Karl Rove - the PNAC's Joseph Goebbels indicted.

Sunday, May 14, 2006 - GOP Prisonwatch: BAM! Rove Indicted!

Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators

BY JASON LEOPOLD, TRUTHOUT.ORG

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald spent more than half a day Friday at the offices of Patton Boggs, the law firm representing Karl Rove.

During the course of that meeting, Fitzgerald served attorneys for former Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove with an indictment charging the embattled White House official with perjury and lying to investigators related to his role in the CIA leak case, and instructed one of the attorneys to tell Rove that he has 24 hours to get his affairs in order, high level sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said Saturday morning.

Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, did not return a call for comment. Sources said Fitzgerald was in Washington, DC, Friday and met with Luskin for about 15 hours to go over the charges against Rove, which include perjury and lying to investigators about how and when Rove discovered that Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert CIA operative and whether he shared that information with reporters, sources with direct knowledge of the meeting said.

It was still unknown Saturday whether Fitzgerald charged Rove with a more serious obstruction of justice charge.

Sources close to the case said Friday that it appeared very likely that an obstruction charge against Rove would be included with charges of perjury and lying to investigators.

An announcement by Fitzgerald is expected to come this week, sources close to the case said. However, the day and time is unknown. Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the special prosecutor was unavailable for comment. In the past, Samborn said he could not comment on the case.

The grand jury hearing evidence in the Plame Wilson case met Friday on other matters while Fitzgerald spent the entire day at Luskin's office.

The meeting was a closely guarded secret and seems to have taken place without the knowledge of the media.

As TruthOut reported Friday evening, Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to sources.

Details of Rove's discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House, where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee....

Read the rest of the good news at Truthout Url.: http://aliberaldose.blogspot.com


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John Pilger: Venezuela's Chavez is a threat because he offers alternative of a decent society

And here again one of the FPF's great calibers: John Pilger

Venezuela's Chavez is a threat because he offers alternative of a decent society

"UNDER HUGO CHAVEZ, VENEZUELA IS THE FIRST MAJOR OIL PRODUCER TO USE ITS OIL REVENUE TO LIBERATE THE POOR. "

The Guardian (John Pilger) - Saturday, May 13, 2006 - I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog.

Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform," "popular democracy," "equity," "social justice" and, yes, "freedom."


The other night, in a room bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I heard these words spoken by the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86, Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two young children.

UNTIL ABOUT A YEAR AGO, NONE OF THEM COULD READ AND WRITE; NOW THEY ARE STUDYING MATHEMATICS. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN ITS MODERN ERA, VENEZUELA HAS ALMOST 100% LITERACY.

This achievement is due to a national program, called Mision Robinson, designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because of poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a secondary school education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century.)

Named, like much else here, after the great liberator Simon Bolivar, "Bolivarian," or people's, universities have opened, introducing, as one parent told me, "treasures of the mind, history and music and art, we barely knew existed."

UNDER HUGO CHAVEZ, VENEZUELA IS THE FIRST MAJOR OIL PRODUCER TO USE ITS OIL REVENUE TO LIBERATE THE POOR.

Mavis Mendez has seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside over the theft of tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to Miami, together with the steepest descent into poverty ever known in Latin America; from 18% in 1980 to 65% in 1995, three years before Chavez was elected.

"We didn't matter in a human sense," she said. "We lived and died without real education and running water, and food we couldn't afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the east of the city, where the mansions are, we were invisible, or we were feared. Now I can read and write my name, and so much more; and whatever the rich and their media say, we have planted the seeds of true democracy, and I am full of joy that I have lived to witness it."

Latin American governments often give their regimes a new sense of legitimacy by holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution.

When he was elected in 1998, Chavez used this brilliantly to decentralize, to give the impoverished grassroots power they had never known and to begin to dismantle a corrupt political superstructure as a prerequisite to changing the direction of the economy. His setting-up of misiones as a means of bypassing saboteurs in the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical of the extraordinary political and social imagination that is changing Venezuela peacefully.

This is his "Bolivarian revolution," which, at this stage, is not dissimilar to the post-war European social democracies.

CHAVEZ, A FORMER ARMY MAJOR, WAS ANXIOUS TO PROVE HE WAS NOT YET ANOTHER MILITARY "STRONGMAN."

He promised that his every move would be subject to the will of the people. In his first year as President in 1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether or not people wanted a new constituent assembly; elections for the assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new constitution ... 71% of the people approved each of the 396 articles that gave Mavis and Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children and grandchildren, unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the first time recognized the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom Chavez is one.

"The indigenous peoples," it says, "have the right to maintain their own economic practices, based on reciprocity, solidarity and exchange ... and to define their priorities ... "

THE LITTLE RED BOOK OF THE VENEZUELAN CONSTITUTION BECAME A BESTSELLER ON THE STREETS.

Nora Hernandez, a community worker in Petare barrio, took me to her local state-run supermarket, which is funded entirely by oil revenue and where prices are up to half those in the commercial chains. Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written on the backs of soap-powder packets. "We can never go back," she said.

In La Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round black woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a program aimed specifically at poverty among single mothers.

UNDER THE CONSTITUTION, WOMEN HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE PAID AS CARERS, AND CAN BORROW FROM A SPECIAL WOMEN'S BANK. FROM NEXT MONTH, THE POOREST HOUSEWIVES WILL GET ABOUT £120 (US$227) A MONTH.

It is not surprising that Chavez has now won eight elections and referendums in eight years, each time increasing his majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of state in the western hemisphere, probably in the world. That is why he survived, amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002.

Mariella and Celedonia and Nora and hundreds of thousands of others came down from the barrios and demanded that the army remain loyal.

"The people rescued me," Chavez told me.

"They did it with all the media against me, preventing even the basic facts of what had happened. For popular democracy in heroic action, I suggest you need look no further."

The venomous attacks on Chavez, who arrives in London tomorrow, have begun and resemble uncannily those of the privately-owned Venezuelan television and press, which called for the elected government to be overthrown.

Fact-deprived attacks on Chavez in the Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher's and Blair's one true way, follow a travesty of journalism on Channel 4 News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan President of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran ... an absurd fantasy.

The reporter sneered at policies to eradicate poverty and presented Chavez as a sinister buffoon, while Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to Hitler, unchallenged.

In contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic record, having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote and having caused the violent death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd political survival tale.

Chavez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States.

Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage.

* In the US media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being "softened up" for something similar.

A US army publication, 'Doctrine for Asymmetric War against Venezuela,' describes Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism."

When I said to Chavez that the US historically had had its way in Latin America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no surprise. But the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack."

"WE ASK ONLY FOR THE SUPPORT OF ALL TRUE DEMOCRATS."


JOHN PILGER

* Article: "Chavez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent society" - Url.: http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=57059

* FPF: Very related: the Washington Post, which in a leading article and in a sly way advocated that oil rich Venezuela has to be taken - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/jxzab

* Recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Eason Jordan, a CNN executive, told a panel that the U.S. military deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq. He said he "knew of about 12 journalistswho had not only been killed by American troops, but had been targeted as a matter of policy" - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/hok5o

Faking, Lying, bribing, killing journalists - Propaganda: The US' Military's Information War Is Vast and Often Secretive - By JEFF GERTH - The despicable war propaganda rag 'The New York Times' - Url.: http://tinyurl.com/klue5

* John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, is published next month by Bantam Press www.johnpilger.com

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