Truthdig – A/V Booth – Weekly Video Roundup:

Media Matters has collected, stomached and ranked the 11 most outrageous conservative comments of 2006, including Rush Limbaugh blaming America’s obesity crisis on the left and Ann Coulter calling Al Gore a “total fag.” Glenn Beck Watch it

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PETER GABRIEL -DOWNSIDE UP on Jools Holland

 

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 19:

Save The Internet: Net NeutralityNew spot…

it’s good to see Bill Moyers…

Firedoglake

1976-1978: General Services Officer, Niamey, Niger
1978-1979: Administrative Office, Lomé, Togo
1979-1981: Administrative Officer, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.
1981-1982: Administrative Officer, Pretoria, South Africa
1982-1985: Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM), Bujumbura, Burundi
1985-1986: Congressional Fellow, offices of Senator Al Gore and Representative Tom Foley
1986-1988: DCM, Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo
1988-1991: DCM, Baghdad, Iraq
1992-1995: Ambassador to Gabon and São Tomé and Príncipe
1995-1997: Political Adviser to Commander in Chief U.S. Armed Forces, Europe EUCOM, Stuttgart, Germany
1997-1998: Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton and Senior Director for African Affairs, National Security Council, Washington, D.C. (p. 451)

Accusations Fly After the Pierre Gemayel Assassination:

Accusations Fly After the Pierre Gemayel Assassination

By Andrew McGregor
In the aftermath of the war with Israel, Hezbollah and its allies (the Shiite Amal Party and Christian leader General Michel Aoun) are struggling to depose the Lebanese government of Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his March 14 coalition of anti-Syrian Sunni, Druze and Maronite politicians. On November 21, a team of assassins murdered Lebanese Minister of Industry Pierre Gemayel in the streets of a northern Beirut suburb. The latest in a series of assassinations in Lebanon, the murder of the Maronite Christian leader seemed designed to inflame tensions as Lebanon’s political crisis threatens to plunge the country into civil war. It was the attempted assassination of Gemayel’s grandfather and namesake, Sheikh Pierre Gemayel, which sparked Lebanon’s long civil war in 1975.

Gemayel’s death by gunfire was highly unusual in Lebanon, where the preferred method of assassination is the car bomb. A Range Rover or similar vehicle rammed the car Gemayel was driving before a number of gunmen jumped out and began firing handguns equipped with silencers through the driver’s side window, killing Gemayel and a bodyguard. A second bodyguard was seriously wounded. Suspicion for the attack fell on Syria, whose alleged intention was to disrupt the Lebanese government to prevent an investigation by a UN international tribunal into the assassination of Lebanese politician Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005. Rafiq’s son, Sa’ad al-Hariri (leader of the al-Mustaqbal Party), quickly identified Syria as the culprit in the Gemayel killing (al-Mustaqbal, November 22). Later al-Hariri denounced Syria and Israel for wanting civil war in Lebanon and predicted that he and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt were the next targets for assassination (al-Ahram, November 28). Hezbollah’s military wing also claimed the killing was designed to instigate civil war in Lebanon (Moqawama.org, November 19).

Radical factions in Lebanon’s minority Sunni population saw the murder as part of an attempt by the Shiite Hezbollah organization to destroy Sunni political influence in Lebanon. A Sunni group known as the “Mujahideen in Lebanon” claimed that the murder was the work of five Hezbollah members. In a novel view of Lebanon’s political situation, the group accused the Shiites of engineering the insertion of UNIFIL to act as “a buffer” between Lebanese Sunnis and their Palestinian brethren, as well as acting in alliance with “the Crusaders” and Iranian-organized death squads to eliminate the Sunnis in Lebanon (al-Muhajirun, November 16). The group also threatened attacks on the predominantly Shiite southern suburb of Beirut, which it describes as a “pit of unbelief.” A leading Sunni sheikh, Sa’id Harmush, accused Hezbollah of abusing the Sunnis with “acts of robbery, slaughter, humiliation, and expulsion, much more than the Jews have done anywhere” (al-Mustaqbal, November 20). Other radical Sunni websites have urged the “liquidation” of Shiite leaders.

Hezbollah refutes claims that their opposition to the government is religiously inspired. According to Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Na’im Qasim, “we do not demand the prime minister to resign because he is Sunni, but because he represents a political line which we believe makes the country adopt the U.S. position, something which the Sunnis themselves reject” (Asharq al-Awsat, November 22). Amal’s representative in Tehran also asserts that the dispute with the Sunnis over the government is “political and not religious” (Fars News Agency, November 22).

