Bush starts the second cold war

[titus27]

Who Lost Russia

by Patrick J. Buchanan
June 5 , 2007
By 1988, Ronald Reagan, who had famously branded the Soviet Union “an evil empire,” was striding through Red Square arm-in-arm with Mikhail Gorbachev. Russians were pounding both men on the back. They had just signed the greatest arms reduction agreement in history – eliminating all Soviet SS-20s targeted on Europe, in return for removal of the Pershing and cruise missiles Reagan had deployed in Europe.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” wrote Wordsworth about his first hearing the news of the fall of the Bastille.
Many of us felt that way then.
Within three years, the Berlin Wall had come down, the puppet regimes of Eastern Europe had been swept away, Germany was reunited, the Red Army had gone home, the Soviet Empire had vanished and the Soviet Union had broken up into 15 nations. The Baltic republics were free. Ukraine was free.
Yet, on the eve of the G-8 summit, Vladimir Putin has announced that Russia would re-target missiles on NATO. We must, he said, counter Bush’s decision to put anti-missile missiles in Poland and radars in the Czech Republic. Why are we doing this?
The United States says the ABM system in Europe is to defend against an Iranian attack. But Tehran has no atom bomb and no ICBM.
We appear to be headed for a second Cold War – and, if we are, responsibility will not fully rest with the Kremlin. For among those who have mismanaged the relationship are presidents Clinton and Bush II, the baby boomers who appear to have kicked away the fruits of a Cold War victory won by their Greatest Generation predecessors.
How did they do it?
* When the Red Army went home from Eastern Europe, the United States, in violation of an understanding with Moscow, began to move NATO east. We have since brought into our military alliance six former members of the Warsaw Pact and three former provinces of the Soviet Union: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
* Anti-Russia hawks are now pushing to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. If they succeed, we could be dragged into future confrontations with a nuclear-armed Russia about who has sovereignty over the Crimea and whether South Ossetia should be part of Georgia.
Are these vital U.S. interests worth risking a war? Why are we moving a U.S.-led military alliance into the front yard and onto the side porch of a country with thousands of nuclear weapons? Would we accept any commensurate Chinese or Russian move in the Caribbean?
* After Moscow gave us a green light to use the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to base U.S. forces for the Afghan war, the United States has sought permanent bases there. Russia and China have now united to throw us out of their back yard.
* America colluded with Azerbaijan and Georgia to build a Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan pipeline to transmit Caspian Sea oil across the Caucasus to the Black Sea and Turkey, cutting Russia out of the action.
* In 1999, the United States bombed Serbia 78 days to punish her for fighting to hold her cradle province of Kosovo, which Muslim Albanians were tearing away. Orthodox Russia had long seen herself as protectress of the Balkan Slavs. That Clinton ignored Russia in launching this unprovoked war on Serbia was seen in Moscow as proof that Russian concerns had become irrelevant in Washington.
* After helping dump over the government in Belgrade, our Neocomintern – the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House and other fronts – interfered in Ukraine and Georgia, helping oust pro-Moscow regimes and install pro-American ones. Since then, NED has been run out of Belarus and its subsidiaries are about to get the boot from Moscow.
Can we blame the Russians for being angry? How would we react to left-wing NGOs in Washington, flush with Moscow oil money, aiding elements hostile to the Bush administration?
* The United States has been constantly hectoring Russia on backsliding from democracy. But compared to Beijing, Moscow is Montpelier, Vt. And why, if the Cold War is over, are Russia’s political arrangements any of our business?
If we don’t like the way Putin treats Mikhail Khorokovsky, Boris Berezovksy and the other “oligarchs” who robbed Russia blind in the 1990s, maybe Putin doesn’t like how we treated Martha Stewart.
Harry Truman is often blamed for having started the Cold War. He didn’t. Stalin did. But Clinton, George W. and the neocons have a strong claim to having started the second. A first order of business of the next president should be to repair the damage this crowd has done – and to get out of Russia’s face.
Click here for a printable version

[titus27]

Gorbachev criticises US 'empire'
Mr Gorbachev said relations between Blair and Putin had started well
Gorbachev interview The former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, has blamed the US for the current state of relations between Russia and the West.
In a BBC interview, Mr Gorbachev said that the Russians were ready to be constructive, but America was trying to squeeze them out of global diplomacy.
He added that the Iraq War had undermined Tony Blair's credibility. Mr Gorbachev accused America of "empire-building", which he said the UK should have warned it away from.


