…But if the streets were vacant, so were the voting booths. In one polling station after another, voters dribbled through the doors. At a primary school in western Kabul, I found just one voter – a 70-year-old woman hobbling into the polling station, supported at the elbow by her son.
And at the Habiba high school, there were none. My footsteps echoed loudly in the empty corridors as election officials fidgeted beside vacant booths.

It seemed bizarre – Afghanistan was hosting a great party for democracy, yet it looked as though nobody had bothered to turn up. Figures released yesterday confirmed those suspicions.

Turnout was just 36% in the capital and around 53% across the country, the chief electoral officer, Peter Erben, said – a sharp dip on the 70% seen in last year’s presidential poll.

Officials are pedalling hard to find comforting explanations. Mr Erben said the drop was normal in comparison with other post-conflict countries – even though, days earlier, he had handed me a factsheet predicting a sharp rise in turnout.

The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, also put on a happy face for a positive spin. He was “more than happy”, he said during a roundtable press conference at his fortified Kabul palace a few days later.
guardian.co.uk

VIENNA, Sept. 22 — The European Union and United States backpedaled Thursday in their drive to have Iran referred to the U.N. Security Council for nuclear treaty violations, following strong opposition from other countries on the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear monitoring group.

Russia, China and members of the 115-nation Non-Aligned Movement said during a closed board meeting that they opposed a draft E.U. resolution backed by the United States to escalate pressure on Iran through a Security Council referral.
washingtonpost.com

The Iraqi official was visibly flustered and embarrassed when questioned in Baghdad about the storming of the police station in Basra by British troops.

“It is a very unfortunate development that the British forces should try to release their soldiers the way it happened,” said Haydar al-Abadi, the Prime Minister’s press secretary.

He defended the way the local police had acted. He said: “For two guys to collect information in civilian clothes, in the current tense security situation, I believe that the reaction of the Iraqi security is totally understandable.”

It was not a good day for the Iraqi government. It wanted to publicise the capture of the northern city of Tal Afar by the Iraqi army backed by US forces at the weekend. Instead it had to answer question after question about why Iraqi sovereignty had been treated with such contempt at the other end of the country.

At the weekend an Iraqi minister said to me in frustration: “We must try to eliminate the grey areas where our authority conflicts with the coalition. We must try to reach some understanding about what to do when our jurisdictions clash.”

Ordinary Iraqis were drawing their own conclusion about what had happened in Basra. Abdul Hamid, a goldsmith, said over the phone from the city: “People here have seen that our government has no authority inIraq. The British did not respect them when they smashed into the jail, so why should we respect our own leaders?”
counterpunch.org

British soldiers in terrorist attack? What is going on in Iraq?

That nothing would surprise anyone now, two and a half years into the incredible act of mass butchery called the war in Iraq, in which a sovereign nation was attacked, its infrastructures destroyed and tens of thousands of its civilians slaughtered in an unprovoked and unfounded casus belli, is nothing new. But day-by-day, new chasms of incredulity are opened with revelations which would have appeared absurd only a few years ago.

After Abu Ghraib, little else remains to shock and few stones are unturned in terms of the depths of evil and sheer depravity to which the soldiers of the USA and its allies are prepared to sink to, in a never-ending war which sees the occupation forces losing control on a daily basis.

Now it transpires that two British soldiers were dressed as Arabs and attacking the Iraqi security forces in Basra? And the British authorities have admitted they were members of the SAS? They were caught after shooting at and murdering an Iraqi police official and their car was found to be packed with explosives and a C4 detonator?

Or is it that the two troops were in fact undercover agents dressed as Sadrists, Al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, trying to stir up a war in Iraq between rival anti-occupation forces to help the beleaguered Iraqi security forces to stay in control as events spiral ever downwards? Is it that they were planning a massive bomb attack against Shia targets, to blame on the Sunni?

Is it true that many of the killings in Iraq are not in fact perpetrated by Sunni extremists or foreign insurgents, but indeed by British and American security forces, trying to take the strain off their troops in their realization that the war in Iraq was a monumental mistake from day one, witness to freedom and democracy George Bush style and that followed by his sickening bunch of sycophants eager to make an easy buck on the international stage by breaking an international law or six?

