives of precious baby girls and baby boys and even footing the bill for it all with our tax dollars, turning every single one of us into accessories to murder," he says. "You know who their biggest fans must be, that must be the Klu Klux Klan, because the woman who founded this organization detested black people.... African Americans were number one on Margaret Sanger's list. So this 'Lady MacDeath,' as I like to call her, studied the works of Englishman Thomas Robert Malthus, and embraced his plan of eugenics."

Rod Parsley: Planned Parenthood = KKK, Nazis

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Hillary Clinton Keeping the Politics of Fear Alive

MY Pastor received a commendation

Doing such a fine job during the surgery of President Lyndon B. Johnson .. **can you see him standing there behind the pole :)This is the man they are characterizing as a anti - white racist!Don't go there people.....UPDATE - Okay, I'm going through comments MY LORD!!! Just to clarify though, Pastor Wright wasn't President Johnson's nurse nor was he just 'the guy who wheeled the president in'.Pastor Wright was a cardio pulmonary technician at the U.S. Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland.

His full bio is here http://www.answers.com/topic/jeremiah-wrightLinkHere

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FOX Lies!! Barack Obama Pastor Wright

I heard him too, on O'Liely, who was having a corony while interviewing him, and thought how true his words where.

Ambassador Edward Peck is a retired career United States diplomat who served thirty-two-years in the U.S. Foreign Service. He served as Chief of Mission in Baghdad (Iraq 1977 to 1980) and later held senior posts in Washington and abroad. He also served as a Foreign Service Officer in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, and as Ambassador in Mauritania. He served as deputy director of the White House Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan Administration. He is president of Foreign Services International, a consulting firm that works with governments, businesses and educational institutions across the world.Edward Peck argued against invading Iraq prior to the March 2003 invasion. He argued, in part, "when you take out Saddam Hussein, the key question you have to ask then is, what happens after that? And we don't have a clue. Nobody knows, but it's probably going to be bad. And a lot of people are going to be very upset about that, because that really is not written into our role in this world is to decide who rules Iraq."

Meet The (White) Man Who Inspired Wright's Controversial Sermon

Meet the man who inspired Reverend Jeremiah Wright's now famous tirade about America's foreign policy inciting the terrorist attacks of September 11.
His name is Ambassador Edward Peck. And he is a retired, white, career U.S. diplomat who served 32-years in the U.S. Foreign Service and was chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq under Jimmy Carter -- hardly the black-rage image with which Wright has been stigmatized.
In fact, when Wright took the pulpit to give his post-9/11 address -- which has since become boiled down to a five second sound bite about "America's chickens coming home to roost" -- he prefaced his remarks as a "faith footnote," an indication that he was deviating from his sermon.
"I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday," Wright declared. "He was on Fox News. This is a white man and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out, a white man, an ambassador, that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true: America's chickens are coming home to roost."
Wright then went on to list more than a few U.S. foreign policy endeavors that, by the tone of his voice and manner of his expression, he viewed as more or less deplorable. This included, as has been demonstrated in the endless loop of clips from his sermon, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuking "far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye."
"Violence begets violence," Wright said, "hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism."
And then he concluded by putting the comments on Peck's shoulders: "A white ambassador said that yall, not a black militant, not a reverend who preaches about racism, an ambassador whose eyes are wide open and is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice... the ambassador said that the people we have wounded don't have the military capability we have, but they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them... let me stop my faith footnote right there."
Watch the video (the relevant material starts around the 3:00 mark): >>>cont

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Richardson: Obama "Appealed To The Best In Us" ... Clinton Aide Calls Endorsement "Insignificant"

Obama Endorsed By Bill Richardson

Mayhem At Fox News: Anchor Walks Off Set, Wallace Rails Network For "Obama-Bashing"

Chris Wallace Takes Fox & Friends to Task

Will Rush Limbaugh Be Indicted for Voter Fraud?

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted March 21, 2008.
As Ohio election officials investigate illegal crossover voting in the 2008 primary, questions arise on Limbaugh's role.