'New empire'
Moscow and the West have been in dispute over Iraq, America's plans for a missile defence system and civil rights within Russia itself.

I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire'
Mikhail Gorbachev


Britain's extradition request for a Russian man in connection with the murder of ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko has also caused tension.
In an interview with Radio Four's The World This Weekend, Mr Gorbachev said relations between Russia and the West were in a bad state.
"Well, it's worse than I expected," he said through a translator.
"We lost 15 years after the end of the Cold War, but the West I think and particularly the United States, our American friends, were dizzy with their success, with the success of their game that they were playing, a new empire.
"I don't understand why you, the British, did not tell them, 'Don't think about empire, we know about empires, we know that all empires break up in the end, so why start again to create a new mess.'"
He added that the war with Iraq had damaged Britain's relationship with Russia after a promising start.
"Tony Blair and Putin established a very good relationship and that made it possible to advance our relationship," he said. "But then Iraq happened and Tony found himself in the embrace of that military monster, of that war situation, and he lost a lot of his credibility in the world and in Europe."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...pe/6717037.stm

Published: 2007/06/03 15:48:42 GMT

© BBC MMVII

[titus27]

Czech unease over US missile shield grows as Bush appeals to Putin

By Anne Penketh and Daniel McLaughlin in Prague

Published: 06 June 2007



President George Bush has sought to reassure the Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that US plans for a Europe-based missile shield are no threat to Russia. However, he risked stoking tensions by accusing Moscow of derailing democracy.
Speaking in Prague yesterday before heading to Germany for a G8 summit that has been overshadowed by talk of a new Cold War, Mr Bush stressed: "Russia is not the enemy."
"The Cold War is over. It ended," he said. Mr Bush held talks with Czech leaders who have endorsed US plans for a radar facility to be located in the Czech Republic as part of a missile defence system. But the plan is not popular in the country, with 72 per cent of Czechs opposed, according to latest opinion polls. Interceptor rockets are to be based in Poland, which Mr Bush will visit after the G8.
Mr Bush says the missile shield would be a defence against "rogue states" such as North Korea and Iran but Mr Putin is not convinced. The Russian President has caused consternation in the West by threatening to re-target Russian nuclear missiles against Europe in retaliation.
Speaking later in the day at a democracy conference organised

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2617438.ece

[titus27]

Let"s sing along..

http://filmstripinternational.com/

video

[Kim S.]

Listen, titus, I'll just post the FIRST comment that was on the site of that "video" (can garbage like that still be defined "video"? I don't think so...):

What a bunch af ASSHOLES to publish such garbage ! This is our American President ! A total lack of respect for our
country, the office of President, and self respect for themselves could only be at the root of this tactless display ! Regardless of who the president is, which party he represents, he is still the President of the United States of America, the greatest country on earth. My turn for a question- Where are the ASSHOLES that were going to leave this great country if George Bush were to be elected to a second term? The scum sucking assholes are all show and no go ! Good-bye Seam Penn, Jane Fonda, Alec Baldwin and the like, keep your word, LEAVE- permently- I for one will help finance your one-way trip to your home in Afghanistan or Iraq.... good ridance.. GO ... PLEASE ! Maybe someone will have the chance to breathe the good air you don't deserve ! GOD BLESS THE USA, her people and her leaders !
- DK, Texas

[titus27]

74% of americans think like this ..
If you like him ...keep him.
http://takebackthemedia.com/triwimp.html

have fun
video

P.S.what the hell you are doing in Italy ?
Go to Israel..

Good bye for good...Fly a kite..

[Kim S.]

Listen, titus, someone must have voted for President Bush, if he's won the elections. So please stop saying that "Americans hate their Presidente! Boo-hoo! etc etc..".
I support President Bush and I'm not afraid of saying that, but insulting me for my ideas means only that you don't know what to say.
And, by the way, being a Republican doesn't make me an Israelian. So good bye. (YOU should fly a kite, and stop posting this garbage)

[titus27]

We need peace ...
American soldiers at the rate of 54% need psyho help.
They are fed up fighting a non-sense war .
Canada has many young american deserters.
Not yet as much as during the Vietnam war..
when we had 100.000 .
Most of them still live in Canada and are Canadians.
Before Bush, young american used to join the Army
by the thousands.
Now the recruiting offices are empty.
To make the number ,they accept anyone .
Drug adicts ,Alkies ,mental sick ...
This is the reason many iraqis civilians are killed for no reason.