There are signs that al-Qaeda may attempt to exploit the political turmoil to create a violent rift between Lebanon’s Sunni and Shiite populations. A statement originating in the Nahr al-Barid Palestinian refugee camp declared that a group calling itself “Al-Qaeda in Lebanon” was prepared to “destroy this corrupt [Lebanese] government that takes its orders from the U.S. administration” (al-Nahar, November 13). The Mujahideen in Lebanon later claimed that the “al-Qaeda” statement was a fake. The leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Hamza al-Muhajir, denounced Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah as a “charlatan agent of the anti-Christ” in a statement released by the Ministry of Information of the Islamic State of Iraq. Abu Hamza accuses Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of conspiring with Iran and Hezbollah to recreate “the old Persian Empire.”

Druze leader Walid Jumblatt accuses Syria of sending hundreds of al-Qaeda members to Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps, raising the possibility of Iraq-style sectarian violence and a continuing campaign of political assassinations (Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, November 22). Reports from anti-Syrian factions claim that Syrian President al-Assad sent 200 terrorists to Lebanon from Fatah-Intifada, a Syrian-backed Palestinian group led by Abu Musa, a long-time dissident Palestinian leader. Working out of the camps, the Palestinians are alleged to be preparing the assassination of 36 Lebanese leaders (al-Mustaqbal, November 29; Naharnet/AFP, November 29).

The “Fighters for the Unity and Freedom of al-Sham” claimed responsibility for the assassination in a statement that described Gemayel as an agent working for foreign interests. The statement added that other “agents” would soon “be paid their due” (al-Nahar, November 22). The group (which many Lebanese see as a front for Syrian intelligence) claimed responsibility for the assassinations of anti-Syrian journalists Samir Kassir and Jibran al-Tueni in 2005 (al-Nahar, November 22). Both men were killed by car bombs rather than by gunmen.

Hezbollah and Amal leaders have hinted at a U.S. role in the Gemayel murder, making reference to a parcel addressed to the U.S. embassy in Lebanon that was intercepted by Lebanese Customs at Beirut Airport on February 3. The parcel contained silencers and other high-tech military equipment suitable for a sniper (al-Akhbar, February 3). Prior to Gemayel’s murder, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah asked in a Lebanese TV interview, “Why does the U.S. Embassy need silencers? Is this meant to protect the U.S. Embassy or the Americans who are traveling or residing in Lebanon? Or is this meant to carry out assassinations, which the Americans are speaking about and expecting and which the Israelis are speaking about and expecting?” (al-Manar TV, October 31). U.S. officials denied any knowledge of the shipment, which was sent through the normal post rather than sealed diplomatic bags. The incident suggests premeditation on the part of some group that desired to implicate the United States in coming assassinations.

Unfortunately, Lebanon has become a showcase for covert activities, false-flag operations, provocations and disinformation campaigns. Attempting to pin responsibility for a specific operation is to wade deeply into the dark waters of international intrigue and manipulation. It is perhaps instructive to note that both sides in the struggle for dominance in Lebanon claim that the assassination of Pierre Gemayel benefited the opposing party.

It is difficult to see the advantage for Syria of killing a Lebanese cabinet minister from a U.S.-friendly faction just as Washington and London are moving toward opening a dialogue with Syria over Iraq and other regional issues. At the moment, the U.S. State Department and Pentagon are engaged in an internal struggle over Middle East policy. Syria’s ambassador to the United States pointed to “enemies” of Syria as the responsible parties for the assassination, suggesting their intention was to derail the Syrian-American rapprochement (CNN, November 22). Killing Gemayel would be to risk an opportunity to sweep the al-Hariri tribunal under the carpet and leverage Syria’s support on Iraq into concessions from Israel in the Golan Heights. It is also hard to see how al-Qaeda can successfully insert itself into the complicated Lebanese political structure. The notion of creating an Islamic regime exclusively from Lebanon’s minority Sunni community would be immediately dismissed by most Lebanese Sunnis.

Despite incredible internal and external pressures, Lebanon has not yet burst into sectarian violence. This indicates a maturing of the political process in Lebanon and a general reluctance to rejoin the horrors of civil war, although the crisis could tip over into violence at any moment.

Basic Info about Islam:

MARY, the mother of Jesus, is considered especially holy in Islam and is, in fact, the only woman mentioned by name in the Koran, “Mary” (Arabic, Maryam) being the name of one of the Koran’s most often-read chapters.

