UPDATED: SURREAL DAYS FOR OBAMA, the USA and the World at large!

Surprise Nobel for Obama Stirs Praise and Doubts here

This post has been updated to include items from October 10th

(Quick simple ACTION at end of this post)

Down-Payment for the future? OR more Orwellian intimations of our future world?
WARMONGER Wins Peace Prize By Paul Craig Roberts 10 October, 2009, Countercurrents.org here It took 25 years longer than George Orwell thought for the slogans of 1984 to become reality.“War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” “Ignorance is Strength.” I would add, “Lie is Truth.” The Nobel Committee has awarded the 2009 Peace Prize to President Obama, the person who started a new war in Pakistan, upped the war in Afghanistan, and continues to threaten Iran...

Obama has done nothing to hold the criminal Bush regime to account, and the Obama administration has bribed and threatened the Palestinian Authority to go along with the US/Israeli plan to deep-six the UN’s Goldstone Report...The US Ministry of Truth is delivering the Obama administration’s propaganda that Iran only notified the IAEA of its “secret” new nuclear facility because Iran discovered that US intelligence had discovered the “secret” facility. This propaganda is designed to undercut the fact of Iran’s compliance with the Safeguards Agreement...The Nobel committee has bestowed the prestige of its Peace Prize on Newspeak and Doublethink//Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

War And Peace Prizes By Howard Zinn 10 October, 2009, The Guardian here
I was dismayed when I heard Barack Obama was given the Nobel peace prize. A shock, really, to think that a president carrying on two wars would be given a peace prize. Until I recalled that Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Kissinger had all received Nobel peace prizes. The Nobel committee is famous for its superficial estimates, won over by rhetoric and by empty gestures, and ignoring blatant violations of world peace. Yes, Wilson gets credit for the League of Nations – that ineffectual body which did nothing to prevent war. But he had bombarded the Mexican coast, sent troops to occupy Haiti and the Dominican Republic and brought the US into the slaughterhouse of Europe in the first World War, surely among stupid and deadly wars at the top of the list. Sure, Theodore Roosevelt brokered a peace between Japan and Russia. But he was a lover of war, who participated in the US conquest of Cuba, pretending to liberate it from Spain while fastening US chains on that tiny island. And as president he presided over the bloody war to subjugate the Filipinos, even congratulating a US general who had just massacred 600 helpless villagers in the Philippines. The Committee did not give the Nobel prize to Mark Twain, who denounced Roosevelt and criticized the war, nor to WILLIAM JAMES,leader of the anti-imperialist league//Howard Zinn is the author of “A People’s History of the United States,” “Voices of a People’s History” (with Anthony Arnove), and “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.” © 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited

AUDACITY in Norway: here By Kim Petersen 10 October, 2009, Dissident Voice
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has seen fit to award a peace prize to a man less than a year into elected presidential office in the United States. So what are Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize credentials? Obama is a man who has yet to shut down a global gulag, who has yet to end the warring in Iraq, who has yet to oversee the return of the elected president of Haiti (deposed by US, Canadian, and French forces), who stands unflinching on the coup d’etat in Honduras, who runs cover for Israeli massacres of Palestinians and Israeli violations of the Geneva Conventions (i.e., supporting war crimes), who seeks to proliferate military bases in Columbia, who has ramped up the killing in Afghanistan, and who has overseen the spillover of war into Pakistan...Obama did something most unusual in acknowledging that the US was behind the 1953 coup d’etat in Iran? Did he offer an apology? Did he offer compensation? ...when one state with a long history of violence stands supremely powerful and claims itself to be a beacon onto all other states, that is where transformation must first occur in a world whose people long for a just peace.
That will require more than wishful thinking. It will require the audacity to mobilize the masses to a revolution for peace. Kim Petersen is co-editor of Dissident Voice. He can be reached at: kim@dissidentvoice.org.

More notes: Jimmy Carter, whose administration instigated a war in Afghanistan that claimed a million lives, was given the same award in 2002.