As the board of election in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where Cleveland is located, launches an investigation into illegal crossover voting in the state's 2008 presidential primary, a big open question remains unanswered: Will county officials go after the ringleaders of apparently illegal electioneering where thousands of Republican voters swore -- under penalty of law -- allegiance to the Democratic Party in order to vote for Hillary Clinton?
In case you missed it, Rush Limbaugh, the nation's top-rated talk radio host, was urging Republicans in Texas and Ohio to skip their party's primary on March 4 and instead cast a vote for Hillary Clinton in order to prolong the fight between her and Barack Obama. And that Tuesday, as media in both states reported, thousands of Republicans did just what Limbaugh and others had suggested -- they changed parties to vote for Clinton.
"I want Hillary to stay in this, Laura," Limbaugh told Laura Ingraham on Feb. 29, near the start of his Hillary crusade. "This is too good a soap opera. We need Barack Obama bloodied up politically, and it's obvious that the Republicans are not going to do it and don't have the stomach for it, as you probably know."
And on Wednesday, the day after the Ohio primary, Fox News asked Clinton if she owed Limbaugh a thank you. "Be careful what you wish for, Rush," she replied. Later that day, Limbaugh played the Fox tape on his show and said, "How do you interpret this, folks? She could have said thank you. She could have said thank you! In fact, I was expecting in her victory speech last night to be thanked.
"I helped give Mrs. Clinton the biggest and happiest moment and night of the campaign season so far, maybe her life, and she tells me, "Be careful what you wish for, Rush"? Why, that sounds like a threat, does it not? I've got a Democrat presidential candidate threatening your host. Why, I am stunned! After all I did ..."

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Webb: McCain Refuses to Co-Sponser GI Bill for Post 9/11 Vets

McCain prides himself on being “a tireless advocate of our military.” Yet this is hardly the first time that Webb has taken McCain to task when it comes to veterans’ advocacy. In September, McCain refused to support Webb’s bill to ensure service members get adequate time at home between deployments. McCain castigated the effort, declaring he “hoped” Congress would reject the bill because it “would create chaos.”

Barack Obama's confidential passport file secretly looked at

Verdict: Former U.S. Attorney Speaks Out On Passportgate II

The State Department is saying that Secretary of State, Condi Rice, is saying that she only learned of the breaches yesterday and as diGenova states, it is inexcusable that she wouldn’t know about something this important and that it shows an incredible lack of leadership and gross negligence. DiGenova also says that even if the IG does do a formal investigation, the employees who were fired cannot be called to testify.

Bill Clinton And Jeremiah Wright Photo Uncovered

Politico is reporting on a recently uncovered photo of Bill Clinton and Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
The recent coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has often cast him as a marginal, almost fringe figure, but Trinity Church is a major Chicago institution, and Wright has long been a prominent pastor on the American scene.
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What is the real death toll in Iraq?

The Americans learned one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the civilian dead. As a result, no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the five years since the invasion. Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million, and now a bitter war of numbers is raging. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg report

Lieutenant General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once announced, "We don't do body counts." This blunt response to a question about civilian casualties was an attempt to distance George Bush's wars from the disaster of Vietnam. One of the rituals of that earlier conflict was the daily announcement of how many Vietnamese fighters US forces had killed. It was supposed to convince a sceptical American public that victory was coming. But the "body count" concept sounded callous - and never more so than when it emerged that many of the alleged guerrilla dead were in fact women, children and other unarmed civilians.
Iraq was going to be different. The US would count its own dead (now close to 4,000), but the toll the war was taking on Iraqis was not a matter the Pentagon or any other US government department intended to quantify. Especially once Bush had declared "mission accomplished" on May 1 2003 - after that, every new Iraqi who died by violence would be a signal that the president was wrong, and would show that a war conducted in the name of humanitarian intervention was exacting a mounting humanitarian toll of its own.
But even though the Americans were not counting, people were dying, and every victim had a name and a family. Wedding parties were bombed by US planes, couples driving home at night were shot at checkpoints because they missed a flashlight warning them to stop, and hundreds of other unarmed civilians were killed for no legitimate cause. In just the last three weeks of April 2003, after Saddam's statue and his regime were toppled, US forces killed at least 266 civilians - a pattern of overeager resort to fire which has continued to this day.
So five years after Bush and Tony Blair launched the invasion of Iraq against the wishes of a majority of UN members, no one knows how many Iraqis have died. We do know that more than two million have fled abroad. Another 1.5 million have sought safety elsewhere in Iraq. We know that the combined horror of car bombs, suicide attacks, sectarian killing and disproportionate US counter-insurgency tactics and air strikes have produced the worst humanitarian catastrophe in today's world. But the exact death toll remains a mystery.

