Stormtroopers Secure Emperors State Visit

TIRANA (Reuters) – An Albanian government decree allowing U.S. Marines to be the only armed corps guarding President George W. Bush on a visit next week has been seen by some in Albania as an insult to their security forces. Albania has been looking forward to Bush’s visit on June 10, the first by a U.S. president. He will be staying for seven hours as part of a regional tour.

As part of preparations, parliament on Thursday approved an act that allows more than 500 combat-ready U.S. troops entry into the country, and sanctions their use of “force proportionate to any possible threat.”

This is effectively a temporary 7 hour occupation of a country, so I guess they are getting off lightly.

Haditha, The Occupiers Tale

“It was unfortunate. We’re sorry about this but this is what happens when terrorists attack us and hide in houses,” Frank recalled his superiors saying. “It’s an unfortunate thing that happens when you let terrorists use your house to attack our troops.”

When Wuterich’s team finished, 19 people were dead in or near the houses and another five men were killed near the car they were riding in.

Frank, who was sent to the scene hours after the killings to move the bodies, said two women and six children were found in the bedroom at the end of a hallway, all but one on the bed. All the children were under age 15, he said. 

In other words we will kill everyone in a house that we suspect a ‘terrorist’ (as determined by us) has been. That is a threat, it is also a war crime. The bottom line of this case is this- if what they did was not a crime then the US is saying to countries it occupies that we will kill anyone with impunity at the same time we expect you to be thankful to us for our presence. So ask yourself, would you accept that deal? Or would you fight to the death to expel the invaders?

From Soup To Nuts

The Empire are now rolling out the next stage of it’s Iraq plans, the Dems are on-board for the war having mastered the pantomime of last weeks vote which they engineered to ensure the war funding passed while appearing anti-war. If you doubt that read the wonky ins and outs courtesy of David Sirota–

When non-political folks look at what happened today, they will see Democrats approved a procedural rule, and voted against a Republican bill to give President Bush a blank check for the Iraq War. What they may not see is the real story: The procedural vote was the vote to create a situation that Democrats knew would result in the passage of a blank check. In other words, the procedural vote was the key vote in support of the blank check, because it set up a situation whereby passage of the blank check was inevitable. If that rule vote didn’t pass, the blank check wouldn’t even be able to come to the floor in the inevitably-going-to-pass situation it ended up coming up in.

Now the admission of the reason for the huge military bases under construction-

President George W. Bush would like to see a lengthy U.S. troop presence in Iraq like the one in South Korea to provide stability but not in a frontline combat role, the White House said on Wednesday. The United States has had thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea to guard against a North Korean invasion for 50 years.

Democrats in control of the U.S. Congress have been pressing Bush to agree to a timetable for pulling troops from Iraq, an idea firmly opposed by the president. White House spokesman Tony Snow said Bush would like to see a U.S. role in Iraq ultimately similar to that in South Korea.

And to recap-

There are a couple of sayings that are often applied to how we citizens are managed on planet earth, old chestnuts, cliches if you will.

1. If you put a frog into a pan of boiling water it will jump out (don’t do this at home kids, the frog will be badly hurt). But if you place a frog in a pan of cold water then gently heat it the frog will remain and be boiled to death eventually.

2. Treat the people like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them on shit.

I don’t even know if the frog thing is true and as a vegetarian I don’t recommend any research in this area. But it is a metaphor for how incrementally small changes over time will go unnoticed while radical change will be seen and perhaps fought against. The lesson for the canny politician is to achieve your ends, do it slowly. The mushroom joke shows how secrecy is also to be employed to mislead and manage the populace. Combine these two together and you get Mushroom Soup.

So there you have it, before they took power the plan existed to occupy and control Iraq, events once they were in power made this more easy. To ensure opposition to the plan would never arise strongly enough to endanger the strategy it is revealed piecemeal and only when circumstances dictate the necessity. This is Empire in motion. In the next 2 years- the oil law heralds the splitting of Iraq into 3 states, the castle keep US bases ensure order and oil production. The only fly in the ointment is not our opposition, that would only matter if this were a functioning democracy, the only opposition to this is the Iraq resistance.