The committee cannot be accused of violating its own principles, such as they are. The founder of the prize, Alfred Nobel, was the inventor of dynamite. He would no doubt be intrigued by the Pentagon’s efforts to speed up production of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to obliterate underground targets. The weapon is being readied for possible use against Iran.

here Tarnished Gold By Guy R McPherson Professor Emeritus
10 October, 2009 , Countercurrents.org
...there is no more political act than awarding the Nobel Peace Prize.
If they were giving the Nobel for results instead of empty hope, Obama would have been awarded the Prize for War, not Peace. Consider the following accomplishments, which represent a partial list of the best-known examples...The war has spilled into Pakistan and now includes political conversations with the Taliban, our allies during the Reagan administration and mortal enemies during the last decade or so. Can we enlist our former foes to help us kill more civilians? Yes, we can.Obama has postponed his promise of closing the torture camp at Guantanamo Bay, despite many promises to the contrary. At the current rate, Gitmo will never be closed. Can we continue imprisoning and torturing people without cause? Yes, we can.
Obama has maintained Bush-era programs of extraordinary rendition and legalized torture. Can we spread our culture of torture throughout the civilized world under the false flag of quashing terrorism? Yes, we can...War is peace. Life is death. Left is right. And this Orwellian world grows more Orwellian with each passing day.

MEANTIME: US Scrambles to Save Pakistan Aid Package (with sleight of hand?)here

AT THE SAME TIME: Legal Case Filed Against 4 U.S. Presidents And 4 UK Prime Ministers
By The Brussels Tribunal 09 October, 2009, Countercurrents.org here
A legal case was filed at the Audiencia Nacional against four United States presidents and four United Kingdom prime ministers for commissioning, condoning and/or perpetuating multiple war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide in Iraq ...Iraq: 19 years of intended destruction - The intended destruction — or genocide — of Iraq as a state and nation has been ongoing for 19 years, combining the imposition of the most draconian sanctions regime ever designed and that led to 1.5 million Iraqi deaths, including 500,000 children, with a war of aggression that led to the violent deaths of over one million more.

Obama's Nobel puzzles Pakistanis living close to war here

Veterans React to President Obama Receiving Nobel Peace Prize
here FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, October 9, 2009, 12:43 PM
CONTACT: Veterans for Peace Mike Ferner, 419-729-7273

TEXT of Nobel Prize Citation: here

Warmonger Wins Peace Prize - By Paul Craig Roberts
The non-cynical can say that the Nobel committee is seizing on Obama's rhetoric to lock him into the pursuit of peace instead of war. We can all hope that it works. But the more likely result is that the award has made "War is Peace" the reality.
here

Obama's Nobel Peace Prize - By Thomas DiLorenzo I'm still surprised, though, that he won the prize after killing so few people. (Mentions Obama on Pakistan! Shameful!z) here

10/9, Glenn Greenwald, Salon, Obama's Nobel Peace Prize here

HAVE YOUR SAY - READER'S COMMENTS ON BBC: here

here

10/9, Leslie Harris, Huffington Post, Obama versus Obama on the PATRIOT Act
CONGRESS NEEDS TO DO THE RIGHT THING - EVEN IF OBAMA WON'T here

10/9, Legislative Analysis by Kevin Bankston, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Obama Sides with Republicans; PATRIOT Act Renewal Bill Passes Senate Judiciary Committee Minus Critical Civil Liberties Reforms - THIS IS BEYOND CONSCIENCE and for a Nobel Peace Prize winner???? here

10/9, Senator Russ Feingold, Daily Kos, It's Not the Prosecutors' Committee, it's the Judiciary Committee here

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ACTION suggested (with follow-up needed): The people of Afghanistan have always forced occupying powers to withdraw at high cost — no one has successfully occupied Afghanistan since Genghis Khan, and there is little reason to believe that our military presence will be more successful than that of the Soviets or the British before us. Yet the Obama administration is now weighing its response to a recommendation from General Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to send as many as 40,000 additional American soldiers to Afghanistan in an attempt to improve the military situation there.

We need a new strategy that gets us out of Afghanistan, protects civilians (particularly girls and women) and does not further destabilize Pakistan. None of this will be accomplished if Congress does not stand up and stop handing out blank checks for the war in Afghanistan. Tell your Senators: Don't write a blank check for war in Afghanistan. Tell them to make any funding contingent on an exit strategy and timetable to end the occupation of Afghanistan. Click here to add your name to our petition.Thank you for working to build a better world. Matt Lockshin, Campaign Manager CREDO Action from Working Assets

SIGN THIS here

Personally, I think we need to follow this up or send simultaneous actions with much more decisive requests because many such demands are simply for slow exit strategies which go nowhere.