Former British prime minister Tony Blair backed Iraq war claimed ‘I’d do it again’ and why wouldn’t he; politicians and senior bureaucrats cashing in on contacts is common and as a British MP said ‘revolving door politics at its worst’.

Mr Blair is using his role as the West’s Middle East envoy for personal gain and revelations also shed fresh light on his astonishing earnings, which include lucrative after-dinner speaking, consultancies with banks and foreign governments, a generous advance for his forthcoming memoirs, as well as the pension and other perks he enjoys as a former prime minister.

Blair Man of Steel John Howard forged close alliances with US President George W. Bush during his invasion of Iraq, and earning blood money – using your own countrymen as front-line troops - doesn’t just look bad, it stinks; being the leader of your country and being on the payroll of big foreign oil corporations and keeping people in the dark about it tells us more than fessing up.

The exact nature of the deal is unknown, but UI Energy is one of the biggest investors in Iraq’s oil-rich Kurdistan region, which became semi-autonomous in the wake of the Iraq war; Blair’s fee have not been disclosed but is likely to have run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and is odd because UI Energy is fond of boasting of its foreign political advisers, who include the former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke and several prominent American politicians.

This is but the tip of the iceberg ….

Arable land, spices, salt, silver, gold, oil and water have long been the resources humans have fought over. As a loose management structure was finally formed, shared between religion, corporations and government (including token royalty) formed the League of Nations (which was taken over) and became the United Nations, the world was split up into segments that ‘super powers’ decided, just like say pirates splitting up the spoils.

Various forms of conscription evolved into standing armed forces to ‘keep the peace’ but of course, first strike options were long exercised as a way of stopping neighbouring powers from possibly threatening the attacker’s people.  America has long practised the art of waging war, but after Vietnam (that kick-started the song ‘war, what is it good for’) its went from under the guise of a ‘cold war’ of democracy versus communism to what it had always been, taking the very thing that funds any army, money; not money in its established world wide accepted currency but resources converted into a given currency.

Controlling one’s populace had always been a problem, so the powers to be decided that an asset rich, comfortable and better educated people would supress internal unhappines – and of course religion long used to project the mantras ‘turn the other cheek’, ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’ and ‘being good will see you sitting at the side of your chosen god’.  However, with assets and education, there are always those who are the ‘haves’ and those who ‘have not’s'; statistically the 80/20 Rule.

[The 80/20 Rule basically translates into 80% being well off to real well off and the remaining 20% is poor to homeless / living on or below the bread-line. This Rule and its figures are regulalry fudged by government to hoodwink the sometimes less than observant public, thats why unemployment rates never reflect the true figure of unemployed (if you work only 2 hours a week, the system is so worded that you are employed; the fact that you can live of the 2 hours is of little importance]

First if was higher numbers employed in federal, state and local governments, then there is the Public works that took up the slack, filled in seasonal flucuations and now the various stimulius packages that try to engender a sense of business as usual. People have tightened their belt and they are waiting for mooted grwoth to filter down to them, problem is, that governments and corporations – lets call them what they really are – Corporate Government have been pushing the people to buy to such a degree and themselves borrowed from the future to improve our standard of living today (thereby proving what good fiscal managers they are) that we Australians have the highest debt per head of anywhere in the world; we can no longer borrow from the future.

So why is this so ? Its very simple really, the value of anything is driven by demand, growth of demand (read more buying public) pushes the value up; but what happens when we – the people – have no more borrowing capacity; when we want to take stock because we feel exposed to the financial reality ?  Well Corporate Government’s answer is simple, bring in more competition (AKA Immigration); problem is, there isn’t as much quality land available and despite all of mankinds ‘ingenuity’ we can’s make more water and most importantly, as we dig up and sell of our resources and energy, we bring closer our eventual destruction.

Well governments are reluctant to rule their population with too heavy an iron rod, so they get us to focus on others; misfits in our community, they incite racial tension to keep our eye off the ball and they point overseas to possible threats, causing us to put aside our differences to join together to face the ‘common threat’.

But as we know, truth will out and eventually we ask questions and oft, receive answers that bemuse and then annoy us; which brings me to the ‘war, what is it good for’ part of the story.

War is about distraction and justifying stealing; the following article is by Monbiot and is about making the thieves pay (for using his population’s money to support another Thief); hopefully John Howard will likwise be held to account.