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This is the war that started with lies, and continues with lie after lie after lie

by Patrick Cockburn

Wednesday, 19 March 2008
It has been a war of lies from the start. All governments lie in wartime but American and British propaganda in Iraq over the past five years has been more untruthful than in any conflict since the First World War.
The outcome has been an official picture of Iraq akin to fantasy and an inability to learn from mistakes because of a refusal to admit that any occurred. Yet the war began with just such a mistake. Five years ago, on the evening of 19 March 2003, President George Bush appeared on American television to say that military action had started against Iraq.
This was a veiled reference to an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein by dropping four 2,000lb bombs and firing 40 cruise missiles at a place called al-Dura farm in south Baghdad, where the Iraqi leader was supposedly hiding in a bunker. There was no bunker. The only casualties were one civilian killed and 14 wounded, including nine women and a child.
On 7 April, the US Ai r Force dropped four more massive bombs on a house where Saddam was said to have been sighted in Baghdad. "I think we did get Saddam Hussein," said the US Vice President, Dick Cheney. "He was seen being dug out of the rubble and wasn't able to breathe."
Saddam was unharmed, probably because he had never been there, but 18 Iraqi civilians were dead. One US military leader defended the attacks, claiming they showed "US resolve and capabilities".

Mr Cheney was back in Baghdad this week, five years later almost to the day, to announce that there has been "phenomenal" improvements in Iraqi security. Within hours, a woman suicide bomber blew herself up in the Shia holy city of Kerbala, killing at least 40 and wounding 50 people. Often it is difficult to know where the self-deception ends and the deliberate mendacity begins.
The most notorious lie of all was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But critics of the war may have focused too much on WMD and not enough on later distortions.
The event which has done most to shape the present Iraqi political landscape was the savage civil war between Sunni and Shia in Baghdad and central Iraq in 2006-07 when 3,000 civilians a month were being butchered and which was won by the Shia.
The White House and Downing Street blithely denied a civil war was happening – and forced Iraq politicians who said so to recant – to pretend the crisis was less serious than it was.
More often, the lies have been small, designed to make a propaganda point for a day even if they are exposed as untrue a few weeks later. One example of this to shows in detail how propaganda distorts day-to-day reporting in Iraq, but, if the propagandist knows his job, is very difficult to disprove.

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Barack Obama speech sets the web alight

Views: 1,616,104

US Senator Barack Obama has achieved what few before him have, with his speech on race becoming a hotter topic on the internet than sex.New debate ... a speech on race relations in the US by presidential candidate Barack Obama has earned global praise and sparked mass activity on non-political websites. Find out why.More

AP president: US arrests journalist in Iraq to 'control' information

Associated Press president Tom Curley says his news organization does not buy the government's argument that one of its photographers arrested in Iraq was working on behalf of the enemy, and he alleged the US is rounding up journalists in an attempt to control information.
"To say the least, we see things very differently," Curley commented dryly, regarding photographer Bilal Hussein, who was arrested two years ago and remains in military custody.
Noting that at least a dozen other Iraqi photographers have been detained or arrested, Curley stated, "It's impossible not to conclude that the words and pictures these journalists produced were considered unhelpful to the war effort and that their arrests would have served a broader strategy of information control."
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THE MORNING AFTER .. IN AMERICA

Silenced Majority Portal

By mike

U.S. Air Force veteran 17 minutes ago Senator Obama will be holding a major speech on Iraq at Fort Bragg. About 150 people hand picked military families will be attending this event at 1015. Now here is the gotcha, Bush found out he was having this speech and now he is having one at the same time. The networks will all be carrying Bushs speech and not Obamas. They are soooooo afraid of Obama. I hope everybody that reads this realizes what we are up agianst, and that we must fight back hard.
I already know GW and Mcbush views on iraq and they suck!!!

