Iceland Comes Out Top, Iraq Bottom in Peace List

The second annual Global Peace Index, a survey on the harmoniousness of the world's nations, has been released. Iceland has been named the world's most peaceful country -- and Iraq its least.

If you don't like conflict, than maybe you should consider moving to Reykjavik -- that's the message from the Global Peace Index.

Iceland headed the rankings of the survey, which is drawn up by a non-governmental initiative called Vision of Humanity. It evaluates 140 nations with respect to 24 criteria, including numbers of deaths from organized conflict, levels of violent crime and proportions of GDP used for military expenditures.

Denmark was deemed the world's second most peaceful country, followed by Norway, New Zealand and Japan.

"The world appears to be a marginally more peaceful place this year," index founder and Australian philanthropist Steve Killelea said in a statement. "This is encouraging, but it takes small steps by individual countries for the world to make greater strides on the road to peace."

 

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Global Peace Index Rankings

 

NSW: Orkopoulos whistleblower rebuffs $100k offer

The Speaker of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly says a compensation offer to the woman who blew the whistle on convicted paedophile Milton Orkopoulos is still on the table.

Gillian Sneddon was made redundant on the day she began giving evidence in the trial of the former NSW Government minister, who was found guilty of having sex with three boys and supplying them with marijuana.

Ms Sneddon has been on stress leave from her job as an electoral officer in Orkopoulos' former seat of Swansea since late 2006.

She has rejected the $100,000 offer from Parliament - which includes a redundancy pay-out and an additional $33,000 - describing it as an insult.

Ms Sneddon says it is not nearly enough.

"Anybody would get a redundancy if they leave a job, so its not like that's a gift from Parliament," she said.

"I was on almost $70,000 a year. I was the person who spoke up and told the truth and yet I'm punished by it."

The Speaker, Richard Torbay, says he is disappointed that Ms Sneddon told the media of her decision before informing him but the offer is still available.

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New NSA Whistleblower Tells of Faulty WMD Evidence

David Swanson

May 19, 2008

 

David Murfee Faulk was a translator in the Navy, working in Arabic and Iraqi dialect. In April 2004 he began working for the National Security Agency (NSA) at Fort Gordon outside Augusta, Georgia. (He now writes, under the name Murfee Faulk, for the Metro Spirit newspaper in Augusta, but he has never written about what he did for the NSA.)

Faulk says that in May 2004 he found an extremely large text file containing grid coordinates for alleged chemical weapons sites in Iraq. Faulk showed it to his supervisor, who was surprised. But he was not surprised that the file existed, only that it had not been deleted. The supervisor said he had believed all such files had been deleted, and that there had been a great many of them. In fact, according to this supervisor, U.S. Special Forces had gone to the locations and found nothing.

That's what usually happens, Faulk's supervisor told him, when you get something from the Israelis. "Four out of five times it's complete and total bullshit."

I asked veteran Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst Ray McGovern what he made of this, and he said that there is "no such thing as a 'friendly' intelligence service. Reporting from liaison services always needs to be taken with utmost reserve. That goes in spades for what comes from the Israelis, the more so since they have unique, yes unique, access to the White House and Pentagon, and are thus able to circumvent the intelligence bureaucracy set up to vet and evaluate raw intelligence and prevent unverified and/or tendentious 'intelligence' from reaching senior officials, lest they be misled."

With regard to other pieces of Israeli "intelligence" on Iraq's mythical weapons of "mass destruction," McGovern said: "Yes, most of the Israeli 'intelligence' on things like chemical weapons in Iraq was of little or no value. Worse still, data like coordinates for suspected chemical weapons-related sites could not be dispassionately evaluated by objective intelligence analysts because the key function of imagery analysis was ceded by the CIA to the Pentagon in 1996. What sergeant was going to tell Rumsfeld that Israeli sources and the 'intelligence' from the Israelis or the likes of [Ahmed] Chalabi were certainly not worth what Rumsfeld was paying for. At the same time, if truth was not the objective, but rather reports alleging this or that WMD-related sites, well, the Israelis were performing a useful service for the likes of Doug Feith, who would bundle them up and give them to the 'Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal' for passing to the president. Woof! Proof!"

