George Bush's finest hour

Af netinu ...

Since today is Veteran's Day here in the freedom-loving heart of the free world, it seems only fitting to remember our leader's appearance on national television back in February 2004, where he explained why he launched the war that now seems to have killed about a million civilians, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Full transcript at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/ but here he is at his most eloquent.

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President Bush: Vital question.

And so we — I expected there to be stockpiles of weapons. But David Kay has found the capacity to produce weapons. Now, when David Kay goes in and says we haven't found stockpiles yet, and there's theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we’ll find out. That's what the Iraqi Survey Group — let me — let me finish here.

But David Kay did report to the American people that Saddam had the capacity to make weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with weapons. Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons. He was a dangerous man in the dangerous part of the world.

And I made the decision to go to the United Nations.

By the way, quoting a lot of their data — in other words, this is unaccounted for stockpiles that you thought he had because I don't think America can stand by and hope for the best from a madman, and I believe it is essential — I believe it is essential — that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent. It's too late if they become imminent. It's too late in this new kind of war, and so that's why I made the decision I made.

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Note the explanation of what happened to Iraq's famed weapons of mass destruction. Once Saddam and his henchmen saw that the US had entered into Iraq, they destroyed them. Hahahaha. What else would you do with weapons when your country is attacked? It was probably this display of Bush's intellect that led the American people to reelect him later that year.

Americans are NOT stupid - WITH SUBTITLES

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE

Loose Change - Final Cut

Var forsýnd í Bretlandi um daginn.

Sjá

http://rinf.com/alt-news/911-truth/loose-change-final-cut-%e2%80%93-uk-premier/1657/

Bandaríkjamarkaður skiptir Kínverja sífellt minna máli.

Ekki nema um 20% af útflutningi Kínverja fer orðið til BNA og fer lækkandi. Kínverjar hafa því vaxandi áhuga á að losa sig við dollarapappíra sína (upp á fleiri hundruð milljarða dollara) en þeir hafa lengi verið mjög duglegir við að taka við þessu ónýta pappírsdrasli og fjármagna þannig botnlausan hallarekstur Sáms frænda. En nú er það komið á endastöð og hrynjandi dollar er til marks um það.

Vöruskiptaafgangur Kínverja er eitthvað um 30 milljarðar dollara á mánuði (vöruskiptahalli BNA er um 60 milljarðar dollara á mánuði) og ekki geta þeir bætt á sig dollurum og leita því annað í gjaldeyri rétt eins og þeir hafa verið að minnka vægi almennra viðskipta við Bandaríkin.

Talandi um vafasamt bókhald ...

GM to record noncash charge of $39B

The automaker says the charge relates to establishing a valuation allowance against deferred tax assets.

November 6 2007: 7:48 PM EST

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- General Motors Corp. which has struggled to overcome losses and reach a non-competitive labor agreement over the last three years says it will take a $39 billion charge to close the door on that period.

The company announced Tuesday that it will record a net noncash charge of $39 billion for the third quarter of 2007 to meet federal accounting rules. ...

http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/06/news/companies/gm_charge/index.htm?postversion=2007110619

Það gæti verið smá kusk á hvítflibbanum

Davíð má hafa skoðanir, við megum öll hafa skoðanir. En nútíminn einkennist mjög af skoðana- og hugsjónaleysi. Fjölmiðlar eru einn allsherjar ruslpóstur sem starfar að því að skapa fjarveg fyrir þá sem búa til og selja skuldir til að geta komið út fjallgörðum af ódýru drasli úr asískum þrælaverksmiðjum. Við erum í hroðalegri tækni- og framleiðnibyltingu og stóra vandamálið er að laun almennings hafa ekki vaxið nógu mikið til að taka við þessum fjallgörðum. Við flytjum með öðrum orðum inn offramleiðslugetu og verðhjöðnun annarra og köllum það kaupmáttaraukningu ! Í rauninni er það ekkert annað en yfirdráttur og nú er svo komið að erlendar skammtímaskuldir þjóðarbúsins eru eitthvað tíu sinnum hærri en gjaldeyrisvarasjóður seðlabankans sem aftur þýðir að ríkissjóður Íslands er í raun tæknilega gjaldþrota. En Davíð talar ekki um það - skiljanlega. Hann talar yfirleitt ekki nema í mesta lagi einu sinni á ári eftir að hann hætti að vera blaðafulltrúi Bush á Íslandi. En samt mætti hann tala meira því þrátt fyrir allt er tekið eftir því þegar hann tekur til máls.

Það eru reyndar engar sérstakar fréttir að bankar séu enn að eignfæra ónýtar innistæður. Það þarf jú einhvern veginn að koma út þessum fjallgörðum af offramleiðslugetu annarra sem ég nefndi. Til þess þarf að lána öllum og hundinum þeirra líka. Það eru víst einhverjir nýir bílar að ryðga á lager og bankarnir liggja með stóra lagera af húseignum sem ekki er hleypt á markað til að hann hrynji ekki - en það er allt í sómanum og allt undir kontról því þetta er jú skipulagt fákeppnis- og samráðsþjóðfélag og það er allt samkvæmt langri hefð.