Many voting for Clinton to boost GOP

For a party that loves to hate the Clintons, Republican voters have cast an awful lot of ballots lately for Senator Hillary Clinton: About 100,000 GOP loyalists voted for her in Ohio, 119,000 in Texas, and about 38,000 in Mississippi, exit polls show.
A sudden change of heart? Hardly.
Since Senator John McCain effectively sewed up the GOP nomination last month, Republicans have begun participating in Democratic primaries specifically to vote for Clinton, a tactic that some voters and local Republican activists think will help their party in November. With every delegate important in the tight Democratic race, this trend could help shape the outcome if it continues in the remaining Democratic primaries open to all voters.
Spurred by conservative talk radio, GOP voters who say they would never back Clinton in a general election are voting for her now for strategic reasons: Some want to prolong her bitter nomination battle with Barack Obama, others believe she would be easier to beat than Obama in the fall.

Robert Wexler: 5 Years in Iraq

To bad he wasn't on the Front Line in Iraq, I wonder if it would have been worth it then. You Decide

Bush: Five Years Of War Have Been Worth It

Number Of Iraqis Slaughtered In U.S. War On Iraq "1,189,173"

Number of U.S. Military Personnel Sacrificed (Officially acknowledged) In U.S. War And Occupation Of Iraq 3,990

Numbers do not include Military personnel who died of their injuries in Germany or the USA

It was worth it huh Georgie?

How to Destroy a Country and Get Off Scot-Free

Linda Heard
Think about it for a moment. The warmongers invaded, crushed and occupied a country that was no threat to anyone. They stood by as it was looted, exacerbated sectarianism, flattened entire towns, tortured untold numbers of innocents, brought in gum-chewing, tattooed foreign mercenaries and paid crony companies billions of dollars for mythical reconstruction projects.
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Ohio's Voting Machines Are Now an Official Crime Scene

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, reporting for The Free Press, write: "At least 15 touch-screen voting machines that produced improbable numbers in Ohio's 2006 statewide election are now under double-lock in an official crime scene. And the phony 'Homeland Security Alert' used by Republicans to build up George W. Bush's 2004 vote count in a key southwestern Ohio county has come under new scrutiny."

Predatory Lenders' Partner in Crime

How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers

By Eliot Spitzer

Spitzer On Bush's Role In The Subprime Crisis

The Bush Administration has ignored dishonest lending practices, then actively intervened to prevent the States from taking action. This letter to the editor was published in the Washington Post last month, just at the time Gov Spitzer was alleged to have engaged a call girl service.

They call themselves the MEDIA? You Decide. They are just GOP Whores.

Fox Attacks Obama


FOX Attacks Obama, part 2

Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

By Anthony WadeThe Sadness Of The Politics Of DistractionObama is a Muslim and the Jeremiah Wright nonsense is just history repeating itself. Don't fall for the distraction America.

A gross failure that ignored history and ended with a humiliating retreat

Partick Cockburn
The war in Iraq has been one of the most disastrous wars ever fought by Britain. It has been small but we achieved nothing. It will stand with Crimea and the Boer War as conflicts which could have been avoided and were demonstrations of incompetence from start to finish. The British failure in the Iraq war has been even more gross because it has not ended with a costly military victory but a humiliating scuttle. The victors in Basra and southern Iraq have been the local Shia militias masquerading as government security forces.... continua / continued

IRAQ: Five Years, And Counting

Analysis by Dahr Jamail

Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20. U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, during a surprise visit to Iraq on Monday declared the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq a "successful endeavour". According to the group Just Foreign Policy, more than a million Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation, now entering its sixth year. A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million. Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book with co-author Linda Bilmes of Harvard University titled 'The Three Trillion Dollar War', a figure it considers a "conservative estimate" of the long-range price tag of the invasion and occupation of Iraq... continua / continued

Iraq War as War Crime (Part One)

Robert, Sam and Nat Parry, Consortiumnews

The Iraq War – now ending its fifth bloody year – represents not only a human tragedy of enormous consequence and possibly the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history but also a systemic failure of American political and journalistic institutions. Instead of checking George W. Bush’s imperial impulse for the good of the Republic, the Congress – including Sen. Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats – and the national press corps tended to their careers and their political viability.... continua / continued