 New York Magazine:

When in Rome

* By Mark Adams

For VII days, all roads seemed to lead to Rome. Emperor George Bush suffered an Et tu? moment when Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki stuck a last-minute dagger in his plans for a triumphant triumvirate dinner. The Baker-Hamilton commission recommended pulling the Army legions out of Iraq; the Pentagon’s Cincinnatus, Colin Powell, crossed the rhetorical Rubicon and called the conflict a civil war. (The president declared that the die was cast, and that “we can accept nothing less than victory.”) Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked Americans to lend him their ears, so that he could explain how the U.S. is too supportive of Zionists. Homeland Security gladiator Michael Chertoff offered a mea culpa for throwing New York City’s anti-terror funding to the lions. After cops shot a bridegroom 50 times, Ciceronian orator Al Sharpton came, saw, and conquered the media moment, even as Queens threatened to burn. Albany consuls Pataki and Spitzer bemoaned the decline and fall of the Empire State’s health-care system and backed the closing of five city hospitals with a hearty “Excelsior!” (Pataki, aware that tempus fugit, also rushed to push through the Atlantic Yards coliseum.) A Cleopatran Craigslist cutie was busted for trying to extort $125,000 from a Pepsi executive. Danny DeVito had watchers of The View running for the vomitorium after boozily bragging about the Caligulan delights he’d enjoyed on an overnight White House stay. (“Every place in that bedroom was, ah, utilized,” he slurred to a horrified Barbara Walters.) 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan had his own in vino veritas moment during a Henry Hudson Parkway drunk-driving bust, tipsily telling cops he’d “had some beers.” Nascar held a chariot race in midtown. Coney Island’s Astroland—the Circus Maximus of Tilt-a-Whirl parks—was sold to a developer. Scientists determined that an artifact found aboard a sunken Roman ship was a 2,000-year-old astronomical computer. And soothsayers saw bad omens in the entrails of John Gotti’s grandson’s arrest report: pills, pot, and a barbarically unflattering Caesar haircut

The Woodward Scandal Should Not Blow Over:

by Norman Solomon

Bob Woodward probably hoped that the long holiday weekend would break the momentum of an uproar that suddenly confronted him midway through November. But three days after Thanksgiving, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” a question about the famed Washington Post reporter provoked anything but the customary adulation.

“I think none of us can really understand Bob’s silence for two years about his own role in the case,” longtime Post journalist David Broder told viewers. “He’s explained it by saying he did not want to become involved and did not want to face a subpoena, but he left his editor, our editor, blind-sided for two years and he went out and talked disparagingly about the significance of the investigation without disclosing his role in it. Those are hard things to reconcile.”

An icon of the media establishment, Broder is accustomed to making excuses for deceptive machinations by the White House and other centers of power in Washington. His televised rebuke of Woodward on Nov. 27 does not augur well for current efforts to salvage Woodward’s reputation as a trustworthy journalist.

The Woodward saga is a story of a reporter who, as half of the Post duo that broke open Watergate, challenged powerful insiders — and then, as years went by, became one of them. He used confidential sources to expose wrongdoing at the top levels of the U.S. government — and then, gradually, became cozy with high-placed sources who effectively used him.

Now, Woodward is scrambling to explain why, for more than two years, he didn’t disclose that a government official told him the wife of Bush war-policy critic Joe Wilson was undercover CIA employee Valerie Plame. Even after the Plame leaks turned into a big scandal rocking the Bush administration, Woodward failed to tell any Post editor about his own involvement — though he may have been the first journalist to receive one of those leaks. And, in media appearances, he disparaged the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald without so much as hinting at his own stake in disparaging it.

Interviewed several months ago on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program, Woodward portrayed the investigation as little more than a tempest in a teapot. “The issues don’t really involve national security or people’s lives or jeopardy,” he commented, adding that “I think in the end, we will find there’s not really corruption here.”

Woodward also told the national radio audience: “The woman who was the CIA undercover operative was working in CIA headquarters. There was no national security threat, there was no jeopardy to her life, there was no nothing. When I think all of the facts come out in this case, it’s going to be laughable because the consequences are not that great.”

But there was never anything laughable about Fitzgerald’s investigation into the Plame scandal. And Woodward had learned to take it a lot more seriously by the time he appeared as the only guest on CNN’s hour-long “Larry King Live” the night of Nov. 21.

After days of bad publicity, Woodward was in a spinning mood. He seemed eager to run out the clock as he filled time with digressions and minor details. When in a corner, he often brought up Watergate, as though his days of indisputable glory could draw light away from his recent indefensible behavior.

