Wendi Deng

From Jacob Hornberger:

Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa may not be long for this world, both in a political sense and in genuine life-or-death sense. He recently fired his defense minister, army chief of intelligence, and commanders of the army, air force, and joint chiefs.

Why might those firings cost Correa his job or even his life? Because the reason he fired them was that Ecuador’s intelligence systems were “totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA.” As other rulers around the world, including democratically elected ones, have learned the hard way, bucking the CIA is a real no-no that sometimes leads to coups and assassinations.

What’s the CIA doing infiltrating Ecuador’s military intelligence systems? Good question! Maybe it’s because the CIA still fears the threat of communism. Don’t forget that that was the apparent rationale for the U.S. government’s support of Operation Condor, the campaign of assassination and torture co-sponsored by the brutal regimes in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru during the 1970s. Don’t forget also that many of the brutal military personnel in those regimes received their training at the U.S. Army’s infamous School of the Americas, famous for, among other things, its torture manuals.

To make matters worse for Correa, he promises to throw the U.S. military out of his country when the U.S. government’s lease at its base in Manta expires in 2009. The U.S. government spent $60 million to build the base in 1999, securing a 10-year lease that provided no rent to be paid to Ecuador.

So, why does the U.S. military have a $60 million military base in Ecuador? The base is part of the U.S. government’s much-vaunted 30-year-old war on drugs, one of the U.S. Empire’s never-ending wars around the world. The base houses Awacs surveillance planes whose purported mission is to search for international drug smugglers.

What irked President Correa is that apparently his CIA-infested intelligence services fed classified information to Colombian officials that led to a Colombian military attack on a Colombian rebel camp that was located inside Ecuador. One big problem was that when Correa’s intelligence services leaked the information to Colombia, they left Correa (their boss) out of the loop.

The final nail in Correa’s coffin might be the fact that he is an ally of Venezuela’s Marxist president Hugo Chavez, who himself is a likely target of CIA ouster or assassination.

The good news for Americans in all this is that the Ecuadorian people are doing their best to rid their country of the CIA and the U.S. military. Maybe the Ecuadorans will start a trend in which all other countries will do the same. While it would obviously be best if the American people were to dismantle their government’s overseas empire themselves, having foreigners do it instead by throwing the CIA and the Pentagon out of their countries would be just as effective and beneficial — to both the United States and the people of the world.

Mr. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

More from the Guardian:

Just a few days before, it was reported that Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, who as the foreign minister of Sandinista Nicaragua during the 1980s was one of the era's most virulently anti-American figures, will be the next president of the United Nations General Assembly. Under other circumstances, Washington might well have launched a full-scale campaign to block his candidacy.
...

This is a radical departure from more than a century of US policy toward Latin America. President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that policy in 1904, in his succinct "corollary" to the Monroe Doctrine. Its essence was an assertion that the US had assumed "an international police power" and would intervene in any Latin American country that engaged in "chronic wrongdoing" or failed to meet its "obligations".

In the decades that followed, the United States sponsored dictatorships from Cuba to Brazil, deposed governments from Chile to Guatemala, landed Marines on shores from Panama to Haiti, and thwarted the election of independent-minded leaders from Guyana to the Dominican Republic. Generations of Latin Americans grew up understanding that any challenge to US hegemony in the hemisphere would be crushed swiftly and with all necessary violence.

I got a visit from an Israeli government agent last night. The bastard ignored the intercom, slipped through the security gate, and came right up to my front door while my wife and kids were eating dinner. He was just a scrawny, drug-addled messenger. I told him to piss off.

Sure it sounds ridiculous, but that's how these things go sometimes, isn't it?

Odd that Tim Blair was taking a shot at me on the same day. Has my little blog created another disturbance in The Force or something?

Was it my talk of Rupert's Zionist Crusade? The repeated calls for a Royal Commission into our role in the illegal invasion of Iraq (I note Blair's minions have been desperately clicking the "traiter" option on my blog poll, which was previously running at about 70% in favour)? Or maybe it was that Op-Ed I submitted to a major national newspaper?

Or maybe it was my oft-repeated suggestion that Mossad knew about the 9-11 attacks. Hey, I'm only repeating what FOX NEWS said!

