News: Troops crush freedom in Pakistan w/martial law

Look at bush and condy using empty words, and NO action, praising this brutal dictator (US puppet government) on his democracy crackdown. Sickening, shows what little regard they have for human rights.

And they still send money to fund that brutal regime. Hey, profits over people always.

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CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush backed Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Saturday despite the embattled leader's detour off the path of democracy to impose emergency rule and arrest thousands of opponents.

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Pakistan was plunged into political turmoil a week ago when Musharraf declared a state of emergency — a move his critics claim was an attempt to cling to power.

Hours before Bush spoke, Musharraf's government announced plans to lift the state of emergency within one month, release opposition leader Benazir Bhutto from house arrest and hold parliamentary elections by Feb. 15 — one month later than originally scheduled.

Bush called these "positive steps" — words that left no doubt the United States remained squarely behind the Pakistani leader in the fight against Islamic militants.

"I take a person for his word until otherwise," Bush said during a news conference at his Texas ranch with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Bush, standing in a prairie of tan grasses and cactus, refrained from directly criticizing Musharraf. He said that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Pakistani leader followed through with a pledge to help fight al-Qaida.

"If you're the chief operating officer of al-Qaida, you haven't had a good experience," Bush said. "There has been four or five No. 3s that have been brought to justice one way or the other, and many of those folks thought they could find safe haven in Pakistan. And that would not have happened without President Musharraf honoring his word."

He noted that Musharraf now has promised to lift emergency rule, resign as army chief and hold elections.

"He has declared that he'll take off his uniform, and he has declared there will be elections, which are positive steps," Bush said.

Musharraf insists he called the week-old emergency to help fight Islamic extremists who control swathes of territory near the Afghan border. The main targets of his subsequent crackdown, however, have been his most outspoken critics, including the increasingly independent courts and media. Thousands of people have been arrested, TV news stations taken off air, and judges removed.

In an interview on Friday with The Dallas Morning News, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Musharraf a "reasonable man" who made a poor political decision.

"We think this was a bad decision. Full stop. A bad decision," Rice said. "I don't have any doubt that he is somebody who tries to have the best interests of his country at heart."

National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters at the ranch that the administration was willing to give Musharraf a chance to change course.

"We'll see if he does what he says," Hadley said. "And if he does not do what he says, then there will be issues for President Musharraf, obviously, with his people, and there will be issues with us."

Merkel arrived Friday with her husband, Joachim Sauer, for an overnight visit at Bush's remote central Texas ranch. Their talks spanned the globe, from Afghanistan to Iran and from Russia to Kosovo to the United Nations.

Tehran's defiance of international demands that it halt its uranium enrichment program was a major topic of discussion. Russia and China — two of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — are blocking the U.N. from moving toward a third set of harsher sanctions against Iran.

Both Bush and Merkel emphasized that diplomatic efforts with Iran have not yet been exhausted. Bush dismissed a question about when patience with Iran would run out.

"What the Iranian regime must understand is that we will continue to work together to solve this problem diplomatically, which means they will continue to be isolated," said Bush, who has recently warned that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to World War III.

Merkel said all members of the Security Council must be engaged on the issue and said that if talks with Tehran "do not yield any results, further steps will have to be made."

"We need to think about further possible sanctions and we do not only need to think about them but we need to talk and agree," she said through a translator.

Hadley said China needed to play a more responsible role in getting Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions.

"China needs to recognize that it is going to be very dependent in the decades ahead on Middle East oil," he said. "Therefore, China, for its own development, its own purposes is going to need a stable Middle East, and an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is not a prescription for stability in the Middle East."

 

Yes, simplistic and incorrect.

FYI, a left-leaning, democratically elected government in Iran was overthrown by the CIA and the Shah was installed in 1953. The reason: Iranian government nationalized the oil fields.

Imagine if we had left that government alone - we might actually have real democracy in Iran since 1950's.

 

Musharraf's government is a puppet. They do what Washington DC tells them. You wonder why the people there hate the USA?

 

How come we do not hear the shrill hysterics of: "he's the next hitler, he will take over the middle east".

Facts are: this dictator has nukes, he has suspended democracy.

I'll tell you why, because he is suiting the needs of the Israel lobby . Otherwise, we'd see Israel unleash the biggest smear campaign ever to hit our media.

Remember, the first thing an invading army does is to take control of the media. You see how in Pakistan they closed down opposition TV stations.