Larry King is rarely a vigorous interviewer; his customary mode of questioning is much closer to Oprah than “60 Minutes.” But King, who has featured Woodward on his show many times over the years, seemed agitated during the latest interview. And that’s understandable. After all, Woodward had previously gone on the show and dismissed the importance of the Plamegate scandal while withholding relevant firsthand information.

Woodward has written best-selling books heavily reliant on interviews granted by top administration officials. During the Nov. 21 interview, the unusually engaged King zeroed in on a dynamic that often pollutes the work of big-name journalists in Washington: They get and retain access to the powerful because they don’t go out of bounds.

Noting that Woodward was able to avail himself of lengthy interviews with President Bush for a recent book, King said: “He’s given you three hours. He’ll help you with the next book. Doesn’t that give him an edge with you?” And, King pointed out, the benefits of such arrangements run in both directions, for author and president alike: “He’s not going to come out looking terrible because you want him for your next book and you’d like to have that in.”

Bob Woodward wasn’t grilled by Larry King. But the questions were vigorous enough to make America’s most renowned reporter seem evasive and self-absorbed.

During the long interview, Woodward gave various explanations for his careful silence that misled Post editors and the public. He did not want to get dragged into the Plame-leak investigation with a subpoena, and anyway he was preoccupied with gathering information that would be revealed later in a book.

Overall, Bob Woodward’s priorities seemed to center on Bob Woodward. Yet near the end of the interview, he offered this platitude with a straight face and without a hint of self-reproach: “I think the biggest mistake you can make in this sort of situation as a reporter is to worry about yourself.”

Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information and excerpts from the book, go to: http://www.WarMadeEasy.com.

Polonium – Alexander V. Litvinenko – Vladimir V. Putin – New York Times:

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored ByDecember 3, 2006
All Aglow
Polonium, $22.50 Plus Tax
By WILLIAM J. BROAD

THE trail of clues in the mysterious death of Alexander V. Litvinenko may lead to Moscow, as the former spy claimed on his deathbed. But solving the nuclear whodunit may prove harder than Scotland Yard and many scientists at first anticipated.

The complicating factor is the relative ubiquity of polonium 210, the highly radioactive substance found in Mr. Litvinenko’s body and now in high levels in the body of an Italian associate, who has been hospitalized in London. Experts initially called it quite rare, with some claiming that only the Kremlin had the wherewithal to administer a lethal dose. But public and private inquiries have shown that it proliferated quite widely during the nuclear era, of late as an industrial commodity.

“You can get it all over the place,” said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who has advised the United States government on nuclear forensics. “And it’s a terrible way to go.”

Today, polonium 210 can show up in everything from atom bombs, to antistatic brushes to cigarette smoke, though in the last case only minute quantities are involved. Iran made relatively large amounts of polonium 210 in what some experts call a secret effort to develop nuclear arms, and North Korea probably used it to trigger its recent nuclear blast.

Commercially, Web sites and companies sell many products based on polonium 210, with labels warning of health dangers. By some estimates, a lethal dose might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. “Radiation from polonium is dangerous if the solid material is ingested or inhaled,” warns the label of an antistatic brush. “Keep away from children.”

Peter D. Zimmerman, a professor in the war studies department of King’s College, London, said the many industrial uses of polonium 210 threatened to complicate efforts at solving the Litvinenko case. “It’s a great Agatha Christie novel,” he said. “She couldn’t have written anything weirder than this.”

Mr. Litvinenko, 43, a vocal critic of the Russian government, died on Nov. 23 after a traumatic illness in which his organs failed and his hair fell out. As he lay dying, he claimed that he had been poisoned and blamed Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin. The Kremlin dismissed the charge as absurd.

The British authorities soon found that Mr. Litvinenko had died of polonium 210 poisoning in what appeared to be its first use as a murder weapon. Conspiracy theorists said Russia had the motive and means, noting its long history of polonium work, as well as creative assassinations. The recent discovery of traces of radioactivity on British commercial jets flying to and from Russia has heightened the suspicions.

As in any good murder mystery, the deadliness was foreshadowed. Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive element in 1898 and named it after her native Poland, organized its close study. One of her polonium workers died in 1927 from apparent poisoning, according to Susan Quinn, author of “Marie Curie: A Life” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Another worker lost her hair.