At the end of the day, who are the terrorists in Iraq?
pravda.ru

The U.S. military is bracing for future attacks in space, and the Air Force has deployed an electronic-warfare unit capable of jamming enemy satellites, the general in charge of space defenses says.
“You can’t go to war and win without space,” said Gen. Lance Lord, the four-star general in charge of the Colorado-based Air Force Space Command.
Gen. Lord said in an interview with The Washington Times that his command plays a key role in monitoring space, protecting satellites from attack or disruption and preparing to carry out strikes on enemy spacecraft.
Gen. Lord said the United States has a major strategic advantage over other nations’ militaries because of its satellite communications and intelligence capabilities. “So we’ve got to protect that advantage,” he said.
“We’re not talking about weaponizing space. We’re not talking about massive satellite attacks coming over the horizon or anything like that. This is really a way to understand space situational awareness, who’s out there, who’s operating. We understand that,” Gen. Lord said.
The top priorities of the space command are monitoring space and knowing the threats. Two other missions are defending satellites and conducting offensive operations against enemy spacecraft or ground signals that threaten U.S. satellites.
washtimes.com

Three Chicago-area children have died of a toxic shock syndrome-like illness caused by a superbug they caught in the community and not in the hospital, where the germ is usually found.

The cases show that this already worrisome staph germ has become even more dangerous by acquiring the ability to cause this shock-like condition.

“There’s a new kid on the block,” said Dr. John Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, referring to the added strength of the superbug known as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.

“The fact that there are three community-acquired staph aureus cases is really scary,” continued Bartlett, an infectious disease specialist.
abcnews.go.com

t has long been an article of faith among America’s senior policymakers — Democrats and Republicans alike — that military force is an effective tool for ensuring control over foreign sources of oil. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first president to embrace this view, in February 1945, when he promised King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia that the United States would establish a military protectorate over his country in return for privileged access to Saudi oil — a promise that continues to govern U.S. policy today. Every president since Roosevelt has endorsed this basic proposition, and has contributed in one way or another to the buildup of American military power in the greater Persian Gulf region.

American presidents have never hesitated to use this power when deemed necessary to protect U.S. oil interests in the Gulf. When, following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush sent hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia in August 1990, he did so with absolute confidence that the application of American military power would eventually result in the safe delivery of ever-increasing quantities of Middle Eastern oil to the United States. This presumption was clearly a critical factor in the younger Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Now, more than two years after that invasion, the growing Iraqi quagmire has demonstrated that the application of military force can have the very opposite effect: It can diminish — rather than enhance — America’s access to foreign oil.
commondreams.org

The motivation for Iraq’s invasion was not primarily oil.

Lawmaker Cautions Against Eminent Domain in Rebuilding
Maxine Waters Sees Threat to Poor Blacks in New Orleans
by Carolyn Lochhead

WASHINGTON – Rep. Maxine Waters, a Los Angeles Democrat, warned Tuesday against using government’s power of eminent domain to redevelop New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina concentrated its devastation on largely poor African American neighborhoods.

“We have to watch the redevelopment in New Orleans for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to make sure that the shadow government of the rich and the powerful does not end up abusing eminent domain to take property that belongs to poor people in order to get them out of the city.”

Waters’ comments came after the Senate Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on legislation to cut off federal funding for cities that use eminent domain to condemn private property for economic redevelopment, including such private uses as shopping malls, hotels and condominiums.

Congress is searching for ways to blunt the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in June in Kelo vs. New London, Conn., which held that governments can condemn private property if the project serves a “public purpose.”

The decision created a public uproar and a rare alliance of conservative and liberal lawmakers, many of them minorities, concerned about government incursions on private property.
commondreams.com

NEW ORLEANS – Searchers looking for bodies smashed into homes that had been locked or submerged under Hurricane Katrina’s highest floodwaters, pushing the overall body count past 1,000 as another hurricane threatens to prolong the hunt for the dead.

The death toll in Louisiana stood at 799 on Wednesday, an increase of 153 since the weekend and nearly 80 percent of the 1,036 deaths attributed to Katrina across the Gulf Coast region. Officials said the effort could last another four to six weeks.

