THE BUSH'S ANATHEMA (CURSE) IN IRAQ

WORD OF THE DAY "anathema"

It seems Iraq is heading for CIVIL WAR! This was an inevitable outcome told to Bush and his Neocons even before they decided to go to war with Iraq (and this was well before 9/11)...

Below is a poignant note from Cindy Sheehan. She asks President Bush "What was the noble cause my son died for?" He has yet to answer her, in plain words, question.

Now with Britain not only stopping the pull out of some troops in Iraq but sending in 6000 more Desert Rats in what is being described as "an unexpected redeployment. This, to me, is an acknowledgement that is beyond a doubt, the leaders of Britain and the United States realize CIVIL WAR is not only looming but is already happening.

The Bush and his neocon's anathema in Iraq has begun... and with CIVIL WAR evolving into a reality, there are going to be numerous US and British deaths to follow.

I do not believe that Cindy will ever get an answer to her question from Bush nor will the Mothers of the many who have yet to be lost. Thinking Blue

PS: If the above isn't bad enough now it seems the Bush administration is trying to blame environmentalists for the levee breaks...
Click here or below:
Administration: Blame environmentalists for levee failures

Now for the word of the day

anathema n., pl. anathemas. 1. A formal ecclesiastical ban, curse, or excommunication. 2. A vehement denunciation; a curse: "the sound of a witch's anathemas in some unknown tongue" (Nathaniel Hawthorne).

A denunciation invoking a wish of evil: execration - curse - damnation - imprecation - malediction - oath - evil spell - evil eye - whammy (slang)
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Wake Up
By Cindy Sheehan
t r u t h o u t Perspective
Monday 19 September 2005

So we have come to cash this check - a check that will give
us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We
have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce
urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off
or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. -- MLK, Jr. Aug. 28, 1963, I Have a Dream speech

What Bush's Katrina shows once again is that my son died for
nothing. If you listen to Bush - and fewer and fewer are, thank goodness
- we are in Iraq in part due to 9/11. All our president has been talking
about has been protecting this country since 9/11. That's why people
voted for him in the last election. Katrina shows it's all a sham, a
fraud, a disaster as large as Katrina itself.

Hundreds of billions and tens of thousands of innocent lives
wasted later, what have we achieved? Nothing. Casey died for nothing and
Bush says others have to die for those that have died already.

Enough, George! What is disgusting is not, as the first lady
says, criticism of you, but rather the crimes you've committed
against this country and our sons and daughters.
Stop hiding behind your twisted idea of God and
stop destroying this country.

This week I arrive in Washington DC to begin my Vigil at the
White House just like I did in Texas. But this time I'll be joined by
Katrina victims as well. In your America we are all victims. The failed
bookends of your Presidency are Iraq and Katrina.

It is time for all of us to stand up and be counted: to show the
media, Congress, and this inept, corrupt, and criminal administration
that we mean business. It is time to get off of our collective behinds
to show the people who are running our country into oblivion that we
will stand for it no longer. That we want our country back and
we want our nation's young people back home, safe and sound, on our
shores to help protect America. That it is time for a change in
our country's "leadership." That we will never go away until our dreams
are reality.

We have so-called leaders in our country who are waiting for the
correct "politically expedient" time to speak up and out against the
occupation of Iraq. It is no sweat for our politicos to wait for the
right time, because not one of them has a child in harm's way. I don't
care if the politician is a Democrat or a Republican, this is not about
politics. Being a strong leader to guide our country out of the quagmire
and mistake of Iraq will require people of courage and determination to
stand up and say: "I don't care if I win the next election, people are dying in Iraq every day and families are being decimated." We, as the 62% of Americans who want
our troops to begin coming home, will follow such a leader down the
difficult but oh-so-rewarding path of peace with justice.

It is no longer time for the tranquilizing drug of
gradualism. It never has been the time for that. Our "now" is
so fiercely urgent. Like my daughter, Carly, wrote in the last verse of
her "A Nation Rocked to Sleep" poem:

Have you ever heard the sound of a Nation Being Rocked to Sleep?