It's ironic that even Al Quaeda today is desperately trying to argue against that same "Conspiracy Theory":

One questioner asked about the theory that has circulated in the Middle East and elsewhere that Israel was behind the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Al-Zawahri accused Hezbollah's Al-Manar television of starting the rumor. "The purpose of this lie is clear — (to suggest) that there are no heroes among the Sunnis who can hurt America as no else did in history. Iranian media snapped up this lie and repeated it," he said.

"Iran's aim here is also clear — to cover up its involvement with America in invading the homes of Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq," he added. Iran cooperated with the United States in the 2001 U.S. assault on Afghanistan that toppled al-Qaida's allies, the Taliban.

If the enemy of my enemy is really my friend, then things are a lot more complicated than they seem.

(Of course Juan Cole pointed out this Bush-Iran convergence last week, US intelligence agents have already admitted that secret talks with Iran have been going on for 5 years, and now even the New York Times is writing stories about it. So what was all that talk about bombing Iran? Just another Cheney ruse to drive up the cost of oil? Is Hillary in on the game?)

Stay tuned. And don't believe the hype.

... for John McCain:

Mrs. Clinton faces major challenges going forward: her campaign is essentially out of money, with unpaid bills piling up...

But she quickly put out a call for supporters to donate to her campaign, noting that “we can only keep winning if we can keep competing with an opponent who outspends us so massively.” She urged viewers to visit her Web site and “show your support.”

Within a few hours she raised over $2.5 million. The nightmare continues.

UPDATE: A good response:

Senator Obama said November's election was about not just defeating the Republicans, but about what kind of Democratic Party might win power...

"We can be a party that thinks the only way to look tough on national security is to talk, and act, and vote like George Bush and John McCain. We can use fear as a tactic, and the threat of terrorism to scare up votes," he said...

Still attacking Senator Clinton, Senator Obama said "you can't be the champion of working Americans if you're funded by the lobbyists who drown out their voices".

"We can be a party that says and does whatever it takes to win the next election. We can calculate and poll-test our positions and tell everyone exactly what they want to hear. Or we can be the party that doesn't just focus on how to win but why we should."

Why I (Still) Hate John Howard.

Rudd is making it easier for big foreign corporations like Wal-Mart to buy Australian land. This is supposedly going to "increase competition and drive down food prices". Oh really?

Now, I'll be the first to admit that local giants Woolworths and Coles desperately need some competition: they don't even bother slapping discount stickers on their filthy, out-of-date fruit and veges any more. But this is definitely not the answer.

When the time comes for a referendum on ending our ties to the British monarchy, will one of the alternatives on offer be "Join The United States Of America"?

Mike Whitney:

When George W. Bush took office in 2000, oil was $28 per barrel, the euro was $.87 on the dollar, gold was $274 per ounce, and the national debt was $5.9 trillion. Today, oil is a record $114 per barrel, the euro is nudging $1.60 on the dollar, gold is $945 per ounce, and the National Debt is $9 trillion. The country is presently engaged in a $2 trillion war in Iraq with no end in sight. The federal government has expanded over 30% under Bush. Wages for working people have stagnated, unemployment has risen, 47 million Americans are without health care, and the economy is slipping into recession. By every objective standard, the country is worse off today than when Bush first took office.

Just don't tell the kids. They wouldn't understand:

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900... Eleven percent thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal. Another 11 percent thought it was Harry Truman.

Who's George Bush anyway?

News Corp closes in on another NYC asset:

For Murdoch, gaining Newsday would allow News Corp to greatly pare down persistent losses at the New York Post, partly by combining back-office and production operations...

Any deal for Newsday would be sure to face close regulatory scrutiny since Murdoch's News Corp already owns the New York Post, the [Wall Street] Journal and two New York-area television stations.

Don't worry, I'm sure the Bush administration would never let him get away with it. Right?

UPDATE: So much for all that talk about the new Murdoch WSJ maintaining it's independence:

"It was reassuring that he was there because he was not a News Corp. guy," Yount said Tuesday... Yount did not place much faith in its having an impact on Brauchli's replacement. He said no one should expect anything other than a Rupert Murdoch selection: "I don't think anyone seriously believes that Rupert was not going to run Dow Jones and run the Wall Street Journal. Anyone who thinks there was any chance that this would not happen is mistaken."

Surprise.