Bush destroyed America and Iraq.

[titus27]

Try Times Reader Free

Week in Review

• Soviet-Style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation’

• published: June 3, 2007

HOW did the United States, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, come to adopt interrogation techniques copied from the Soviet Union and other cold war adversaries?
Investigators for the Senate Armed Services Committee are examining how the methods, long used to train Americans for what they may face as prisoners of war, became the basis for American interrogations.
In 2002, the C.I.A. and the Pentagon became concerned that standard questioning was inadequate for suspected terrorists and turned to a military training program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE. For decades, SERE trainers had exposed aviators and others at high risk for capture to Soviet-style tactics, including disrupted sleep, exposure to extreme heat and cold, and hours in uncomfortable stress positions. Sometimes the ordeal included waterboarding, in which a prisoner’s face is covered with cloth and water is poured from above to create a feeling of suffocation.
Some of those techniques have been used on prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A.’s secret overseas jails for high-level operatives of Al Qaeda.
Many SERE veterans were appalled at the “reverse engineering” of their methods, said Charles A. Morgan III, a Yale psychiatrist who has worked closely with SERE trainers for a decade.
“How did something used as an example of what an unethical government would do become something we do?” he asked.
His question is only underscored by a 1956 article, “Communist Interrogation,” in The Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, recently turned up by the Intelligence Science Board, which advises the spy agencies. Written by doctors working as Defense Department consultants, Lawrence E. Hinkle Jr. and Harold G. Wolff, the article shows that methods embraced after 2001 were once considered torture that would produce false information. SCOTT SHANE
•
The article describes basic Soviet N.K.V.D. (later K.G.B.) methods: isolation in a small cell; constant light; sleep deprivation; cold or heat; reduced food rations. Soviets denied such treatment was torture, just as American officials have in recent years:
The effects of isolation, anxiety, fatigue, lack of sleep, uncomfortable temperatures, and chronic hunger produce disturbances of mood, attitudes and behavior in nearly all prisoners. The living organism cannot entirely withstand such assaults. The Communists do not look upon these assaults as “torture.” But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture.
Interrogators looked for ways to increase the pressure, including “stress positions”:
Another [technique] widely used is that of requiring the prisoner to stand throughout the interrogation session or to maintain some other physical position which becomes painful. This, like other features of the KGB procedure, is a form of physical torture, in spite of the fact that the prisoners and KGB officers alike do not ordinarily perceive it as such. Any fixed position which is maintained over a long period of time ultimately produces excruciating pain.
Overt brutality was discouraged, as it was at American facilities:
The KGB hardly ever uses manacles or chains, and rarely resorts to physical beatings. The actual physical beating is, of course, repugnant to overt Communist principles and is contrary to K.G.B. regulations.
Closed trials and military tribunals were standard, as at Guantánamo:
Prisoners are tried before “military tribunals,” which are not public courts. Those present are only the interrogator, the state prosecutor, the prisoner, the judges, a few stenographers, and perhaps a few officers of the court.
The Bush administration concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Qaeda detainees. Similarly, the Soviets argued that international rules did not apply to foreign detainees:
In typical Communist legalistic fashion, the N.K.V.D. rationalized its use of torture and pressure in the interrogation of prisoners of war. When it desired to use such methods against a prisoner or to obtain from him a propaganda statement or “confession,” it simply declared the prisoner a “war-crimes suspect” and informed him that, therefore, he was not subject to international rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war.
Communist-style interrogation routinely produced false confessions:
The cumulative effects of the entire experience may be almost intolerable. [The prisoner] becomes mentally dull and loses his capacity for discrimination. He becomes malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate. By suggesting that the prisoner accept half-truths and plausible distortions of the truth, [the interrogator] makes it possible for the prisoner to rationalize and thus accept the interrogator’s viewpoint as the only way out of an intolerable situation.

