U.S. Speeds Up Bomb Delivery for the Israelis

July 22, 2006
Link

By DAVID S. CLOUD and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, July 21 — The Bush administration is rushing a delivery of precision-guided bombs to Israel, which requested the expedited shipment last week after beginning its air campaign against Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, American officials said Friday.

The decision to quickly ship the weapons to Israel was made with relatively little debate within the Bush administration, the officials said. Its disclosure threatens to anger Arab governments and others because of the appearance that the United States is actively aiding the Israeli bombing campaign in a way that could be compared to Iran’s efforts to arm and resupply Hezbollah.

The munitions that the United States is sending to Israel are part of a multimillion-dollar arms sale package approved last year that Israel is able to draw on as needed, the officials said. But Israel’s request for expedited delivery of the satellite and laser-guided bombs was described as unusual by some military officers, and as an indication that Israel still had a long list of targets in Lebanon to strike.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday that she would head to Israel on Sunday at the beginning of a round of Middle Eastern diplomacy. The original plan was to include a stop to Cairo in her travels, but she did not announce any stops in Arab capitals.

Instead, the meeting of Arab and European envoys planned for Cairo will take place in Italy, Western diplomats said. While Arab governments initially criticized Hezbollah for starting the fight with Israel in Lebanon, discontent is rising in Arab countries over the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon, and the governments have become wary of playing host to Ms. Rice until a cease-fire package is put together.

To hold the meetings in an Arab capital before a diplomatic solution is reached, said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, “would have identified the Arabs as the primary partner of the United States in this project at a time where Hezbollah is accusing the Arab leaders of providing cover for the continuation of Israel’s military operation.”

The decision to stay away from Arab countries for now is a markedly different strategy from the shuttle diplomacy that previous administrations used to mediate in the Middle East. “I have no interest in diplomacy for the sake of returning Lebanon and Israel to the status quo ante,” Ms. Rice said Friday. “I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling around, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do.”

Before Ms. Rice heads to Israel on Sunday, she will join President Bush at the White House for discussions on the Middle East crisis with two Saudi envoys, Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the secretary general of the National Security Council.

The new American arms shipment to Israel has not been announced publicly, and the officials who described the administration’s decision to rush the munitions to Israel would discuss it only after being promised anonymity. The officials included employees of two government agencies, and one described the shipment as just one example of a broad array of armaments that the United States has long provided Israel.

One American official said the shipment should not be compared to the kind of an “emergency resupply” of dwindling Israeli stockpiles that was provided during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, when an American military airlift helped Israel recover from early Arab victories.

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said: “We have been using precision-guided munitions in order to neutralize the military capabilities of Hezbollah and to minimize harm to civilians. As a rule, however, we do not comment on Israel’s defense acquisitions.”

Israel’s need for precision munitions is driven in part by its strategy in Lebanon, which includes destroying hardened underground bunkers where Hezbollah leaders are said to have taken refuge, as well as missile sites and other targets that would be hard to hit without laser and satellite-guided bombs.

Pentagon and military officials declined to describe in detail the size and contents of the shipment to Israel, and they would not say whether the munitions were being shipped by cargo aircraft or some other means. But an arms-sale package approved last year provides authority for Israel to purchase from the United States as many as 100 GBU-28’s, which are 5,000-pound laser-guided bombs intended to destroy concrete bunkers. The package also provides for selling satellite-guided munitions.

An announcement in 2005 that Israel was eligible to buy the “bunker buster” weapons described the GBU-28 as “a special weapon that was developed for penetrating hardened command centers located deep underground.” The document added, “The Israeli Air Force will use these GBU-28’s on their F-15 aircraft.”

American officials said that once a weapons purchase is approved, it is up to the buyer nation to set up a timetable. But one American official said normal procedures usually do not include rushing deliveries within days of a request. That was done because Israel is a close ally in the midst of hostilities, the official said.

Although Israel had some precision guided bombs in its stockpile when the campaign in Lebanon began, the Israelis may not have taken delivery of all the weapons they were entitled to under the 2005 sale.

Israel said its air force had dropped 23 tons of explosives Wednesday night alone in Beirut, in an effort to penetrate what was believed to be a bunker used by senior Hezbollah officials.

A senior Israeli official said Friday that the attacks to date had degraded Hezbollah’s military strength by roughly half, but that the campaign could go on for two more weeks or longer. “We will stay heavily with the air campaign,” he said. “There’s no time limit. We will end when we achieve our goals.”

