Life in the USA
By James Rothenberg ICH 9 Feb 06

The political system has not been corrupted. It is working effectively, like always. The backbone is the patronage system. Politicians have wonderful memories. They know who they owe. Prostitution is a profession, allegorically the oldest one. Politics is a business. At one time it was popular to think that if someone rich enough were to get elected, he (at that time it would surely be a he) would be immune, but who can owe as much as the rich?
We could try term limits, a single term. In and out. Make room for the next bright face. What do politicians do during the summer? They give college commencement speeches til hoarse, all the same speech… “You are our country’s future leaders”. Meanwhile 50 years pass, the college kid is gray and that politician still has his ass on his seat. A single term would not fundamentally change the patronage system, but it would devalue it. You’re not worth as much.

Also sensible would be a switch to runoff elections, or at least instant runoff elections. But as the snide commandant in Stalag 17 told the feisty boys in Barracks 4, “Curtains vud do vunders for this barracks. You veel not get them!” Democrats and Republicans staunchly unite in opposition to such extreme measures. Why take poison unless you are trying to commit suicide?

There were no intelligence failures concerning Iraq. The invasion was not a mistake. Neither was the torture. Instead, bright, rational people acted in the best tradition of U.S. foreign policy since the birth of our great nation, the redskins being the first foreigners. Try telling Americans that their country uses violent force without moral compunction in wresting from weaker countries just what it wants from them and the air will suddenly get chillier around you. However, there is a record. Like Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.”

It would take more than a cell block of arrests from the president on down to make America the Beautiful’s dress pretty enough to party again, but who will arrest the arrestors? For the future we could require political office holders to speak their own words, that is, write their own speeches. That shouldn’t be too much to ask of a leader.

Americans are well trained in how to think. It occurs so naturally from birth that we are unaware of the training. The basic idea is that your country knows better than you do. The most thoroughly educated Americans treat it as undying dogma that our country is always and everywhere a force for good in the world. Those who have been deprived of formal education rely more on their nose, an organ of exceptional trustworthiness.

The primary writer of the Constitution, James Madison, stressed that the government must be set up in such a way so as “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority”, such protection of the rich becoming axiomatic. Good Americans seem very comfortable with the great wealth and income divide in their country. Another founding father, first Chief Justice John Jay, felt that those who owned the country should run it. Good Americans are comfortable with that also.

In election year 2000, Al Gore claimed that the greatest beneficiaries of Bush’s proposed tax cuts would be the richest 1% of Americans, but sufficient voters, ever mindful of longstanding tradition, protected that minority.

We are not a nation of laws, despite the priestly incantations. There are plenty of people who are above and beyond the law. We say we are a nation of laws but for that statement to have the intended, hallowed effect it has to mean more than hauling some vagrant off the street. It has to mean that the punishments meted out to the weak and poor will in identical measure be meted out to the rich and powerful. We could try, Stengel-like, to look it up, but for that the record is meager.

Declaring war is a popular tactic. Thanks to modern technology we have a handy measure of its permeability throughout our culture. Googling the term “war on hunger” yields some 21,900 references. The “war on poverty” yields 646,000 references, and the “war on drugs” yields 4,310,000. Then there is the “war on terror” with 25,100,000.

We are supposed to accept the sincerity of these wars with all the seriousness that the naming is intended to imply. Looking to actual practice the war on hunger more closely resembles a war on the hungry, the war on poverty a war on poor people, and the war on drugs a war on the people who use them. Now comes the punch line, only it isn’t funny. The war on terror more closely resembles a war to terrorize (intimidate) we the people.

First, if we wanted to reduce terror, we could stop harboring terrorists, stop supporting them, stop paying them, and stop doing it ourselves. There are a couple of reasons why Americans are slow in coming to this conclusion. One is that we only acknowledge the terrorism of others, never our own. Ours is always precautionary action or legitimate self-defense. The second reason is ironclad; the State Department confines its definition of terrorism to that which is carried out by “subnational groups or clandestine agents”, so acts carried out by the United States of America are conveniently exempt.

Countries, even countries with armies so mighty they encircle the globe, cannot commit terrorism, by official decree. They do it unofficially. But they can do a lot more. They can plan and initiate a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime” as adjudged at Nuremberg, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. One of those other war crimes is Art. 6 (c) Crimes against Humanity, meaning civilians, meaning terrorism.

Americans learn early on about the unmatched freedoms we enjoy. What is all the fanfare about if these freedoms are only granted on a tentative basis? What does it mean to be free from surveillance when the government finds no pressing reason to surveil, but subject to surveillance when the government claims the need? Or to have the right to dissent when it does not greatly worry the government, only to have dissent stifled when it poses serious problems? These freedoms that our leaders boast about to succeeding generations are surely more than fair-weather freedoms. That would be bad enough but it goes one step deeper. Freedom is expressly for the bad weather, or it never really was.

The “war on terror” is our national slogan. It went into the shop for a nomenclature change last year, but emerged intact. For awhile we didn’t want to seem too warlike. Better to stress promotion of freedom and democracy, freshen up the old image. But the war on terror says it all, and it is oh so useful. The other day the man with the worst job in America, Scott McClellan, landed a blow for freedom with his retort to a questioner, “Are we a nation at war?” Of course there is an answer besides the dutiful yes but to voice it may affect your ability to continue roaming without a straitjacket.

