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WASHINGTON - New penalties against Sudan — check. More dollars to fight AIDS in Africa — check. A respected internationalist to lead the World Bank — check. Friendly words about tackling global warming — check. George Bush is ready to go to Europe. His bag packed with a pre-emptive agenda he spent all week detailing, the president leaves Monday on a trip that will take him to six countries in eight days. Bush journeys from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean, with the centerpiece of his travels a three-day summit in Germany with leaders from Europe, Canada, Japan and Russia....

...So after putting in a request that I thought Jackson's staff wouldn't take seriously, I was startled when my phone rang two hours later and the reverend was on the other end. I would be absolved, I thought, in two or three minutes. I was very wrong. When I explained my request, it became clear that this hypothetical offensive thing I might do someday was instead happening right now. "Why should you be offensive?" Jackson asked, annoyed. "I don't know why you would do that." Luckily, as I was stammering a response, Jackson smoothly segued into reciting his own agenda....

SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea will respond to a pre-emptive U.S. military attack with an "annihilating strike and a nuclear war," the state-run media said Monday, heightening its antagonistic rhetoric. The Korean Central News Agency, citing an unidentified Rodong Sinmun newspaper "analyst," accused the United States of increasing military pressure on the isolated communist state. The North Korean threat of retaliation, which is often voiced by its state-controlled media, comes amid U.S. official reports that Pyongyang has shown signs of preparing for a test of a long-range missile. "The army and people of the DPRK are now in full...

"As I have said time and time again, a negotiated settlement is the best solution." -- Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations The American ambassador to that non-august body calls the Iran problem one of the great dangers facing the West, and indeed the world. China and Russia have both said they will veto any attempt to create sanctions in the Security Council -- which may be taken to signify that to them Iranian terrorists with their own stock of nukes are less a threat to world peace than was South African apartheid. Events are shaping the situation...

BOSTON (Reuters) - If U.S. officials overhear talk of a planned murder or rape while eavesdropping on a telephone call under President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, what can they do -- within the law -- to stop it? "We don't know," said Harvard law professor and celebrated defense lawyer Alan M. Dershowitz. "Plainly we would not want them to ignore it" but no laws have been written to govern how the information can be used in court, he said. "We wouldn't even know where to look to find the law because there is no law," Dershowitz, one of...

Tony Blair is facing a political backlash over his decision to order a new generation of nuclear weapons to replace the ageing Trident fleet at a cost of billions of pounds. Rebel Labour MPs will meet tomorrow to coordinate their fight against his plans, which seem set to provoke one of the biggest shows of opposition to Mr Blair from inside his own party since the start of the Iraq war. Opposition to an updated version of Trident goes far beyond MPs who object to nuclear weapons on principle. It includes senior figures in the military, who question whether this...

NEW YORK -- I have no doubt that the lying zealots running Iran these days are trying to produce nuclear weapons. And they are capable of using them. These are bad people -- not the people of Iran, but the people running the country. During their long war with Iraq in the 1980s, the mullahs gave their own children little slips of paper they called "tickets to paradise" and then sent the kids running into minefields, blowing themselves up so that regular troops could advance into battle. "Iran is not Iraq," said the Iranian envoy to the International Atomic Energy...

Which kind of intelligence failure is better — the kind that badly understates a threat, such as the one in London, or the kind that overstates a threat, such as the insistent warnings before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein was armed with weapons of mass destruction? Even in the best intelligence services, failures are sometimes inevitable. Foresight will never be as sharp as hindsight. Only after the fact — after the Underground blows up, after 9/11, after the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons are nowhere to be found — is it clear what the picture looks like...

International law is not a suicide pact. Fashioned to ensure the survival of states in a world still lacking global government, these binding rules emphasize the right of national self-defense. This right may be exercised not only after an attack has already been suffered, but also in advance, if the defensive first strike can meet certain essential conditions. Consider Iran. President Bush has assuredly authorized the Pentagon to prepare plans for the pre-emptive destruction of that country's developing nuclear installations. Leaving aside the difficult tactical side of such an operation, a prior question arises: Would this particular pre-emption be permissible...

North Korea on Tuesday refused to rule out a pre-emptive attack, even amid signs that it may be willing to return to the nuclear bargaining table. The North poured out anti-American rhetoric - a tactic it has used in the past before entering negotiations - by claiming that Washington's "hostile policies" led it to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent and warning against any attack to dislodge its leadership. "The United States should be aware that the choice of a pre-emptive attack is not only theirs," the North's official news agency quoted the Cabinet newspaper Minju Joson as saying....

Sunday May 1, 5:39 PM Draft U.S. paper allows commanders to seek preemptive nuke strikes (Kyodo) _ The U.S. military plans to allow regional combatant commanders to request the president for approval to carry out preemptive nuclear strikes against possible attacks on the United States or its allies with weapons of mass destruction, according to a draft new nuclear operations paper. The paper, drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces, also revealed that submarines which make port calls in Yokosuka, Sasebo and Okinawa in Japan are prepared for reloading nuclear warheads if necessary to deal...

