US Want Full Access to Bulgarian Military Bases

"The United States demand that Bulgaria grants them unlimited access to Bulgaria's military bases and equipment, and Bulgaria does not agree."

"Negotiations concerning US military bases here still haven't been concluded, Angel Naydenov, head of the Parliamentary Defence Committee explained for private Nova television. Three negotiation stages have been so far completed since October 2005, and Bulgaria is currently very close to the finish, he said."

"However, major disagreements arise around the conditions of access to the bases. While Bulgaria wants guarantees that these facilities would not be used without its consent, the US demand full access. They also want to apply their own jurisdiction and laws when an American violates the law on Bulgarian territory. Bulgarians do not agree on that point and this has stalled the negotiations for a while, the MP added."

More strong arming in the effort to achieve "full spectrum dominance" through force or intimidation. What right do we have insisting that the laws of sovereign nations should not apply to any of our people, while dictating that our own jurisdiction spans the globe. We're supposed to be immune from braking anyone elses' laws, but the world must comply to ours. Is this the kind of behavior of "good guys"? Is this an example of freedom and democracy we're supposed to be promoting throughout the world?

This is the classic behavior of conquerers, so let's cut the bullshit and call a spade a spade. Conquerers don't always need to attack, just threatening economic or political war, can often achieve the same goal.

Testing, Testing. (damn Blogspot)

This is just a test to see if I can post again. The people that run this */#@!!%# operation can't seem to keep Blogger from screwing up at least once a week now. I've been trying to post since my last post, but keep getting errors. Others are getting it too when they try to publish. I was finally able to post to my other blog, in spite of getting different errors, but they've still got work to do. Apparently some elective surgery they performed yesterday, left the system screwed. Oddly enough, things have gotten a lot worse around here since many bloggers have been visited by certain government agencies. Ok, maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe it's a consequence of being run by an ever-growing Google. I don't know, but if this keeps up, I'm going to have to look for a new home.

Iraq: Permanent US Colony

"Why does the Bush Administration refuse to discuss withdrawing occupation forces from Iraq? Why is Halliburton, who landed the no-bid contracts to construct and maintain US military bases in Iraq, posting higher profits than ever before in its 86-year history?"

"Why do these bases in Iraq resemble self-contained cities as much as military outposts?"

At the end of this article, the author answers this question with one word; "Empire". Well that's to be sure, but everything else in between those initial questions, and their short answer, you'll find an interesting description of the permanent bases and embasy we're building there. You'll have to read it for yourself to believe. The scale of not only the bases, but especially our new embasy, is staggering. There's just no way these bases were ever meant to be turned over to the Iraqis.

The article also goes into the lies being told about our progress in training Iraqi troops. If you recall, late last year it was said that there was only one Iraqi battalion, and it was lacking in equipment, much more so than our own troops. Well apparently, in the span of just six months, a miracle has occured in Iraq that should be the top headline of every newspaper, and every lead story on TV, in the world. We're being told that the Iraqis now have over one hundred battalions in the field. Isn't that an amazing feat? Or more obviously, just another of a never-ending stream of lies.

More British Memos

"Senior British diplomatic and military staff gave Tony Blair explicit warnings three years ago that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq, according to leaked memos."

"John Sawers, Mr Blair's envoy in Baghdad in the aftermath of the invasion, sent a series of confidential memos to Downing Street in May and June 2003 cataloguing US failures. With unusual frankness, he described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as "an unbelievable mess" and said "Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals" were "well-meaning but out of their depth"."

These memos point to the fact that the Bush administration was warned that their lack of post invasion troop strength was inadequate. It shows that neither our military nor our government had any interest in dealing with Iraq properly, after the invasion.

This adds to the belief that our leaders are clueless when it comes to conducting war and its' aftermath, or, I believe, they knew exactly what they were, and are doing, in the handling of Iraq. They knew that by not only maintaining too small a force themselves, but also disbanding Iraqs' military and police, that there would be the problems we see there today. I also believe we're deeply involved in causing the violence by much more than just being there. I think we allowed and incited radical elements to grow strong and cause violence, to suit our purpose of maintaining a permanent military presence in Iraq to use as a staging ground to strike at other countries in the region. We never had any intention of leaving. As long as the violence continues, we're justified in staying, which is why the President keeps insisting that any withdawl will be determined by "conditions on the groud". Whenever things do calm down, if ever, little if anything will be said about our permanent bases, after we make a big deal about the majority of our troops coming home. That's what happened in Saudi Arabia after we "defended" it from Saddam in the first Gulf War, we're still there. The big difference was we didn't have to "regime change" them first, to get bases there.

