From Mark Weisbrot:

One of the nice things about a blog is that you can provide a few details that don't fit in columns or op-eds that the mainstream press runs. Below is a column I wrote that ran during the past week in a number of US newspapers. It provides some background, missing from almost all press coverage, about why President Hugo Chavez might see George W. Bush as "the Devil:" namely, the Bush administration's involvement in the 2002 military coup that briefly overthrew Venezuela's democratic government, and the administration's continued intervention inside Venezuela, to this day.

The military marching through the children's playroom.The Pentagon and its corresponding military branches have been trying for years to interest young people for military service, however it is rare to find a recruiting officer who is capable of filling his proscribed quota.

In order to reverse this trend the Pentagon engaged itself in a campaign against the perceived lack of heroism. The strategy for this involved changing focus to a new social group, now it is not just adults being targeted but also teenagers and children.

Waterflake

Chrs Floyd - Empire Burlesque

When I read the passage below from Moazzam Begg's account of his years in Bush's Terror War prisons, I had a strange feeling of dislocation: it was as if 30 years had suddenly fallen away and I was back in high school, reading Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in stunned disbelief at the hideous cruelty inflicted on the prisoners -- deliberately, as a carefully calculated instrument of state policy. And all of it done in the name of national security, of course, to protect the nation against "terrorists" and "traitors."

Solzhenitsyn's books -- not just the factual Gulag but also the deep-delving fiction of his middle years, the powerful First Circle and Cancer Ward -- were enormous influences on my own understanding of politics, power and morality. Years later, I was in Moscow when he returned to Russia from his long exile, having outlasted the system of state terror that had consumed so many of his compatriots. However much I had come to disagree with some of his political positions on certain issues, it was a still a moment of triumph for the deeper truths and moral courage that he continued -- and continues -- to represent.

Crossposted at Empire Burlesque

So now we know: Next time the fire will come in Iran. The blow will be delivered by proxy, but that will not spare the true perpetrator from the firestorm of blowback and unintended consequences that will follow. Even now, the gruesome deaths of many innocent people in many lands are growing in futurity's womb.

The Rubicon of the new war was crossed on Oct. 27. Oddly enough for this renewal of the ancient enmity between the heirs of Athens and Persia, the decisive event occurred on the edge of the Arctic Circle, at the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, where a Russian rocket lifted an Iranian spy satellite, the Sinah-1, into orbit. This launch, scarcely noticed at the time, has accelerated the inevitable strike on Iran's nuclear facilities: Israel is now readying an attack for no later than the end of March, The Sunday Times reports.

The order, from embattled Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, puts Israel's special forces at the "highest stage of readiness" for the strike. While Iran's plan to begin enriching uranium -- which will give it the capability of building a nuclear bomb -- is the precipitating factor, the budding Iranian space program is a "point of no return" for Sharon, and that is what is driving the actual timing of the strike. The Sinah-1 is just the first of several Iranian satellites set for Russian launches in the coming months.

That's right, the United States has struck another blow against the forces that seek to defame us and demean us on the world stage.  No, no, this time it's not Bush.  It's Canada.

MI6 and CIA 'sent student to Morocco to be tortured

An Ethiopian claims that his confession to al-Qaeda bomb plot was signed after being tortured in a Moroccan jail and claims torturers used scalpel on his chest and penis as he was hung, 'strappado' from his wrists from the ceiling. The British government and CIA are now facing complicity in the affair due to the Extraordinary Rendition program.

Agencies said he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a 'dirty bomb' in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Funny enough, now that the torture allegations used against Mohammed came out, the claims against Padilla were subsequently dropped. He now faces a civil charge of supporting al-Qaeda financially.

He was stripped naked, photographed, given an enema and put on a plane with shackles, earphones and a blindfold.