LAHORE/LONDON (Reuters) – Pakistani police put opposition leader Benazir Bhutto under house arrest for a week on Tuesday as the Commonwealth threatened suspension unless President Pervez Musharraf repealed a state of emergency.

Army chief Musharraf set off a storm of criticism when suspended the constitution, sacked most judges, locked up lawyers, rounded up thousands of opposition and rights activists and curbed the media.

The Commonwealth, a 53-member body consisting mainly of former British colonies, gave Musharraf until November 22 to end emergency rule and take other steps to address his country’s problems, or Pakistan would face suspension.

Bhutto detained ahead of mass protest

Think-tank calls for gradual sanctions on Pakistan

U.N. chief urges Pakistan to end emergency rule

“Our plan is on. Definitely she’ll try to come out. We will start our procession from here and if they try to stop us, the whole of Punjab will be a battleground,” said Bhutto spokeswoman, Fazana Raja. Police have said Bhutto could be the target of a suicide assassination bid, like the one that killed 139 people at a rally last month welcoming her back from eight years in self-exile”We will try to go out, we will try to go ahead with the march. There are two laws in the country at the moment, one for the opposition and one for the government,” Bhutto’s spokeswoman Naheed Khan told AFP.

Since 1951, the United States Agency for International Development has provided nearly $7 billion to support Pakistan’s development efforts. This assistance has strengthened the political, economic and cultural ties between the two nations.

Since before 1951, the US has had it’s hands in Pakistani affairs. The US has basically groomed this diverse country as an extension of it’s influence in the area. Just like Saudi & Egypt & India, Pakistan has been groomed and manipulated to assist US wants and needs. This arrangement has caused much resentment among segments of the population. Those unhappy segments are the terrorists we created. The same terrorists that resent the leaders the US bought and paid for. The US has figuratively ‘broken the camel’s back’. US influence is now so volatile that we contaminate everything we touch … even though we delude ourselves that our way of living is a gift to our allies. Our politicians have sold the humanitarian motive to it’s constituents. But, we watch aghast, as spectators at a horror movie while Pakistan disassembles before our eyes. Aghast, because the nukes the US, Russia and Europe have helped them build are now at risk of falling into the hands of those unhappy factions we created. The responsible parties to this dangerous tragedy must acknowledge the mess it has made and attempt to reconcile. Bhutto and Musharraf are polar opposites that we have tried to combine. The only common ground is their willingness to deal with the US … but we have made them impotent and they struggle on their interpretation of Democracy.

While the knee jerk western world thinks that “Sanctions” can stop the infighting, sanctions would be more inflammatory. The Pakistanis have their own lives to live – the city mouse and the country mouse live in two different worlds. They are at odds already, this political horror flick may be the final spark that erupts into a conflagration of Civil War. From Civil War to World War Three, the world has a lot at stake here. Real solutions are not forthcoming. Strong arming this situation is NOT a solution.

©2010 BlueBloggin. All Rights Reserved.

Why does NewsMax Media have to ruin a good resource for Medical and Financial news?

Pentagon Has 3-Day Blitz Plan for Iran

The United States has a “shock and awe” plan designed to annihilate Iran’s military, in the event of an attack.

According to the Sunday Times of London, the plan calls for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, over three days.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, told the Times that U.S. military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military. … Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.”

President Bush has accused Iran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust” because of its nuclear program. He has warned that the U.S. and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late.” One Washington source told the Time that the “temperature was rising” inside the administration.

Bush is committed for now to the diplomatic route but thinks Iran is moving towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to one well placed source, Washington believes it would be prudent to use rapid, overwhelming force, should military action become necessary.

Israel, which has warned it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, has made its own preparations for airstrikes and is said to be ready to attack if the Americans back down.

When it comes to politics, NewsMax is Right Scream Media propaganda rag.

©2010 BlueBloggin. All Rights Reserved.

Will President Bush bomb Iran?

In a nondescript room, two blocks from the American Capitol building, a group of Bush administration staffers is gathered to consider the gravest threat their government has faced this century: the testing of a nuclear weapon by Iran.

Nightmare scenario

The United States, no longer prepared to tolerate the risk that Iranian nuclear weapons will be used against Israel, or passed to terrorists, has already launched a bombing campaign to destroy known Iranian nuclear sites, air bases and air defence sites. Iran has retaliated by cutting off oil to America and its allies, blockading the Straits of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf bottleneck, and sanctioned an uprising by Shia militias in southern Iraq that has shut down 60 per cent of Iraq’s oil exports.

