corrente

I liked this Sirota column (from Working for Change, via Common Dreams.org) so i'm submitting the link below.
Dem's "Free" Trade Zealots Change Their Tune by David Sirota.

If you have a good link (reading suggestion) that you'd like to submit for open stage just leave it in comments and i'll try to post it here asap. (assuming its not one of those FoxNoiseBot spam-link entries.)

Otherwise, random observations can be entered below (comment thread) as usual (or unusual, as the case may be).

4 Friday July 28 - John McKay in Seattle:

Damn
Someone just shot up the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. As of this moment, the official word is that five people were wounded and a sixth killed in the attack. The gunman is an American citizen, Muslim from the Tri-Cities (that's the area around the Hanford nuclear reservation, about 250 miles from Seattle). Police still have the area, about four miles from my house, locked down while they make sure there are no other gunmen or victims. By the time there are more details, I'm sure it will be well covered on the national news and you won't need me to tell you what's happening. [ continued at archy ] + [ update]

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James Bamford (Rolling Stone Magazine | August 10, 2006 issue):

"...investigates the Bush administration’s secret plans to sell a new war — with Iran."





4REWIND/Previously posted:

From the Corrente archives - Saturday, August 28, 2004: Spy in the House of 'W'?

Team GWB's Shadowy Groupies

Manucher Ghorbanifar - (a Newsweek item) Iranian arms dealer and one of Oliver North's go-to-guys with respect to the orchestration of the Iran Contra scam. And other stuff.

Michael Ledeen (American Enterprise Institute) - Chalabi boosteroo and also...

Leading the charge against Iran is AEI's Michael Ledeen, perhaps best known for setting in motion the US-Israeli arms deal with Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as Iran/contra.

[See] Michael Ledeen: Still Dreaming of Tehran - by Robert Dreyfuss & Laura Rozen (The Nation magazine March 25 2004)

Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin:

Rhode and Franklin were critical players in the campaign for war against Iraq. In 2002 they helped organize the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, the Iraq war-planning unit whose intelligence staffers are now under investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for allegedly manipulating evidence about Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorism. Both the OSP and the Rhode-Franklin effort on Iran were run out of the office of Douglas Feith, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and a key neocon ally. Their initiative on Iran reportedly drew a sharp protest from the State Department. Newsday quoted a US official who said that the entire effort was designed to "antagonize Iran so that they get frustrated and then by their reactions harden US policy against them." [Still Dreaming of Iran - Dreyfuss/Rozen - see The Nation link above]

AND "more more more" on topic: For more back info/links - including previous published material noted above - see Spy in the House of 'W'?.

-- image from: Force De Frappe (farm runoff / 4.14.2006).

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