Pre-emptive Strikes Justified: UN Report   New York, Nov. 29 (NNN): Effectively justifying American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, a report by a high-level panel on reforming the United Nations says that preemptive military strikes for self-defence are legitimate. However, the report says that any final decision on such action rests with the Security Council.The report, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, also upholds the international community’s duty to intervene in any state where the government is unable or unwilling to protect its people, and offers two proposals for expanding the Security Council. The report, portions of which appeared in The...

ALL IN THE NAME OF ENFRANCHISEMENT By now most Americans have heard that John Kerry plans to undertake a "preemptive" legal strike against Republicans during this election cycle. His justification for flooding every key battleground state in the union with thousands of lawyers, is to say that Democrats need to stop the Bush political machine before it can disenfranchise people, like it did in Florida four years ago. http://tampatrib.com/nationworldnews/MGBN1ZHOOZD.html http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0884144.html Kerry is DEEPLY concerned that many liberals, and black liberals in particular, may not have their votes counted due to the shenanigans of all those despicable conservatives out there, who...

The first two of these were posted on Drudge the other day. The third, appeared on an official Bush/Cheney BLOG. For reasons I cannot understand although Rep peter King D-NY has a video of the third quote it has not appeared as a tv ad. Quote: '[Saddam Hussein] cannot be permitted to go unobserved and unimpeded toward his horrific objective of amassing a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. This is not a matter about which there should be any debate whatsoever in the Security Council, or, certainly, in this Nation." (Sen. John Kerry, Congressional Record, 11/9/97, pp. S12254 -S12255)...

John Kerry at the debate: "No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America. But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.  John Kerry says pre-emptive action needs to pass some kind of "global test"......

Russia has joined the United States and Israel in adopting the doctrines of preemptive wars and preventative strikes in fighting terrorism-a move that further diminishes the prospects of conflict resolution through diplomacy and political dialogue and reinforces the principle of settlement through military means. The terrorists have succeeded in bringing the world to this juncture, but politicians have used the war on terrorism as an excuse for pushing outmoded ideological positions and biased political strategies. The war on terrorism will not succeed as long as governments continue to adopt policies that weaken and undermine critical popular resistance to the use...

Q & A: WHO WOULD JESUS VOTE FOR? 8/20/04 Issue: Bush should not be asking churches to run voter registration drives. Ministers should not endorse a particular presidential candidate. Question: Who would Jesus vote for? Answer: Jesus would endorse the more moral man. Argument: Bush taking America to war with Iraq was wrong. Response: Bush's war with Saddam was the removal of a government that threatened the safety of our own nation; a government that was willing to harm the United States and collaborate with other people who wanted to attack America as well as other nations. This threat has...

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's defense minister expressed his government's disquiet about the U.S. troop presence in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, and hinted that some Iranian generals believe they should strike first if they sense an imminent U.S. threat. In an interview with pan-Arab satellite channel Al-Jazeera, Ali Shamkhani was asked how Iran would respond if America were to attack its nuclear facilities. "We will not sit to wait for what others will do to us," he said. "There are differences of opinion among military commanders (in Iran). Some commanders believe preventive operations is not a model created by Americans...

Iran Warns Of Preemptive Strike To Prevent Attack On Nuclear Sites DOHA, Aug 18 (AFP) - Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warned Wednesday that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities. "We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly," Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities. "America is...

... Intelligence from computer records seized during the arrests in Pakistan was shared among the intelligence community. And it was shared within hours. Not only was it passed around, but representatives from intelligence and law enforcement got in one room and talked about it — something that would actually have been illegal before 9/11 and the passage of the Patriot Act. Effectively sharing intelligence and connecting dots was one of the most strident recommendations of the 9/11 report. It's good to see Washington isn't waiting to put the principle into practice. By Friday night, the Homeland Security Operations Center in...

Prosecuting the war against terrorism necessitates taking the fight to the enemy rather than waiting for another 9-11-style assault, a senior DoD civilian leader said here today. "The stakes are so high that we must take action before the threats ripen and destruction is again brought to our shores," Thomas W. O'Connell, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low intensity conflict, said to attendees at a downtown defense industry symposium. Accordingly, O'Connell said he supports President Bush's policy of taking pre- emptive military action against global terrorists. Such a policy, he pointed out, "necessitates a new, more robust,...

The strategic reason for crushing Saddam was to reverse the tide of global terror that incubated in the Middle East. Is our pre-emptive policy working? Was the message sent by ousting the Baathists as well as the Taliban worth the cost? Set aside the tens of thousands of lives saved each year by ending Saddam's sustained murder of Iraqi Shia and Kurds, which is of little concern to human rights inactivists. Consider only self-defense: the practical impact of U.S. action on the spread of dangerous weaponry in anti-democratic hands. 1. In Libya, Col. Gadhafi took one look at our army...

