U.S. Economy Could Fall Because of Wars!!!
Monday, March 10, 2008 at 12:34PM The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show.
In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.
Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion -- or more -- by 2017.
Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.
The Democratic chairman and Republican former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee have asked government auditors to determine what Iraq is doing with the billions of dollars in oil revenue it generates. 
Israel approved plans yesterday to build 330 new homes in a suburban West Bank settlement north of Jerusalem. The move was denounced by the Palestinian Authority as "a slap in the face of the peace process" and called on the Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia to "act to get Israel to revoke the decision".
"While RealID in the US is a threat whose implementation is a ways in the future, the Japanese long ago implemented something similar; and there has been very little complaint raised about it. The 
A vast array of pharmaceuticals — including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones — have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.
Members of the Minnesota National Guard returning from the longest tour of any ground combat unit in Iraq were surprised to learn that they were not eligible for the education benefits that they expected to receive under the G.I. Bill.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke will "destroy the U.S. dollar" by cutting interest rates, investor Marc Faber said. 
A prominent Chinese human rights lawyer was released Saturday after two days of secret police detention. 
In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country.
President Bush said today(3-8-08) he vetoed legislation that would ban the CIA from using harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding to break suspected terrorists because it would end practices that have prevented attacks.
9/11 represents a double challenge to the American way of life: the external threat of terrorists attacks and also the internal threat of subversion of the Constitution by cabals and a deep state that are threatening to get out of control. The U.S. faces a fundamental choice of what and of whom to trust. Will we deal with the problem of terrorism primarily by working to resolve issues that provoke conflict and projecting values that the rest of the world will wish to share?
Nearly a week after Colombia's cross-border raid against an encampment of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) guerrilla movement in neighboring Ecuador, Latin America continues to confront its worst regional diplomatic and military crisis in decades. The US government and mass media have weighed in with unsolicited judgments and advice, attributing the tense standoff between Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela to the threat of terrorism to Colombia, the complicity in terrorism on the part of Venezuela and overheated animosities between the respective heads of state of these three countries.
The United States plotted the armed overthrow of the Hamas government elected by the Palestinian people in January 2006, according to “The Gaza Bombshell”, an article based on leaked documents and interviews with key players in the Bush administration that was published in the latest edition of the US magazine Vanity Fair.
A British factory worker has shut down a tourism site he owned at the request of the U.S. air force after he 
A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003. 
For the first time at any airport, the biometric checks will apply to all domestic passengers leaving the terminal, which will handle all British Airways flights to and from Heathrow. 