The President must have the war because the war makes it possible to do all the things he could never do if there wasn’t a war. Ask his cover, Attorney General Gonzales, who informs the Judiciary Committee that there is no such thing as a bad inherent power. One of the senators asked Gonzales a very improper question. “How will we know when the war is over?” Gonzales could only smile at the suggestion that between these two learned men there could be any general disagreement about the usefulness of war to a country intent on dominating the world with military force.

War is not inevitable but there is something innate in our species that prepares us to march to the beat of the drum. Our primitive herd instinct makes us vulnerable to exploitation. When everybody is taught precisely the same thing, it no longer matters what is taught. The result is always orthodoxy. The military teaches a valuable strategy. After being captured, the best time to escape is as soon as you can. Of course you have to realize you are a captive.

A million men frozen at attention waiting for the signal of another to act as one. Is this not true ugliness? Ugliness is not deformity but its opposite; it is any multitude of people in constant agreement.

War as a tool of control relies on the glorification of battle and death. Humans are the only of earth’s creatures that cherish life. This is because they know it will end. This is why they invented god. But what is the historical record of the god concept? Is it used more effectively to save or take life? We could look it up.

James Rothenberg, dissident writer/activist - jrothenberg@taconic.net


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U.S. steps up force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay
By Tim Golden The New York Times 9 Feb 06

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.
The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center.

Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. H e said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate's life or health.

"There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

"The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person's life," he said.

Some international medical associations and human rights groups, including the World Medical Association, oppose the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive.

Lawyers for the detainees, although troubled by what they said were earlier reports of harsh treatment of the hunger strikers, have generally not objected to such actions when necessary to save their clients.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains.

"This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn't matter whether you're at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."

Military officials and detainees' lawyers said the primary rationale for the hunger strikes had evolved since last summer. In June and July, they said, the detainees were mostly complaining about their conditions at Guantánamo.

Several lawyers said that military officers there had negotiated with an English-speaking Saudi detainee, Shaker Aamer, who is thought to be a leader of the inmates, and that the detainees had agreed to stop their hunger strike in return for various concessions.

Military officials denied that such negotiations had occurred. But military officials and the lawyers agreed that when another wave of hunger strikes began in early August they were more generally focused on the indefinite nature of the detentions and that it was harder for the authorities there to address.

Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."

Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.

Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.

Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives. Detainees' lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees' access to United States courts.

Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers' motions on the detainees' treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.

"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-à-vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."

Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantánamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.

Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Wilner said. On Jan. 9, Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.

Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee's urging, Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day. Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."

United States military authorities have taken tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after concluding that some were determined to commit suicide to protest their indefinite confinement, military officials have said.

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center.

Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. H e said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

The lawyers said other measures used to dissuade the hunger strikers included placing them in uncomfortably cold air-conditioned isolation cells, depriving them of "comfort items" like blankets and books and sometimes using riot-control soldiers to compel the prisoners to sit still while long plastic tubes were threaded down their nasal passages and into their stomachs.

Officials of the military and the Defense Department strongly disputed that they were taking punitive measures to break the strike. They said that they were sensitive to the ethical issues raised by feeding the detainees involuntarily and that their procedures were consistent with those of federal prisons in the United States. Those prisons authorize the involuntary treatment of hunger strikers when there is a threat to an inmate's life or health.

"There is a moral question," the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., said in an interview. "Do you allow a person to commit suicide? Or do you take steps to protect their health and preserve their life?"

Dr. Winkenwerder said that after a review of the policy on involuntary feeding last summer Pentagon officials came to the basic conclusion that it was ethical to stop the inmates from killing themselves.

"The objective in any circumstance is to protect and sustain a person's life," he said.

Some international medical associations and human rights groups, including the World Medical Association, oppose the involuntary feeding of hunger strikers as coercive.

Lawyers for the detainees, although troubled by what they said were earlier reports of harsh treatment of the hunger strikers, have generally not objected to such actions when necessary to save their clients.

The Guantánamo prison, which is holding some 500 detainees, has been beset by periodic hunger strikes almost since it was established in January 2002 to hold foreign terror suspects. At least one detainee who went on a prolonged hunger strike was involuntarily fed through a nasal tube in 2002, military officials said.

Since last year, the protests have intensified, a sign of what defense lawyers say is the growing desperation of the detainees. In a study released yesterday, two of those lawyers said Pentagon documents indicated that the military had determined that only 45 percent of the detainees had committed some hostile act against the United States or its allies and that only 8 percent were fighters for Al Qaeda.

After dozens of detainees began joining a hunger strike last June, military doctors at Guantánamo asked Pentagon officials to review their policy for such feeding. Around that time, officials said, the Defense Department also began working out procedures to deal with the eventual suicide of one or more detainees, including how and where to bury them if their native countries refused to accept their remains.

"This is just a reality of long-term detention," a Pentagon official said. "It doesn't matter whether you're at Leavenworth or some other military prison. You are going to have to deal with this kind of thing."

Military officials and detainees' lawyers said the primary rationale for the hunger strikes had evolved since last summer. In June and July, they said, the detainees were mostly complaining about their conditions at Guantánamo.

Several lawyers said that military officers there had negotiated with an English-speaking Saudi detainee, Shaker Aamer, who is thought to be a leader of the inmates, and that the detainees had agreed to stop their hunger strike in return for various concessions.

Military officials denied that such negotiations had occurred. But military officials and the lawyers agreed that when another wave of hunger strikes began in early August they were more generally focused on the indefinite nature of the detentions and that it was harder for the authorities there to address.

