Monday, August 08, 2005

Forget Impeachment

I want Bush and Cheney tried for CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY.

In Iran, NY Times reports progress on nuclear program:

Iran started work today at its uranium conversion plant in Isfahan, where raw uranium can be converted into gas, according to Iranian officials. The International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors arrived in Isfahan, said Iran started today to feed uranium ore concentrate into the first part of the process line at the facility......

"The uranium conversion facility in Isfahan has started its activities under I.A.E.A. supervision," the deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Mohammad Saeedi, told reporters at the plant, according to Reuters.

I have a hard time blaming them entirely. I mean, if a neighboring country was being turned upside down by the U.S. in order to coerce the creation of a pro-U.S. government and permanent (or as long as the oil lasts) U.S. presence in the middle east, it'd be more tempting to buff up national security, including any nuclear powers. And it's probably becoming a joke for the other countries which realize that as long as we're stuck in Iraq... they're free to do whatever they want.

Speaking of Iraq, the mother of a killed soldier is making quite a bit of publicity by camping outside Crawford, where- during economically and domestically unstable times- the President is vacationing in his fake ranch. (Somebody at DailyKos pointed out that his insanity can be proved by that fact: he went to TEXAS in AUGUST) The president refused to see her, but sent over his two aides to talk to the mother, who is still holding her vigil until the president answers her questions or leaves Crawford.

President Bush draws antiwar protesters just about wherever he goes, but few generate the kind of attention that Cindy Sheehan has since she drove down the winding road toward his ranch here this weekend and sought to tell him face to face that he must pull all Americans troops out of Iraq now......

But when she was blocked by the police a few miles from Mr. Bush's 1,600-acre spread on Saturday, the 48-year-old Ms. Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., was transformed into a news media phenomenon, the new face of opposition to the Iraq conflict at a moment when public opinion is in flux and the politics of the war have grown more complicated for the president and the Republican Party.

Ms. Sheehan has vowed to camp out on the spot until Mr. Bush agrees to meet with her, even if it means spending all of August under a broiling sun by the dusty road. Early on Sunday afternoon, 25 hours after she was turned back as she approached Mr. Bush's ranch, Prairie Chapel, Ms. Sheehan stood red-faced from the heat at the makeshift campsite that she says will be her home until the president relents or leaves to go back to Washington. A reporter from The Associated Press had just finished interviewing her. CBS was taping a segment on her. She had already appeared on CNN, and was scheduled to appear live on ABC on Monday morning. Reporters from across the country were calling her cellphone.


Her basic question is "For what did my son die?" And apparently, the question is stumping Bush because he can't use the "war on terror" excuse much nowadays. It's like a separate entity now. There's the War in Iraq and a separate War on Terror which is not making any progress.

But I hope Bob Newman is kidding. I sincerely hope this man is NOT saying that being an activist for peace after losing her son is an act of betrayal to Cindy Sheehan's son. Well, he wouldn't know that, because he DIED. Her child is dead, dammit. So please, Mr. Newman, take your racist language elsewhere. I would quote your absurd comments, but they are an insult to my common sense. Frankly, she has the right to ask why her son died. In fact, she's doing a service for the rest of the grieving families and a torn nation by trying to get a straight answer out of the President of the United States of America:

"If he doesn't come out and talk to me in Crawford, I'll follow him to D.C.," she said. "I'll camp on his lawn in D.C. until he has the courtesy and the integrity and the compassion to talk to somebody whose life he has ruined."

Now, I've been goign insane with Google News search with this update from Daily Kos. But this is one of those times I wish Daily Kos was wrong. But I'm certain enough on the credibility of this DKos diary from David Swanson:

Cindy Sheehan phoned me from Texas a few minutes ago to say that she's been informed that beginning Thursday, she and her companions will be considered a threat to national security and will be arrested. Coincidentally, Thursday is the day that Rice and Rumsfeld visit the ranch, and Friday is a fundraiser event for the haves and the have mores. Cindy said that she and others plan to be arrested.

A national security threat... Did her son die to protect her right to peaceful protest (which, btw, this is) just so that the president that sent him in the first place could deem her a national security threat?

And elsewhere with our brilliant foreign policy... The U.S. and North Korea are pointing fingers at each other for stalemated talks.

North Korea and the United States on Sunday each blamed the other after nearly two weeks of six-nation negotiations deadlocked over the issue of "peaceful use" nuclear programs.

Hours before he was scheduled to fly back to Washington, Christopher R. Hill, the top American envoy, said North Korea had derailed the process by unexpectedly making a late demand for the right to operate light-water nuclear reactors. American officials believe the North Koreans could use such reactors to secretly make material for nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, the chief North Korean negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, said the United States had been unwilling to compromise on North Korea's desire for a peaceful nuclear program and needed to acknowledge its right as a sovereign nation for such a program.

"We couldn't meet in the middle because we were too far apart," Mr. Kim said. "What we are making is a just demand."


But if they went ahead with the nuclear program, what would the U.S. do? Or, I should rephrase that. What CAN we do?

So while the repercussions of our mistakes reverberate throughout the world, why don't we charge these incompetent crooks with war crimes: heinous misdeeds against Americans, against the international community, and against humanity.