And Obama has outdone W on several points besides:

** Advocating bombing Iran
** Proposing to invade Pakistan
** Advocating a troop surge in Afghanistan
** Advocating a larger standing army

The only remotely credible thing his supporters can say to bolster Obama's anti-war street cred is an October 2002 speech he made at Chicago's Federal Plaza. But don't look too closely at that speech and its tortured history, or your illusions in the Democrat's "peace candidate" will surely suffer.

The speech itself, made at a rally sponsored by an organization whose leaders SUPPORTED the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, was quite a tepid affair. Consistent with his message last evening, it advocated redeploying combat troops from the proposed Iraq invasion to another shooting war, Afghanistan -- hardly an anti-war message.

More importantly, it was made when Obama was a mere state senator, when he could advocate mining cheese on the moon for all it mattered. Once he became a U.S. senator, his voting record became almost totally hawkish. In the months following the October 2002 speech, as the war drums for the Iraq invasion grew louder, the alleged anti-war poltician went silent. In an Orwellian twist, his tepid anti-war speech was wiped off his website.

As the summer of 2004 rolled around, the "anti-war" senator was still mute. In the run up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, national reporters contacted me and other Chicago area anti-war activists, desperately pleading for a transcript, even a snippet of tape from the speech. But as long as the war was the least bit popular, the "anti-war" senator kept his head down.

Not exactly a profile in political courage.

Last night's speech had a long list of gifts for people concerned about deteriorating prospects for working class people in this country. But sorry, starry-eyed Obama followers, Christmas won't come on November 4th this year.

As the old anti-fraud adage goes, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."

Those hoping that a President Obama will keep his numerous promises, or live up to his anti-war media image, would do well to remember his heart-felt promise -- and back-stabbing -- on the FISA bill.

The man is a Chicago Democrat, with solid backing from every hackish politician our city can muster, right up to our crooked mayor and all his hangers-on. They wouldn't have backed him, solidly and early on, if he wasn't one of them and not one of us.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Andy Thayer is an activist with the Chicago Coalition Against War and Racism and is co-founder of Chicago's Gay Liberation Network (www.GayLiberation.net)

It seems that neither the Democrats nor Republicans will get the message in time, or they just don't care about the fate of the people of the U.S. or anywhere else. What i got from the Obama acceptance speech was that Iraq was the wrong venue for military invasion (factually correct) if the 'hunt for Osama" was the motivation. However, it appears that Obama is as eager as McCain to "Bomb, bomb, bomb..., bomb, bomb, Iran" (as sung to the Beach Boys tune), though Obama puts it a bit more discreetly "NO options are off the table if Iran continues with their uranium enrichment." We in the U.S. literally have our hands full with nuclear waste, and no safe place to put the waste currently exists. Telling Iran they cannot enrich uranium for energy use is hypocritical, and the people of Iran will find out for themselves soon enough the downfalls of nuclear waste..

The BEST deterrent to Iran's uranium enrichment is for Iranian Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be invited to personally visit the downwinder cancer clusters of the Nevada/Utah test site regions, visit with the cancer stricken uranium miners of the Navaho/Dineh reservation, read the facts about Yucca Mt. nuke waste depository (seismic activity, water percolation, etc...), visit Hanford upstream on the Columbia, then eat some radioactive mussels caught from the Columbia River delta downstream from Hanford, and after all that he can decide if uranium enrichment is still the best idea for the Iranian people..

Then there is Obama's seeming eagerness to continue the "hunt for Osama" by bombing every cave from Afghanistan to Pakistan, inciting more angry Muslims to sign up for Al Queda, Taliban or whatever other terrorist group that recruits in their region..

If the U.S. government were serious about stopping al Queda, there are some simple points to follow. If Muslims have no legitimate reason to join al Queda, the organization will cease to exist by attrition, nobody will be a martyr for al Queda if they feel safe from oppression, exploitation and U.S. military invasion and occupation. Local regimes that oppress their people (like Saddam against the Shia in Iraq) are better left to the justice of the local population, not some global policeman like the U.S. invading to 'liberate' them, especially when control of their oil is the underlying reason for the so-called 'liberation'...

The basic points to end al Queda are;

1) Close and withdraw troops from ALL U.S. military bases located in Muslim lands (and other non-Muslim lands for good measure). There is no justification for the U.S. to play the world's police force. Other nations have fought one another for centuries long before the U.S. existed, and they will continue to do the same long after the U.S. ceases to exist, so present day resources and troops are needed in the North American continent to deal with climate disasters (Katrina, Hanna, etc...) and other infrastructure repairs. U.S. military bases in North America will remain operating for purposes of self defense ONLY!!