Bounty for Blair’s Arrest

Today I am launching a new fund – www.arrestblair.org – to reward people who attempt to arrest the former prime minister. By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 26th January 2010

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg Tribunal called “the supreme international crime”(1): the crime of aggression.

But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury. As a senior judge told the Guardian in November, “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”(2)

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”(3). Last month the former law lord, Lord Steyn, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal.”(4) In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law.”(5)

Under the UN Charter, two conditions must be met before a war can legally be waged(6). The parties to a dispute must first “seek a solution by negotiation” (Article 33). They can take up arms without an explicit mandate from the UN Security Council only “if an armed attack occurs against [them]” (Article 51). Neither of these conditions applied. The US and UK governments rejected Iraq’s attempts to negotiate(7). At one point the US State Department even announced that it would “go into thwart mode” to prevent the Iraqis from resuming talks on weapons inspection(8). Iraq had launched no armed attack against either nation.

We also know that the UK government was aware that the war it intended to launch was illegal. In March 2002, the Cabinet Office explained that “a legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to Law Officers’ advice, none currently exists.”(9) In July 2002, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney-general, told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [Security Council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.”(10) Bush and Blair later failed to obtain Security Council authorisation.

As the resignation letter on the eve of the war from Elizabeth Wilmshurst, then deputy legal advisor to the Foreign Office, revealed, her office had “consistently” advised that an invasion would be unlawful without a new UN resolution. She explained that “an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression”(11). Both Wilmshurst and her former boss, Sir Michael Wood, will testify before the Chilcot Inquiry today (Tuesday). Expect fireworks.

Without legal justification, the war with Iraq was an act of mass murder: those who died were unlawfully killed by the people who commissioned it. Crimes of aggression (also known as crimes against peace) are defined by the Nuremberg Principles as “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties”(12). They have been recognised in international law since 1945. The Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and which was ratified by Blair’s government in 2001(13), provides for the Court to “exercise jurisdiction over the crime of aggression”, once it has decided how the crime should be defined and prosecuted(14).

There are two problems. The first is that neither the government nor the opposition has any interest in pursuing these crimes, for the obvious reason that in doing so they would expose themselves to prosecution. The second is that the required legal mechanisms don’t yet exist. The governments which ratified the Rome Statute have been filibustering furiously to delay the point at which the crime can be prosecuted by the ICC: after eight years of discussions, the necessary provision still hasn’t been adopted.

Some countries, mostly in eastern Europe and central Asia, have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws(15), though it is not yet clear which of them would be willing to try a foreign national for acts committed abroad. In the UK, where it remains illegal to wear an offensive T-shirt, you cannot yet be prosecuted for mass murder commissioned overseas.

All those who believe in justice should campaign for their governments to stop messing about and allow the International Criminal Court to start prosecuting the crime of aggression. We should also press for its adoption into national law. But I believe that the people of this nation, who re-elected a government which had launched an illegal war, have a duty to do more than that. We must show that we have not, as Blair requested, “moved on” from Iraq, that we are not prepared to allow his crime to remain unpunished, or to allow future leaders to believe that they can safely repeat it.

But how? As I found when I tried to apprehend John Bolton, one of the architects of the war in George Bush’s government, at the Hay festival in 2008(16), and as Peter Tatchell found when he tried to detain Robert Mugabe(17), nothing focuses attention on these issues more than an attempted citizen’s arrest. In October I mooted the idea of a bounty to which the public could contribute, payable to anyone who tried to arrest Tony Blair if he became president of the EU(18). He didn’t of course, but I asked those who had pledged money whether we should go ahead anyway. The response was overwhelmingly positive.

So today I am launching a website, www.arrestblair.org, whose purpose is to raise money as a reward for people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former prime minister. I have put up the first £100, and I encourage you to match it. Anyone meeting the rules I’ve laid down will be entitled to one quarter of the total pot: the bounties will remain available for as long as Blair lives. The higher the reward, the greater the number of people who are likely to try.