The Bush administration announced Thursday a military equipment sale to Saudi Arabia, worth more than $6 billion, a move that may in part have been aimed at deflecting inevitable Arab government anger at the decision to supply Israel with munitions in the event that effort became public.

On Friday, Bush administration officials laid out their plans for the diplomatic strategy that Ms. Rice will pursue. In Rome, the United States will try to hammer out a diplomatic package that will offer Lebanon incentives under the condition that a United Nations resolution, which calls for the disarming of Hezbollah, is implemented.

Diplomats will also try to figure out the details around an eventual international peacekeeping force, and which countries will contribute to it. Germany and Russia have both indicated that they would be willing to contribute forces; Ms. Rice said the United States was unlikely to.

Implicit in the eventual diplomatic package is a cease-fire. But a senior American official said it remained unclear whether, under such a plan, Hezbollah would be asked to retreat from southern Lebanon and commit to a cease-fire, or whether American diplomats might depend on Israel’s continued bombardment to make Hezbollah’s acquiescence irrelevant.

Daniel Ayalon, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, said that Israel would not rule out an international force to police the borders of Lebanon and Syria and to patrol southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah has had a stronghold. But he said that Israel was first determined to take out Hezbollah’s command and control centers and weapons stockpiles.

Thom Shanker contributed reporting for this article.

Go to Democracy Now for Good Info

also Huffington Post

The article below is from Knight Ridder News service

Violence soaring despite growing number of Iraqi forces
Link
By Tom Lasseter
McClatchy Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Despite the addition of almost 100,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops in the past year, American efforts to pacify central Iraq and the capital appear to be failing, challenging a central assumption behind the U.S. strategy in Iraq: that training more Iraqi security forces will allow American troops to start going home.

The number of trained Iraqi soldiers and police grew from an estimated 168,670 in June 2005 to some 264,600 this June. Yet Baghdad's morgue is receiving nearly twice as many dead Iraqis each day as it did last year. The number of bombings causing multiple fatalities has risen steadily. Attacks on American and Iraqi troops last month grew 44 percent from June 2005.

"Even as the number and capabilities of Iraqi security forces have increased, overall security conditions have deteriorated," concluded a report that the Government Accountability Office submitted to Congress earlier this month.

Baghdad, usually clogged with traffic, has fallen quiet in recent weeks. Shops are shuttered. Roads are nearly empty in many neighborhoods. No one wants to be caught out in the open by gunmen, who set up roadblocks with seeming impunity.

Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who commands the task force that's training Iraq's army, didn't respond to written questions about whether the U.S. still has confidence in the training program. Other American officers in Iraq acknowledged the difficulties but counseled patience.

"You don't stand up an organization ... overnight and expect it to have all the same values, the same organization, the same commitment as you might in other organizations that's been in existence for 10 or 15 years," Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top U.S. spokesman in Iraq, said recently. "I mean, they're only a month and a half into their new government right now. They're only three years into this new formation of their armed forces. So they do have some ways to still go."

If the U.S.-led effort to stand up more Iraqi troops and police doesn't start improving security in the capital and other troubled areas, however, the Bush administration may be forced to consider sending more troops to Iraq, trying to convince other nations to send troops or even beginning to withdraw some Americans from the worst areas - or from Iraq. That could risk triggering the all-out civil war that some think has already begun.

Indeed, the growing violence between Sunni and Shiite Muslims has raised troubling questions about whether Iraqi forces, which are disproportionately drawn from the Shiite population, are helping to curb the bloodshed or are contributing to it.

Eyewitnesses at some scenes of sectarian cleansing in Sunni areas report that gunmen travel in government vehicles. Others note that attackers have traveled from one neighborhood to another through police checkpoints, apparently unchallenged.

In Shiite areas, residents complain that security forces seem unable to stop large groups of Sunni fighters, who either detonate large car bombs, killing dozens, or swarm in large groups wielding AK-47 rifles and grenades.

In Baghdad's Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah, the few remaining Shiite families recently got notes on their doorsteps that said, "Leave Ghazaliyah, you Shiites, or be ready for death." A single bullet accompanied each note.

One Shiite who lives there, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that he be identified only by his first name, Ali, said Iraqi army checkpoints "disappear from the area at sunset, which is why we guard ourselves."