The job of the officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Departments of Homeland Security and Energy, who have gathered in an office just off Massachusetts Avenue, behind the rail terminus, Union Station, is to prevent a spike in oil prices that will pitch the world’s economy into a catastrophic spin.

The good news is that this was a war game; for those who fear war with Iran, the less happy news is that the officials were real. The simulation, which took four months, was run by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank with close links to the White House. Its conclusions, drawn up last month and seen by The Sunday Telegraph, have been passed on to military and civilian planners charged with drawing up plans for confronting Iran.

In a speech to war veterans, Mr Bush said: “Iran’s active pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.”

He went on to condemn Iranian meddling in Iraq, where America increasingly blames the deaths of its soldiers on Iranian bombs and missiles. Mr Bush made clear that he had authorised military commanders to confront “Iran’s murderous activities”.

This was widely taken to mean that he is set on a confrontation with Iran that will culminate in a bombing campaign to destroy Iranian nuclear facilities …

The president’s intervention came just weeks after leaks from a White House meeting suggested that Vice-President Dick Cheney, who is understood to favour the use of force, has regained the upper hand over the Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who both advocate diplomacy and sanctions to isolate Iran. Mr Cheney reacted with fury when the State Department suggested that negotiations might continue past January 2009, when Mr Bush leaves the White House.

So the question is: did Mr Bush last week set America inexorably on a path to the next war?

European observers, and some in the American government, believe that Mr Bush has resolved to “do something” about Iran before he leaves office. A State Department source said: “If we get closer to the end of this administration and we are not seeing suitably tough diplomatic action at the UN, and other members of the P5 [the five permanent members of the Security Council] are still resistant to anything amounting to more than a slap on the wrist to the Iranians, then people will start asking the question: how do we stop our legacy being a nuclear-armed Iran?”

Mr Bush’s escalation of the rhetoric was deliberate.

“By using that word ‘holocaust’, Mr Bush has provided a moral reason to allow the Jewish state to do what it needs to do,” said the former aide. “He is reinvoking the notion of ‘never again’.

How many analogies does Bush need to justify his destruction of this country? We know he is up to no good, but ‘the sum of our fears’ is that he is stupid enough to pull the trigger, leave office, and go hide in his bright and shiny new bunker, probably designed by Cheney. The more horrible a nightmare scenario is painted for him, it seems he gets more determined to make it happen.

A Pentagon source said: “We have a targeting list and there are plans, but then there are also plans for repelling an invasion from Canada. We don’t know where everything is but we do know where enough is to cause them enough damage to set back the programme.”

Look out Canada! They’re expecting you to send terrorists over the border, too. The height of paranoia is approaching the executive branch at a break neck speed … doesn’t Bush realize that the whole world may as well invade America, just to stop the insanity. Tom Clancy, we need one of your heroes!

©2010 BlueBloggin. All Rights Reserved.

Pushing the Envelope on Presidential Power

By Barton Gellman and Jo Becker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, June 25, 2007

Shortly after the first accused terrorists reached the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Jan. 11, 2002, a delegation from CIA headquarters arrived in the Situation Room. The agency presented a delicate problem to White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, a man with next to no experience on the subject. Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, who had a great deal of experience, sat nearby.

The meeting marked “the first time that the issue of interrogations comes up” among top-ranking White House officials, recalled John C. Yoo, who represented the Justice Department. “The CIA guys said, ‘We’re going to have some real difficulties getting actionable intelligence from detainees’” if interrogators confined themselves to treatment allowed by the Geneva Conventions.

Cheney and his allies, according to more than two dozen current and former officials, pioneered a novel distinction between forbidden “torture” and permitted use of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” methods of questioning. They did not originate every idea to rewrite or reinterpret the law, but fresh accounts from participants show that they translated muscular theories, from Yoo and others, into the operational language of government.

A backlash beginning in 2004, after reports of abuse leaked out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay, brought what appeared to be sharp reversals in courts and Congress — for Cheney’s claims of executive supremacy and for his unyielding defense of what he called “robust interrogation.”

What more proof does anyone need that this is not an American administration? This is a nightmare out of a bad horror flick. Where are the heroic teenagers from the 1950s who discover the Monster that adults do not believe exists? Americans today are as dumb as their ‘B’ movie counterparts. They look right at the monster and are hypnotized into believing the monster mantras. The movie ‘1984′ has us in it’s “Group Speak” and “Group Think” grip. Thinkers are outlaws. Lord Cheney, the evil ruler of America’s powers is out to change us from free thinkers to ‘group robots’. We are living in a ‘B’ Horror Movie! Feel Free to scream!

©2010 BlueBloggin. All Rights Reserved.