Well it seems the weapons for the nuclear attack are in place.

There was that strange incident where a B-52 Stratofortress flew from Minot Air Force base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force base in Louisiana carrying six nuclear missiles in August 2007. This was illegal under existing treaties and the USAF has not flown nuclear weapons anywhere in the US for nearly forty years. The official story is that it was all an 'error'. The story is the crew flew the nukes without knowing they were on board. This in spite of the fact that the missiles were not in the cargo hold but mounted on the wings and primed for firing. It's simply not credible that the crew didn't know and flew 1500 miles across America with six nuclear tipped cruise missiles on their wings without noticing.

This all only came out because crewmen at Barksdale AFB blew the whistle and told the 'Military Times' services publication what had happened. The word is that the whole thing was orchestrated by Dick Cheney for his own dark purposes. I don't think it's too hard to guess what those purposes are.

It means every self defined Palestinian everywhere on the planet forever unto infinity. Literally yes it does. 10 x 10 generations from now, anyone can claim they are a Palestinian refugee, even if their grandparents grandparents grandparents grandparents went to Canada became citizens, lost their Arab name, forgot their ancestry, didn't know jack from squat.

Would that I could reclaim my Belarussia, Italian, Irish, Polish and German homeland. Would that the hillbillies in NC could go back to Scotland and declare themselves long lost Scotts. Would that all the Russians could declare themselves ancient Mongols entitled to the Mongolian homeland.

In the UN there are two different, parallel and separate refugee organizations. UNWRA - for the Palestinians and another agency, for everyone else in the world. UNWRA was established specifically and only for the Palestinians. Moreover their definition of who even is a Palestinian constitutes anyone who can or wishes to demonstrate with little or no documentation, that their family lived generally in the area of the British Mandate in 2 of the 3 years 1947-49. And once that is granted then every single descendant unto the day the sun explodes, forever and forever on is deemed a 'refugee'. Any Palestinian American in the US today, for perhaps 4 generations could, if they wanted to, apply to the UN for refugee status and get their names added to the roster of people the UN wants to see forcibly repatriated to Israel.

So the notion of diaspora takes on a different meaning for Palestinians than it does for anyone else. Check your law books next time. Or just call me names, that works too.

So you did not put "It's like conversing with Bucky!" in the title of your post?

Of course I said that.

David Sugarman actually would have been a better example. Go back to whatever it was you were doing.

"Of course I said that."

Glad to see you own up to your little attack. I'll go back to watching several here make fools of themselves over an issue they do not understand.

Very entertaining.

http://www.counterpunch.org/andrew05022008.html

Thanks for finding this article -- I'd read it the other day and couldn't get back to it.

This really sounds like the run-up to war, to me, with many Dems complicit, unfortunately. Pray I'm wrong.

Seems to me that carrots are always less expensive and more effective in the long run for trying to get international actors to do what you want them to do. For one thing, they don't break everything nearby when you swing them.

The downside is that they don't scare anybody. But that's also the upside.

Do we have the right to influence world events? Yes, of course we do, because we're so bloody rich (or were). That means that we are positioned to take the most advantage of any result---including peace. So why not do what it takes to get there?

I've commented before that usually merchants prefer peace because it allows them to trade. Not anymore. The wrong merchants are in power.

Not challenging you, but do you have a link to that story? On military.com I found only this,

http://www.military.com/features/0,15240,165396,00.html?wh=wh

which reports on the Defense Science Board's report. Not exactly a whitewash, but not the Cheney thing either ... would a bunch of airmen at Barksdale actually *know* it was a Cheney thing?

letters@nytimes.com

The last time Glenn wrote about Gordon's "an American official said" crap, the Times was inundated with letters, and actually changed that article IIRC.

Push back, people. It may not be much, but it's something.

Yes. And the Public Editor piece criticizing Gordon for his mindless adoption of the administration's "everyone-we're-fighting-is-Al-Qadea" formulation was also a direct by-product of angry e-mails of complaint to the Public Editor after I and a couple of other bloggers wrote about that.

These things chip away and matter.

I don't understand why it's necessarily true that "the 2-state approach does not fully deliver on those points." Nor do I see why right of return is more likely to result in a just peace than in civil war.

You know, that has been my own private conspiracy theory for a while now. I started to wonder around 2005 why the Rethugs were doing so little about grooming anyone for succession.

It's still tin-hat stuff, just as it was when Jack Anderson said in 1980 that Carter had a secret plan to invade Iran and suspend the elections (I know for a fact there was a *plan* to invade Iran, but it had the same status as alot of other 'contingency plans' prepared, archived and occasionally exercised by the mil). But it's alot more chilling to think about it now, isn't it?

"... a track record of uncritically parroting administration positions... the defining attribute of a rank government propagandist ...

Absolutely true, but in this case, the Parrot is correct.

Iranians - or at least some cloistered official factions - are aiding the insurgency, as Nir Rosen confirms.

We could probably save billions by closing down the CIA and the NSA to just pay Rosen a handsome salary for reporting the facts of the matter.

The Quds forces are the exclusive domain of the 'Islamic Supreme Leader' [Ayatola], not the Iranian government itself. They are a few thousand radicals who do aid and train Shiite forces in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Their funding and control is totally separate from any official Iranian government body.

That fact-of-the-matter has totally baffled occupation managers, since Iran is essentially supporting and defending the official Iraqi Shiite "government" that the U.S. put in place ... to such a degree that the elections, likely to be dominated by Iran-sympathetic Shiites, will have to be cancelled.

The bottom line is that it is our presence, our military occupation, that stands in the way of a stable Iraq that can exercise its own sovereignty. That's untenable, because Iran will exert more influence on an independent Iraq than the United States.

Therefore ... from the lips of Hillary ... our "national interest" dictates a military attack on Iran. Not to destroy any fantasized "WMDs", but to cripple any support for the insurgent Shiite forces in Iraq. If Iraq can't be our client state, we'll have to destroy them to save them from their own folly.