Ian Paisley Jnr. & My Secret Shame

Yes, I have come to admit a terrible prejudice, a low-lying bigotry that frankly I do not care to correct. I mean I know to many people this feeling I hold is unacceptable but I think I am right, the title of this post is incorrect. I feel I am compelled by political correctness to profess shame but within myself I feel none. Simply put I am repulsed by Ian Paisley Jnr. and I think what he does is wrong. Furthermore I think he harms himself and without caring about it he harms society. I hate what he does.

I imagine in a fearful fugue the vile things Ian must do with his sexual partners, to feel properly moral I need to think about his evil lustful activities quite a lot and then be repulsed by them. Imagine his rubbery protestant lips gliding over a greasy labia, his pale Anglo-Irish back undulating above some female as he pounds away, probably smiling all the while at the harm he carelessly causes to society. Sometimes to feel extra repulsed I imagine him naked and oiled pleasuring several women at once, kissing and fingering there nubile flesh as he mounts them one after another in a variety of sweaty and explicitly revealing positions. Oh yes that’s extra specially repulsive, oh how he should be punished for that, for all he does within his ‘conservative lifestyle’ all he cares about is his own filthy pleasure, his perverted desires for power to order society to his disciplined design. Sometimes to maintain the proper level of outrage I search, late at night, websites depicting the filthy man/woman love this selfish sex monster so enjoys.

I know however, I am strong I will not give in to this deranged decadence, I mean there were occasions, everyone makes mistakes when they are young and drunk. Lascivious ladies with their painted lips and soft curves, the fullness of a breast, the pleasing haunch, the soft silky panties sliding slowly down long legs. No, NO! I will not be a dirty beast not again, not after last weekend. No it is the duty of all upstanding right thinking men to concern themselves night and day with the sex other people are having. And Ian it has to stop. I think you know what I mean…

Tories Praise Conservative

The Conservatives are best placed to carry on Tony Blair’s public service reforms, the shadow chancellor says.
George Osborne claimed Gordon Brown, the next prime minister, had “abandoned the centre ground of public service reform to the Conservative Party”.

Two words when you think about Osborne should enter your mind- Flat Tax. Blair is a tory Osborne only more so, flat tax is the rich’s holy grail, anyone that mentions it has the concerns of less than half a percent of the population at heart. And most of them avoid tax anyway. Yet strangely more than that tiny percentage vote conservative, there’s one born every minute.

My Name Is Robert Zoellick & I Globalize Death

In a speech to the right-wing Heritage Foundation in Washington, Zoellick made the case that there is no alternative to globalization and that U.S. companies and consumers were already benefiting in countless ways from this new wave of corporate-led economic integration. To drive his point home about all the new opportunities, Zoellick noted: Even the funeral business has gone global, with a Houston-based company now selling funeral plots in 20 countries.

Bush’s pick for the WorldBank is business as usual. Let me list the ways. PNAC, ENRON, Republican, A Vulcan,’Free’ Trade ideologue, Bush family friend, Panda fondler, NAFTA, Corporate board member,

member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as the Trilateral Commission and was one of the signers of the January 26, 1998, Project for the New American Century (PNAC) letter.
Zoellick spelled out a new foreign policy that would be based on the preeminence of military power—a concept of a new American century in which unquestioned U.S. military superiority would allow the United States to shape the international order.

Zoellick coined the phrase “the coalition of the liberalizers” prior to the failed WTO ministerial in September 2003 in referring to the group of countries that have joined the United States in bilateral or regional trade pacts. In the face of mounting opposition from Brazil and other developing nations to the U.S. global economy agenda, trade rep Zoellick began forging a “coalition” of trade partners to agree to open their markets and protect U.S. investment in order to ensure coveted access to the huge U.S. market.

And he will be tough on copyright clampdowns (hello the bootleggers, hello DRM), because he profits from it, on the board of-

SAID Holdings, the Bermuda-based South African patent and copyright security specialists.

More at Lenin, such as his direction to the decimated Fallujah to be self reliant. He has worked on stabilising Darfur, pushing for a UN/NATO involvement, which seems his one glint of humanity contrary to his ambitious banker heart, unless… there’s oil there.