Our leaders want to keep us numb so the pain won't be too deep,

But if we the people allow them to continue, another mother will weep,

Have you heard the sound of a Nation Being Rocked to Sleep?

Wake up: See you in DC on the 24th.

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British Troops to Stay, Fears of Iraq Civil War

Moves to withdraw soldiers from Iraq have been
scrapped due to fears of civil war, a newspaper claimed. The
British Ministry of Defense insisted it had never set a timetable for
removing its 8,500 troops. But it confirmed that more soldiers would
be redeployed to Iraq before the end of the year, suggesting thousands
will remain in the country well into 2006.

"The formal anouncement of that redeployment will be made during the
autumn and they would be scheduled to go out around the end of
November," a MoD spokesman said. Britain, the main ally of the United
States in Iraq, has frequently said its soldiers will stay there "until
the job is done".

However, a Government document leaked to a newspaper in July
suggested London hoped to cut its forces in Iraq to 3,000 by the middle
of next year. The Sunday Telegraph said that plan had now been
scrapped amid "growing concerns that Iraq is heading into
full-scale civil war".

It said 6,000 Desert Rats would go to Iraq in what it
described as "an unexpected redeployment". The MoD described
the figure as speculative and said the redeployment was part of a
rotation of troops and did not mean Britain was increasing its presence
in Iraq.

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Sliding into civil war

Simon Tisdall
Friday September 16, 2005

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's
declaration of war "against Shias in all of Iraq" has reinforced fears
that the country is sliding towards all-out civil war. This week's
toll included day-laborers in a Shia district of Baghdad and pre-dawn
executions of Shia men in the provincial town of Taji.

The Shia response has so far been relatively restrained. Shia
leaders are fully aware that al-Qaida is trying to draw them into
civil conflict. The main Shia parties, in government for the first
time, hope a constitution to be voted on next month and a general
election in December will confirm an historic shift of power in their
favor.

This prospect of permanent dispossession is anathema (DAMNATION)
to leaders of the Sunni Arab minority, accustomed under Saddam Hussein
to running the show, and may be a factor in the violence. But a
distinction should be drawn between the national concerns of
mainstream Sunni Arabs and al-Qaida's more grandiose, destabilizing
objectives, said Rime Allaf, a Middle East expert at Chatham House.

"It's not just about Sunnis versus Shias. Al-Qaida often makes no
distinction about who is being targeted. Some of these Baghdad
neighborhoods are mixed Sunni, Shia and others. They're all
civilians," Ms Allaf said. "There is already a civil war, but
it's primarily a war for power, not a war for religion. That's what
it's about for al-Qaida. And power is what it's about for the US as
well - power over the region."

Considered from this perspective, the Iraqi conflict lies at the
heart of two historic struggles that were given a modern dimension by
9/11. All-out sectarian warfare in Iraq, if not avoided, could inflame
passions in Shia Iran and among Sunnis and Shias in Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf states, possibly leading to the sort of regime-changing,
region-wide upheavals sought by al-Qaida.

At the same time, the US, wrestling with contradictory impulses to
keep control in Iraq and disengage, may be tempted to lash out.
Heavy-handed action against Syria and Iran could also spark a broader
Middle East conflict.

That is one reason why a compromise on Iraq's constitution that
satisfies moderate Sunnis is vital before the October 15 vote, said
Joost Hiltermann, Middle East director of the International Crisis
Group. "If no compromise is reached ...
the country will slowly dissolve into civil war and disintegrate," he
predicted. "Unfortunately, this scenario now seems likely."

VISIT: http://geocities.com/loyal_resistance/nonono/iraqcivalwar.html
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FRANCES NEWTON
THE LINK: http://www.freefrances.org/

*** SAD UPDATE ***
FRANCES NEWTON WAS MURDERED

BY THE STATE OF TEXAS

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2005

READ: Sacrificial Murder by Texas

Dave Lindorff: 'Frances Newton died for Bush's sins'

Date: Friday, September 16 @ 09:55:54

EDTTopic: Laws, the Courts and the Legal System

Sacrificial Murder by Texas By Dave Lindorff, CounterPunch

Frances Newton died Wednesday for Bush's sins.The 40-year-old black woman, executed by the death-obsessed state of Texas last night following a rejection by the US Supreme Court of her attorneys' last-ditch appeal, and after the state's craven and bloodthirsty "pardons and parole" board refused to recommend a stay to Gov. Rick Perry, hardly merited mention in the nation's media, which is now awash in stories about Bush's disaster in New Orleans.