Colonel Martin said the number of hunger strikers peaked around Sept. 11 at 131, but added that he could not speculate about why other than to note that "hunger striking is an Al Qaeda tactic used to elicit media attention and also to bring pressure on the U.S. government."

Until yesterday, Guantánamo officials had acknowledged only having forcibly restrained detainees to feed them a handful of times. In those cases, the officials said, doctors had restrained detainees on hospital beds using Velcro straps.

Two military officials, who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the question, said that the use of restraint chairs started after it was found that some hunger strikers were deliberately vomiting in their cells after having been tube-fed and that their health was growing precarious.

In a telephone interview yesterday, the manufacturer of the so-called Emergency Restraint Chair, Tom Hogan, said his small Iowa company shipped five $1,150 chairs to Guantánamo on Dec. 5 and 20 additional chairs on Jan. 10, using a military postal address in Virginia. Hogan said the chairs were typically used in jails, prisons and psychiatric hospitals to deal with violent inmates or patients.

Hogan said that he did not know how they were used at Guantánamo and that had not been asked how to use them by military representatives. Detainees' lawyers said they believed that the tougher approach to the hunger strikes was related to the passage in Congress of measure intended to curtail the detainees' access to United States courts.

Federal district courts have put aside most lawyers' motions on the detainees' treatment until questions about applying the measure have been litigated.

"Because of the actions in Congress, the military feels emboldened to take more extreme measures vis-à-vis the hunger strikers," said one lawyer, Sarah Havens of Allen & Overy. "The courts are going to stay out of it now."

Wilner, who was among the first lawyers to accept clients at Guantánamo and represented them in a case in 2004 before the Supreme Court, said a Kuwaiti detainee, Fawzi al-Odah, told him last week that around Dec. 20, guards began taking away items like shoes, towels and blankets from the hunger strikers.

Odah also said that lozenges that had been distributed to soothe the hunger strikers' throats had disappeared and that the liquid formula they were given was mixed with other ingredients to cause diarrhea, Wilner said. On Jan. 9, Odah told his lawyers, an officer read him what he described as an order from the Guantánamo commander, Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood of the Army, saying hunger strikers who refused to drink their liquid formula voluntarily would be strapped into metal chairs and tube-fed.

Odah said he heard "screams of pain" from a hunger striker in the next cell as a thick tube was inserted into his nose. At the other detainee's urging, Odah told his lawyers that he planned to end his hunger strike the next day. Another lawyer, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, said one of his three Bahraini clients, Jum'ah al-Dossari, told him about 10 days ago that more than half of a group of 34 long-term hunger strikers had abandoned their protest after being strapped in restraint chairs and having their feeding tubes inserted and removed so violently that some bled or fainted.

"He said that during these force feedings too much food was given deliberately, which caused diarrhea and in some cases caused detainees to defecate on themselves," Colangelo-Bryan added. "Jum'ah understands that officers told the hunger strikers that if they challenged the United States, the United States would challenge them back using these tactics."


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company
Comment: Notice the "reason" given, "Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center."

In other words, they are mainly concerned about being "criticised." But isn't that the point of legitimate protest? To draw attention to something that is fundamentally wrong to begin with? In short, this is nothing more or less than a particularly violent suppression of protest.



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Government without Representation: A Call to Action
By Charles Sullivan ICH 9 Feb 06

There are events in human history that galvanize a people into action. Such events are so profoundly wrong and troubling that they can no longer be ignored by the great majority of the citizenry. Instinct tells us that we are nearing a crossroads in the history of our nation, when we must decide upon a course of action. In this momentous decision there can be no neutrality. It is understood that there can be no reconciliation with corrupt power and authority. Either we stay the course and witness the systematic destruction of not only our own nation, but perhaps the entire world; or we refuse our allegiance to this system of inequity called capitalism and operate upon a new premise, or paradigm.
Upwards of eighty percent of the people recognize that they have essentially no representation in government. They appreciate the political process for the sham it is and many of them refuse to participate in it. In the process they allow a small minority to elect people to office, some of them as servants to the people, others not.

Let us proceed upon the assumption that all persons are created equal. Therefore, all people should be treated accordingly, regardless of their income, property holdings, race, sex or creed. Assuming that a great majority accept this credo, we must then recognize that the current system does not operate upon this principle. It favors those with wealth over people without wealth. It offers privileges and advantages to a small percentage of the citizenry that it does not accord to the great majority. Thus it is a paradigm that is inherently unjust and unequal. At this point we must ask ourselves: Do we believe in such a system? If we do not, then we must ask: Does an unjust system deserve and warrant our support?

Let it be understood that any system based upon a paradigm of inequity, and therefore injustice, cannot be reformed. Capitalism is an economic and social system based upon private wealth, not the commonwealth. It is inherently unstable and unsustainable because it is based upon the idea of private greed and waste. The result is that power and wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few by exploiting the many, and by destroying the earth. It is the philosophical basis for trickle down economics that gives plenty to those at the top, much less to those immediately below the top, and virtually nothing to those at the bottom. Those at the top stand upon the shoulders of everyone below the top, which is an enormous burden for them to bear. This is also the psychological underpinning of plutocratic rule.

No matter how good the intentions of the thousands or millions of first-rate people operating in good faith within that system, it is inherently unfair and unjust. It cannot produce equity or justice because it was not designed to operate in this way. Expecting a different result than the kind we always get is like asking an oak tree to produce oranges. However we might wish it possible, it is not going to happen. Oaks can only produce acorns—the seeds of their own kind.