McGovern seemed to find it perfectly possible that "evidence" of the sort that Faulk stumbled upon was voluminous: "The neuralgic search for WMD pointed up the problem. US chief WMD-searcher, David Kay, has told lurid stories of being awakened in Iraq at all hours by people working in the office of the Vice President: 'Hey we got new coordinates; check them out!'"

McGovern recalled one instance of someone speaking openly about the quality of Israeli "intelligence." When John Negroponte was Director of National Intelligence, National Public Radio´s Robert Siegel asked him to explain why the Israelis have suggested a much shorter timeline for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. "I think that sometimes what the Israelis will do [is] give you the worst-case assessment," Negroponte said.

Faulk is not the first former NSA employee from Fort Gordon to speak about things he saw there. In fact, Faulk contacted me after reading an article I wrote last July ( http://afterdowningstreet.org/node/24183 ) when Adrienne Kinne decided that she would stay silent no longer. (She also told her story on "Democracy Now" this month: http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/13/fmr_military_intelligence_officer ). Kinne described the priority that was given to less than credible WMD claims that came in from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. She also described how the NSA's policies with regard to spying on Americans changed completely on September 11, 2001. Prior to that date, she said, it was unacceptable to listen in on or collect information on Americans. The practice was barred by United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18. Kinne recalled an incident in 1997 in which an American's name was mentioned, and she and her colleagues deleted every related record because they took very seriously the ban on collecting information on Americans. After September 2001, she said, it was acceptable to spy on Americans even after identifying them as aid workers for non-governmental organizations. Faulk confirmed that this was the policy when he worked there as well.

It's a shame that we have to learn what our government is up to, after the fact, from former employees daring to speak out, but if more of them would do so the risk to them would be lessened, our knowledge increased, and our government's worst abuses reined in.

 

[ Source: American Chronicle ]

South Africans take out rage on immigrants

A wave of horrifying violence has swept the townships around Johannesburg in the past week, The Globe and Mail's Stephanie Nolen reported in an article Tuesday Xenophobic rage explodes in South Africa.

At least 22 people are dead, hundreds injured and an estimated 4,000 have been left homeless, most of them refugees and immigrants from other African countries.

"The sudden eruption of xenophobic savagery has forced South Africans into a moment of uncomfortable self-reckoning, as the newspapers and TV screens fill with images of ethnic-based brutality of a kind not seen since the darkest days of apartheid, and considered part of the past in this country, which fancies itself to be Africa's beacon of democracy and tolerance."

The attacks began in Alexandra Township and have spread to at least nine other poor, black communities. Foreigners are the ostensible target, although hundreds of native South Africans have also fled their homes in fear, seeking shelter in the yards of police stations and churches.

[ Via: The Globe and Mail ]

 

Everybody knows... - by Sheila Samples

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded.
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed. 
Everybody knows the war is over. 
Everybody knows the good guys lost. 
Everybody knows the fight was fixed. 
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. 
That's how it goes.  Everybody knows.
~~Leonard Cohen

 

The fate of millions was sealed the moment Dick Cheney selected himself as The Destroyer whose charge to keep for the next eight years would be -- as Capitol Hill Blue's Doug Thompson so succinctly described George W. Bush -- a "criminally insane, pill-popping dry drunk."  I don't know about that.  I've seen some drunks in my time -- even dry ones -- and George Bush appears to be more than a little moist.