(The story got a 79-word shirt-tail report on page 25 of the New York Times, tucked under a larger story about the House changing rules for hate crimes and child molesters, and next to a story about Hurricane Ophelia.)

Those who are looking for an example of an innocent person's being executed by the state may well find it in the case of this unfortunate woman, who almost certainly was not guilty of killing her husband and child as charged by the state of Texas.

Her guilt was always hard to fathom, with the prosecution claiming that, after killing her alleged victims, Newton somehow left the scene, disposed of the gun, and returned only 30 minutes later with not a trace of blood on her body or clothes, which were all dry-a good trick, as OJ Simpson could attest, given the amount of blood at the scene.

Newton insisted on her innocence of the crime right up to her death, and offered an alternative theory-that her husband and 7-year-old had been killed over a debt to a drug dealer-a theory that her notoriously inept and subsequently suspended attorney Ronald Mock never bothered to investigate.

Newton claimed she had removed a gun from the house after hearing her husband and his brother talking about "some trouble," and she thought it better to get the weapon out of the house.

The trial was rife with improprieties and prosecutorial misconduct-the most egregious of which was that investigators had recovered not one but three identical .25 cal. Pistols during their investigation of the case, while the prosecution pretended there had been only one pistol recovered and hid the other two from the defense.

It was also rife with the standard neglect and incompetence we've come to expect from underpaid, unmotivated and incompetent public defenders provided to poor and black defendants in such cases-Mock never even brought in Newton's husband's parents, who had volunteered to testify on her behalf, and who have steadfastly opposed her execution!

Ironically, when there was more attention being paid to the case back in December 2004, Gov. Perry granted a 120-day stay from execution because of evidentiary questions in the case that raised some doubt about her guilt.

Yet the matter of the multiple guns and the outrageous hiding of important exculpatory evidence from defense-which raised much more serious questions about her guilt and about the fairness of her trial--came up subsequent to that stay.

In other words, doubts about Newton's guilt were much greater the day she was executed than they were last year when Perry granted a stay.

So what was different between December '04 and September '05? The lack of public and media attention to the case. Katrina and the disastrous Bush response to the deadly flooding of New Orleans simply trumped the story of the first execution of a black woman since the Civil War.

Of course, Newton also got less media attention all along because of her race. The execution of an admitted female killer, Karla Faye Tucker, by Texas only seven years ago, was page-one news for weeks leading up to her execution.

What was different?

Certainly not the depravity of the crime, as her bloodthirstiness was stunning. The real difference was her race-Tucker was white--and the fact that Tucker had "found God" while on death row.

So, in a sense one could say Newton is yet another victim of Hurricane Katrina, though given her race and class, it is quite likely she would have died anyway had the hurricane never hit the Gulf Coast.

She is, however, clearly also another notch for chief executioner George Bush. It was while he was governor that her shameful trial unfolded. It was on his watch as governor that her initial efforts to win a new trial were rejected, it was a state pardons and parole board that still bears the marks of Bush's appointments that rejected her plea for her life, and it was in Bush's shadow as the former Governor Death that her latest effort to win a stay or a pardon from Bush's successor, Gov. Perry, that she finally met her fate with a lethal injection.

It is now time for death penalty opponents and the team of appellate defenders who fought for Newton's life to redouble their efforts to prove her innocence, and to once and for all demonstrate the monstrosity of the sick, racist death penalty in not just Texas but the entire United States.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com

Reprinted from CounterPunch:http://counterpunch.org/lindorff09152005.html

CAROLYNCONNETION - I've got a mind and I'm going to use
it!Thinking Blue
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