Bush Lied to Us About Iraq War

Bush Lied to Us About Iraq War

"..it comes as no surprise to learn that the Bush administration intentionally misled the U.S. public and the world and operated with tremendous bad faith when it said it was trying to do everything it could to avoid war. And what we have here is really solid documentation that backs that up."

- Jeremy Scahill, producer and correspondent for Democracy Now!, who has an article at The Nation magazine's website, called "The Other Bomb Drops: How Bush Began the Iraq Invasion Before He Went to Congress or the U.N."

The Bush administration dropped all of the rhetoric about the no-fly zones having something to do with defending Shiites or Kurds. They used them, instead,to systematically and preemptively degrade Iraq's ability to defend itself, not from an uprising of Shiites or Kurds, but from the invasion of a foreign army. The Downing Street Memo proves that the United States was not just planning and preparing for war, but was actively carrying out air strikes in support of this war and that the invasion had begun already when the British had the "Downing Street" meeting.

See Sen. Ted Kennedy's comments today at Daily Kos. He has a letter of petition for you to sign.

America, you totally got punk'd. Only this time, I don't hear anyone laughing.

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Labor in Focus

Labor in Focus

In the June edition of Monthly Review there is an excellent article on the issue of Labor with suggestions as to how workers, who are regrouping and re-strategizing, can develop a local power base of the movement.

History bears powerful witness to the need for a radical reorientation of the world’s labor movements, movements with principles like those enumerated by U.S. Labor Against the War.

In TNR, Joseph Braude has written about "Why the Gulf States Need Labor Unions."

"Thomas Friedman recently dubbed the emirate of Dubai "an amazing city-state on the Gulf that is becoming the Singapore of the Arab East," and told NPR's Terry Gross that the Palestinians should emulate it...These sentiments sound nice. But they are increasingly out of touch with reality...there is growing political unrest in Gulf capitals, too. Some of it takes the form of Al Qaeda-style violence, once exclusive to Saudi Arabia but now common in Kuwait and cropping up in Qatar as well. But there's another form of discontent that's ubiquitous in the Arabian desert--even amid the shimmering skyscrapers of Friedman's "amazing city-state on the Gulf": The appalling treatment of workers in these countries has spawned gutsy labor movements, which are agitating for basic freedoms of association and collective bargaining..

..the United States, apparently intoxicated by the promise of free trade with Gulf states, has not done enough to support them. This is too bad--not only because the groups are fighting for American values such as freedom and social justice, but also because many of the Gulf's labor leaders happen to be pro-Western and anti-Islamist."

MSM Shirking Their Duty

MSM Shirking Their Duty

The Sun-Sentinel printed a letter to the editor by Guy D. Boero of Boca raton, FL. It goes like this:

The recent revelation of Mark Felt as "Deep Throat" has made me long for the days of true investigative journalism.
Men such as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, along with Daniel Ellsberg, helped to expose the corruption and deceit that led us to Watergate and Vietnam.
Their published works were widely read by the young people of that day and helped shape the opinions that many of that generation have of their government today.

While it's true that we still have many fine journalists who feel it's important to report our government's misdeeds, most of this material seems to be in the form of books or subscription periodicals.
Our mainstream media, both print and broadcast, appear to be more interested in tawdry sex scandals or the latest celebrity arrest.
Meanwhile, serious issues are shoved off on the cable networks, which are more about opinion than news and seem to favor one political party over the other.

We are now into our third year fighting in Iraq.

While the American body count rises and the Bush administration refuses to even discuss a withdrawal time, the Downing Street memo raises the question that our president may have lied to us about weapons of mass destruction so he could sell this war to the American people.
Will this, along with all the other known miscalculations and blunders in Iraq, finally get the attention of the mainstream media?

For the sake of our nation, it better.