Tremendous amounts of energy and capital are spent waiting for our oaks to produce oranges, as the inequity gap continues to widen and the system spins wildly out of control. Meanwhile, the infection deepens and spreads violence and imperialism throughout the world, setting a chain of events in motion that has the potential to destroy us all. Under capitalism the rich are parasites that prey upon the labor of the poor; they continually bleed them dry and treat them as mere servants. War rages wherever there is social and economic injustice with its staggering cost in capital, misery, environmental degradation and appalling loss of life. In very simplistic terms, this is nothing more than the output of the input. Injustice can never create justice; inequity will never produce equity. If we believe in getting a better result, we must find a better paradigm such as Democratic Socialism.

So we come to the realization that the political process does not, and cannot work for us—the great majority of the citizens. It plays us against one another and distracts us from recognizing the root causes of injustice that is the source of our misery. Thus we come to realize that we do not live in a democracy, as we are so recklessly told; we live in a Plutocracy—a system in which those with wealth rule those without wealth. That is the kind of government we have. Let us have it no more. If the form of government we have offers little benefit to us, or does us great and irreparable harm, why should we support it? Plutocratic government does not and cannot liberate us—it enslaves us.

Nearly ninety percent of us have no more freedom from endless toil and sacrifice than the slave on the plantation. Under the enormous and oppressive weight of capitalism, we are nothing more than the property of our employers, who can and do terminate us at will without just cause or provocation. The system that created slavery is incapable of emancipating its slaves. The genius of the wage slave system is that the great majority of its subjects do not realize that they are in fact slaves to fraudulent corporate and plutocratic power.

We must also recognize that no political party, regardless how well intentioned it is, represents us by operating within the existing framework of capitalism, or wage slavery. The only representation we have is ourselves. Our power cannot come from the system that produces our misery and suffering; it can only come from without. We the people are our own power; but only if we act. It was this realization that gave organized labor and the civil rights movements their impetus for social justice. True grass roots movements understand that their power lies in direct action, not in waiting for corrupt leaders to give us what is already ours under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We must assert our rights, here and now, and without compromise. Nothing is given without a demand. We cannot cure one part of a diseased body—we must cure the whole organism in order to give it health.

The neocon cabal that is in power will not voluntarily step down. They must be forcefully removed from power by demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience on a massive scale. Let me stress that these demonstrations and marches are to be non-violet. Violence begets violence. These must not be sporadic events—they must be frequent, widespread and economically disruptive. As workers, our greatest weapon has always been to withhold our labor through the general strike, as well as our refusal to consume beyond the most basic necessities.

We have but a brief window of opportunity to organize and to mobilize against our oppressors, before dissent is criminalized and punishable by imprisonment. Beyond the Rubicon dissenters will be imprisoned and every channel of free and open communication will be commandeered and subverted to the service of empire. This is already happening on a large scale. Unless we appreciate the approaching danger and act to defend our human rights and our dignity, we will quickly reach the point of no return. We stand now at the brink of the Rubicon wondering how to proceed.

As we put our bodies on the line we will suffer many defeats and indignities. These events must be so widespread that even the commercial media cannot afford to ignore them. There will be beatings and attacks upon us. Our oppressors must be exposed and revealed for who and what they are. The world will be our witness. So great will be the force of worldwide opposition to this brutal conduct, that its perpetrators will be forced to relinquish their hold on power. This is the only way to bring the system down and give power to the people.

At this point a brief clarification is in order: Giving power is a misnomer. Power is never given; it is taken, or asserted. Let us take that which is rightfully ours and use it for the public good. We cannot afford to wait for our acorns to evolve into oranges. The window of opportunity is rapidly closing. It may not be available to us tomorrow.

Regimes such as the Bush cabal have always plagued America They are a recurring cancer that pervades every cell of society. They recur because we are treating symptoms, not underlying causes. A few decades ago it was Nixon and his henchmen. The cancer replicates itself through the capitalistic system of inherent inequity. The time has come to treat the disease, to rid ourselves of its scourge for all eternity, rather than treating the symptoms manifested in the present moment of crises. Otherwise, history is doomed to repeat itself in endless replicating cycles of want and waste and human misery. A long road to industrial and personal emancipation awaits our eager footsteps. Let the journey begin.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer living in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net.


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Hastert, Frist rigged bill for drug firms - Frist denies protection was added in secret
By BILL THEOBALD Gannett News Service The Tennessean 29 Feb 06 Issue

WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert engineered a backroom legislative maneuver to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits, say witnesses to the pre-Christmas power play.

The language was tucked into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of a House-Senate conference committee, say several witnesses, including a top Republican staff member.
In an interview, Frist, a doctor and Tennessee Republican, denied that the wording was added that way.

Trial lawyers and other groups condemn the law, saying it could make it nearly impossible for people harmed by a vaccine to force the drug maker to pay for their injuries.

Many in health care counter that the protection is needed to help build up the vaccine industry in the United States, especially in light of a possible avian flu pandemic.

The legislation, called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, allows the secretary of Health and Human Services to declare a public health emergency, which then provides immunity for companies that develop vaccines and other "countermeasures."

Beyond the issue of vaccine liability protection, some say going around the longstanding practice of bipartisan House-Senate conference committees' working out compromises on legislation is a dangerous power grab by Republican congressional leaders that subverts democracy.

"It is a travesty of the legislative process," said Thomas Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

"It vests enormous power in the hands of congressional leaders and private interests, minimizes transparency and denies legitimate opportunities for all interested parties, in Congress and outside, to weigh in on important policy questions."