At this stage the arrests will be largely symbolic, though they are likely to have great political resonance. But I hope that as pressure builds up and the crime of aggression is adopted by the courts, these attempts will help to press governments to prosecute. There must be no hiding place for those who have committed crimes against peace. No civilised country can allow mass murderers to move on.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://books.google.com/books?id=-Ni6Qy2E9KwC&pg=PA46&lpg=PA46&dq=essentially+an+evil+thing…to+initiate+a+war+of+aggression…is+not+only+an+international+crime%3B+it+is+the+supreme+international+crime,+differing+only+from+other+war+crimes+in+that+it+contains+within+itself+the+accumulated+evil+of+the+whole.&source=bl&ots=vi_FtNzs0T&sig=D8sYeDqbnueaLmJvomG3Og2YBHw&hl=en&ei=Is5ESpOwMpTCML2A3bAC&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=&f=false

2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/nov/23/chilcot-inquiry-iraq-war

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/12/iraq-invasion-violated-interational-law-dutch-inquiry-finds

4. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/dec/01/iraq-inquiry-interim-finding-illegal-law-lord

5. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/18/iraq-us-foreign-policy

6. http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/index.shtml

7. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/11/11/dreamers-and-idiots/

8. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2002/10/08/thwart-mode/

9. http://downingstreetmemo.com/iraqoptions.html

10. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article387374.ece

11. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4377605.stm

12. http://www.icrc.org/ihl.nsf/full/390

13. http://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=XVIII-10&chapter=18&lang=en

14. Article 5.2, http://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/EA9AEFF7-5752-4F84-BE94-0A655EB30E16/0/Rome_Statute_English.pdf

15. Astrid Reisinger Coracini, 2010. National Legislation on Individual Responsibility for Conduct Amounting to Aggression, in: Roberto Bellelli (ed.), International Criminal Justice. Lessons Learned and the Challenges Ahead (forthcoming).

16. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/06/03/justice-undone/

17. http://www.petertatchell.net/direct%20action/mugabe.htm

18. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/10/26/arresting-blair/

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/01/25/a-bounty-for-blairs-arrest/

Sales are broken up into 4 steps, 1) introduction 2) create a need 3) have a product that addresses that need and 4) take the order.

Sales down in full body imaging at airports … how about a few – well publicised – apprehended plane bombers, like the ‘Underwear Bomber’ plot, the ‘Toothpaste, Shampoo, and Bottled Water Bomber’ plot and the ‘Shoe Bomber’ plot?

All seemingly ‘not the sharpest tool in the shed’ tyes seemingly getting past the ‘fool-proof’ inspections, but definite reasons that countries buy American made full body imagers.

As time passes, we discover things were not as they were presented to us. Is this a sign of a complacent or compliant media?

If you are to believe the USA government, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (alleged al-Qaida mastermind behind 9/11), outwitted the CIA and the NSA, in fcat 16 USA intelligence agencies as well as those of all American allies including Mossad (who should be right on top of Muslim hardliners) their National Security Council and Airport Security four times on just one morning; that largely untrained and inexperienced pilots pulled off skilled piloting feats of crashing hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and how state of the art air defenses somehow failed to function.

As one report said, ‘after such amazing success, al-Qaida sould have attracted the best minds in the business, but, instead, it has been reduced to amateur stunts’, but is al-Qaida really real or is it a ‘create a need to buy some product’ ?

Look up integrity in an American dictonary and its been crossed out, they’s sell their own mother for better-than-the-Jones’s- look. President Obama has commited to an ‘undeclared war’ on Yemen, that neither the American public or Congress were informed of or consulted with. The ‘Underwear Bomber’ provides a convenient excuse for Washington’s new war.

We’re all a bit jaded these days and ask outselves whose agenda are these, who benefits or is best served by these events and the spin-doctoring. According to the news report, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh told the Saba news agency that a terrorist cell was arrested and that the case was referred to judicial authorities for its links with the Israeli intelligence services. So is the ‘Underwear Bomber’ an Israeli terrorist recruit?

Israel may have an interest in keeping the US fully engaged militarily against all potential foes of Israel’s territorial expansion. There was a rumour back in the 80′s that USA and USSR generals had a pact of some sort to keep government spending high to fight the threats of the other country; how many times can collusion be factored into any business dealing?

In Russia, the Tsar’s secret police set off bombs so that they could blame those whom they wanted to arrest; Cossiga (president of Italy from 1985-1992), revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, a false flag operation under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The bombings were blamed on communists and were used to discredit communist parties in elections.