Cindy Sheehan Takes A Break From The Empire

A few days ago she showed her disgust with the Dems helping to keep the war going but she has now written that she is to leave the peace movement behind, her disgust is overwhelming-

This is my resignation letter as the “face” of the American anti-war movement. This is not my “Checkers” moment, because I will never give up trying to help people in the world who are harmed by the empire of the good old US of A, but I am finished working in, or outside of this system. This system forcefully resists being helped and eats up the people who try to help it. I am getting out before it totally consumes me or anymore people that I love and the rest of my resources.

Good-bye America…you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it.

It’s up to you now.

Animal Factory

The assault involved at least six men at the Catterick Garrison. One of the gang is said to have pinned down the unnamed victim as another attempted to rape him It is claimed the solider, one of 300 trainee paras at Catterick, was accused of being gay and, after the alleged assault, was curled up on a bed crying: “Help me”.

Accused of being gay? Hey Paras in case you don’t have a calender it is 2007, shut the fuck up you repressed cowards. Or hey how often does a dirty lefty get to say this- Go back to Russia!

And what does the MOD do? Try to spin it using the most heinous rape denying techniques that unfortunately have been around forever, some progress-

But privately officials suggested it had been exaggerated by “salacious reporting”. They also claimed the incident was “consensual” and pointed out that the alleged victim had not filed a complaint.

Disgraceful. Of course not, he is scared, traumatised, probably being threatened to keep silent and somehow I doubt the paras have a proactive rape counselling service. The ‘officials’ are reprehensible to use those old lies & excuses and clearly demonstrate the neanderthal attitudes at play. Retards.

Take it away Bill…

Iraq Resistance Snatch Oil Privatisation Expert

The rumours are that it is a Bearing Point operative that was kidnapped, along with his mercenary bodyguards, this is clearly tied to the push for the iniquitous oil privatisation bill and shows the Iraqi’s are not going down without a fight. Maybe this will halt the bill and allow for one created by the Iraqis to be drawn up and debated instead of this one which was written by Bearing Point under the gaze of Big oil and Bushco and wasn’t even shown to Iraq parliament until a year later after the occupation govts. and world bank had their say so. Of course that is a slim chance especially as Bush is about to push through a new World Bank head who will maintain pressure on Iraq to accept the invader’s terms.

Hey Moscow! Lighten Up

Moscow Dammit!

The Moscow cops cooperated with thugs who attacked a gay rights march in Moscow, this is waking some people up to Putin and his authoritarianism and some of the wingnut batshit eejits in Russia. Nationalists (violent bigots) & religious fundamentalists united against the marchers and the police let them be beaten before allowing the aggressors to go free then arrest the victims who they then laid into as well. Scumbags.-

The counter-demonstration was staged by ultra-nationalists and members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Some of them chanted “Moscow is not Sodom!”

Sunday’s march was to commemorate the 14th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Russia. Moscow city police spokesman Viktor Bryukov had warned the organisers not to go ahead.

Gay activists were also attacked by right-wing protesters and arrested during a march last year. The head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Alexy II, supports the ban on gay parades.

Richard Fairbrass of pop act Right Said Fred (no really Deeply Dippy is actually a great summery pop song) earns tons of respect for going, standing up and then coming forth with these great words-

“When it was over I actually felt more sorry for the guy that whacked me than I did for me… How threatened can he be, how insecure is he to be threatened by a bisexual pop singer who’s most famous for singing ‘I’m too sexy’?”

Polls Apart

Gosh, seems us anti-war types are not such a minority despite what the MSM and the warmongers made us feel,

Ipsos-MORI
Methodology: Telephone interviews with 961 British adults, conducted from May 11 to May 13, 2007. No margin of error was provided.

Do you approve or disapprove of the way the prime minister, Tony Blair, is handling the current situation with Iraq?

	May 2007	Jan. 2003	Sept. 2002
Approve	17%	26%	40%
Disapprove	77%	62%	49%
Don’t know	6%	13%	11%

Do you approve or disapprove of the way the president of America, George W. Bush is handling the current situation with Iraq?

