That's what I told BBC World Service when they called to record an interview on the plight of two HIV/AIDS doctors who are being held in Iran. The two Iranian doctors, who are brothers, have been held incommunicado since late June, without access to attorneys or visits from their family.
According to international media reports, they've been accused of fomenting "a velvet revolution." The prosecutor offers as evidence that they've traveled internationally, participated in HIV/AIDS conferences that drew the attention of international non-governmental organizations, and trained people. Those activities are not internationally recognized crimes; that's what freedom looks like.
Is a US Blockade of Iran approaching? A blockade is considered an act of war. Perhaps war is the goal.
Two additional United States naval aircraft carriers are heading to the Gulf and the Red Sea, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Kuwait Times.
Kuwait began finalizing its "emergency war plan" on being told the vessels were bound for the region.
The US Navy would neither confirm nor deny that carriers were en route.
Every year around the first of August, Ivy would bring a couple of well worn books to my office, a shawl, and a few articles to put on a table near the worship center on the first Sunday of August. "People need to remember the horror of nuclear weapons" she would say referring to the anniversaries of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9. Ivy was a Japanese American woman, a natural born citizen of this country who had been interned with thousands of others during the Second World War. Every year some would complain that Ivy’s displays were inappropriate for a worship setting: "using those bombs saved thousands of lives," some would say. Most passed the displays by without a glance. These are not days marked on the calendars of many U.S. citizens. Not remembering may be to our peril.
Along with more than two million other red-blooded Americans, I watched your response to the attack on you by John McCain. Kudos to you for not letting the wrinkly white-haired guy push you around.
But you're wrong about energy policy. Here's what you said in the video:
"Here's my energy policy: Barack wants to focus on new technologies to cut foreign oil dependency. And McCain wants offshore drilling. Well why don't we do a hybrid of both candidates' ideas. We can do limited offshore drilling, with strict environmental oversight, while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars. That way, the offshore drilling carries us until the new technologies kick in, which will then create new jobs and energy independence. Energy crisis solved."
Offshore drilling isn't going to do squat, Paris. Have you looked at the numbers?
Three words inspire us all. There are "Gonna be wars," and yes, we are going to "Bomb, bomb Iran." As every inhabitant of the globe knows, "withdraw [from Iraq or Afghanistan] means chaos." If Americans and citizens around the world think things are bad now, you ain't "seen nothin' yet." "It, [this war and that one] was ugly." However, each of us can be assured the combat will continue. Engagement may be impossible to escape. The fight may flourish for "maybe a hundred" years. As Presidential hopeful so eloquent stated, that is "fine with me." However, a perpetual war is not satisfactory for those who advocate for peace.
Does public pressure, personal contact with legislators, and protest matter in shaping public policy? After eight years of Bush and Cheney many might say no, our voices and opinions are ignored in Washington. But read on.
Today's exhibit: Representative Jan Schakowsky, Democrat of Illinois. She appears to have had an awakening. Or, as we used to say, her consciousness has been raised.
The Czech Republic has agreed to be the site of the array of sensors and accompanying electronics for the anti-missile system the U.S. wants to build to defend against an attack by a small number of Iranian missiles.
Now the U.S. needs a place to site the missiles. Poland is balking and making new demands like being able to have partial control over the missiles, etc. Now rumors are floating that we are turning to Lithuania as a back up if, as seems increasingly likely, Poland falls through.
As stated in previous diary entries, I oppose the anti-missiles. We would be increasing dissension among our NATO allies (the governments and populations of Europe are divided) and ratcheting up tension with Russia and Iran in return for the still unproved possibility that in the future, this system might actually be made to work. (It won't work effectively now, or would be countered easily.)
These two Iranian HIV/AIDS physicians, who are brothers, need your help right now. This will just take a minute, and will make a difference. As I write this, my colleagues at Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) are holding a press conference in Mexico City, at the international AIDS conference. One of the brothers was scheduled to speak there this week. Instead, there will be an empty chair on the dais. Why is that, and what urgent action can you take to help?
