Are there signs of US troops heading for Pakistan? Is a complete breakdown foreseen after the Pakistani election, with the introduction of US special forces planned to keep the country from becoming an Islamic State?
Bhutto was supposed to take over, with close cooperation with the US. She was to allow US troops in, against the expressed wishes of the Pakistani military. 20 percent of the military is from the Northwest areas targeted for US troop intervention. If US special forces were sent in, they would also be very close to the Chinese and the Russian boarders, another risk. Moreover, it is the area with the most nuclear weapons.
Dangerous games being played with Pakistan may indicate that the US is increasingly desperate and willing to try almost any military solution. Once again we may be going against vast majorities of a population. Another military quagmire? Too bad our media doesn't make these issues understandable.
(From Real News Website: www.therealnews.com)
And would the Pakistanis resist a US invasion? University of Maryland poll found that a strong majority of Pakistanis consider the U.S. military presence in Asia and neighboring Afghanistan a much more critical threat to their country than al Qaeda or Pakistan’s own Taliban movement.
Only five percent of respondents said the Pakistani government should permit U.S. or other foreign troops to enter Pakistan to pursue or capture al Qaeda fighters, compared to a whopping 80 percent who said such actions should not be permitted.
(from http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/07/6232/)
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US: Official Version of Naval Incident in the Strait of Hormuz Starts to Unravel.
Despite the official and media portrayal of the incident in the Strait of Hormuz early Monday morning as a serious threat to U.S. ships from Iranian speedboats that nearly resulted in a "battle at sea", new information over the past three days suggests that the incident did not involve such a threat and that no U.S. commander was on the verge of firing at the Iranian boats.
The new information that appears to contradict the original version of the incident, and includes the revelation that U.S. officials spliced the audio recording of an alleged Iranian threat onto to a videotape of the incident. That suggests that the threatening message may not have come in immediately after the initial warning to Iranian boats from a U.S. warship, as appears to do on the video.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40747
And the NY Times' response. A front page article outlining how these tiny boats could have been a threat to the US warships. Questions about the Pentagon's version of events are reserved for the NY Times blog.
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France best, US worst in preventable death ranking. France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.
If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs.
Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care. (Reuters)
A search of the NY Times indicates that this story was not "fit to print." The US healthcare industry is obviously more important to the NY Times than the people's right to know.