Bush was the perfect foil for Cheney.  The Scalia-driven 2000 election coup catapulted Bush to the top of the political heap.  For the first time in his worthless, impotent, cruelly indifferent life, Bush was suddenly important -- the most powerful man on the face of the earth -- and all because he had been told to scream, "Jezus!  Jezus is my philosopher!" to the swooning masses.  Makes one wonder at the rigid consent of those same "believers" for the ensuing slaughter of so many innocents -- when murdering even one in the name of Jesus should have sent a collective shriek reverberating throughout the religious universe. (See Matthew 18:14; Mark 9:42; Luke 17:2)

Everybody knows that Bush isn't remotely qualified to be at the helm of the world's superpower.  He can neither think nor speak coherently, can recognize little other than Texas on a map, has completely torpedoed every business venture he attempted, and admittedly was a hard-partying sot until he was 40.  Cheney was another matter.  He was a household word.  He had been a public servant throughout his career.  He served as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, earned six terms in the House of Representatives where he ascended to the position of minority whip and, finally, was the elder Bush's Secretary of Defense.

We trusted Cheney to keep Bush from making rash decisions.  Was it not Cheney who, at the conclusion of the 1991 Desert Storm assault, made the assessment that to expand the exercise to include regime change in Iraq was not morally sustainable because of the chaotic bloodletting -- the needless toll on our uniformed military?

We were wrong.  Had we bothered to check the "other priorities" that allowed Cheney to dodge the draft five times on his rise to power, his chilling congressional voting record, his efforts to enrich the military industrial complex by privatizing defense duties and granting massive contracts to Halliburton, we would have known that Cheney was consumed with lust for power and money.  We would have known Cheney had been champing at the bit for more than a decade to impose a new order wherein the American Empire controls the world and its resources.  

Had we checked, we would have known Dick Cheney was the wrong babysitter for a kid who gets his jollies by blowing things up.

Cheney Unbound

In 1991, Cheney was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But the upheaval of the following decade, the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, and the expanding manipulative power of the corporate media created the axis of corruption necessary for a Cheney reign of terror.  Cheney was ready, as were the militant warmongers of the Project for the New American Century who had been demanding Saddam Hussein's head for years.  At least 12 of the 18 co-signers of the January 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton, and another letter four months later to then House Speaker Newt Gingrich, demanding the overthrow of Saddam were given key positions on Cheney's destructive team.

The fix was in.  Four days before the 2001 inauguration, PNAC's deputy director, Thomas Donnelly, wrote a memorandum to "Opinion Leaders," reminding them that "the task of removing Saddam Hussein's regime from power still remains...Many in the incoming Bush Administration understand this challenge..."  

Four months after the inauguration, the White House issued a press release warning that the threat of terrorist-nations using weapons of mass destruction against the American "homeland" was very real.  To counter this danger, Cheney put himself in charge of the entire government -- departments of Defense, Justice, Health and Human Services, Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, FEMA, and "other federal agencies," which would naturally include both FAA and NORAD.  A new department -- the Office of National Preparedness -- was created so Cheney could protect us from catastrophic harm and deal with "consequence" management.  

The next four months were busy ones.  With malicious indifference, Cheney set about screwing the American people; destroying 225-year Constitutional protections, passing secret laws to seize unlimited executive power, and locking both Congress and the public out of the legislative process.  Bush provided cover by regaling us with hilarious "Benny Hill" bits of linguistic derring-do, strutting from one presidential photo op to another, falling off couches and bicycles, choking on pretzels, and attacking brush with a chainsaw at his Crawford ranch.  

Cheney in Charge

Then it was 9-11.  Suddenly Bush was no longer a spoiled, bumbling, schizophrenic little president.  In an instant, he was transformed into a loaded codpiece -- The Commander in Chief, The Decider of life and death -- a modern-day Caligula towering above mankind with lighted depleted uranium firecrackers gripped in both fists.  Cheney could not have picked a more willing accomplice to export death and violence to the four corners of the earth...

With smoke still rising from the ashes of Afghanistan, the drive to topple Saddam, who was demanding Euro for his oil, quickly turned into a crusade. It was Cheney-orchestrated and Cheney-driven.  Under the deepening shadows of mushroom clouds, administration neoconservatives teamed up with ecstatic corporate media co-conspirators to terrify an already traumatized public.  Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith launched a separate intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to create the propaganda needed to invade Iraq.  