Next Article in Week in Review (7 of 11) »


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[titus27]

The Real Reason for Bush’s Invasion of Iraq Is a National Security Secret

by Paul Craig Roberts

by Paul Craig Roberts

[ [/center]

DIGG THIS

American soldiers have been fighting and dying in Iraq since 2003, and Americans do not know why.
All the reasons President Bush gave us for his war are false. Bush said he invaded Iraq "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people."
We now know that these were false claims. Disinformation about Iraq was produced by a special unit within the Pentagon run by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith. The unit operated outside the normal intelligence channels of the CIA and DIA. Its purpose was to create false intelligence to enable Bush to initiate war with Iraq.
Did President Bush know that the claims put into his speeches by his speechwriters was false?
Who instructed Bush’s speechwriters to incorporate known lies into the President’s speeches?
Why did Vice President Cheney, the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of Defense all lie to the American people and to the entire world?
What is the real agenda?
Millions of Americans have come to their own conclusions about the reasons for Bush’s invasion: (1) Oil: the US government wants to hold on to power by expanding its control over oil, and Bush and Cheney want to reward their oil company cronies. (2) Military-security complex: Police agencies favor war as a means of expanding their power, and military industries favor war as a means of expanding their profits. (3) Neoconservative ideology: Neocons’ believe in "American exceptionalism" and claim that America’s virtue gives the US government the right and the obligation to impose US hegemony on the rest of the world, especially in the Middle East where independent Muslim states object to Israel’s theft of Palestine. (4) Karl Rove: Rove used the "war president" role to rescue Bush from attack by Democrats as an illegitimate president elected by one vote of the US Supreme Court. (5) American self-righteousness over 9/11 and lust for revenge.
All of these reasons came together to make a cruel war on an innocent people.
There may be other reasons about which we know not.
As it is now recognized that every reason for the war is false or illegitimate, the question is: why does Bush insist on persisting with a costly war, the express reasons for which are now known to be mistakes? There were no weapons of mass destruction, no connections to al Qaeda, and Bush has installed a puppet Iraqi government that cannot venture outside the heavily fortified and US protected "green zone." The Iraqi government governs nothing.
War without cause is murder, not war.
That Bush persists with a war for which he can provide no legitimate reason indicates that there is a secret agenda that has not been shared with the American people. Are we experiencing the privatization of the US government by police agencies, the military-security complex, and the Israel Lobby?
That the American people and their elected representatives continue to tolerate a war that has killed and maimed thousands of their own soldiers, destroyed the infrastructure of a country, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and created 4 million refugees for no known reason raises serious questions about the morals of the American people.
Is the impotence of the peace movement due to the power of the Israel Lobby or have Americans become morally degenerate as commentators increasingly assert?
One indication would be the response of presidential candidates to the gratuitous and failed war. What we saw at the Republican presidential candidates’ debate on June 5 is inconsistent with the self-esteem of the American people. All of the leading Republican presidential candidates openly and nonchalantly endorsed using nuclear weapons against Iran unless Iran abandons its right to enrich uranium under the non-proliferation treaty, to which Iran is a signatory (unlike nuclear-armed Israel, India, and US puppet Pakistan).
What is moral degeneracy if it is not using nuclear weapons to murder masses of innocent civilians and spread deadly radioactivity over vast areas merely in order to force a country to do as we order? If this isn’t barbarism, what is barbarism?
Do the American people realize that the frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination are monsters who want to murder people who have done us no harm?
After five years of war that has achieved no noble purpose, no valid aim, indeed, no aim at all except perhaps Osama bin Laden’s aim of stirring up uncontrollable strife in the Middle East, how can Republicans cheer for candidates who preach a wider war and the use of nuclear weapons against defenseless people?
Is the approval lavished on Republican presidential candidates, who are willing to use nuclear weapons as means of terrorizing Muslim peoples, an indication that the American people have morphed into inhuman monsters?
If not, what does it indicate? Ignorant fanaticism? Paranoia? Blind hatred? The belief that no one is of any value but Americans?
For six and one-half years the Bush Regime has relied on coercion, intimidation, war, and threats of war. Diplomacy and good will have been shunned. The regime’s blatant warmongering has resurrected the nuclear arms race. China and Russia regard America’s drive for world hegemony with great alarm. China has put nuclear ICBMs on mobile platforms to increase their survivability in event of an American attack. Russia has developed new multi-warhead ICBMs, which can penetrate any known missile defense, and new cruise missiles that Putin says will be targeted on Europe if the US persists in its aggressive military encirclement of Russia.
An administration that resurrects the threat of nuclear Armageddon so that its cronies in the military-security complex can become still richer is evil beyond compare.

June 8, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is author or coauthor of eight books, including The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions. He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He is also coauthor with Karen Araujo of Chile: Dos Visiones – La Era Allende-Pinochet (Santiago: Universidad Andres Bello, 2000).
Copyright © 2007 Creators Syndicate

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