Why Won't The US Impeach Bush & Cheney?

I am totally amazed at how far The United States Of America has travelled, from beacon of democracy and freedom to a virtual dictatorship which is seen by the majority of the outside world as the biggest threat to global peace at this time. Up until a while ago, the nations people could be forgiven for their inaction. Many said that the electorate were simply stunned, being caught wrong-footed by a manipulative and sly leadership. But that time has long passed and anyone who sits and watches as an illegal war is waged, as US citizens are spied upon, as elections are rigged, as the nations judiciary is gagged, as torture and kidnapping are sanctioned as matters of policy, as the threat of terror is used on its own people as a means to get them to give up their rights, anyone who sits by and does nothing is complicit.

So in case anyone is still unsure, success on impeachment is virtually guaranteed on ANY of the following charges:

Bush and Cheney's lies about Iraqi ties to al Qaeda are on videotape and in writing, and Bush and Cheney continue to make them to this day. There was no al Qaeda in Iraq until the invasion.

Their claims about Iraqi weapons have been shown in every detail to have been, not mistakes, but lies.

Their threats to Iran are on videotape.

Bush being warned about Katrina and claiming he was not are on videotape.

Bush lying about illegal spying and later confessing to it are on videotape. A federal court has ruled that spying to be a felony.

The Supreme Court has ruled Bush and Cheney's system of detentions unconstitutional.

Torture, openly advocated for by Bush and Cheney and their staffs, is documented by victims, witnesses, and public photographs. Torture was always illegal and has been repeatedly recriminalized under Bush and Cheney. Bush has reversed laws with signing statements.

Those statements are posted on the White House website, and a GAO report found that with 30 percent of Bush's signing statements in which he announces his right to break laws, he has in fact proceeded to break those laws.

So any time you guys want to do the right thing and prove to the world that you are the great, strong nation that your reputation suggests, please go ahead. We can't do it for you. The rest of the world is waiting.

Sun Cycle Not Causing Global Warming, Scientists Say

Scientists from Britain's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the World Radiation Centre in Davos, Switzerland have completed a study of the suns cycles, including its 11 year sunspot cycle, and found no link between it and global warming.

The scientists believe that solar activity has influenced the planet in the past but is not doing so today. The Royal Society added that the conclusions were an important argument to further the theory of warming being caused by human activity.

"At present there is a small minority which is seeking to deliberately confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day," they say.

Oil is a Key Motive Behind Iraq Occupation, Australia Admits

Australia has admitted for the first time what many have long suspected - that securing oil resources is a key motive behind deploying troops in Iraq. "Resource security" is a priority, says Defence Minister Brendan Nelson.

"Obviously the Middle East itself, not only Iraq but the entire region, is an important supplier of energy, oil in particular, to the rest of the world." he said. Previously the government had denied such reasons for the 2003 coalition invasion.

Critics have questioned the motives behind Prime Minister John Howards decision to join the campaign to oust Saddam and whether the reasons given for participation in the war were excuses rather than genuine concerns.

Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Challenged

I 'stumbledupon' this video which concerns the human contribution towards global warming, and the arguments behind what our actions should or should not be. Despite ultimately agreeing with the conclusion offered in the video, I find the basis for the argument put forward fundamentally flawed.

The proposition offered by the commentator goes something like this:

What should we be doing about the (theoretical) threat of global warming, whether its effects are enhanced or not by human race? At a basic level, our options can be divided up into four groups which can be visualised in a two-by-two grid pattern -

scenario 1 - that human global warming theory is wrong but we act anyway by investing heavily in clean power, reduce CO2, etc. result: the huge costs involved lead us into global economic depression.

scenario 2 - that human global warming theory is correct and we take the appropriate action by investing heavily in clean power, reduce CO2, etc. result: the planet is saved through our actions.

scenario 3 - that human global warming theory is wrong and we take no action. result: life goes on as normal.

scenario 4 - that human global warming theory is correct but we take no action. result: floods, famine, wars, death and destruction.

Where I see a glaring flaw is where scenario 1 leads to economic doom because of the costs involved in the global change in energy production/usage, etc, but scenario 2 doesn't. Surely if scenario 1 is correct then logically scenario 2 should also lead us into a great depression also, with the only difference being that we would have saved the planet in the process.