An Italian parliamentary investigation unearthed the fact that the attacks were overseen by the CIA. Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated in sworn testimony that the attacks targeted innocent civilians, including women and children, in order ‘to force the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security’.

Is local politics so different, to self-mutilation of election signs being damaged and the ‘under-dog’ status to garner sympathetic voters; on a larger scale, why not 9/11 ?  After all our good intentions and well-meaning can be also described as gullible; John Howard used it prolifically. Tony Abbott has nothing for global warming so he just pushes the greed / fear tax button.

Are we really that gullible that ppolitical parties who purport to represents the public’s interest in truth represents private interests, that office holders and lobby groups finance their political campaigns. We know the Russians pretty much went bankrupt in Afghanistan, yet we spend hundreds of millions of dollars over there.

The newest diversion (yes I believe these are distractions to keep our eye off the ball over here, the mis-management and misappropriations of public funds) is the Iranian nuclear bomb capacity, despite the unanimous conclusion of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary.

So it comes back to the media and why they would be supportive and subservience to government and it all comes back to profitability. When I was growing up, the Aboriginals were the bad guys; but as we know, when a referendum for the rights of Aboriginals to vote was taken, it was the highest affirmative of any referendum anywhere, so the government had to find a new enemy and co-incidentally, the Americans had one ready to go Vietnam. Now days its the Muslims; and how would you react if someone started picking on you … cop it sweet ?

Remember, the media’s focus is on one thing primarily, profit and as the media saying goes ‘never let the truth get in the way of a good story‘.

November 18, 2008 “Information Clearinghouse” — According to all accounts the US faces its worse economic crisis since the Great Depression with $2 trillion in near-term financing needs for bailouts and economic stimulus. This is an enormous sum for any country, especially for one that is so heavily indebted that it is close to bankruptcy. If the money can’t be borrowed abroad, it will have to be printed, a policy that carries the implication of hyper-inflation.

In normal life a borrower who must appeal to creditors makes every effort to bring order to his financial affairs. But not the Bush regime. The out-of-pocket costs of Bush’s Iraq war are about $600 billion at the present moment, a figure that increases by millions of dollars every hour.

[and one must remember that this is where corporate government has over-ridden the rights of Americans by spending public funds to keep oil companies in business DB]

In addition, there are the much larger future costs that have already been incurred, such as long-term care for the wounded and disabled US soldiers, the replacement costs of the used up equipment, interest payments on the war debt, and the lost economic use of the resources and manpower squandered in war. Experts estimate that the already incurred out-of-pocket and future costs of Bush’s Iraq war to be $3 trillion and  rising.

Even these costs might be small if an article by Richard LaMountain in the November 2008 Middle American News is accurate. According to LaMountain, US refugee programs for Iraqis displaced by the US invasion and occupation could result in a large and growing Muslim US population. These would be people whose lives were adversely impacted by the US invasion of Iraq.  If the US maintains its pro-Israeli stance against Arabs and Muslims generally, the implications of a growing Muslim population and a government obsessed with its “war on terror” are frightening for American civil liberty. In order to contain the potential terror that it will have imported, Washington would impose a total police state. We will have our own Saddam Hussein.

To avoid the immigration that would be problematic for US civil liberties, the war must end. The war must also end in order that bankrupt Washington can borrow abroad the money it needs to bail out the US economy. The budget authority for the annual out-of-pocket costs of the war have been rising by $150 billion per year, an addition to the budget deficit that must be financed by borrowing abroad. A sane person might think that a government, such as the US, in need of foreign loans to save its economy, would jump at the change to get its troops out of Iraq, where they are not wanted.

Instead the Bush regime has been struggling all year with the Iraq government in order to secure an agreement that lets the US government continue to hemorrhage hundreds of billions of dollars by keeping American troops in Iraq.

The Korean War ended 55 years ago, and the US still has troops in Korea.

Germany was defeated in 1945, and the US still has troops in Germany.

A country that must go hat in hand to its creditors must first look to where costs can be cut. Annual military spending of $700 billion is certainly a good place to start. But the US government has far more hubris than intelligence and is on its way to being a failed state that has to print money to pay its bills.

It is not too late for the US to save itself and the dollar standard, but it would require a rapid transition from arrogance to humility. The rest of the world can bring America down by not lending to us, in which case neither the trade nor budget deficits could be financed.  The world does not want to bring us down in this way. Our creditors would like to preserve as much as possible the values of their trillions in US dollar assets. This is easier done if the dollar remains the reserve currency. Therefore, the US government has an opportunity to go to its creditors with a plan.

