I favor the last of these possibilities. In Glenn Greenwald's article on the NSA phone-sex snooping, he quotes the following exchange, set off with (what else?) a typically implausible lie from GWB: ROSS: Kinne says she listened to hundreds of Americans simply calling their families … KINNE: Personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything having anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that nobody else should have been listening to. ROSS: President Bush has reassured Americans again and again: GEORGE BUSH: It’s phone calls of known Al Qaeda suspects making a phone call into the United States. KINNE: I would say that that is completely a lie — I would call it a lie — because we were definitely listening to Americans who had nothing to do with terrorism… ROSS: Kinne says she intercepted, recorded, and transcribed conversations with the military, journalists, and Red Cross and aid workers. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/10/09/eavesdropping/index.html Now the point is that no one ever believed that particular lie of Bush's. And yet Democrats capitulated. They pretended they thought he was telling the truth, and voted to immunize telecoms that broke they law, they sanctioned these abuses. I truly feel sorry for them.

Our Government is the most predictably corrupt, and contemptibly so, in our nation's history. For example, the entirely non-shocking revelation that NSA has been deploying its wiretapping powers to eavesdrop on phone sex- including that of soldiers in the Green Zone. http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=5987804 Is anyone surprised by this? What makes me laugh is all those 'conservative' "Blue Dog" Dems whom pelosi blamed for her failure to accomplish anything in the way of reigning in Bush's perverse demands: Surely they can't be happy with this use of our national security apparatus which, thanks to Madam Speaker and maybe those uncontrollable Blue Dogs themselves(not to mention a solid bloc of panting Republicans), now operate beyond the law, where they can get unlimited free phone sex. Thank you, Democratic Congress, for caving in to the lineal successors of J.Edgar Hoover at every turn. He'd be proud, though I doubt the general public will have similar sentiments.

In a sign that we have yet again learned the wrong lesson from our latest disaster, WaPo reports that we are going to use our Armed Forces as our main instrument of subsiding 'failed states' (often the very ones we caused to 'fail' ourselves), aka nation rebuilding:

The new manual aims to orchestrate and plan for a range of military tasks to stabilize ungoverned nations: protecting the people; aiding reconstruction; providing aid and public services; building institutions and security forces; and, in severe cases, forming transitional U.S. military-led governments.

This is the ultimate in Big Government conservatives have been crying about since FDR, with the nasty twist that we pay to destroy and rebuild, getting no gratitude from the nations we reduced to rubble first, and none from the poor saps of taxpayers here at home, who see our own 'stability' collapsing.

However, this has paid off in one respect: we were able to persuade our fellow G8 nations to cancel Iraq's debts, with the effect that Iraq is one country that is not beset by financial worries.


Poor GWB. Al-Maliki will always be more of a friend to Iran than to America, despite this FDR-like largesse bestowed upon his Government.

It seems that Osama bin Laden was on the verge of being killed or captured several times in late 2001.

But each time, his friends in the White House said no.

Bin Laden recieved the Bush Administration's first major bailout (that we know of).

Disgraced Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is going to Moscow to beg the Russians not to send anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, so the Israelis can bomb Iran with impunity:
 
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, traveling to Russia this week on one of his last diplomatic missions, said Sunday he would urge Moscow not to sell sophisticated weapons to Israel's enemies.

Iran is interested in buying anti-aircraft missiles that could cripple any military strike against its nuclear program. Israel is also afraid Moscow would sell Syria the same missile defense system.

To make the abject Olmert's case even worse, Israel has been supplying weapons to Georgia:

Russia... sent Israel’s foreign minister a letter of protest, asking that it stop supplying military hardware to Georgia. The letter pointed out that Russia had sometimes heeded Israel’s requests to refrain from supplying weapons systems to states seen as threatening to Israel, according to a lengthy exposé in the weekend magazine of the Israeli daily Ma’ariv. The Foreign Ministry then asked the Defense Ministry to cancel the authorizations to sell offensive weapons to Georgia and to allow only the sale of defensive weapons, as well as military training, to proceed, Ma’ariv reported.