2) We must stop supporting Israeli violence and oppression of Palestinian people! This cannot be said enough! Stop pro-Zionist lobbyist groups like AIPAC and CUFI from derailing peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis who are actually working for peace (many more Israeli/Palestinian peaceniks exist than the U.S. media lets on to!) by outlawing the the above mentioned Zionist lobbyist groups completely, they do more harm than good..

3) Cut all ties with Saudi Royal Family. The Saudi Royalty will no longer be able to oppress and exploit immigrant (Pakistan, Africa, etc...) oil rig workers without the U.S. military protection. Get petroleum from elsewhere besides Saudi Arabia, and especially (MOST IMPORTANT!!) find alternatives to petroleum, increase public transit, bicycle riding, pedestrian paths, etc...

4) Petroleum should be saved and CONSERVED (how's that for being a true conservative!!) for emergency vehicles (fire, ambulance, etc...), public transit busses, and some other public common needs (food transport, small tractor farming, etc...), NOT for people to cruise around town in their gas guzzling SUVs!! Start holding petroleum corporations responsible for our collective petroleum addiction, make SUV drivers pay additional gas taxes for their role in driving up the prices for everyone else by overpurchasing and thus increasing demand and price of gas..


These points are very similar to what Adam Gadahn (high ranked al Qaeda spokesperson, aka Azzam the American of Orange County, CA!) has outlined in a list of demands;

"Bush, the die has been cast and the blood has been spilled and there is no way to undo what you have done.

There are, however, some steps you can take to curtail your losses and prevent the number of American casualties at home and abroad from rising even higher.

The Champions of Islam, defending their faith and brethren against your evil doing have repeatedly made clear these steps but because I know you live in a cocoon of your own making, and prefer to remain ignorant of what goes on in the world, I shall summarize them here. I strongly suggest you heed and implement them for your own good and the good of your people.

One, pull every last one of soldiers, spies, security advisors, trainers, attaches, and so on out of every Muslim land from Afghanistan to Zanzibar. Should so much as one single American soldier or spy remain on Islamic soil, it shall be considered sufficient justification for us to continue our defensive jihad against your nation and people.

Two, stop all support and aid - military, political, economic, or otherwise – to the fifty-six plus apostate regimes of the Muslim world and abandon them to their well-deserved fate at the hands of the soldiers of Islam. Should you fail to comply in full we will deem it sufficient justification to continue to fight and kill Americans.

Three, end all support, moral, military, economic, political, or otherwise to the bastard state of Israel and ban your citizens, Zionist Jews, Zionist Christians, and the rest from traveling to the occupied Palestine or settling there. Even one penny of aid will be considered sufficient justification to continue the fight .

Four, cease all interference in the religion, society, politics, and governments of the Muslim world and leave us alone to establish the Islamic Shura State which will unite the Muslims of earth in truth and justice. A single word of American protest shall be silenced by a thousand Islamic bombs.

Five, put an end to all forms of interference in the educational curricula and information media in the Islamic world and impose a blanket ban on all broadcasts to our region, especially those designed to alter or destroy the faith, minds, morals, and values of our people.

And six, free all Muslim captives from your prisons, detention facilities, and concentration camps regardless of whether they have been recipients of what you call a fair trial or not. Your refusal to release them will mean the continuation of our just struggle against your tyranny until the last kidnapped Muslim has been liberated.

This is not a call for negotiations. We don’t negotiate with baby killers and war criminals like you. No, these are legitimate demands which must be met. And your failure to heed our demands and the demands of reason means that you and your people will - Allah willing- experience things which will make you forget all about the horrors of September 11th, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Virginia Tech.

And let us be clear. A pull-out from Iraq alone in the absence of compliance with the remainder of our legitimate demands will get you nowhere and will not save you from our strikes.

SO stop wasting your time, and trying to save face with these futile, farsical maneuvers on Capitol Hill and start making some serious moves.

It’s your choice, Bush, cutting your losses and saving some face by getting out now with what you’ve still got, or continuing to coun t your dead and pursue a bloody fight to the very end. Your end, not ours.

By the grace of Allah, and with his help and power, we’ve struck back hard these past several years and with Allah’s permission we shall continue to strike back hard.

This year, next year, the year after that, and so on, until the last Crusader goes home whether waving a white flag or lying in a flag covered casket.

