and the Republican Party has called for it all: birther's, deathers, eliminationists, fundamentalists, secessionists...and the RNC points to CodePink act-up antics as a rationale for such unrealistic tactics. They think that if their legislators behave with equally outrageous tactics they will win, when it is all too clear they are only inspiring the most extreme & irrational 12 per cent of their base.

When the final tally is in, they will have failed to address folks' real concerns about health reform, EFCA, Wall Street reform and the entire panoply of Democratic legislation. In fact, they MISlead, and that's their basic flaw.

They do it with lies, distortion, exaggeration, hypocrisy - any tactic that sucks air out of the room will do, as long as truth and fact are suppressed - but you knew that.

provided a far more informative, incisive and compelling explanation of the challenge and peril of bringing a Medieval society under central government control in Afghanistan. Walking across the country during wartime, he found predominantly illiterate peasants distributed in thousands of villages throughout the nation. Kabul is in ruins with garbage stacked 7 feet high, and even teacher illiteracy is most common.

Stewart acknowledges the moral imperative but warns that we do not have the means to bring about remedies within decades. Perhaps, he says, it would be better to use a smaller intelligent force embedded in a distrustful population and deployed for as long as fifty years, and even then, because of the rugged geography and entrenched tribalism, we still might not see a society as developed as Pakistan which is only a decade or two ahead of Afghanistan in terms of infrastructure and institutions.

See his interview with Lynn Sherr at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09252009/watch.html

The brutal disconnect between military and humanitarian goals becomes shockingly clear, evoked by a man who has been there and knows the country first-hand. Afghanistan is no more a threat to the US than Iraq was. What is needed in abundance to do counter-terrorism is intelligence against a resurgent Taliban or alQaeda training camps, and it is plain from the compelling U.S. political situation that President Obama has no choice but to maintain a vigilant military mission there with no clear endpoint in sight...and all the while wanting for intelligence.

The Taliban is mostly removed to Pakistan now, and there lies a greater threat with far more need for stability.

is more noteworthy as it is manipulated by principally CIA & also DIA. What is so obviously forced is President Obama's "revelation."

It shows foreign affairs is pure manipulation, as usual.

Internal conditions in Iran are stressed...population since the revolution has doubled. This is unsustainable.

Inter Press Service:

POLITICS: U.S. Story on Iran Nuke Facility Doesn't Add Up

Analysis by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON, Sep 29 (IPS) - The story line that dominated media coverage of the second Iranian uranium enrichment facility last week was the official assertion that U.S. intelligence had caught Iran trying to conceal a "secret" nuclear facility.

But an analysis of the transcript of that briefing by senior administration officials that was the sole basis for the news stories and other evidence reveals damaging admissions, conflicts with the facts and unanswered questions that undermine its credibility.

Iran's notification to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the second enrichment facility in a letter on Sep. 21 was buried deep in most of the news stories and explained as a response to being detected by U.S. intelligence. In reporting the story in that way, journalists were relying entirely on the testimony of "senior administration officials" who briefed them at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh Friday.

U.S. intelligence had "learned that the Iranians learned that the secrecy of the facility was compromised", one of the officials said, according to the White House transcript. The Iranians had informed the IAEA, he asserted, because "they came to believe that the value of the facility as a secret facility was no longer valid..."

Later in the briefing, however, the official said "we believe", rather than "we learned", in referring to that claim, indicating that

it is only an inference rather than being based on hard intelligence.

Leaked Paper on Iranian Nuke Based on Disputed Intel

The Iranian Rift in the IAEA

By GARETH PORTER

October 6, 2009

Excerpts of the internal draft report by the staff of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published online last week show that the report's claims about Iranian work on a nuclear weapon is based almost entirely on intelligence documents which have provoked a serious conflict within the agency.

Contrary to sensational stories by the Associated Press and The New York Times, the excerpts on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reveal that the IAEA's Safeguards Department, which wrote the report, only has suspicions – not real evidence - that Iran has been working on nuclear weapons in recent years.

The newly published excerpts make it clear, moreover, that the so-called "Alleged Studies" documents brought to the attention of the agency by the United States five years ago are central to its assertion that Iran had such a programme in 2002-03.