What the commentator fails to appreciate is the fact that the global economy is going to, if anything, improve due to the new industries and markets created by alternative fuels, recycling patterns, etc. Whatever jobs or revenues are lost due to us dropping fossil fuels, for example, will be easily made up by the shift to solar, wind, wave or bio-fuel technology and production. There will be a worldwide market for environmentally-friendly measures and so the usual supply-and-demand requirements will still exist. They would have just shifted from dirty to clean energy, etc.

Why is it that people have allowed themselves to believe that clean energy, environmental cleanup/protection, alternative raw materials and all the rest is bad for the economy? And even if they were bad for the economy, what use is that economy if human-influenced global warming is going to wreck the planet in the near future?

As the video concludes, regardless of what we currently believe, we have to get on with the change to a green global economy. The effects of pollution and fossil fuel shortages alone should be enough for us to take this path anyway and I'm sure we'd be well on the way down it if it wasn't for big business blocking our journey and feeding us with disinformation, aided by self-interested politicians and lobbyists.

Webster Tarpley - The 9/11 issue - How to stop World War III

If you only had 2 hours left to live you'd still do a lot worse than spend it watching THIS. No explanation, just go and watch it. Please.

Could We Be On The Eve Of Another 9/11?

With US forces poised to attack Iran, the talk is of a Good Friday (April 6th) assault involving massive air power and quite possibly nuclear weapons. Israel is hovering in the wings and would willingly step up to volunteer its services, having already publicly stated that it considers Iran a threat to its national security.

The US has had an assault plan in place for over a year now and has envisaged the concept of an attack for even longer, but the leadership is aware that their public won't go along with their plan just like that. A massive terrorist attack, on the other hand, would almost certainly turn them and support for retaliation on a colossal scale would then be widespread.

Former CIA Officer Philip Giraldi chillingly noted that the Pentagon's plans to attack Iran were drawn up "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States." Writing in The American Conservative in August 2005, Giraldi added, "The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites ... As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States."

Just this week Democratic presidential candidate Bill Richardson warned of the dangers of a nuclear terror attack on the US (source article), which some feel is simply a way of lending plausibility to such an event. The US has already stated that should such an attack occur it would attack Iran whether the 'axis of evil' state was implicated or not.

General Tommy Franks said back in 2003 that this would lead to the US introducing martial law within its borders. He talked of "a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution."

It seems that there would be a domino effect immediately following any 'attack' which would change the US, and the rest of the world, dramatically. You may see this as just another 'conspiracy' theory, but the stakes are far too high to risk complacency. Iran is totally foolish in the game that it is playing with the 15 UK sailors, but isn't about to harm them or nuke the US mainland. There is no threat, just like there was none 4 years ago when Iraq was invaded. This will be another contrived war and it will be one that isn't turned on and then off again as the US would wish. Russia and China won't stand by and idly watch. Nuclear powers Pakistan and India will surely be dragged into the affair. And what of the estimated 450,000 Iranian troops and the missiles capable of reaching Europe? I'm sure that they'll have a part to play in reply. Israel will have its hands full with Hezbollah (remember them from last year?).

This is World War III we are talking about. Next week may well be the last week of peace that we'll experience for a very, very long time.

Global Warming - A Swindle Or An Unknown?

The debate about Global Warming continues to rage as fiercely as the extreme weather many of us appear to be experiencing nowadays. Now a hurricaine-strength storm has been whipped up, taking me (and I suspect many others) by total surprise.

UK TV's Channel 4 aired a documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle (available now on YouTube) recently which temporarily muddied the already-murky waters. Writer and director Martin Durkin put forward the 'truth' about global warming, that we have been deliberately deceived by a variety of all-powerful people (ranging from Margaret Thatcher to extreme-left fanatics bent on seeing the demise of capitalism and preventing third world development) and that the current warming trend is nothing more than part of a natural cycle encouraged by the activities of our Sun.

The arguments in the programme, if taken at face value, seemed to blow a hole right through the heart of the generally accepted climate change theory - the one that states that greenhouse gas emissions, primarily CO2, produced by humans (and partially contributed to by nature) is causing global temperatures to rise at a dangerous and uncontrollable rate. That's the theory I'd always accepted, not because I am an expert in climatology, but because the overwhelming majority of scientists all seemed to say it. Who am I to doubt so many 'experts'?

