be just

McClatchy Washington Bureau | 06/19/2008 | General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes : "WASHINGTON — The Army general who led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison accused the Bush administration Wednesday of committing 'war crimes' and called for those responsible to be held to account. The remarks by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who's now retired, came in a new report that found that U.S. personnel tortured and abused detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, using beatings, electrical shocks, sexual humiliation and other cruel practices. 'After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes,' Taguba wrote. 'The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account....

ei: Obama picks pro-Israel hardliner for top post : "One of the most influential politicians and fundraisers in his party, Emanuel accompanied Obama to a meeting of AIPAC's executive board just after the Illinois senator had addressed the pro-Israel lobby's conference last June. In Congress, Emanuel has been a consistent and vocal pro-Israel hardliner, sometimes more so than President Bush. In June 2003, for example, he signed a letter criticizing Bush for being insufficiently supportive of Israel. 'We were deeply dismayed to hear your criticism of Israel for fighting acts of terror,' Emanuel, along with 33 other Democrats wrote to Bush. The letter said that Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders 'was clearly justified as an application of Israel's right to self-defense' ('Pelosi supports Israel's attacks on Hamas group,' San Francisco Chronicle, 14 June 2003). In July 2006, Emanuel was one of several members who ...

     The Election: It Had to Be this Way   : Information Clearing House - ICH : "November 07, 2008 'Information Clearinghouse' -- The Democrats winning Congress and the White House just had to happen. If we are ever going to change this country from an empire to a representative democracy, we have to rid ourselves of the notion that one corporate political party can do anything toward that goal. Barack Obama will be the catalyst for a new movement, away from false hope and false promises, not because he will deliver to the people of this country anything worthwhile, but because he won’t. This will be the final nail in the coffin of our corporatist society. There are so many so-called “progressives” that have believed that it was the Bush Republican neo-cons that have gotten us where we are. This is wishful thinking. The Democratic 110th Congress did nothing but rubber-stamp every bill that was put before it. Democrats have blindly caved in to fear of being called “anti-pat...

 The Promised Land?       : Information Clearing House - ICH November 07, 2008 "Counterpunch" -- -- In the first major appointment of his administration, President-elect Barack Obama has named as his chief of staff Congressman Rahm Emanuel, an Israeli citizen and Israeli army veteran whose father, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was a member of Menachem Begin's Irgun forces during the Nakba and named his son after "a Lehi combatant who was killed" -- i.e., a member of Yitzhak Shamir's terrorist Stern Gang, responsible for, in addition to other atrocities against Palestinians, the more famous bombing of the King David Hotel and assassination of the UN peace envoy Count Folke Bernadotte. In rapid response to this news, the editorial in the next day's Arab News (Jeddah) was entitled "Don't pin much hope on Obama -- Emanuel is his chief of staff and that sends a message". This editorial referred to the Irgun as a "terror org...

At Least 40 Civilians Killed as US Strikes Afghan Wedding Party | News From Antiwar.com Afghan officials and local residents say that a US air strike struck an Afghan wedding party on Monday, killing at least 40 civilians and wounding 28 others (including the bride). The strike occurred in the Shah Wali Kot district of Kandahar Province. Reporters on the scene say that villagers are still search the debris for survivors, and the toll is expected to rise even further. Afghan President Hamid Karzai warned that bombings were not the way to win the war on terrorism, and said he hoped President-elect Obama would make it a priority to stop killing Afghan civilians. US spokesman Commander Jeff Bender said an investigation is ongoing, and “if innocent people were killed in this operation, we apologize and express our condolences.” This is the largest incident of US-inflicted civilian casualties in Afghanistan in over two months. In late August, a US air strike in Herat Province killed 90 civil...

The punditocracy's Seven Biggest Blunders of the 2008 election | Salon News Oct. 23, 2008 | This has been a campaign season when the conventional wisdom has fared about as well as Bob Barr's prospects for moving into the Oval Office. During the primaries, the political prediction business -- all those glib quasi-certainties spouted by TV talking heads and embedded in the opening paragraphs of newspaper and magazine articles -- gave us such fantasies as Rudy Giuliani masquerading as a serious presidential candidate and mistakenly consigned John McCain to the GOP dust heap. Remember when Hillary Clinton was prematurely anointed as the nominee or the dire warnings that a protracted Clinton-Obama primary fight would, in a typical burst of Democratic self-destructiveness, cost the party the White House? Of course, that was all long ago and everyone involved in these bum calls has been sent to their rooms without supper. But what about the errors of the last two months -- the equally...

Moscow Removes Ingushetia President - Yahoo! News : "Spontaneous dancing broke out in the streets Thursday night in the tiny Russian republic of Ingushetia, which borders the troubled Chechnya region. The reason for the celebration was that Moscow had accepted the 'voluntary resignation' of Ingush President Murat Zyazikov. No part of the Russian Caucasus today has a political situation hotter than Ingushetia's, and no leader in the volatile region has been less effective and more embattled than Zyazikov. Moscow had picked Zyazikov, a general of the FSB (the state security body that succeeded the KGB), in 2002 to replace then-Ingush President General Ruslan Aushev, whose 'fault' had been immensely popularity among his people and his opposition to the war in Chechnya. But under Zyazikov's tenure, Ingushetia has supplanted Chechnya as the permanent hub of anti-Moscow Islamist resistance in the Caucasus. Chechen rebels now wage hit-and-run attacks from the Ingu...