US public losing interest in Iraq as news coverage wanes: report

Axis og Logic

People in the US have "lost interest" in the war in Iraq as Iraqis continue to be maimed and killed, their infrastructure destroyed and neglected, and the official number of dead US soldiers hovers around 4,000. The loss of US public interest in the war is not by chance. The corporate media has shifted what skewed coverage they gave to the war on the people of Iraq to other "more important things", like their wall-to-wall coverage of Hillary, Barack and John in the 2008 elections, their hand-wringing over the collapsing economy or lurid stories on Hollywood/New York celebrities. The capitalist media is all too happy to change the topic and allow the Iraqi Holocaust to go on... continua / continued

Five years later, a hidden crisis: Report of the IRC Commission on Iraqi Refugees

International Rescue Committee

The war that was launched in Iraq five years ago has produced one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time. Yet this crisis is largely hidden from the public and ignored by the international community. More than four million Iraqis of different religions, ethnicities and backgrounds are estimated to be uprooted by horrific violence and death and are in dire need of help. About half have fled to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and elsewhere in the region. Because they are not huddled together in a camp or traveling as a group across a windswept plain, these refugees are not receiving the attention and help they deserve from the international community. Much of the reporting about them has been wrong, perpetuating myths that they are wealthy or that the crisis is over and that many are returning to their homes in Iraq... continua / continued

Militias and Death Squads: The Occupation Strategy to Divide Iraq

Eman A. Khamas

Whether their name is sectarian militias, paramilitary groups, death squads, mercenaries, criminal gangs, rogue elements in the new Iraqi security forces (no matter what they are called or how different they are), it is said they are controlling Iraq now and turning it into a no-man's land. It is said that the American occupation authorities, and their Iraqi agents in the government are helplessly incapable of controlling them. That they are ever stronger, better functioning, and more organized , and that they are consolidating their control over the north and the south of Iraq, making its division a de facto truth. Operating independently, or as part of the Iraqi government security forces trained and equipped by the US, these gangs have committed the worst of atrocities, five years after the fall of the State of Iraq. They have dismantled the society and the State, robbed the country, kidnapped, brutally tortured and assassinated thousands, drove millions of their houses, terrorized the citizens, the question remains why and how is it possible for them to commit all these crimes, and why there is no investigation or judicial pursuit for them all these year...For the Americans it was very useful this state of terror. Many eye witnesses talk about militias' raids done in daylight, with the American and the Iraqi forces watching and not moving a finger to help the victims. It is illogical that all these thousands of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, illegal raids, illegal check points which kidnap people and kill them, and horrible torture linked to the militias would go unnoticed.... continua / continued

New Yorker: Abu Ghraib abuses were 'de facto US policy'

Nick Juliano, Raw Story

...Harman and other soldiers told of taking prisoners' blankets and leaving them naked in bare cells while temperatures dipped near freezing. The New Yorker writers relay witness accounts of bones being found inside Abu Ghraib incinerators and prisoners being submerged in ice-filled trash cans. She also told of women and children being held at the prison, according to the magazine. The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old -- "a little kid," she said. "He could have fith through the bars, he was so little." Like a number of the other kids and of the woman there, he was being held as a pawn in the military's effort to caputre or break his father. ... She didn't like seeing children in prison "for no reason, just because of who your father was," but she didn't dwell on that... continua / continued

How Many Child Prostitutes Is Bush Responsible for?

Bob Fertik, Democrats.com

George Bush has been tied to a prostitution ring involving as many as 50,000 women and girls. The prostitutes, some as young as 13, are among the 1.2 million desperate Iraqis who fled to Syria after Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to the U.K. Independent. Bush's invasion destroyed the Iraqi government and unleashed a wave of political and sectarian violence that has killed over 1 million Iraqis and forced 4 million to become refugees, according to the UN. Facing starvation, as many as 50,000 women and girls have been forced into prostitution in Syria alone, according to Hana Ibrahim of the Women's Will Association.... continua / continued

Obama: "Race Is An Issue That I Believe This Nation Cannot Afford To Ignore..."