Over a year has elapsed since President Bush declared that the United States would act decisively and with armed force to preempt danger from terrorists and rogue states. His declaration—implemented last March in Iraq—has provoked a steady stream of commentary ever since, much of it negative. With the Iraqi war still controversial and tests still facing America in Iran, North Korea, and Syria, the "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive war is ripe for a fresh appraisal. Two things about it stand out. First, the doctrine may be more difficult to execute than many of its supporters first thought. For one thing,...

VIENNA, Austria — The U.N. atomic agency (search) board on Friday said Iran (search) has until the end of October to clear up suspicions about its nuclear aims, setting the stage for possible U.N. Security Council action should it not comply. (MORE)

Neocon 101 Some basic questions answered. What do neoconservatives believe? - "Neocons" believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary – to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a US empire. Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the US can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action. - Today, both conservatives and neocons favor a robust US military. But most conservatives express greater reservations about military intervention and so-called nation building. Neocons share no...

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio (Reuters) - President Bush said on Friday the United States is still at war and vowed to attack any "terrorist group or outlaw regime" that threatens the United States with mass murder. Bush's tough message came as he marked the July 4 Independence Day holiday with a flag-waving speech before 25,000 or so military personnel and families at a base where Orville and Wilbur Wright's invention of the first flying machine 100 years ago is being celebrated. "The United States will not stand by and wait for another attack or trust in the restraint and...

Kant and Mill in Baghdad By John B. Judis Issue Date: 6.1.03 In justifying their war against Iraq, the Bush administration and its supporters based their case primarily on the threat to the United States posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties with al-Qaeda. But to date, American and British troops have found no signs of a chemical-, biological- or, more importantly, a nuclear-weapons program and have uncovered only low-level ties to al-Qaeda. And even if they subsequently find a few canisters of mustard gas, or railway tickets from Kandahar to Baghdad, it would hardly confirm America's claims...

NO DOUBT the Bush White House has its own good reasons to feel cross with me, but scheduling Operation Shock and Awe to begin precisely at the moment of my new CNBC TV show seems a little excessive. Oh, well. Being pre-emptively struck off the air is a more honourable way to go than the bum’s rush administered to other cable-news types such as poor tonto Peter Arnett or the world-class swaggerer Geraldo Rivera, of Fox News, who was booted by the Pentagon. Less justified in the build-up to war was aborting the comebacks of the liberal talk host Phil...

<p>MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia should revise its military doctrine to counter threats from terrorism, the defense minister said in an interview published Friday, suggesting the military be allowed to strike terror facilities in other countries.</p> <p>The remarks by Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov were similar to those made by President Vladimir Putin after Chechen gunmen seized a Moscow theater last year.</p>

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is about to take the first public step toward obtaining a controversial, high-yield, earth-penetrating nuclear weapon that could be aimed at North Korea's underground nuclear and missileproduction facilities, according to senior Bush administration officials. Within a week, an Air Force report is to be delivered to the House and Senate Armed Services committees stating the military requirements for the "robust nuclear earth penetrator," a device designed to dig into the ground before it explodes and crushes any facility buried beneath it. Already five times more powerful than the device detonated at Hiroshima, the bomb would have...

In 1587, as Philip II massed a formidable fleet for the invasion of England, Queen Elizabeth did not wait to be attacked. Sir Francis Drake launched a pre-emptive assault and destroyed part of the Armada while it was still anchored in Cádiz. Partly as a result, England won a famous victory the following year. In 1756, as Austria, Russia and France plotted to crush Prussia, Frederick the Great did not wait to be attacked. He struck first, invading Saxony and Bohemia, and eventually winning important victories against his far more numerous foes. In 1967, as Arab armies gathered on Israel's...

America's New "Sucker Punch" Strategy Patrick J. Buchanan September 25 2002 Inherent in the Natural Law right of self-defense is the right to strike first if one's life is in peril. If a criminal demands your money at gunpoint, you have no moral obligation to inquire if he also intends to kill you before shooting him. People have an innate sense of this right. Americans thus rallied to the side of Bernie Goetz, the "Subway Vigilante," who, threatened by thugs with screwdrivers demanding five dollars, dropped all four in that subway car in the style of Wyatt Earp. Nor is...

Saddam's Rap Sheet by Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer New York Post August 20, 2002 http://www.danielpipes.org/article/444 http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/55073.htm Consider the paradox: Almost every government agrees that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is an appalling monster and shudders at the prospect of his acquiring nuclear weapons. Yet those same governments are also furiously signaling their disapproval of an American-led military effort to depose him. That would be "risky adventurism," declares Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder; Saddam poses no immediate threat, and Washington lacks a justification to attack him. Most U.S. allies worldwide agree. But they are plain wrong. Saddam is an immediate menace, and...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is drawing up a document laying out a strategy of striking first to prevent nuclear, chemical or biological attacks, officials said on Monday, as authorities captured an Al Qaeda operative planning to attack the United States with a "dirty" bomb. The doctrine, to be included in a broad U.S. strategy document this autumn, was first laid out by President Bush on June 1 when he said the U.S. military must be prepared to launch preemptive strikes because the Cold War policies of deterrence and containment do not fit the post-Sept. 11 world. Bush said...