And our final prayer is that all Praise is due to Allah, who gives victory to the believers."

entire statement of Gadahn found @;
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1841904/posts

(Never mind the website 'free republic' being operated by neo-cons, they make fun of Adam Gadahn by calling him a 'loser', etc..., but we all know that the exact opposite is true! The actual statement by Gadahn found there is most likely factually accurate, even if the free republic is run by some neo-con a-holes!!)

These demands apply to whomever takes the reigns of power in '09 after war criminal GW bush finally and thanks be to God steps down from power..

It is interesting to note that Dr. Ron Paul also recognizes that U.S. military bases overseas are directly responsible for our current problems with the Muslim world, and also advises that foreign bases need to be closed, that the U.S. stops being the world's police and attend to pressing domestic issues..

From Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty;

"With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy. Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda. Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country."

found @;
http://www.campaignforliberty.com/mission/

We are free to disagree with Dr. Paul on many other issues, though on foreign policy he is correct. For pointing out that the 9/11 attacks were a direct result of "blowback" (as stated by Ward Churchill also) for U.S. foreign policy flaws (like supporting Israel, military base in Saudi Arabia, etc...), he was attacked by 'fellow' Republican Rudy "9/11 Firehat Hero" Giuliani for caving in to terrorists. All Ron Paul did was spell out the facts that the media won't tell us, our foreign policy of interventionism is making U.S. more enemies than we can handle, and most importantly, it is ethically wrong to be bullying other smaller nations for better control of their oil resources, and the righteous and oppressed fight back so much harder than the oppressor, no matter how many powerful guns the oppressor may have in their arsenal..


Swapping U.S. bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Qatar, etc...

by Is Pakistan or Iran next on the list?

Friday Aug 29th, 2008 4:55 PM

For clarification purposes the above comment mentions the 9/11 attacks were primarily a result of U.S. military bases in the Muslim Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, and in 2003 the U.S. military base in Saudi Arabia was closed down, though this occurred simultaneously with the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There's also another base now in nearby Qatar. The close down of the Saudi base wasn't so much to appease Bin Laden as it was a strategic move to a more centralized position to exercize control of Iraq's neighbors (Iran, Syria, etc...). So no dice still with trying to listen to the legitimate demands made by Azzam or other Al Queda spokespeople, swapping bases doesn't count for closing them..

from common dreams;

"The “swap” from Saudi Arabia to Iraq

In much the same way that the “abuses and usurpations” committed by King George III’s “standing armies” in England’s North American colonies were denounced in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Osama bin Laden and others experienced the presence of U.S. troops and bases near Mecca and Medina, Islam’s holiest cities, and elsewhere in Saudi Arabia as demeaning. These were unacceptable sacrileges. Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa calling for their withdrawal put Washington and the Saudi monarchy on notice. Al Qaida’s murderous assaults against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon finally led the Bush administration to take bin Laden seriously.

As Brigadier General Robert Pollman has since explained, “It ma[de] a lot of logical sense” to “swap” U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia for new bases in Iraq. Using preparations for the 2003 invasion of Iraq as political cover, nearly all U.S. troops and most of the Pentagon’s military infrastructure were pulled out of Saudi Arabia. Qatar now hosts the Combined Air Command Center. Thousands of U.S. troops are based in Kuwait, where they are trained, have easy access to the model supply base at Doha, and can support military operations in Iraq. But the greatest part of the infrastructure has been redeployed to Iraq.

The Baker-Hamilton Study Group functionally endorses the Pentagon’s “Go Long” strategy, which envisions 50,000 to 60,000 troops – including one-tenth of the U.S. Army – remaining in Iraq “for years to come.” This helps to explain why the Pentagon is continuing to spend nearly $1 billion a year to build and expand military bases in Iraq. As Major General Allen G. Peck, deputy air commander of the U.S. Central Command, put it in May 2006, “We’ll be in the region for the foreseeable future … Our intention would be to stay as long as the host nations will have us.”

The invasion of Iraq was thus rooted in more than neoconservative fantasies of imposing liberal democracy and a neoliberal economic system on Iraq. It was designed to transform the oil-rich nation into an unsinkable U.S. aircraft carrier from which U.S. attacks and military interventions could be launched to “discipline” oil-rich Iran, Syria, and others who might challenge U.S. regional hegemony, terrorizing potential rivals – including indigenous insurgents – with high-tech and potentially nuclear “shock and awe” destruction."

complete article @;
http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0319-26.htm

The presence of U.S. bases in Qatar and other nearby regions also continues to bolster the Saudi Royalty against growing popular unrest, and their continued exploitation of immigrant oil rig workers, another fact ignored by the U.S. media;

"Five extended families in the Middle East own about 60 percent of the world's oil. The Saud family, which rules Saudi Arabia, controls more than a third of that amount. This is the fulcrum on which the global economy teeters, and the House of Saud knows what the West is only beginning to learn: that it presides over a kingdom dangerously at war with itself. In the air in Riyadh and Jidda is the conviction that oil money has corrupted the ruling family beyond redemption, even as the general population has grown and gotten poorer; that the country's leaders have failed to protect fellow Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere; and that the House of Saud has let Islam be humiliated--that, in short, the country needs a radical purification.