Markets fear banks have $1 trillion in toxic debt

By Sean O’Grady, Economics Editor

Published: 06 November 2007

A new phase in the credit crunch, one of “$1 trillion losses” seems to be dawning. The crisis at Citigroup and renewed doubts about some of the world’s leading banks disquieted stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic yesterday, with the fractious mood set to continue.

The FTSE 100 fell 69.2 to 6,461.4, with Alliance & Leicester (down 4 per cent) and Barclays (off 3 per cent, to a two-year low) singled out for punishment. In New York, Citigroup, down |4.9 per cent to multi-year lows, weighed on the Dow Jones index, which fell 51.7, or 0.4 per cent, to 13,543.4. Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers also dropped on speculation they face more writedowns on top of the $40bn (£19bn) announced in the past four months.

Bill Gross, the chief investment officer of Pacific Investment Management, said US mortgage delinquencies and defaults would rise in 2008. “There are $1 trillion worth of sub-primes, Alt-As [self-certified] and basically garbage loans,” he said, adding that he expects some $250bn in defaults. “We’ve only begun to see the pain from rising mortgage payments,” he added. Brian Gendreau, an investment strategist at ING, commented: “Financials are 20 per cent of the S&P 500 and if that sector doesn’t do well all bets are off. People just don’t know what’s on the balance sheets.” .....

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article3132507.ece

No evidence of Iranian nuclear-weapons program, experts say

Posted on Sat, Nov. 03, 2007

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/world/story/294914.html

BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY [e-mail]

WASHINGTON --

Despite President Bush's claims that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons that could trigger ''World War III,'' experts in and out of government say there's no conclusive evidence that Tehran has an active nuclear-weapons program.

 

Even his own administration appears divided about the immediacy of the threat. While Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney speak of an Iranian weapons program as a fact, Bush's point man on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, has attempted to ratchet down the rhetoric.

''Iran is seeking a nuclear capability . . . that some people fear might lead to a nuclear-weapons capability,'' Burns said in an interview Oct. 25 on PBS.

''I don't think that anyone right today thinks they're working on a bomb,'' said another U.S. official, who requested anonymity because of the issue's sensitivity.

Outside experts say the operative words are ''right today.'' They say Iran may have been actively seeking to create a nuclear-weapons capacity in the past and still could break out of its current uranium-enrichment program and start a weapons program. They, too, lack definitive proof but cite a great deal of circumstantial evidence.

Bush's rhetoric seems hyperbolic compared with the measured statements by his senior aides and outside experts.

''I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon,'' he said Oct. 17 at a news conference.

''Our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its grandest ambitions,'' Cheney warned on Oct 23. ``We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.''

Bush and Cheney's allegations are under especially close scrutiny because their similar allegations about an Iraqi nuclear program proved to be wrong.

Nevertheless, there are many reasons to be skeptical of Iran's claims that its nuclear program is intended exclusively for peaceful purposes, including the country's vast petroleum reserves, its dealings with a Pakistani dealer in black-market nuclear technology and the fact that it concealed its uranium-enrichment program from a U.N. watchdog agency for 18 years.

''Many aspects of Iran's past nuclear program and behavior make more sense if this program was set up for military rather than civilian purposes,'' Pierre Goldschmidt, a former U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general, said in a speech Oct. 30 at Harvard University.

If conclusive proof exists, however, Bush hasn't revealed it. Nor have four years of IAEA inspections.

''I have not received any information that there is a concrete active nuclear-weapons program going on right now,'' IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei asserted in an interview Oct. 31 with CNN.

''There is no smoking-gun proof of work on a nuclear weapon, but there is enough evidence that points in that direction,'' said Mark Fitzpatrick of the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation controls.

New light may be shed when the IAEA reports this month on whether Iran is fulfilling an August accord to answer all outstanding questions about the nuclear-enrichment program it long concealed from the U.N. watchdog agency.

Its report is expected to focus on Iran's work with devices that spin uranium hexafluoride gas to produce low-enriched uranium for power plants or highly enriched uranium for weapons, depending on the duration of the process.

Iran asserts that it's working only with the P1, an older centrifuge that it admitted buying in 1987 from an international black-market network headed by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.

But IAEA inspectors determined that Iran failed to reveal that it had obtained blueprints for the P2, a centrifuge twice as efficient as the P1, from the Khan network in 1995.

Iranian officials say they did nothing with the blueprints until 2002, when they were given to a private firm that produced and tested seven modified P2 parts, then abandoned the effort.