Many Iraqis fear that the goal of a peaceful, unified country with a representative government and competent security forces will remain unachievable for a long time to come.

Some U.S. officials acknowledge privately that their hopes that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will be able to rein in Shiite militia groups and persuade Sunni insurgents to negotiate may be misplaced. Many of the government's leaders, they note, are themselves linked to Shiite or Kurdish militias or guerrilla groups.

"I keep hope up - it's misguided perhaps - that cooler heads will prevail," said an American defense official in Iraq, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "I have to believe that; otherwise all of this has been a tremendous, tremendous fiasco."

Statistics indicate that the security situation is steadily deteriorating, despite the much-heralded ascendancy of the Maliki government in April and the death in June of the country's most notorious terrorist, al-Qaida ally Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Last month, the Baghdad morgue received the bodies of 1,595 Iraqis who'd been killed by violence in and around the capital, the highest toll since Saddam Hussein fell in 2003, according to morgue officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired from their government jobs or being targeted by armed groups.

In June 2005, the director of the Baghdad morgue said he received 700 to 800 bodies a month, or 24 to 26 a day. Now, the morgue is receiving at least 50 slain Iraqis each day, morgue officials said.

A human rights report that the United Nations mission in Baghdad released Tuesday says 2,669 civilians were killed across Iraq during May and 3,149 were killed in June. In total, 14,338 civilians were killed from January to June this year, and 150,000 were forced out of their homes, the report says.

Sunni insurgent attacks on Iraqi and U.S. forces continue unabated. While the number of American troops killed by hostile fire has declined, the average daily number of attacks on U.S. and Iraqi soldiers and police nationwide increased by 44 percent last month versus June 2005, to 88 from 61.

Other months have shown similar increases: April was up 59 percent, to 86 this year from 54 last year, and May was up 44 percent, to 91 from 63, according to figures supplied by the U.S. military in Baghdad.

Statistics compiled by the Brookings Institution in Washington indicate that daily attacks by insurgents have risen consistently during the past three years.

They also show a steady rise in multiple-fatality bombings, a hallmark of Sunni insurgents and foreign terrorists. In 2004, the highest monthly total was 19 multiple-fatality bombings, which occurred in only one month that year. In 2005, the highest monthly total was 46. This year, there already have been two months in which the total has surpassed 50.

Major attacks now come with startling frequency.

-On July 8, a car bomb killed at least five people in front of a Shiite mosque in a Sunni neighborhood in western Baghdad. On July 9, gunmen whom residents identified as members of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia pulled Sunnis from their homes and cars and shot them dead in the street. Iraqi police put the number of dead at more than 40, though U.S. military officials said their troops found just 14 bodies. The next day, two car bombs detonated in a northeast Baghdad neighborhood known as a Sadr stronghold, killing at least eight Shiites and wounding more than 30.

-This Monday, dozens of gunmen, presumably Sunnis, stormed into a market in the town of Mahmoudiya, just south of Baghdad, and killed more than 45 people and wounded at least 90 - almost all of them Shiites - in a hailstorm of AK-47 fire, grenades and mortars. Witnesses said Iraqi police and army troops stationed nearby didn't appear until after the killing was over.

-On Tuesday, a man pulled up to a group of laborers across the street from a Shiite shrine in the southern town of Kufa and asked if they were looking for work. When a crowd gathered around his minivan, the man detonated a bomb, killing more than 50 Iraqis and wounding about 120.

There are about 8,000 American soldiers in Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a top U.S. spokesman in Iraq.

"They can't be everywhere all the time in a city of over 7 million people," he said.

That's left many areas governed by AK-47s.

Ali said his vigilante force in the Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah usually was joined by Shiites from a Shiite neighborhood to the east, who were there to make sure the Sunnis didn't push farther toward them.

Ali and his neighbors were watching from their rooftops last week when they saw gunmen approaching through the alleyways from several directions. The gunmen were carrying AK-47s and heavy PKC machine guns.

"They started firing at our houses. They didn't expect a very quick response, but we gave them one ... we surrounded them. They were in a trap, and gunfire on them was from everywhere," Ali said, relishing the story. "We killed a lot of them; I don't know an exact number. After defeating them, it was our turn to attack. We followed them, and we saw them entering (a) mosque, which we shot with two rocket-propelled grenades. And then we returned home."

Ali said he was ready for the next fight, the next chance to defend his piece of Baghdad.