At first, mines provided minute samples nearly invisible to the human eye. But the debut of nuclear reactors let scientists make polonium 210 by the pound. The substance emits swarms of subatomic rays, and the Manhattan Project in 1945 used them to trigger the world’s first atom bombs. Such initiators became the global standard for basic nuclear arms.

President Eisenhower, eager to promote “atoms for peace,” had the high heats of polonium 210 turned into electricity for satellites. But the batteries lost power relatively fast because of the material’s short half-life, just 138 days. The United States made few such spacecraft.

By the 1960’s, researchers worried increasingly about polonium 210’s deadly health effects. Harvard researchers found it in cigarette smoke and argued that its concentrations were high enough to make its radioactivity a contributing factor in lung cancer.

Vilma R. Hunt, who helped lead the studies, called polonium 210 a nightmare for health workers, and perhaps sleuths, because it tended to move about in unexpected ways. “It crawls the walls,” she said in an interview. “It can be lost for a while and then come back.”

Though dangerous when breathed, injected or ingested, the material is harmless outside the human body. Skin or paper can stop its rays cold.

Industrial companies found polonium 210 to be ideal for making static eliminators that remove dust from film, lenses and laboratory balances, as well as paper and textile plants. Its rays produce an electric charge on nearby air. Bits of dust with static attract the charged air, which neutralizes them. Once free of static, the dust is easy to blow or brush away.

Manufacturers of antistatic devices take great pains to make the polonium hard to remove. Even so, Dr. Zimmerman of King’s College said it could be done with “careful lab work,” which he declined to describe.

The Health Physics Society, a professional group in McLean, Va., that distributes information on radiation safety, estimates that a lethal dose of polonium 210 is 3,000 microcuries (a radiation measure named after Marie and Pierre Curie). Other experts put the figure slightly higher.

An antistatic fan made by NRD, of Grand Island, N.Y., contains 31,500 microcuries of polonium 210 — or, in theory, more than 10 lethal doses. The unit often sells commercially for $225.00. Repeated calls to NRD were not returned, but the company in sales literature describes its products as unusually safe.

The company’s antistatic brushes contain less polonium, typically 500 microcuries of radiation. The three-inch brush often sells on the Web for $33.99. In theory, by spending $203.94, before tax and any handling charges, and then disassembling six brushes, someone with lab experience could accumulate a lethal dose.

In Tennessee, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory sells dozens of types of rare nuclear materials to American manufacturers. But Bill Cabage, a lab spokesman, said it sold no polonium 210 because Russia was able to do so much more inexpensively.

“That’s typical” of exotic radioisotopes, he said. “We can’t compete with their prices.”

Last week, Russia’s top nuclear official said it exports 8 grams of polonium 210 a month, or 96 grams a year, to the United States. That is 3.4 ounces, which seems like a trifle but in theory is enough for thousands of lethal doses. He also said Russia had made no exports to Britain in the past five years. “Allegations that someone stole it during production are absolutely unfounded,” Sergei Kiriyenko, director of the Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency, said on Tuesday. “The controls are very tough.”

Russian officials have repeatedly called Mr. Litvinenko’s death part of a choreographed effort to discredit Mr. Putin. But despite such denials, British tabloids have tended to blame the Kremlin, and the affair has strained relations between London and Moscow.

Nuclear experts said the apparent origin of much of the world’s polonium 210 in Russia, including quantities used in American products, meant that investigations of the toxin’s provenance would probably reveal little. What would be surprising, the experts said, was if the radioactive toxin turned out to have been made or mined outside Russia.

Still, several experts held out the possibility that close examination of polonium 210 residues from Mr. Litvinenko’s body or from the multiple sites where it has been found around London might reveal nuclear fingerprints that could throw light on the baffling case.

“What they’ll be looking for is radioactive contaminants made at the same time,” said Dr. Happer of Princeton. “They’ll do the best they can technically,” hoping to find a match between the London samples and the known attributes of the world’s stocks of polonium 210. “But my guess,” he added, “is that it will take an informant” to clear up the mystery.

Rolling Stone : Iran: The Next War:

A few years later, after Reagan was elected, Ledeen had become prominent enough to earn a spot as a consultant to the National Security Council alongside Feith. There he played a central role in the worst scandal of Reagan’s presidency: the covert deal to provide arms to Iran in exchange for American hostages being held in Lebanon

Crooks and Liars » 2006 » December » 14:

Adam Reilly
By: John Amato @ 3:05 PM – PST Submit or Digg this Post

Apparently, when we call for good and honest reporting we’re hypocrites because we also praise good and honest reporting. Does he eat Zombie brains too?