Take a look at who owns OUR media, to see who controls us.

 

Hey TT2, just for shits and giggles, why don't you entertain us with your vision of the perfect world, geopolitically.

Summarize for us what changes you would make if you were God.

Don't be shy! Share your wisdom with us ignorant ones, c'mon..

 

Americans are naive as shit.

Later America over threw the Shah, not because there was no democracy, but because Shah was trying to turn Iran into an independent state, America and Britain which as usual hate all independent people, countries, and thoughts, decided to use religion to rule over Iran and so they set the stage for Khomeini to rule, Khomeini who was upset for his son's death in Iraq, and believed it to be America and Iraq's fault, on return to Iran and once given ultimate power clearly stated that America is a piece of shit. He then ordered Americans to be thrown out of the country.

I have no respect for Iran or it's people and could care less if they were nuked but this is what I mean, when I say don't fuck with people's life and expect them to respect you.

 

puppet govt, 10 billion of your taxes in 'aid' to suppor this madness??

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The Coup at Home
By Frank Rich

Published: November 11, 2007

11/12/07 "New York Times" -- -AS Gen. Pervez Musharraf arrested judges, lawyers and human-rights activists in Pakistan last week, our Senate was busy demonstrating its own civic mettle. Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, liberal Democrats from America’s two most highly populated blue states, gave the thumbs up to Michael B. Mukasey, ensuring his confirmation as attorney general.
So what if America’s chief law enforcement official won’t say that waterboarding is illegal? A state of emergency is a state of emergency. You’re either willing to sacrifice principles to head off the next ticking bomb, or you’re with the terrorists. Constitutional corners were cut in Washington in impressive synchronicity with General Musharraf’s crackdown in Islamabad.
In the days since, the coup in Pakistan has been almost universally condemned as the climactic death knell for Bush foreign policy, the epitome of White House hypocrisy and incompetence. But that’s not exactly news. It’s been apparent for years that America was suicidal to go to war in Iraq, a country with no tie to 9/11 and no weapons of mass destruction, while showering billions of dollars on Pakistan, where terrorists and nuclear weapons proliferate under the protection of a con man who serves as a host to Osama bin Laden.

General Musharraf has always played our president for a fool and still does, with the vague promise of an election that he tossed the White House on Thursday. As if for sport, he has repeatedly mocked both Mr. Bush’s “freedom agenda” and his post-9/11 doctrine that any country harboring terrorists will be “regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

A memorable highlight of our special relationship with this prized “ally” came in September 2006, when the general turned up in Washington to kick off his book tour. Asked about the book by a reporter at a White House press conference, he said he was contractually “honor bound” to remain mum until it hit the stores — thus demonstrating that Simon & Schuster had more clout with him than the president. This didn’t stop Mr. Bush from praising General Musharraf for his recently negotiated “truce” to prevent further Taliban inroads in northwestern Pakistan. When the Pakistani strongman “looks me in the eye” and says “there won’t be a Taliban and won’t be Al Qaeda,” the president said, “I believe him.”

Sooner than you could say “Putin,” The Daily Telegraph of London reported that Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had signed off on this “truce.” Since then, the Pakistan frontier has become a more thriving terrorist haven than ever.

Now The Los Angeles Times reports that much of America’s $10 billion-plus in aid to Pakistan has gone to buy conventional weaponry more suitable for striking India than capturing terrorists. To rub it in last week, General Musharraf released 25 pro-Taliban fighters in a prisoner exchange with a tribal commander the day after he suspended the constitution.

But there’s another moral to draw from the Musharraf story, and it has to do with domestic policy, not foreign. The Pakistan mess, as The New York Times editorial page aptly named it, is not just another blot on our image abroad and another instance of our mismanagement of the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It also casts a harsh light on the mess we have at home in America, a stain that will not be so easily eradicated.

In the six years of compromising our principles since 9/11, our democracy has so steadily been defined down that it now can resemble the supposedly aspiring democracies we’ve propped up in places like Islamabad. Time has taken its toll. We’ve become inured to democracy-lite. That’s why a Mukasey can be elevated to power with bipartisan support and we barely shrug.

This is a signal difference from the Vietnam era, and not necessarily for the better. During that unpopular war, disaffected Americans took to the streets and sometimes broke laws in an angry assault on American governmental institutions. The Bush years have brought an even more effective assault on those institutions from within. While the public has not erupted in riots, the executive branch has subverted the rule of law in often secretive increments. The results amount to a quiet coup, ultimately more insidious than a blatant putsch like General Musharraf’s.