We can try to wish this away all we want. But the reality is getting harder and harder to ignore. Per capita income in Saudi Arabia fell from 528,600 in 1981 to $6,800 in 2001. The country's birth rate has soared, becoming one of the highest in the world. Its police force is corrupt and the rule of law is a sham. Saudi Arabia almost certainly leads the world in public beheadings, the venue for which is often a Riyadh plaza popularly known as Chop-Chop Square. Illegal arms routinely flow into and out of the country. Taking into account its murky “off-budget" defense spending, Saudi Arabia may spend more per capita on defense than any other country in the world (some estimates put the figure at 50 percent of its total revenues), and the House of Saud believes this is necessary for its personal protection. The regime is threatened by increasingly hostile neighbors--and by determined enemies within the country’s borders. Popular preachers all over Saudi Arabia call openly for a jihad against the West--a designation that clearly includes the royal family itself--in terms as vitriolic as anything heard in Iran at the height of the Islamic revolution there. The kingdom's mosque schools have become a breeding ground for militant Islam. Recent attacks in Bali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kenya, and the United States, not to mention those against U.S. military personnel within Saudia Arabia, all point back to these schools--and to the house of Saud itself, which, terrified at the prospect of a militant uprising against it, shovels protection money at the fundamentalists and tries to divert their attention abroad."

and;

"If an election were held in Saudi Arabia today, if anyone who wanted to could run for the office of president, and if people could vote their hearts without fear of having their heads cut off afterward in Chop-Chop Square, Osama bin Laden would be elected in a landslide--not because the Saudi people want to wash their hands in the blood of the dead of September 11, but simply because bin Laden has dared to do what even the mighty United States of America won't do: stand up to the thieves who rule the country.

Saudi Arabia today is a mess, and it is our mess. We made it the private storage tank for our oil reserves. We reaped the benefits of a steady petroleum supply at a discounted price, and we grabbed at every available Saudi petrodollar. We taught the Saudis exactly what was expected of them. We cannot walk away morally from the consequences of this behavior--and we really can't walk away economically. So we crow about democracy and talk about someday weaning ourselves from our dependence on for­eign oil, despite the fact that as long as America has been dependent on foreign oil there has never been an honest, sustained effort at the senior governmental level to reduce long-term U.S. petroleum consumption.

Not all the wishing in the world will change the basic reality of the situation.

· Saudi Arabia controls the largest share of the world's oil and serves as the market regulator for the global petroleum industry.

· No country consumes more oil, and is more dependent on Saudi oil, than the United States.

· The United States and the rest of the industrialized world are therefore absolutely dependent on Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and will be for decades to come.

· If the Saudi oil spigot is shut off, by terrorism or by political revolution, the effect on the global economy, and particularly on the economy of the United States, will be devastating.

· Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, criminal, dysfunctional, and out-of-touch royal family that is hated by the people it rules and by the nations that surround its kingdom. "

found @;
http://dunamai.com/articles/general/fall_of_the_house_of_saud.htm

Fall of the house of Saud? Just in time for Gustav??

Let me help you out here.
Stop with the 'al-CIAduh' crap 'cause it's only a data base for the CIA trained terrorists they seem to still have on call to terrorize Iran and Pakistan, so drop it, already.
Saudi Arabia is a Rockefeller holding also kept in line by the American CIA trained death squads that deals with any dissent.
These enery cartels are in a criminal Trust to control supply and prices and your massive word hash promoting austerity for the 'common' person reveals the true purpose of this confused and misleading entry.

Please bugger off.

No, i will not 'bugger off'. Another great big lie put out by so-called 'conspiracy theorists' is their attempt to discredit everything al Queda does today as CIA influenced because once upon a time the CIA helped the Taliban fighting the Soviet Union. Then the Taliban sort of seemed to morph and merge with al Queda, or at least both groups shared similar ideology and the same battle venue for some time..