This is what the plan must be: A declaration that repudiates the neoconservative goal to achieve US hegemony over the world; a budget that reduces annual US borrowing needs by several hundreds of billions by ending the Afghan and Iraq wars, by closing overseas military bases, and by cutting military spending; a new corporate tax system that brings back American jobs, manufacturing capability, and export potential by taxing US corporations’ worldwide profits according to the value-added in the US.

Such a plan would demonstrate that the US respects the sovereignty and aspirations of other countries and is willing to cooperate peacefully with others as an occupant of what the Russian president has termed “our common house.” Such a plan would demonstrate that the US government has come to the realization that there is a limit to its borrowing capacity and the loans that it can service and is prepared to put first things first. Such a plan would show that the US can curtail its unsustainable dependency on imports without erecting a wall of tariffs.

If the US had the leadership to approach its creditors with such a plan, a sigh of relief would emit from the rest of the world. Many of the economic hardships that Americans currently face could be avoided, and the prospect of a hyper-inflationary depression would recede.

Such a favorable outcome requires that the government in Washington give up the delusion that Americans are an “indispensable people” who have a monopoly on virtue that gives them claim to hegemony over the world.

America’s Moronic Iraqi Policy

“If Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others are not prosecuted,” Velvel said, “the future could be threatened by additional examples of Executive lawlessness by leaders who need fear no personal consequences for their actions, including more illegal wars such as Iraq.”

Other members of the Committee are;

• Ben Davis (a law Professor at the University of Toledo College of Law, where he teaches Public International Law and International Business Transactions. He is the author of numerous articles on international and related domestic law);
• Marjorie Cohn (a law Professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, Calif., and President of the National Lawyers Guild);
• Chris Pyle (a Professor at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches Constitutional law, Civil Liberties, Rights of Privacy, American Politics and American Political Thought, and is the author of many books and articles);
• Elaine Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University; winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism);
• Peter Weiss (vice president of the Center For Constitutional Rights, of New York City, which was recently involved with war crimes complaints filed in Germany and Japan against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others);
• David Swanson, author, activist and founder of AfterDowningStreet.org / CensureBush.org coalition, of Charlottesville, Va.):
• Kristina Borjesson (an award-winning print and broadcast journalist for more than twenty years and editor of two recent books on the media);
• Colleen Costello (Staff Attorney of Human Rights, USA, of Washington, D.C., and coordinator of its efforts involving torture by the American government);
• Valeria Gheorghiu (attorney for Workers’ Rights Law Center);
• Andy Worthington of Redress (a British historian and journalist and author of books dealing with human rights violations).

Initial actions considered by the Steering Committee, Velvel said, are as follows:

• Seeking prosecutions of high level officials, including George Bush, for the crimes they committed.
• Seeking disbarment of lawyers who were complicitous in facilitating torture.
• Seeking termination from faculty positions of high officials who were complicitous in torture.
• Issuing a recent statement saying any attempt by Bush to pardon himself and aides for war crimes prior to leaving office will result in efforts to obtain impeachment even after they leave office.
• Convening a major conference on the state secret and executive privilege doctrines, which have been pushed to record levels during the Bush administration.
• Designation of an Information Repository Coordinator to gather in one place all available information involving the Bush Administration’s war crimes.
• Possible impeachment of 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee for co-authoring the infamous “torture memo.”

As more information comes to light, the net will be cast out further and hopefully, bring about the jailing and forfiture of all gains made by this individuals through illegal acts.

Background: the First Brigade of the Third Infantry Division, three to four thousand soldiers, has been deployed in the United States as of October 1. Their stated mission is the form of crowd control they practiced in Iraq, subduing “unruly individuals,” and the management of a national emergency.

Amy Goodman reported that an Army spokesperson confirmed that they will have access to lethal and non lethal crowd control technologies and tanks. How ?

George Bush struck down Posse Comitatus, thus making it legal for military to patrol the U.S. He has also legally established that in the “War on Terror,” the U.S. is at war around the globe and thus the whole world is a battlefield, thus the U.S. is also a battlefield.

