Has Sarah Palin Been Picked as the Titular Head of the Coming Police State?

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by Naomi Wolf 

palin_sarah.jpgPlease understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don’t have freedom.

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The Wounded Shark: ‘Good War’ Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On

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By Chris Floyd

america.jpgDon’t tell Obama and McCain, but the war they are both counting on to make their bones as commander-in-chief — the “good war” in Afghanistan, which both men have pledged to expand — is already lost. Their joint strategy of pouring more troops, tanks, missiles and planes into the roaring fire — not to mention their intention to spread the war into Pakistan — will only lead to disaster.

Who says so? America’s biggest ally in the Afghan adventure: Great Britain. This week, two top figures in the British effort in Afghanistan — Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, UK ambassador to Kabul, and Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British military commander in Afghanistan — both said that the war was “unwinnable,” and that continuing the current level of military operations there, much less expanding it, was a strategy “doomed to fail.”

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Of Family Jewels and Scapegoats

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A missive to Mr. Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs

By Anwaar Hussain

danger-sign.jpgMr. Boucher,

Judging by your call to ‘reform the ISI’, you, sir, seem to be in dire need of some advice.

We understand that you are stung by your abject failure in Iraq and the looming near total disaster in Afghanistan, what with the empire now teetering at its outer most edge and your imperial carpetbaggers out in a frenzied search for a scapegoat. It is perhaps on their urging that you now think in ISI you have a scapegoat and in Pakistan an escapegoat. You, sir, are as far from reality as the Mars from planet Earth. Neither will prove to be a goat of any kind for you.

There are reasons that I say this.

First, with a 3-million strong tribal population, with every Pathan armed to the gills and caring not a fig for even his own life and an honor code as primitive and rigid as the Hindukush, and a million strong nuclear armed Pakistan army at their back, you want to tread very softly in this region. The dispute with these Pathans is an internal one and the Pakistanis know how to deal with each other. While between them this dispute may take years to resolve, resolve it will in the end. However, your entering into the fray will instantly evaporate any ill will that the warring parties have for each other, uniting them in an unreserved hate for your country. Despite the well established facts of your limitless ruthlessness as was witnessed against the Iraqis and your ability to lay waste to the entire region, they will go for your collective throat with a ferocity that will make you forget what you have seen thus far. Please be careful in taking Pakistan for an escapegoat or the FATA for an escape route.

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Pop goes the Weasel

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Welcome to the Great Game with the same battlefield but different protagonists, different battle cries and different weapon yields.

By Anwaar Hussain

admiral.gifOn 26th August 2008, barely two weeks back, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kiyani met with Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen aboard USS Abraham Lincoln that has been anchored somewhere in the Indian Ocean for more than a month now.

It was a star-studded affair. Other than the Admiral, the attendees included Gen David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, who will soon leave to become the senior commander in the Middle East; Adm Eric T Olson, head of the Special Operations Command; Gen David McKiernan, NATO’s commander in Afghanistan; Lt-Gen Martin E Dempsey, acting commander of American forces in the Middle East; and Rear Adm Michael LeFever, American military liaison in Pakistan. General Kiyani was accompanied by another unnamed Pakistani General; most probably the Director General of ISI. Reportedly, the meeting was conducted in a relaxed ambience and ended on a note of positive understanding between the participants.

General Kiyani had barely set foot on solid land when pop went the weasel.

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And Then We Will Die

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By Angie Riedel

nuclearholocaust1dj.jpgIt is time to get past the ‘death and violence is the answer’ mentality. We can not afford to let it continue.

The US government now confronts every minor inconvenience with brutality and force. With lies. With tricks. With deceit. With unrivaled hypocrisy. It speaks a scripted and rehearsed dialog of illogic and insults. It changes the meanings of words and uses those words as weapons to crush, to silence and oppress, to steal what it wants. This government no longer shows respect for anyone but itself and feels no compulsion to listen or cooperate, to show respect for others, or to care at all about right and wrong, truth or lies, justice or injustice.

It seems that this government can’t take a single step without stepping on others, without breaking the very laws it exists to uphold, without negating every principle we stand for.

At what point will this criminality cease?

It is no surprise that we are seeing our own citizens being brutalized and arrested for imaginary political crimes before any crimes are committed; and when there is no possibility that they will be committed. For this government there is no longer any concept of innocence until guilt is proven in a court of law. A court of law un-tampered with, a court uncontrolled by compromised loyalists, a court left free to honor its commitment to see justice done. There is no longer any concept of requiring proof of any crime at all.

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TS Picks

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1. Can NATO Survive Georgia? : By Immanuel Wallerstein

2. The Biden Bid : By The Nation Editors

3. Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis : By Glenn Greenwald

4. The White House’s Weak Denials : By Dan Froomkin

5. Sick Justice : By The Nation Editors



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Is Perpetual War Our Future?

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Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Bush Era

By Andrew Bacevich

chess.jpg To appreciate the full extent of the military crisis into which the United States has been plunged requires understanding what the Iraq War and, to a lesser extent, the Afghan War have to teach. These two conflicts, along with the attacks of September 11, 2001, will form the centerpiece of George W. Bush’s legacy. Their lessons ought to constitute the basis of a new, more realistic military policy.

In some respects, the effort to divine those lessons is well under way, spurred by critics of President Bush’s policies on the left and the right as well as by reform-minded members of the officer corps. Broadly speaking, this effort has thus far yielded three distinct conclusions. Whether taken singly or together, they invert the post-Cold War military illusions that provided the foundation for the president’s Global War on Terror. In exchange for these received illusions, they propound new ones, which are equally misguided. Thus far, that is, the lessons drawn from America’s post-9/11 military experience are the wrong ones.

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The Dark Side

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The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

dark.jpg“In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers. Under the guise of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ it has succeeded, in Mayer’s words, in ‘making torture the official law of the land in all but name.’ Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.”

Online discussion: A transcript follows.

Journalist Jane Mayer was online Tuesday, July 15 to discuss her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, which was reviewed in Book World. Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

She is the co-author of two other books: Landslide: The Unmaking of The President 1984-1988 and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.

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Thoughts of a US-hater

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By Zafar Masud

uncle_sam_blackwater.jpgAT 67, André de la Roche stands ramrod straight and a full head taller than one’s idea of an averagely tall person.

Hard labour here at his ancestral vineyards by the Loire river in central France has imparted this mild-mannered Parisian intellectual a lean, muscled physique.

The descendant of an old aristocratic family, André now refuses to return to the capital which he says is being taken over by the Americans, as is the rest of the world for that matter. A surprising conclusion, given today’s weak dollar, you’d say!

Can he be described as an America-hater?

Caressing a plant on which shiny, translucent grains are forming already, André turns back to look at the sky, deeply browned fingers shading his eyes and the winegrower’s worry written large across his bronzed forehead. Will the blazing midsummer sun turn his fine white Sauvignon grapes too sweet by harvest time end September? Then he shakes his head and smiles.

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TS Picks

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1. Rhetorical Questions : James Fallows, The Atlantic

2. Eight Strikes and You’re Out : Thomas L. Friedman, The NYT

3. From Stupid to Moronic to Evil : Paul Craig Roberts, The Baltimore Chronicle

4. The Mukasey Doctrine : Scott Horton, Harpers Magazine

5.Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation : Glenn Greenwald, Salon



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Anwaar’s articles appear simultaneously here at Truth Spring and at Soul Vibes in The Pakistan Tribune.


US loses its status as economic world power
DAVOS, Switzerland, 2008
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