We don't want a strong, democratic and independant Iraq. It's far too strategically importatant to leave to the Iraqis. It's essential that their government be obedient puppets, totally dependant on us. One look at a map shows just how important it is in seizing control through force and intimidation, all the oil in the region.

And by the way, we're never going to leave Afghanistan either. We're planning on protecting oil pipelines there.

Feingold Draws Little Support for Censure

"Democrats distanced themselves Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold's effort to censure President Bush over domestic spying, maneuvering to prevent a vote that could alienate swing voters. Republicans dared Democrats to vote for the proposal."

"Some Democrats in Congress have decided the president is the enemy," Vice President Dick Cheney told a Republican audience in Feingold's home state."

Well there you have it, the chickenshit Democrats are showing their lack of backbone once again. See why I say not to expect anything from them? This is why people need to jump on the backs of all the politicians, and ride them into the ground until we get our country back. The Republicans have no real opposition party to contend with, and their only issues are in covering their own asses from all the scandals they've created for themselves, because the Democrats refuse to take advantage of them. We have to stop waiting for someone else to take the lead, and step up ourselves. If we can do that, it won't matter what party rules. They're supposed to work for us, and they must be reminded of that.

Feingold Proposes Bush Censure Over Spying

"A liberal Democrat and potential White House contender is proposing censuring President Bush for authorizing domestic eavesdropping, saying the White House misled Americans about its legality."

"The president has broken the law and, in some way, he must be held accountable," Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., told The Associated Press in an interview."

It's about time for them to at least go through the motions of trying to bring some law and order back into the Whitehouse, even if it goes nowhere, which it probably won't. I doubt it will get much further than the proposed censure of Bush and Cheney for lying about Iraq. We can only hope that this time there will be much more public discussion that builds momentum that forces appropriate action. Time will tell.

Here's another site with an embedded video and transcript of an interview Feingold gave this morning. It also has the PDF version of the censure resolution:

Feingold TV Interview

Also, here's a good page to bookmark and keep up on all the other censure talk:

AfterDowningStreet.orgs' Censure Page

Tal Afar: Al Qaeda's Town

"This is a story about an entire city that was taken over by al Qaeda. It's called Tal Afar and about 200,000 people who live there became prisoners in their own homes when terrorists took control and turned it into their town."

"They used Tal Afar as a base to train insurgents and launch attacks around Iraq. Last September, U.S. and Iraqi forces set out to recapture Tal Afar, and as Lara Logan reports, the Bush administration is pointing to that operation as a model for how to fight and win the rest of the war."

Here's a story that lends further credence to the idea that the violence Iraq is being allowed to happen. This is from one of the segments on the TV news magazine 60 Minutes, that I just watched.

The story in a nutshell, is about a city in Iraq that was taken over by Al Qaeda, who apparently had an easy time crosing back and forth across the border with Syria. Here comes the cavalry. U.S. troops went in and cleaned out the town, but then left only a handfull of troops to guard the place, and, you guessed it, Al Qaeda just walked right back in and picked up where they left off. That was in 2004. Last year, U.S. and Iraqi troops went back and cleaned it out again, this time sticking around and training a police force. Success!!

Well now you just know there's more to the story than that. First thing you notice is that there was absolutely no one in that entire city of 200,000 people, to protect them. The second problem was that when we finally did go in, we did just like we did in Vietnam; take a village, then leave it for the enemy to go right back in. And the third and most interesting part, was when troops went back for the second time. They surrounded the city and had completely encircled the terrorists' headquarters ready for final battle to wipe them out, when they were ordered to wait two days to let the civilians get out first. After that, they were ordered to wait another three days, supposedly to let more civilians get to safetly. Ok, time for the assault, but guess what, there was nobody there to fight. Yep, they all got away.