At issue is what happened Dec. 18 as Congress scrambled to finish its business and head home for the Christmas holiday.

That day, a conference committee made up of 38 senators and House members met several times to work out differences on the 2006 Defense Department appropriations bill.

Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., the ranking minority House member on the conference committee, said he asked Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, the conference chairman, whether the vaccine liability language was in the massive bill or would be placed in it.

Obey and four others at the meeting said Stevens told him no. Committee members signed off on the bill and the conference broke up.

A spokeswoman for Stevens, Courtney Boone, said last week that the vaccine liability language was in the bill when conferees approved it. Stevens was not made available for comment.

During a January interview, Frist agreed. Asked about the claim that the vaccine language was inserted after the conference members signed off on the bill, he replied: "To my knowledge, that is incorrect. It was my understanding, you'd have to sort of confirm, that the vaccine liability which had been signed off by leaders of the conference, signed off by the leadership in the United States Senate, signed off by the leadership of the House, it was my understanding throughout that that was part of that conference report."

But Keith Kennedy, who works for Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., as staff director for the Senate Appropriations Committee, said at a seminar for reporters last month that the language was inserted by Frist and Hastert, R-Ill., after the conference committee ended its work.

"There should be no dispute. That was an absolute travesty," Kennedy said at a videotaped Washington, D.C., forum sponsored by the Center on Congress at Indiana University.

"It was added after the conference had concluded. It was added at the specific direction of the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate. The conferees did not vote on it. It's a true travesty of the process."

After the conference committee broke up, a meeting was called in Hastert's office, Kennedy said. Also at the meeting, according to a congressional staffer, were Frist, Stevens and House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

"They (committee staff members) were given the language and then it was put in the document," Kennedy said.

About 10 or 10:30 p.m., Democratic staff members were handed the language and told it was now in the bill, Obey said.

He took to the House floor in a rage. He called Frist and Hastert "a couple of musclemen in Congress who think they have a right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding."

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., also was critical of inserting the vaccine language after the conference committee had adjourned.

"It sucks," he told Congress Daily that night.

Rep. Jim Moran, D-Va., another member of the conference committee, was upset, too, a staff member said, because he didn't have enough time to read the language. The final bill was filed in the House at 11:54 p.m. and passed 308-102 at 5:02 the next morning.

The Senate unanimously approved the legislation Dec. 21, but not before Senate Democrats, including several members of the conference committee, bashed the way the vaccine language was inserted.

"What an insult to the legislative process," said Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., a member of the conference committee. Byrd is considered the authority on legislative rules and tradition.

President Bush signed the legislation into law Dec. 30.

When asked about Frist's earlier denial, spokeswoman Amy Call said: "Bill Frist has fought hard to protect the people of Tennessee and the people of the United States from a bioterror emergency and that's what he did throughout this process."

Hastert's office did not provide a response.

Not against the rules

The practice of adding to a compromise bill worked out by bipartisan House-Senate conference committees, while highly unusual, is not thought to violate congressional rules.

Some Senate and House Democrats have proposed banning the practice as part of broader attempts at ethics reform in Congress.

They, consumer groups and others with concerns about possible harm caused by vaccines charge that the move was a gift by Frist to the pharmaceutical industry, which they point out has given a lot of campaign cash to the Nashville doctor through the years.

"The senator should be working to ensure there are safe vaccines to protect American families rather than protecting the drug industry's pocketbooks," Pamela Gilbert, president of Protect American Families, said in a statement. The group is an alliance of consumer, labor and advocacy organizations.

Frist has received $271,523 in campaign donations from the pharmaceutical and health products industry since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

He is also a possible candidate for president in 2008.

In the interview, Frist reiterated how important he thinks the vaccine protections are.

"The United States of America, if a pandemic occurs, is totally unprepared," he said. "And the only way we are going to be prepared is rebuilding our manufacturing base to build a vaccine infrastructure that can be timely and responsive. We don't have it today."

Frist has long advocated liability protection for vaccine makers, and it was widely reported that he would attempt to attach the legislation to the Defense Appropriations bill because it is considered must-pass legislation.

Ken Johnson, senior vice president of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said that, while the group favors liability protection, it did not take a position nor did it lobby on behalf of the law that passed. •

Copyright © 2006, tennessean.com. All rights reserved.


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When Corporations Rule the World - Race to the Bottom
by David C. Korten published by Kumarian Press, 1995

While competition is being weakened at the core, it is intensifying among smaller businesses, workers, and localities at the periphery as they become pitted against one another in a desperate struggle for survival.

What the corporate libertarians call "becoming more globally competitive" is more accurately described as a race to the bottom. With each passing day it becomes more difficult to obtain contracts from one of the mega-retailers without hiring child labor, cheating workers on overtime pay, imposing merciless quotas, and operating unsafe facilities.
If one contractor does not do it, his or her prices will be higher than those of another who does. With hundreds of millions of people desperate for any kind of job the global economy may offer, there will always be willing competitors.

Faced with its own imperatives, the core corporations can do little more than close their eyes to the infractions and insist that they have no responsibility for the conditions of their contractors.