That doesn't discount the '9/11 truthseeker' movement's quest to obtain greater understanding and facts (many covered up) of how the GW bush regime was aware and complicit in the 9/11 WTC bombings (internal thermite installations, NORAD stand down, etc...) later used as pretext to invade Iraq..

http://www.911truth.org/

Not all 9/11 truthseekers think alike and believe the "al Queda as patsies" argument with 9/11, only that the GW bush regime somehow had a hand in this WTC building collapse action and exploited the 9/11 tragedy for his own (and oil corporation sponsors) benefit by lying about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden (lies obtained by torture of senior al Queda operative), missing WMDs, etc... so that the long term occupation of Iraq could have a good excuse (ie., 'war or terror' abstraction) to justify torture and killing of Iraqi civilians, etc...

That doesn't mean that al Queda is completely controlled by the CIA, only that their actions of 9/11 and elsewhere are amplified by media with the 'boogeyman effect' to scare people in the U.S. into accepting further militarization and loss of personal freedom in the name of 'war on terror'. This shows that al Queda is having an effect, though not so pleasant to the people of the U.S., this is the side effect of the GW bush regime's continued escalation and insistance in the continued occupation of Iraq...

People in the U.S. and elsewhere may dislike and disagree with the tactics used by al Queda, though they have been effective at engaging with the U.S./Israeli imperialists on multiple fronts, and this should be recognized, Sunni Wahhabist ideology and all..

Yes, Osama bin Laden is related by blood to one of the wealthiest families in the ruling House of Saud, though we learn through history (U.S. civil war for example) that internal civil strife often pits family members against one another. In this case Osama Bin Laden broke ties with his family and decided to fight the U.S. imperialists on his own terms. Just because most people wouldn't want their daughters marrying him doesn't mean that his struggle against the crusaders is not effective..

Saddam was also once a powerful U.S. ally against the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran during the Reagan years, do we really need to show the pics of ugly ass Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam when he went over to Iraq with his present of chemical weapons? When Saddam was killing Kurds during the Reagan years that was all fine and dandy with the U.s. foreign policy team so long as he kept the Iranians busy at the border. When Saddam stopped listening and did his own thing (go to EU currency rate, invade Kuwait, etc...), he became a threat and that led to Gulf War 1 and the eventual full on invasion of Iraq. Very similar story with the former CIA-Taliban connection, though now the Taliban and Al Queda are no longer allies with the U.S. This pattern is duplicated in other continents around the globe (Manuel Noriega, etc..), so why would Al Queda be the only exception??

Just in case we didn't see his ugly mug enough, here he is again;


http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/images/blsaddamrumsfeld.htm

and some text background from counterpunch;

"A few months later, on July 17, 1984, a Times article with a Baghdad dateline sketchily filled in a bit more information, saying that the U.S. government "granted Iraq about $2 billion in commodity credits to buy food over the last two years." The story recalled that "Donald Rumsfeld, the former Middle East special envoy, held two private meetings with the Iraqi president here," and the dispatch mentioned in passing that "State Department human rights reports have been uniformly critical of the Iraqi President, contending that he ran a police state."

Full diplomatic relations between Washington and Baghdad were restored 11 months after Rumsfeld's December 1983 visit with Saddam. He went on to use poison gas later in the decade, actions which scarcely harmed relations with the Reagan administration.

As the most senior U.S. official to visit Iraq in six years, Rumsfeld had served as Reagan's point man for warming relations with Saddam. In 1984, the administration engineered the sale to Baghdad of 45 ostensibly civilian-use Bell 214ST helicopters. Saddam's military found them quite useful for attacking Kurdish civilians with poison gas in 1988, according to U.S. intelligence sources. "In response to the gassing," journalist Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, "sweeping sanctions were unanimously passed by the U.S. Senate that would have denied Iraq access to most U.S. technology. The measure was killed by the White House."

The USA's big media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests combined to strengthen and arm Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes. "In the 1980s and afterward, the United States underwrote 24 American corporations so they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, which he used against Iran, at that time the prime Middle Eastern enemy of the United States," writes Ben Bagdikian, a former assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, in his book The New Media Monopoly. "Hussein used U.S.-supplied poison gas" against Iranians and Kurds "while the United States looked the other way."
"

entire article found @;
http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon12082005.html

My goodness, the spooks are ON this aren't they? It must be important and worth the manhours needed to promote the farce of a boogy man we affectionately call al-CIAduh, al-CIAda or the paint 'de joiur you servant freaks or your masters come up with to justify the rape job your kind perform upon the people.
First I would like the families of the major banking houses, after asset seizure and criminal proscecusion to be sent to Iraq for terminal occupation, then the enablers in the media like you, to follow them.
'Conspiracy theroists' my ass, you treasonous scum.