	May 2007	Jan. 2003	Sept. 2002
Approve	9%	19%	30%
Disapprove	85%	68%	59%
Don’t know	6%	13%	11%

Which, if any, of the following statements comes closest to your own view about the war in Iraq?

I supported the war and I support it now	11%
I supported the war but do not support it now	22%
I did not support the war but I support it now	3%
I did not support the war and I do not support it now	61%

Freedom IS Slavery

Read how Reuters reported this, makes the UK sound like a police state, go figure-

British Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to push through a new anti-terrorism law before he steps down next month giving “war-time” powers to police to stop and question people, a newspaper reported on Sunday. Blair, who is due to resign on June 27 after a decade in office, wrote in an article in The Sunday Times that his government planned to publish new anti-terrorism proposals “within the next few weeks”.

An interior ministry spokeswoman confirmed the government was looking at including a “stop and question” power in the new legislation. “We are considering a range of powers for the bill and ‘stop and question’ is one of them,” she said.
The “stop and question” power would enable police to interrogate people about who they are, where they have been and where they were going, Such powers had only existed before in other parts of Britain in war time, it said.

Interior minister John Reid is proposing other measures to combat Islamist militants, the report said. These would give police the power to take documents away for examination even if their value as evidence was not immediately obvious and the power to remove vehicles to examine them.

Not forgetting this-

…details of every Briton could soon be on the national DNA database, raising fresh concerns of a ‘surveillance society’. Controversial plans being studied by the government would see the DNA of people convicted of even the most minor, non-imprisonable offences, such as dropping litter, entered on the national database.
The proposals are part of a wide-ranging government review of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (Pace)

17 Years After Aung San Suu Kyi Won The Election Burmese Military Still In Charge

Click pic to go to the Burma Campaign. To see all posts on Burma click here.

Pro-democracy activists rallied in the Burmese capital, Rangoon, to mark the 17th anniversary of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party’s victory in national polls.
Some 200 members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) gathered to shout slogans and call for Ms Suu Kyi’s release from house arrest.

The rally came on the day her latest detention period was due to expire. But on Friday Burma’s military junta extended it by another year, drawing swift international condemnation.

Ms Suu Kyi, 61, has spent 11 of the last 18 years in detention. In 1990 her NLD won national elections, but these were annulled by the army and she was never allowed to take power. Her latest period of house arrest began in May 2003.

MOD Discreetly Sanctions Torture

Is it just me or is this holiday weekend being used to dump and awful lot of ‘bad news’, MOD caught in a lie about their sanctioning of torture on the ground in Iraq-

The court martial into the death of Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa, who died after sustaining 93 separate injuries, heard evidence that senior British officers in Iraq sanctioned the ‘conditioning’ of prisoners, which included the use of hooding and forcing detainees to stand for hours in stressful positions. The MoD, however, told the joint committee during its recent inquiry into the UK’s compliance with the UN Convention Against Torture that the use of hooding and stress positioning for the purpose of interrogation has been prohibited since 1972.

The Committee has now written to the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, seeking an explanation. The move threatens to become a major embarrassment for the MoD, potentially pitting the department against international human rights laws.

‘The Government should now accept our recommendation that the provisions of the torture convention should apply to all of our armed forces’ actions,’ Andrew Dismore, the committee’s chairman, said. ‘It should ensure that our troops are suitably trained to equip them with the skills and knowledge needed to comply fully with our international obligations.’

Leanne MacMillan, director of policy and external affairs at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, welcomed the decision to seek answers from the MoD. ‘It is quite clear that assurances given to parliament by the then Prime Minister Edward Heath in March 1972 have not been honoured,’ MacMillan said.

‘He stated quite unequivocally in the House of Commons that conditioning techniques such as hooding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, the withholding of food and drink, and bombardment with loud noise would not be used by Britain’s armed forces unless sanctioned in advance by parliament. It is quite clear, however, both from the court martial, and from what the Medical Foundation has learnt from former army interrogators, that the techniques have continued to be used.’

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that such techniques are inhuman and degrading. More recently, the United Nations Committee Against Torture said that they amounted to torture.