Modern Slavery

Descriptions of the working conditions of millions of workers, even in the 'modern and affluent" North, sound like a throwback to the days of the early industrial revolution. Consider this description of conditions at contract clothing shops in modern affluent San Francisco:

Many of them are dark, cramped and windowless.... Twelve-hour days with no days off and a break only for lunch are not uncommon. And in this wealthy, cosmopolitan city, many shops enforce draconian rules reminiscent of the nineteenth century. "The workers were not allowed to talk to each other and they didn't allow us to go to the bathroom," says one Asian garment worker . . .

Aware of manufacturers' zeal for bargain-basement prices, the nearly 600 sewing contractors in the Bay Area engage in cutthroat competition-often a kind of Darwinian drive to the bottom.... Manufacturers have another powerful chip to keep bids down Katie Quan, a manager of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in San Francisco, explains, "They say, 'If you don't take it, we'll just ship it overseas, and you won't get work and your workers will go hungry.'"

In 1992 a [Department of Labor] investigation of garment shops on the U.S. protectorate of Saipan found conditions akin to indentured servitude: Chinese workers whose passports had been confiscated, putting in eighty-four-hour weeks at sub-minimum wages.

The line between conditions in the South and the North as defined by geography becomes ever more blurred. Dorka Diaz, a twenty-year old textile worker who formerly produced clothing in Honduras for Leslie Fay, a U.S.-based transnational, testified before the Subcommittee on Labor-Management Relations of the U.S. House of Representatives that she worked for Leslie Fay in Honduras alongside twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls locked inside a factory where the temperature often hit 100 degrees and there was no clean drinking water. For a fifty-four-hour week, she was paid a little over $20. She and her three-year old son lived at the edge of starvation. In April 1994, she was fired for trying to organize a union.

When the black women who toiled over knitting machines in a Taiwanese-owned sweater factory in South Africa for fifty cents an hour made it known that with the election of Nelson Mandela they expected "a union shop, better wages and a little respect," the Taiwanese owners responded by abruptly closing their seven South African factories and eliminating 1,000 jobs. Low as the wages were, the cost of labor in South Africa is twice that of labor in Brazil or Mexico and several times that in Thailand or China. Noting that prospective foreign investors have turned wary of South Africa, the New York Times suggests, "There are doubts about the Government's long-term commitment to capitalism, about whether Mr. Mandela can contain the expectations of the impoverished majority." In the world of big money and multimillion-dollar compensation packages, greed is a worker who wants a living wage.

In many Southern countries, to say that conditions verge on slavery is scarcely an exaggeration. China has become a favorite of foreign investors and corporations seeking cheap labor and outsourcing for offshore procurement at rock-bottom prices. Business Week described the prevailing conditions of Chinese factory workers:

In foreign-funded factories, which employ about 6 million Chinese in the coastal provinces, accidents abound. In some factories, workers are chastised, beaten, strip-searched, and even forbidden to use the bathroom during work hours.

At a foreign-owned company in the Fujian province city of Ziamen, 40 workers-or one-tenth of the work force-have had their fingers crushed by obsolete machines. According to official reports, there were 45,000 industrial accidents in Guangdong last year, claiming more than 8,700 lives.... Last month ... 76 workers died in a Guangdong factory accident.

Although the Chinese government reportedly is trying to tighten up on standards, it has faced enormous problems of unemployment since its decision to free up market forces. Tens of millions of rural workers are streaming to the cities. Urban unemployment stood at 5 million in mid-1994, a 25 percent increase in a year. Two million workers lost their jobs in Heilongjiang province in 1993 alone. Millions more urban workers face pay cuts, and half of the government-owned enterprises that employ approximately half of the urban workforce are losing money, creating prospects of massive layoffs and plant closings.

Government efforts to tighten up on standards in this "free-market miracle" are also hampered by skyrocketing rates of crime and corruption.

In Bangladesh, an estimated 80,000 children under age fourteen, most of them female, work at least sixty hours a week m garment factories. For miscounting or other errors, male supervisors strike them or force them to kneel on the floor or stand on their heads for ten to thirty minutes.
It isn't only in the garment industry.

In India, an estimated 55 million children work in various conditions of servitude, many as bonded laborers-virtual slaves-under the most appalling conditions. Each child has his or her own story. A few months after his rescue from forced labor, Devanandan told a reporter that he had been coaxed to leave home by a promise of wages up to $100 a month for working at a loom two hours a day while going to school. When he agreed, he found himself locked up in a room where he ate, slept, and was forced to work knotting carpets from four in the morning till late evening for pennies in pay.

Former Indian Chief Justice P. M. Bhagwati has publicly testified to observing examples of boys working fourteen to twenty hours a day: "They are beaten up, branded [with red-hot iron rods] and even hung from trees upside down."

The carpet industry in India exports $300 million worth of carpets a year, mainly to the United States and Germany. The carpets are produced by more than 300,000 child laborers working fourteen to sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Many are bonded laborers, paying off the debts of their parents; they have been sold into bondage or kidnapped from low-caste parents. The fortunate ones earn a pittance wage. The unfortunate ones are paid nothing at all. The carpet manufacturers argue that the industry must have child laborers to be able to survive in competition with the carpet industries of Pakistan, Nepal, Morocco, and elsewhere that also use child laborers.

As we rush to enter the race to the bottom in a globally competitive world, it is sobering to keep in mind just how deep the bottom is toward which we are racing.

The Limits of Social Responsibility

Within the apparel industry, a few socially concerned firms such as Levi Strauss, Esprit, and The Gap are attempting to live by their values. They are proving that a responsible, well-managed company need not tolerate the worst of the conditions described above, but they face the same competitive pressures as others in their industry. Almost inevitably, such firms find themselves developing split personalities. In the end, they finance their public good works and the good pay and conditions of their headquarters staffs by procuring most of the goods they sell through contractors that offer low wages and substandard working conditions.