More Machiavellian still, Mr. Bush has constantly told the world he’s championing democracy even as he strangles it. Mr. Bush repeated the word “freedom” 27 times in roughly 20 minutes at his 2005 inauguration, and even presided over a “Celebration of Freedom” concert on the Ellipse hosted by Ryan Seacrest. It was an Orwellian exercise in branding, nothing more. The sole point was to give cover to our habitual practice of cozying up to despots (especially those who control the oil spigots) and to our own government’s embrace of warrantless wiretapping and torture, among other policies that invert our values.

Even if Mr. Bush had the guts to condemn General Musharraf, there is no longer any moral high ground left for him to stand on. Quite the contrary. Rather than set a democratic example, our president has instead served as a model of unconstitutional behavior, eagerly emulated by his Pakistani acolyte.

Take the Musharraf assault on human-rights lawyers. Our president would not be so unsubtle as to jail them en masse. But earlier this year a senior Pentagon official, since departed, threatened America’s major white-shoe law firms by implying that corporate clients should fire any firm whose partners volunteer to defend detainees in Guantánamo and elsewhere. For its part, Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department did not round up independent-minded United States attorneys and toss them in prison. It merely purged them without cause to serve Karl Rove’s political agenda.

Tipping his hat in appreciation of Mr. Bush’s example, General Musharraf justified his dismantling of Pakistan’s Supreme Court with language mimicking the president’s diatribes against activist judges. The Pakistani leader further echoed Mr. Bush by expressing a kinship with Abraham Lincoln, citing Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of a prisoner’s fundamental legal right to a hearing in court, habeas corpus, as a precedent for his own excesses. (That’s like praising F.D.R. for setting up internment camps.) Actually, the Bush administration has outdone both Lincoln and Musharraf on this score: Last January, Mr. Gonzales testified before Congress that “there is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

To believe that this corruption will simply evaporate when the Bush presidency is done is to underestimate the permanent erosion inflicted over the past six years. What was once shocking and unacceptable in America has now been internalized as the new normal.

This is most apparent in the Republican presidential race, where most of the candidates seem to be running for dictator and make no apologies for it. They’re falling over each other to expand Gitmo, see who can promise the most torture and abridge the largest number of constitutional rights. The front-runner, Rudy Giuliani, boasts a proven record in extralegal executive power grabs, Musharraf-style: After 9/11 he tried to mount a coup, floating the idea that he stay on as mayor in defiance of New York’s term-limits law.

What makes the Democrats’ Mukasey cave-in so depressing is that it shows how far even exemplary sticklers for the law like Senators Feinstein and Schumer have lowered democracy’s bar. When they argued that Mr. Mukasey should be confirmed because he’s not as horrifying as Mr. Gonzales or as the acting attorney general who might get the job otherwise, they sounded whipped. After all these years of Bush-Cheney torture, they’ll say things they know are false just to move on.

In a Times OpEd article justifying his reluctant vote to confirm a man Dick Cheney promised would make “an outstanding attorney general,” Mr. Schumer observed that waterboarding is already “illegal under current laws and conventions.” But then he vowed to support a new bill “explicitly” making waterboarding illegal because Mr. Mukasey pledged to enforce it. Whatever. Even if Congress were to pass such legislation, Mr. Bush would veto it, and even if the veto were by some miracle overturned, Mr. Bush would void the law with a “signing statement.” That’s what he effectively did in 2005 when he signed a bill that its authors thought outlawed the torture of detainees.

That Mr. Schumer is willing to employ blatant Catch-22 illogic to pretend that Mr. Mukasey’s pledge on waterboarding has any force shows what pathetic crumbs the Democrats will settle for after all these years of being beaten down. The judges and lawyers challenging General Musharraf have more fight left in them than this.

Last weekend a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that the Democratic-controlled Congress and Mr. Bush are both roundly despised throughout the land, and that only 24 percent of Americans believe their country is on the right track. That’s almost as low as the United States’ rock-bottom approval ratings in the latest Pew surveys of Pakistan (15 percent) and Turkey (9 percent).

Wrong track is a euphemism. We are a people in clinical depression. Americans know that the ideals that once set our nation apart from the world have been vandalized, and no matter which party they belong to, they do not see a restoration anytime soon