“There still could be quite a few, especially in the deepest flooded areas,” said U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Jeffrey Pettitt. “Some of the houses, they haven’t been in yet.”
news.yahoo.com

by Phil Toler
No matter how they spin it, the red-handed nabbing of two British agents-provocateurs in Basra will lift the veil of deceit that has cloaked the otherwise unexplainable internecine attacks between Sunnis and Shi’ites. The long-held Israeli/Neocon goal has been to break up Iraq, among other Arab states, into more easily managed Bantustans. The obvious fault lines among the Sunni, Shia, and Kurd communities made Wolfowitz believe achieving the goal would be a cakewalk. It wasn’t the toppling of Saddam he was talking about, you see, and all those terrible ‘mistakes’ made by Proconsuls Garner and Bremmer were as carefully calculated as the rest of this bloody farce.

What happened in Basra, from the Iraqi standpoint — which is all that matters now that the end-game approacheth — is that two Brits in robes were driving a civilian car packed with explosives. Their mission was to throw a heavy distraction at the Shia militias who were quite upset that three of their chiefs were taken captive by the Brits. They sought to blow up a huge bomb in the busy marketplace, with the obvious blame pointing to Sunnis. But, as often happens with such false flag tactics, they backfired.

Now, those in the Shi’ite community who favor the withdrawal of the occupation troops, sidelined only by their apparent power grab in the elections, are smelling the salts of reality and will come out of their stupor to realize the Yanks have screwed them yet again. They’ll go back to the bloody beginning, say, to the massive bombing of the UN Headquarters in Baghdad, and recalculate. They know they weren’t responsible, and it will dawn on them that the ‘coalition’ had far more to gain from the routing of the international body, such as it is, than the ‘dead-enders’ in the Sunni Community. Same goes for the Jordanian Embassy, the scores of journalists, the mosque bombings, and virtually all of the so-called suicide bombers. These actions all had the effect of fomenting civil war with the Kurds, who are heavily backed by the Israelis, being the only local party to gain from the mayhem.

Early in the war, there were reports of Iraqi men being detained by occupation authorities for several hours while they were interrogated and had their vehicles ‘searched’. The were released on the condition they must go to a specific police station to pick up their papers, or some such necessity. Fortunately, a lucky few discovered by happenstance that explosives had been placed in their vehicle with the purpose remote detonation at whatever destination they were directed to. Apparently the trick still works, because the rash of ‘suicide’ car bombings is unceasing.

But back to Basra. The Yanks have to placate the Shia — at least enough to feel secure that they will not be overwhelmed from the rear, the only point of escape if such becomes necessary. It was the only reason elections were held in a way that would guarantee nominal Shia control of the ‘government’. But, perhaps with Iran’s nominal assistance, the Shia began to look for proof of coalition involvement in acts that really only benefit the coalition. Hence the capture of the two Brit operatives en flagrante. You can ignore comfortably British claims their disguised boys were just surveying suspected militants. If that was their true mission, why would they shoot up the Iraqi police who stopped them, and why would storming of the police station occur before negotiations could produce the soldiers’ release with far less hoopla? More crucial, why would the usually calm city of Basra erupt in such rage? Perhaps they’re feeling the twisting Yankee knife in their backs yet again.

As for the other predictions I have made, the potential for economic collapse has been virtually guaranteed by Katrina and her sibling, Rita, which is poised to take out the drilling platforms Katrina missed. Throw in further damage to refineries, and they’re going to have to retrofit the nation’s gas pumps to accommodate triple digit fill-ups. Toss in roughly the cost of another Iraqi war, which has quietly surpassed the Vietnam debacle in one third less time, to sop out the pork to Halliburton and the like for hurricane cleanup, and it’s clear the numbers in the debit column will overwhelm real American assets to back them up. It’s all blue sky from here on out, baby.

As for the growth of doubts about the official legend of 9/11, a former Bush official has bluntly stated that the WTC buildings were brought down by explosives, and it is reported that the probe into the outed CIA asset has begun to sniff at the edges of the strange anomalies for which no answer has been given. And this is the real danger for the Neocons, the only thing that could conceivably bring down the Bush administration, or lead to unabashed martial law so that all would know the color of their true designs. In this regard, America will collapse from the rot within and on a schedule that resembles the famously aggressive Spartans far more than Britain or Rome.

Enjoy your Fall, folks, I’ve got to go stock the storm shelter.
axisoflogic.com