Israeli officials are quick to point out that they wisely rejected repeat requests for arms from Georgia in the months leading up to the outbreak of hostilities with Russia in early August. The most ambitious one involved the purchase of 200 Merkava tanks, which was vetoed by the Defense Ministry.

Georgian officials, however, publicly denied that Israel had cut back on weapons sales. Moreover, they showered praise on Israel’s military help after the beginning of the hostilities last month, with Saakashvili stating at a press conference that “Israeli weapons have been very effective.” Minister Yakobashvili told Israel Army Radio that “Israel should be proud of its military, which trained Georgian soldiers.” In the end, Georgia’s army proved to be no match for the Russian military, which has repeatedly accused Western powers and Israel of arming Georgia.

It truly is an example of foreign policy incompetence worthy of Dick Cheney (which makes me think he is the one goading Georgians and Israelis into idiocy- perhaps he is running one of his famous psy-ops programs on them to induce them to act against their own interest, just as he has goaded us into repudiating our own self-interest again and again?).

In any case, an Israeli minister who, apparently, is trying to tighten rules on Israeli arms exports, sounds as incoherent as Condi Rice does when she tries to clean up the disasters her belligerent colleagues have wrought:

Despite the diplomatic backlash with Russia, Sneh believes that Israel “handled the Georgia situation properly” and that it had carefully vetted the arms sales “to ensure that they would not have strategic consequences. It just so happens that a war broke out.”

 

 

Two days ago, I wrote about a purported false flag attack in the capital of South Ossetia http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/2008/10/georgian-accuses-russia-of-fal.php. Its significance was that while false flag attacks do occur, there is a prima facie reason to reject them as an explanation of a blast of this kind.

When that story first emerged, it was a Georgian offical who charged that Russians or Ossetians were responsible because they wanted an excuse to violate the ceasefire, negotiated by Sarkozy with notable absence of American input. I cannot put much weight on the assertion of a single Georgian official. Of course he will deny that Georgians planned this bombing. And since there are few other likely culprits, he hit upon the idea of a false flag attack.

There have been few new developments in the situation. The Russians have been withdrawing from Georgian territory. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iMT5UecZptgLyuYVOhGGoHNC5NDw

But if you read this most recent article, you will note an intriguing detail that was not present before:

Russian forces in Georgia removed a first checkpoint Sunday and began dismantling others as part of an expected troop pull-back after August's war over the South Ossetia rebel region.

The Russians made the move in a buffer zone around South Ossetia and in western Georgia, after warnings by Georgian and US officials that Moscow might try to delay the pull-back following a Friday bomb attack.

Now it appears that US officials are joining with Georgians to express the fear that this attack, which Russians believe was carried out by Georgians, and which prima facie was, in fact, carried out by them, will reignite the conflict.

US officials are presumably privy to Georgian plans of this kind, if they were, in fact, the planners of this attack. 

We know that the US has affiliated with MEK (a group on the US State Department list of terrorist organizations) to foment attacks on Iran. See, for example, this: http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2008/10/key-pmoi-figure.html (the writer here acknowledges the biased nature of Iranian press, but for obvious reasons, one must rely on such sources in this matter).

And prior to the attack, the US Assistant Secretary of State warned:

US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried said he feared Moscow would fail to fully respect the EU-brokered deal which stipulates that it must pull its troops out of parts of Georgia neighbouring two breakaway regions and back to positions they held before the fighting.

"I think the Russians will respect that part of the agreements which requires them to pull their troops out of this so-called 'security zone' and out of uncontested Georgia," Fried said in an interview with AFP.

"What I fear is that they will not respect that part of the ceasefire that requires them to pull all of their combat forces back to their positions of August 7. And this is part of the six-point ceasefire. It's quite explicit," he said during a visit to Lithuania, a former Soviet republic which joined the EU in 2004 and is a staunch ally of Georgia.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hSesNlUULFcMKtF8QsIcQP40FG2A

This was last Thursday. The next day, the blast occurred.