The Channel 4 documentary thrust a torrent of doubts into my overloaded brain, producing several top members of the science community (from MIT, various universities and professional bodies), all of whom said that my favoured theory was inside-out, upside-down and plain wrong. For example, apparently Al Gore, in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, had lied to us, using misleading statistics that should have shown global temperatures leading CO2 emissions and not the other way round. The whole 'environmental industry' is about 'jobs for the boys' and getting funding for pointless research under the guise of global warming research, they said.

I finished watching it as a semi-convert, actually toying with the idea that the worlds climate was ok, it was all supposed to be this way, it was the work of the Sun. I've always been open to the idea that fluctuations in solar activity may effect our weather and climate, and to an extent I still am, but all we have so far is data from a very narrow snapshot of our Suns existence. If its cyclic, we need to capture the whole cycle. If its random, we need to learn the cause and effect of these random changes and see if they match any of the data we have on our planets climate record. Durkin nearly had me convinced, but not quite.

The Independent has investigated the claims made in the TV programme and has managed to cast sufficient doubt to take me back to my place of origin, back to the 'man-made CO2' camp. Why? Here are extracts from the Independent article:

• Mr Durkin has already been criticised by one scientist who took part in the programme over alleged misrepresentation of his views on the climate.

• Mr Durkin's film argued that most global warming over the past century occurred between 1900 and 1940 and that there was a period of cooling between 1940 and 1975 when the post-war economic boom was under way. This showed, he said, that global warming had little to do with industrial emissions of carbon dioxide.

  The programme-makers labelled the source of the world temperature data as "Nasa" but when we inquired about where we could find this information, we received an email through Wag TV's PR consultant saying that the graph was drawn from a 1998 diagram published in an obscure journal called Medical Sentinel. The authors of the paper are well-known climate sceptics who were funded by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the George C Marshall Institute, a right-wing Washington think-tank.

  However, there are no diagrams in the paper that accurately compare with the C4 graph. The nearest comparison is a diagram of "terrestrial northern hemisphere" temperatures - which refers only to data gathered by weather stations in the top one third of the globe.

  However, further inquiries revealed that the C4 graph was based on a diagram in another paper produced as part of a "petition project" by the same group of climate sceptics. This diagram was itself based on long out-of-date information on terrestrial temperatures compiled by Nasa scientists.

  However, crucially, the axis along the bottom of the graph has been distorted in the C4 version of the graph, which made it look like the information was up-to-date when in fact the data ended in the early 1980s.

  Mr Durkin admitted that his graphics team had extended the time axis along the bottom of the graph to the year 2000. "There was a fluff there," he said.

• If Mr Durkin had gone directly to the Nasa website he could have got the most up-to-date data. This would have demonstrated that the amount of global warming since 1975, as monitored by terrestrial weather stations around the world, has been greater than that between 1900 and 1940 - although that would have undermined his argument.

  "The original Nasa data was very wiggly-lined and we wanted the simplest line we could find," Mr Durkin said.

• The programme failed to point out that scientists had now explained the period of "global cooling" between 1940 and 1970. It was caused by industrial emissions of sulphate pollutants, which tend to reflect sunlight. Subsequent clean-air laws have cleared up some of this pollution, revealing the true scale of global warming - a point that the film failed to mention.

  Other graphs used in the film contained known errors, notably the graph of sunspot activity. Mr Durkin used data on solar cycle lengths which were first published in 1991 despite a corrected version being available - but again the corrected version would not have supported his argument. Mr Durkin also used a schematic graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that was at least 16 years old, which gave the impression that today's temperatures are cooler than during the medieval warm period. If he had used a more recent, and widely available, composite graph it would have shown average temperatures far exceed the past 1,000 years.

While I'm sure the burden of proof is not necessarily there yet, its only a matter of time before our suspicions are confirmed. Co2 emissions are a smoking gun and without anything better to go on we have to assume that these theories are correct since time seems to be against us. People with vested interests (of which there are far more on the corporate industry side than the environmental side) will try anything to breed complacency among us. They want us to continue our rabid consumerism, to promote the throw-away culture, for this is what shapes their world. Even if we're wrong and the climate eventually returns to 'normal' (if there is such a thing), think of the new world we'll be inhabiting, one with little pollution, minimal waste, virtually-free energy and no dependence on fossil fuels (one less reason to invade Middle Eastern nations). If they're wrong, its too late. The world might continue on, but the short era of the human race will be be over.