Now I don't know about you, but it looks to me like the delay was meant as much to allow for the terrorist to get away, as the innocent. Of course, no one's going to admit that, and they don't seem to have even bothered checking the people that were leaving at all. Here at home, we can't get on a damned airplane without taking off our shoes, walking through metal detectors, forfeiting "dangerous" personal property like nail files, and being man-handled, or denied simply because we have a name on some watch list, but in Iraq, terrorist are intentionally allowed to fight another day. The soldiers are doing the best they can, but those in charge seem to constantly treat "the terrorists" just like allies.

Even after allowing an unkown number of terrorists to escape, the administration calls the operation a model for success in Iraq. This whole story stinks with the smell of neocon colonialism. It stands as an example for why there's so much violence there, and it's to getting worse. But, that's the plan.

Iraqi Civil War Planned?

"One of the abiding myths about the War on Iraq is that the neocons were too stupid to realize that they would confront an unrelenting, indigenous resistance to their occupation of Iraq. Unwittingly, the story line goes, they led the U.S. into a conflict which has now produced a civil war. But this simply does not fit the facts. The neocons clearly anticipated such an outcome before they launched their war as Stephen Zunes documents in Antiwar.com:

"Top analysts in the CIA and State Department, as well as large numbers of Middle East experts, warned that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could result in a violent ethnic and sectarian conflict. Even some of the war's intellectual architects acknowledged as much: In a 1997 paper, prior to becoming major figures in the Bush foreign policy team, David Wurmser, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith predicted that a post-Saddam Iraq would likely be "ripped apart" by sectarianism and other cleavages but called on the United States to "expedite" such a collapse anyway."

I've wondered about that from the start of the war. It seemed as though our war plans were purposely inadequate, simply because those inadequacies were never corrected. True, it wouldn't and didn't take a large force to conquer Iraq, but keeping the peace and rebuilding just seemed so screwed up that it seemed another part of the overall plan. There was no excuse for having too little troop numbers to stabilize the country, especially after disbanding the Iraqi military, which in itself, seems to have been designed to release well trained Iraqi soldiers into the general population so they would be available for any forthcoming insurgencies.

The lack of a sufficiant post-war force could lead to nothing other than exactly what is taking place now. Questions about Iraqi death squads being under the supervision of the coalition, if true, does fit perfectly into a plan to keep Iraq weak, divided, and fighting amongst themselves, so we can claim that we must stay for years to come.

Only the blind can believe that there's no way we could've stabilized the country by now, if we really wanted to. If we had succeeded in calming the country down and re-establishing a degree of normalcy in the lives of the Iraqis, we would not be shipping home so many bodybags. We would've shown people in the region that it was actually the regime that was the target, and not it's citizens. We would've been more convincing in quelling the belief that we are on a crusade against the Muslum world. But that just would'nt have fit into the neocon plans for the region that involve total domination of the oil production through the use of puppet governments, and a divided opposition. We want unrest in the region, and we want the people there to think we're on a religious crusade, because it causes exactly the conditions we need, to give us more reason to step up our aggression against oil rich regions, that in turn, incites terrorist acts that justify totalitarian control at home, to prevent domestic opposition.

As it stands now, there's only one group of people in the world who can still put a stop to these insane plans, and that's the American people. Until we wake up, get off our complacent asses, and take back our government, "we the people" will become as despised in history, as the Germans who sat quietly while their government ran amuck.

Audio - O'Connor Decries Republican Attacks on Courts

"Newly retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor took on conservative Republican critics of the courts in a speech Thursday. She told an audience at Georgetown University that Republican proposals, and their sometimes uncivil tone, pose a danger to the independence of the judiciary, and the freedoms of all Americans."

Unfortunately we don't get to hear O'Conner herself, but this is an audio of an NPR reporter who was there.

O'Conner warns that political interference with the court by Congress could result in a slide to dictatorship, if they make judicial reforms based on retaliation for what politicians view to be bad decisions. It's a very short report, just over 3 minutes, but we can only hope that a majority of current justices feel the same way.

Here's another site with the embedded audio, as well as the transcript: O'Conner