For more information online, go to:

www.brookings.edu

http://icasualties.org/oif

McClatchy Newspapers special correspondents Laith Hammoudi, Mohammed al Dulaimy and Huda Ahmed contributed to this report from Baghdad.

Another Mission ‘Accomplished’
NY Times Editorial
July 11, 2006


The release of the White House midsession budget review is an annual event normally marked by a few wonkish observations and the routine updating of various spreadsheets, not by a full-dress presidential dog-and-pony show. But President Bush plans to preside today, with members of Congress and invited guests in attendance. By all indications, including his own in his weekly radio address last Saturday, he plans to turn this into a celebration — just in time for the fall campaign.

This is proof, if anyone still needs it, that this administration is desperate for something to boast about. On Mr. Bush’s watch, triple-digit budget surpluses have turned into annual triple-digit budget deficits. There’s no information in the midsession report to alter that utterly dispiriting fact. Yes, the report is expected to project that this year’s deficit will be somewhat less gargantuan than last year’s — probably somewhere between $280 billion and $300 billion, versus a $318 billion shortfall in 2005. That’s not much to crow about.

But Mr. Bush is likely to gloat, anyway. Earlier this year, the administration conveniently projected a highly inflated deficit of $423 billion. With that as a starting point, the actual results can be spun to look as if they’re worth cheering.

The razzle-dazzle won’t end there. As he did in his remarks on Saturday, Mr. Bush is sure to use today’s event to credit tax cuts for a projected “surge” in tax revenue. The Treasury is expected to take in about $250 billion more in 2006 than in 2005, for a total take of $2.4 trillion. Devoid of context, the number looks impressive.

In fact, it is $100 billion less than the $2.5 trillion revenue estimate the administration touted when it set out in 2001 to sell its policy of never-ending tax cuts. Even with this year’s bigger haul, real revenue growth during the Bush years will be abysmal, averaging about 0.3 percent per capita, versus an average of nearly 10 percent in all previous post-World War II business cycles. That might be excusable if the recent revenue improvements could reasonably be expected to continue. They cannot. Much of the increase in tax receipts is from corporate profits, high-income investors and super high-earning executives, sources that are just as unpredictable as the financial markets to which they’re inevitably linked.

So, the revenue surge is neither a sign that the tax cuts are working nor of sustainable economic growth. A growing number of economists, most prominently from the Congressional Budget Office, point out that upsurges in revenue are also the result of growing income inequality in the United States, an observation that is consistent with mounting evidence of a rapidly widening gap between the rich and everyone else. As corporations and high- income Americans claim ever more of the economic pie, revenues rise, even if there’s no increase in overall economic growth.

If Mr. Bush looked behind his headline numbers, he, too, could see that the rich are getting richer while the rest are, at best, only holding ground. It would make sense to use some of the windfall revenue to enact policies and programs that tilt against growing inequality. Unfortunately, he’s flogging more tax cuts that will deepen the divide.

I have discovered YouTube and have been watching video of the World Trade center coming down.

It is obvious from eye witness accounts that there were multiple explosions in the Trade Center besides the planes that crashed into the towers. I can not find government explanations of these explosions.

The official explanation for why the towers collapsed is that fire and structural damage from the crashing plane caused one floor to collapse, and each floor collapsed under the weight of the first. But the towers collapsed at the speed of gravity, they fell completely in 8.4 seconds according to seismic data.

These facts contradict the official government response, and lead one to believe that a controlled explosion brought down the towers. And what about WTC Building 7 which only had a small fire and no structural damage from any impact, it collapsed exactly like a controlled demolition with explosives. The government should investigate and adequately answer these questions.

Here's an empirical analysis by Steven E. Jones Department of Physics and Astronomy Brigham Young University.
Another analysis by Morgan Reynolds, Ph.D. Texas A&M University

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This video provides a good summary of conflicting evidence, regarding the official explination of 911.

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This video shows eyewitness acounts of the explosions.

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The Strange Collapse of Building 7

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The World Trade Center, destroyed by Controlled Demolition

Another Music Video, The official Album of Summer 2006, Gnarls Barkley St Elsewhere and the Hit Single Crazy. This video is extremely clever, check it out. The whole album is great, it was in my cd player for months.

Wow What a terrific Performance By Sly and the Family Stone. I just had to remember this one. This is as good as music gets. It's a perfectly composed medley of their songs. Amazing.