Obama Speech: 'A More Perfect Union'

Obama Race Speech: Read The Full Text

Ben Smith: Polar Opposite Of Romney’s Speech… Josh Marshall: Stirring Delivery, Like His Victory Speeches…Chris Durang: "Brilliant, Nuanced, Healing"…Jesse Jackson: Obama Just Turned Crisis Into Opportunity… David Corn: “A Speech Unlike Any Delivered By A Major Political Figure”...Andrew Sullivan: Deeply Christian Speech…

Iraq War Winter Soldier Testimony

Winter Soldier Mike Prysner testimony, Pt1

Winter soldier testimonials Hart Viges

Winter Soldier: An Iraqi perspective

Winter Soldier: Adam Kokesh

Has corporate media forgotten Iraq?

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Contractor warned city about crane but was blown off

Source: New York Daily News
A retired contractor warned the city 12 days ago the doomed crane on E. 51st St. wasn't properly braced, but the Buildings Department blew him off after making a cursory check.
"I think the Buildings Department is grossly negligent because they had been warned. They sent an inspector and they brushed it under the rug, so to speak," said Bruce Silberblatt, an 80-year-old former contractor.
"Now, I'm sitting here and, at last count, four people are dead and a couple buildings on 50th St. are completely wrecked. ... It looks like Baghdad over there."
Silberblatt said he called the city at 3 p.m. on March 4 because he had been concerned for days about the lack of braces securing the crane at a construction site near his United Nations Plaza home.
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The Facts, Keith Olbermann and Rabid Hillary Shills

Leading into the Texas and Ohio primaries, The New York Times reported that "the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton is unleashing what one Clinton aide called a 'kitchen sink' fusillade against Obama." Meanwhile, the Clinton camp was busy working the refs: leveraging a Saturday Night Live sketch that ridiculed the media for alleged favoritism of Sen. Obama, Hillary Clinton cried foul as she and her campaign were simultaneously in the process of heaving said sink.
Clinton and her inner circle fueled the worst kind of xenophobia: "No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know," Clinton told 60 Minute's Steve Kroft, when asked if she thought Obama was a Muslim. And while the source of The Drudge Report's well-timed photo of Obama in traditional Somali garb (flaming those Muslim rumors) officially remains unconfirmed, the Clinton camp's history of leaking information to Drudge has been documented. To this day, the campaign has never issued a flat, unequivocal denial that the photo was sent by one of its members. (Mission accomplished: a December 2007 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 8% of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim; a new WSJ/NBC poll reveals that the number of Americans who believe this falsehood has risen to 13%.) Concurrently, as the media failed to effectively challenge Clinton on her refusal to release her tax forms, it featured story after story on Clinton's unrelated and obfuscating counter-punch to any inquire into her tax records: Obama's connection to indicted businessman Antoin Rezko, about which after extensive digging by every major media outlet, not one has confirmed any legal wrongdoing on the part of Sen. Obama. (Welcome to Obama's Whitewater.)
The strategy worked like a charm. The Clinton camp is nothing if not schooled in such politics. With a cowed media focusing lopsided scrutiny on Obama days before the March 4 primary, Clinton's camp landed one shot below the belt after another. Effective and politically shrewd? Sure. Cheap, cynical and sleazy? You bet.
Since the March 4 primaries alone, Clinton press secretary Howard Wolfson has absurdly compared Obama to Ken Starr; Sen. Clinton has done Sen. McCain's bidding, breaking an unofficial rule among same-party candidates by asserting she and Sen. McCain have crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold" while Obama has not; and, of course, this past week one of Clinton's chief fundraisers, Geraldine Ferraro, said, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," then claimed reverse racism when people objected to her racist or, at bare minimum, intentionally racially divisive and factually ignorant comments. And if anyone thinks Ferraro's statements weren't tactical salvos - part of Hillary's "Archie Bunker strategy for PA," to quote my consistently straight-shooting friend, Will Bunch - then they're not paying attention or are willfully ignorant of her campaign's modus operandi.
The worst you can say for the Obama camp during the same period is that then foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, jet-lagged and upset right after the results in Ohio and having witnessed firsthand how Clinton won the state, called her a "monster" during an interview, screwing up by then attempting to keep the comment off the record without having stated that request beforehand. She resigned immediately, publicly and profusely apologizing to Sen. Clinton. Moreover, the media failed to address what drove Power's comment: Clinton's self-evident willingness to do anything to win in Ohio, but also, taking into account Power's expertise on foreign policy and human rights, quite likely her knowledge of Clinton's egregious record on war and innocent civilian lives as well. >>>cont
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