Since Bush can't be trusted to maintain a single train of thought in one-on-one interviews, he hit the campaign trail with a prepared speech he delivered over and over -- is now delivering about Iran -- frantically catapulting the propaganda that Saddam was "threatening America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons."  Bush convinced a majority of Americans that the Iraqi dictator was allied with Al Qaeda and provided a "safe haven" for terrorists, and if we didn't wipe him out, he would "strike us again without leaving any fingerprints."

Cheney's fingerprints are all over every aspect of the drive for war.  For a year and a half, Cheney bullied the entire intelligence apparatus, especially the CIA, into making a false case that Saddam was an immediate nuclear threat.  He denigrated the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report that there was no evidence, sneering that the intelligence was faulty, and IAEA Director-General Mohammed El-Baradei had no credibility where Iraq was concerned.

But it was Secretary of State Colin Powell who rolled the loaded dice at the UN Security Council on February 8, 2003, in a presentation even he admitted was "bullshit."  Powell, who is adept at leaving no fingerprints, but whose shadow lingers over decades of slaughtered innocents, carried the water for his masters one last time.  When Powell completed his somber charges that Al-Qaeda was in Iraq running "poison camps" full bore, that Saddam was obtaining magnets for uranium enrichment -- charges backed up with photos and vials of poison -- we were sold.  Because we trusted him.

A Moral Fork in the Road

I don't want to go off on an Aristotelian rant here, but thanks to Cheney and those around him obsessed with world government, this nation appears to be running on empty where morality, or ethos, is concerned.  Values such as compassion, sympathy, prudence, virtue, decency, ethics -- cannot thrive in a nation controlled by war criminals who force its citizens into submission through fear, violence and propaganda.  How can a society be "just" when natural laws have fallen by the wayside and nobody is held accountable for crimes against God and humanity?  

We are under the control of the criminally insane.  Cheney has turned the greatest democratic republic ever conceived into a world corporation and anointed himself its Chief Executive Officer (CEO).  He has supplanted two centuries of protections afforded by the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with executive orders and secret laws.  In their lust for power and riches, Cheney and Bush have managed in just seven grueling, sadistic, morally corrupt years to destroy entire nations, including their own.  And they accomplished this in the only way possible.  Because we permitted it.  Because we lost our moral compass.

So we stand here in the blood-sodden mess of two lost wars.  Millions -- millions -- have been displaced, destroyed, dishonored in Cheney's quest for oil.  Tens of thousands of our own citizens are injured, maimed -- 4,077 dead -- an entire generation of Americans lost in a depleted uranium wasteland.  "So?" Cheney says, "They were all volunteers."  He admitted that losing sons or daughters could "be a burden" on families, but reminded us sternly that "the biggest burden" is on the President, who has to send even more to their deaths.

We're at the crossroads.  We can no longer remain neutral nor mill around in confused acceptance of the genocidal madness into which we have been swept.  Thomas Jefferson said, "When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil."

Everybody knows the folly of the treasonous "corrections" made to counter the Iran-Contra evil in the 1980's and early '90's -- the flurry of Presidential Christmas-Eve pardons allowing convicted criminals to recede into the shadows only to return and metastasize throughout the current Cheney/Bush administration.  

Cheney, Bush and their co-conspirators throughout the three branches of government must be removed.  Indicted.  Convicted.  Imprisoned.  Voting records of the 435 members of Congress and 33 Senators up for re-election in 2008 must be vetted, and those who do not reflect the will of the people must go.  No exceptions.  The remaining 17 Senators must either stand or fall on their voting records.  If those who are guilty of the same breach of trust as their cohorts refuse to budge, they must be impeached and removed from office.

They have left us with but one choice, and one last chance to make that choice.  We have reached a point in the "course of human events" where it is not only our "right but our duty" to throw off this destructive government and institute one which remembers it "derives its just powers from the consent of the governed."  

The time has come for Americans to blink.  Because the Abyss is staring back at us.

[ Via: Political Cortex ]