Consider specifically the case of Levi Strauss, a company widely acclaimed as a leader in the realm of corporate responsibility. In April 1994, the Council on Economic Priorities gave Levi Strauss an award for its "unprecedented commitment to non-exploitative work practices in developing countries." In 1984, the company was named one of the hundred best companies to work for in America. In June 1992, Money magazine ranked it first among all U.S. companies for employee benefits. Bob Haas, chief executive officer (CEO) of Levi Strauss, was featured in the August 1, 1994, cover story of Business Week titled "Managing by Values," which emphasized his belief that social responsibility and ethical practice are good business.

In 1985, Bob Haas, as CEO and a member of the Levi Strauss family, led a $1.6 billion leveraged buyout of the company, taking it private specifically to prevent a takeover by outside speculators. The fact that 94 percent of the stock is in Haas family hands has given the company more flexibility in maintaining its social commitment than a publicly held company might have in an era of hostile takeovers.

Under Haas's leadership, Levi Strauss has set strict standards with regard to the work environment. As evidence that they mean it, the Levi Strauss board of directors voted unanimously to close out $40 million a year in production contracts in China in protest of human rights violations. When the company found that its contractor in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was hiring girls as young as eleven as full-time seamstresses, it worked out an agreement by which Levi Strauss would continue to pay the wages of these girls while sending them to school and paying for their uniforms, books, and tuition. When they reach age fourteen, the minimum employment age set by International Labor Organization standards, they will return to work. By the standards of the industry, Levi Strauss is a candidate for sainthood. But it is sobering to see how constrained even a Levi Strauss can be.

Although Haas asserts that Levi Strauss has made every effort to keep as many of its production jobs in the United States as possible, during the 1980s, it closed fifty-eight U.S. plants and laid off 10,400 workers. According to Haas, if the company had made its decisions on purely economic grounds, its remaining thirty-four production and finishing plants would all have been closed in favor of overseas production.

Even at its plants in the United States, the core-periphery phenomenon is evident. When the authors of The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America visited the Levi Strauss plant in El Paso, Texas, they found that Money magazine had ranked the company number one on the basis of the benefits enjoyed by its headquarters staff, not by staff at its plants. The benefits received by the El Paso production workers were little different from the marginal conditions at other local textile factories. The authors decided not to include the company among the 100 best in the book's revised edition.

Spreading Cancer

We have focused here on U.S.-based multinationals, because their dysfunctions seem to be spreading through the world like a cancer. By way of 1994, a binge of corporate restructuring in Europe, similar to that in the United States, had pushed Europe's unemployment rate to 10.9 percent. Even these rates, high as they are, may mask a much deeper dysfunction. In Belgium, unemployment was 8.5 percent in 1992, but 25 percent of the workforce was living on public assistance.

Persistent joblessness is resulting in growing social unrest, exacerbating racial tensions, and sparking a vicious backlash against immigrants. Joblessness is especially acute among youth, whose unemployment rate is twice that of the general population and still rising. On March 25, L994, 50,000 students marched down a Paris boulevard, "taunting police and chanting slogans demanding jobs." A survey of 3,000 European teenagers found them "confused, vulnerable, obsessed with their economic futures.

Pointing out that the unemployment rate in Europe has averaged about 3 percentage points higher than in the United States, The Economist cautioned "no trade barrier will keep out the technological changes hat are revolutionizing work in the rich world; and a trade war is sure o destroy more jobs than it saves. It counseled Europe to respond by emulating the United States to reduce the social safety net benefits that give the unemployed little incentive to seek work," minimum wages that cost young workers their jobs," employer social security contributions hat reduce demand for labor, and "strict employment-protection rules" hat discourage firms from hiring by making "it hard, if not impossible, ~ lay off workers once they are on the payroll." To those who point out hat the quality of jobs in America has deteriorated as a consequence f such policies, The Economist has a ready answer:

Too many [of the jobs being created in America], say the merchants of gloom, are part-time, temporary and badly paid. The real wages of low-skilled workers have fallen over the past decade. Yet in comparison with Europe, this should be seen as a sign of success, an example-of a well-functioning labor market-not a failure. As manufacturing has declined, America and Europe have both faced shrinking demand for low-skilled labor. In America, the relative pay of these workers was allowed to fall, so fewer jobs were lost. European workers, by contrast, have resisted the inevitable and so priced themselves out of work."

In short, Europe's unemployment problem is a result of overpaying the poor, taxing the rich, and imposing regulations on European firms that limit their ability to get on with serious downsizing. The Economist editorial pointed to moves by various European countries to reduce minimum wages, cut payroll taxes, and loosen employment-protection laws as signs of hope for Europe. Business Week offered similar counsel:

To ensure it remains competitive once the down-cycle wanes, Europe must be willing to see more of its low-value-added manufacturing jobs move to Eastern Europe and elsewhere.... And it must reduce farm subsidies while continuing to hammer away at high wages and corporate taxes, short working hours, labor immobility, and luxurious social programs. If Europeans don't follow these prescriptions, this recession may be doomed to be more than just a cyclical one.... Putting up trade barriers will only insulate Europeans from the discipline they need to maintain.
Although they are running a bit behind the United States, the evidence suggests that European companies and governments are increasingly heeding this advice, which means that the unemployment, racial tension, and social unrest currently plaguing Europe are almost certain to spiral upward. We may presume that The Economist will then praise Europe for its success.