Bush also led change to the 1807 Insurrection Act to give him far broader powers in the event of a loosely defined “insurrection” or many other “conditions” he has the power to identify. The Constitution allows the suspension of habeas corpus — habeas corpus prevents us from being seized by the state and held without trial — in the event of an “insurrection.” With his own army force now, his power to call a group of protesters or angry voters “insurgents” staging an “insurrection” is strengthened.

U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman of California said to Congress (captured on C-Span and viewable on YouTube), that individual members of the House were threatened with martial law within a week if they did not pass the bailout bill: He is to have said ‘the only way they can pass this bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere…. many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple of thousand on the second day, and a few members were even told that there would be martial law in America if we voted no’

If this is true and Rep. Sherman is not delusional, you have to consider that if they are willing to threaten martial law now, it is foolish to assume they will never use that threat again. It is also foolish to trust in an orderly election process to resolve this threat.
And why deploy the First Brigade? One thing the deployment accomplishes is to put teeth into such a threat.

Interviewed Vietnam veteran, retired U.S. Air Force Colonel and patriot David Antoon Q & A ?

“If the President directed the First Brigade to arrest Congress, what could stop him?”

“Nothing. Their only recourse is to cut off funding. The Congress would be at the mercy of military leaders to go to them and ask them not to obey illegal orders.”

“But these orders are now legal?’”

“Correct.”

“If the President directs the First Brigade to arrest a bunch of voters, what would stop him?”

“Nothing. It would end up in courts but the action would have been taken.”

“If the President directs the First Brigade to kill civilians, what would stop him?”

“Nothing.”

“What would prevent him from sending the First Brigade to arrest the editor of the Washington Post?”

“Nothing. He could do what he did in Iraq — send a tank down a street in Washington and fire a shell into the Washington Post as they did into Al Jazeera, and claim they were firing at something else.”

“What happens to members of the First Brigade who refuse to take up arms against U.S. citizens?”

“They’d probably be treated as deserters as in Iraq: arrested, detained and facing five years in prison. [In Iraq, a study by Ann Wright shows that deserters -- reservists who refused to go back to Iraq -- got longer sentences than war criminals]

“Does Congress have any military of their own?”

“No. Congress has no direct control of any military units. The Governors have the National Guard but they report to the President in an emergency that he declares.”

“Who can arrest the President?”

“The Attorney General can arrest the President after he leaves or after impeachment.”

[Note: Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has asserted it is possible for District Attorneys around the country to charge President Bush with murder if they represent districts where one or more military members who have been killed in Iraq formerly resided.]

“Given the danger do you advocate impeachment?”

“Yes. President Bush struck down Posse Comitatus — which has prevented, with a penalty of two years in prison, U.S. leaders since after the Civil War from sending military forces into our streets — with a ‘signing statement.’ He should be impeached immediately in a bipartisan process to prevent the use of military forces and mercenary forces against U.S. citizens”

“Should Americans call on senior leaders in the Military to break publicly with this action and call on their own men and women to disobey these orders?”

“Every senior military officer’s loyalty should ultimately be to the Constitution. Every officer should publicly break with any illegal order, even from the President.”

“But if these are now legal. If they say, ‘Don’t obey the Commander in Chief,’ what happens to the military?”

“Perhaps they would be arrested and prosecuted as those who refuse to participate in the current illegal war. That’s what would be considered a coup.”

“But it’s a coup already.”

“Yes.”

Naomi Wolf is the author of Give Me Liberty (Simon and Schuster, 2008), the sequel to the New York Times best-seller The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Chelsea Green, 2007).

“I don’t believe that what I see in Iran today is a current, grave and urgent danger. If a military strike is carried out against Iran at this time … it would make me unable to continue my work,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamad ElBaradei told Al Arabiya television in an interview.

“A military strike, in my opinion, would be worse than anything possible. It would turn the region into a fireball,” he said, emphasizing that any attack would only make the Islamic Republic more determined to obtain nuclear power.

“If you do a military strike, it will mean that Iran, if it is not already making nuclear weapons, will launch a crash course to build nuclear weapons with the blessing of all Iranians, even those in the West.”

The New York Times reported on Friday that U.S. officials said Israel carried out a large military exercise this month that appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The newspaper said Israeli officials would not discuss the exercise. (Reporting by Lin Noueihed and Firouz Sedarat; Editing by Catherine Evans)

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL2052544720080621