IAEA inspectors, however, discovered that Iran sought to buy thousands of specialized magnets for P2s from European suppliers, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last year that research on the centrifuges continued.

The IAEA has been stymied in trying to discover the project's scope, fueling suspicions that the Iranian military may be secretly running a P2 development program parallel to the civilian-run P1 program at Natanz.

Other issues driving concerns that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons:

PROJECT 111: The CIA turned over to the IAEA last year thousands of pages of computer simulations and documents -- purportedly from a defector's laptop -- that indicated that Iranian experts studied mounting a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile.

The laptop also contained drawings and notes on sophisticated detonators and conventional high explosives arrayed in a ring -- the shape used to trigger nuclear weapons -- and implicated a firm linked to Iran's military in uranium-enrichment studies.

The documents included drawings of a 1,200-foot-deep underground shaft apparently designed to confine a nuclear test explosion.

Iran denounced the materials as ''politically motivated and baseless,'' but promised to cooperate with an IAEA investigation into so-called Project 111 once other questions are settled. U.S., French, German and British intelligence officials think the materials are genuine.

''I wouldn't go to war over this, but it's reason for suspicion,'' Fitzpatrick said. ``It hasn't been explained.''

Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical and petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California who emigrated from Iran in 1978 and has analyzed Iran's nuclear program closely, dismissed the materials as ``totally not believable.''

Noting how carefully Iranian intelligence agencies monitor the program and the borders, he said, ``If the laptop did exist, I find it hard to believe that its absence wasn't noticed for so long that somebody could take it out of Iran.''

THE 15-PAGE DOCUMENT: ElBaradei revealed in November 2005 that Iran had a document supplied by the Khan network on casting and milling uranium metal into hemispheres.

Uranium hemispheres have no application in power plants, but form the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. Iran denied asking for the document or doing anything with it. It barred the IAEA from making copies but agreed to have it placed under seal.

IAEA investigators have been interviewing Khan network members to verify Iran's version of how it got the document. They also have been looking into whether Iran received a Chinese warhead design from the Khan network. Libya, which bought the same materials Iran did, had the design.

POLONIUM-210: Iran has failed since 2003 to satisfy IAEA inquiries about experiments it conducted from 1989 to 1993 that produced Polonium-210.

Polonium-210 is a highly radioactive substance that has limited civilian applications but is used in warheads to initiate the fission chain reaction that results in a nuclear blast.

URANIUM MINE: IAEA inspectors want to know why and how the same military-linked company that's been implicated in the laptop materials was able to develop a uranium mine and a milling facility in a year when Iran has said the firm has limited experience in such work.

NUCLEAR POWER VS. OIL AND GAS: Many U.S. and European officials dispute Iran's claim that it needs to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants.

They point out that the only Iranian nuclear power plant under construction is being built by Russia, which has an agreement to supply it with low-enriched uranium fuel for 10 years.

Moreover, they contend that Iran doesn't have enough uranium to provide fuel for the lifetimes of the seven to 10 civilian reactors it says it needs to meet the demands of its growing population.

It would be far cheaper for Iran to expand domestic consumption of natural gas, of which it has the world's second-largest reserves, and oil, of which it has the world's third-largest reserves, according to a study by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

But Sahimi argued that given the skyrocketing price of oil and natural gas, it makes more sense for Iran to export as much petroleum and natural gas as possible and fill its power needs with nuclear-generated electricity.

''The price of uranium since 2001 has increased by 800 percent. Iran's presently known resources can supply enriched uranium for seven reactors for 15 years,'' he said. ``It would be foolish not to go after a domestic uranium facility . . . given that, the price of enriched uranium, and the political obstacles and hindrance (Iran faces) if it decides to rely on outside suppliers.''

NOTE: For several months, the Bush administration has been ratcheting up its rhetoric toward Iran, accusing its government of trying to develop a nuclear weapon. The administration has imposed new economic sanctions on Iranian businesses and suggested that military action may be needed if the Iranians don't shut down their nuclear program. But global opinion differs on what threat -- if any -- Iran's nuclear program poses. Over the next several weeks, McClatchy Newspapers will examine key questions surrounding the Bush administration's confrontation with Iran.

Rice Crispy (vonandi).

Rice to face subpoena in spy case

Fri Nov 2, 2:46 PM ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071102/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/pentagon_spy_probe_2

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior intelligence will be subpoenaed to discuss their discussions with pro-Israel lobbyists, a federal judge ruled Friday in an espionage case.

Lawyers for two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists facing espionage charges have subpoenaed Rice, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and several others to testify at their trial next year. Prosecutors had challenged the subpoenas in federal court.

Benni björgunarmaður og peningaprentvélin hans

Temporary OMO: Fed adds $12.00 billion with overnight RP

Temporary OMO: Fed adds $21.00 billion with 7 days RP

(earlier today)

Temporary OMO: Fed adds $8.00 billion with 14 day RP