Scott Ritter is the latest to join the fast-growing chorus that would exculpate the petro-elites by blaming the Iraq adventure—and now the looming Iran intervention—on the Israel lobby. Supposed progressives like Democracy Now! are lapping it up. We will point out, even if nobody else does, that if Ritter's predictions were accurate, the US would have started bombing Iran in June 2005. A Dec. 29 book review by Nathan Guttman from New York's Jewish weekly The Forward:

In a Jan. 12 Washington Post opinion piece, the Trilateral Commission's ideological guru and Carter administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski comments on Bush's speech pitching an escalation (oops, we mean "surge") in Iraq:

The speech reflects a profound misunderstanding of our era. America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq. But the age of colonialism is over. Waging a colonial war in the post-colonial age is self-defeating. That is the fatal flaw of Bush's policy.

Impeaching George Bush is a damn good idea. But the full page ad in the Jan. 12 New York Times by ImpeachBush.org appears to be a bid by the unrepentantly Stalinist Workers World Party to garner mainstream liberal support, probably to keep pace with the Maoist competition. The ad reads "Articles of impeachment drafted by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark." We have repeatedly noted that Ramsey Clark is a totalitarian pseudo-left huckster who supports fascism. The ad also plugs the March 17 anti-war march in Washington sponsored by WWP's front group International ANSWER. Significantly, it does not plug the Jan. 27 march on Washington sponsored by the rival United for Peace & Justice—which has the usual problems with elitism and timidity, but is, at least, not crypto-fascist.

As we have noted, this is the latest in a wave of dangerously specious terror cases which have produced an atmosphere of paranoia in New York City. Now it seems the convict's entire family is to be deported. From the Washington Post, Jan. 11:

NEW YORK - A day after a man was sentenced to 30 years in prison for conspiring to bomb Manhattan's Herald Square, his parents and sister were detained by federal immigration officials seeking to deport them.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were scheduled to appear before Judge L. John Kane in federal court in Denver on Jan. 12 in a follow-up hearing to a civil lawsuit filed by United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 7. The union filed its suit against the government a day after ICE arrested 260 workers at the Swift & Co. meatpacking plant in Greeley, Colorado. The Greeley plant was one of six Swift plants in six states raided by ICE on Dec. 12; a total of 1,282 workers were arrested. The lawsuit charges that the raid was illegal; that federal officials violated the constitutional rights of the arrested workers; and that detainees were treated inhumanely while in custody.

Palestinian immigrant Fawaz Damra, the former imam at the Islamic Center of Cleveland, Ohio, was deported on Jan. 4—a year after reaching an agreement with the US government to give up his fight to remain in the US. That agreement had stipulated that Damra would be deported either to Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Egypt or the Palestinian territories. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced on Jan. 5 that Damra had been deported to the Palestinian territories. (AP, Jan. 5; ICE news release, Jan. 5)

Chanting "We are students, not criminals," nearly 600 students and their supporters marched on Jan. 8 toward the University of Phoenix stadium in Glendale, Arizona, to protest a recently passed state law denying in-state tuition to out-of-status immigrants. Arizona voters approved the Proposition 300 ballot initiative last November; it requires students who cannot prove their legal immigration status to pay out-of-state tuition at state colleges and universities.

Francisco Lopez Barcenas writes for La Jornada, Jan. 10, via Chiapas95:

On January 1 of this year, Oaxaca woke up with one more municipality, that of San Juan Copala, created by Triqui communities who officially belong to the Mixtec municipalities of Juxtlahuaca, Putla y Constancia del Rosario, in the western part of the state; municipalities controlled by mestizos. But this isn't just one more municipality out of the 570 in the state. This one is autonomous, like those that indigenous peoples are constructing in different parts of the country as a way of defending their rights and building their own future.