Over the past few weeks, I’ve grown increasingly weary of John McCain’s negative and often dishonest attacks on Barack Obama. Among other things, McCain has often accused Obama of lacking “the knowledge and judgment” to be President. This past week’s ad depicting Obama as a vacuous celebrity akin to Britney Spears or Paris Hilton is the most recent example of such sophomoric absurdity coming from the McCain campaign. In reality, Obama is one of the brightest and most knowledgeable candidates for President to come down the pike in decades.
But in this blog I want to focus on McCain, not Obama. It’s high time that McCain is revealed as the one who is truly ignorant and uninformed on a wide range of issues. Despite his vaunted “experience,” it is painfully obvious that McCain is not only unknowledgeable about many important domestic and international issues facing the country, but lacks even a rudimentary understanding of the economy and foreign affairs.
Judging by the uninspiring and dispassionate campaign launched by the McCain camp, one can conclude that the current regime along with the entire Republican ‘leadership,’ are completely unconcerned with the outcome of the November election, and with good reason. Last week, the White House announced that the next administration will inherit roughly, a 500 billion dollar debt. The question the American people continue to avoid is, to whom do we owe this astronomical sum? The answer, while ugly, is quite simple. We owe it to them. When Georgie W. took over the family business in 2001, he had one and only one goal: to establish a perpetual source of wealth for his father’s friends and the private interests who installed him in office. Through a campaign of lies, deceit, and propaganda he has achieved his goal.
Here are seven new frames for current topics suggested by Susan C. Strong Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director of The Metaphor Project, from the recent Metaphor News, July - August 2008, an occasional publication of the Metaphor Project: www.metaphorproject.org
I really hope the press will be more than just parrots this time around. Reported in Bloomberg yesterday:
Aug. 1 (Bloomberg) Iran is on a path toward a "major breakthrough" in its nuclear program that is "unacceptable," Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz told a Washington audience today.
"It is an existential threat," Mofaz said at a forum on Iran at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "We have to make sure we are prepared for every option."
Mofaz, a former Israeli army chief of staff, is a potential future leader of Israel because of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's planned departure from office. Mofaz is competing with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni for control of the ruling Kadima party after Olmert said July 30 that he won't compete in the party's Sept. 17 primary amid a corruption scandal.
Skyrocketing oil and natural gas prices in the second quarter of this year led ExxonMobil to report the highest profit ever by an American company. In spite of falling production and rising operating costs, Exxon brought in a 138 billion dollars in revenue and reported an astounding net income of 11.7 billion dollars.
Senator McCain, President Bush, and some of their oil industry friends are urging Americans to support overturning a 26 year ban on offshore drilling as a way to bring down gas prices. Of course, it's snake oil designed for what the Joe Lieberman campaign affectionately called "low information voters."
As Dean Baker and Nichole Szembrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted in a June 2008 paper ,
the Energy Information Agency (EIA) projects that Senator McCain's proposal would have no impact in the near-term since it will be close to a decade before the first oil can be extracted from the currently protected offshore areas. The EIA projects that production will reach 200,000 barrels a day (0.2 percent of projected world production) at peak production in close to twenty years. It describes this amount as too small to have any significant effect on oil prices.
I'm not of the conspiracy theorist persuasion, but the modus operandi of the Bush Administration makes me question the the actions and motives of my government in ways I never would have imagined.
First, Hersh expands upon his New Yorker story at a journalism conference, disclosing one idea tossed about in Cheney's office to provoke war with Iran - dressing up Navy SEALs as Iranian Al Quds Forces to fire upon US ships in the Gulf.
Now, Greenwald reminds us of the false information given to ABC News by government officials linking Iraq to the anthrax attacks.
And I am left questioning the circumstance surrounding the apparent suicide of Bruce Ivins.
So where exactly do I go for my tinfoil hat fitting...
In Hersh’s most recent article, he reports that this meeting occurred in the wake of the overblown incident in the Strait of Hormuz, when a U.S. carrier almost shot at a few small Iranian speedboats. The "meeting took place in the Vice-President’s office. ‘The subject was how to create a casus belli between Tehran and Washington,’" according to one of Hersh’s sources.
Speaking at the Campus Progress journalism conference earlier this month, Seymour Hersh — a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for The New Yorker — revealed that Bush administration officials held a meeting recently in the Vice President’s office to discuss ways to provoke a war with Iran.
HERSH: There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up.
Might cost some lives. And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.