Although Japan, with unemployment below 3 percent, continues to be the full-employment champion of the industrial world, there is evidence that the commitment there to lifetime employment has begun to break down and that a growing number of Japanese are experiencing the pinch of joblessness. A series of economic shocks has leaf Japanese managers to look to the United States for lessons on increasing efficiency. According to Michael Armacost, former U.S. ambassador to Japan:

Japanese business leaders-who just a few years ago thought they had nothing further to learn from us-are examining American business practices with renewed interest and emulating some with interesting results.... Daiei, one of the country's largest chain stores, says it will seek to reduce retail prices by 50 percent over three years.... Wal-Mart Stores recently established links with two of Japan's supermarket chains.... Japanese executives are now studying America's experience with corporate downsizing, merit-pay packages and investment practices.
Armacost goes on to urge American trade negotiators to focus on pushing for regulatory reforms to accelerate these processes.

With or without U.S. tutelage, it is already happening. Domy Co., a discounter, is importing Safeway cola for sale in Japan at forty-seven cents a can, undercutting the price of local beverages by 55 percent. It sees great potential for imports of Safeway lemon-lime soda, cookies, and bottled water. The Japanese government has relaxed size limits on new retail outlets as well as limits on store hours and business days- with the consequence that retailers are seeking the wide-open spaces of the suburbs, and strip malls are springing up throughout the countryside. Retailers are turning to cheap imports, with China as a preferred source. The burgeoning discount retailers have become the darlings of the Japanese stock market. Faced with price cutting based on low-cost imports, Japanese companies have been restructuring to increase their efficiency.

In January 1995, an accord was announced between the United States and Japan under which U.S. investment houses would have the right to participate in the management of Japanese pension funds. Wall Street investment managers may soon be positioned to give the Japanese lessons in their home territory on the money game, predatory finance, corporate cannibalism, and managed competition.

The trend toward concentration in the retail sector is spreading rapidly to other countries, partly as a consequence of changes in trade rules that open domestic markets to the large retail chains. On January 14, 1994, only two weeks after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Wal-Mart announced its move into Canada, which began with the purchase of 120 Woolco discount department stores from Woolworth Canada. Business Week called it "a full-scale invasion of the Canadian market." Investors rushed to sell holdings of Canada's major retail chains, which were believed to be ill-equipped to meet Wal-Mart's price competition. Canadian retailing consultant John Winter predicted that by the late 1990s, "half of the Canadian retailers you see up here now may not be in business.

With the signing of NAFTA, U.S. retailing giants were poised to quickly "conquer retailing" in Mexico as well, but according to Business Week, "Mexico's army of bureaucrats, steeped in protectionist habits, is plaguing them with mountains of paperwork, ever changing regulations, customs delays, and tariffs of up to 300 percent on low-priced Chinese imports favored by the discounters. Mexico thought that it had a free-trade agreement with the United States to become the major low-wage supplier of the U.S. market. It seems to have balked when confronted with the reality that U.S. retailers intended to use NAFTA to open Mexico to goods produced by even lower paid Chinese workers.
The complaints of the U.S. retailing giants aside, we might conclude that the Mexican government showed better sense in putting up a few roadblocks to slow the assault of the mega-retailers than it did in spending millions to promote NAFTA in the first place.

The dream of the corporate empire builders is being realized. The global system is harmonizing standards across country after country- down toward the lowest common denominator. Although a few socially responsible businesses are standing against the tide with some limited success, theirs is not an easy struggle. We must not kid ourselves. Social responsibility is inefficient in a global free market, and the market will not long abide those who do not avail of the opportunities to shed the inefficient. And we must be clear as to the meaning of efficiency. To the global economy, people are not only increasingly unnecessary, but they and their demands for a living wage are a major source of economic inefficiency. Global corporations are acting to purge themselves of this unwanted burden. We are creating a system that has fewer places for people.


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Tale Of A Connecticut Donkey
By Sheila Samples ICH 9 Feb 06

"Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood...It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or a senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes." ~~Senator George McGovern, Sept 1, 1970
Jim Bob came out of the feed store, threw his purchases into the back of the wagon and climbed up beside his wife. He picked up the reins, shook them and called out to the donkey -- "Giddy-up Joe! Come on, Joe, let's go!"

But Joe just stood there, oblivious to Jim Bob's pleading, his tongue-clickings, even to the lash of the reins on his rump. Jim Bob sighed, picked up the baseball bat, climbed down, walked around in front of Joe and, with a mighty swing, smashed him right between his long ears with the bat. Jim Bob hopped back into the wagon, grabbed the reins and, with a single, "Go, Joe!" the donkey headed off at a brisk trot.

Jim Bob's wife was horrified. "Why did you hit Joe in the head with that bat?" she asked.

Jim Bob grinned, "Sometimes ol' Joe forgets who's the boss here," he said. "When that happens, you just gotta get his attention..."

That was back in the day -- but little has changed since then. Donkeys are still stubborn. Especially on the political scene, where most are completely oblivious to what's going on around them. It's easy for some to forget who's the boss when they're free to gallop through the halls of power -- trot around with the big boys...

Unless you happen to be a Connecticut donkey.

Democrats in that very blue, anti-war state are unhappy with their three-term senator, Joe Lieberman, for his stubborn, rabid support of President Bush and his bloody, illegal war. They pleaded with Joe to recognize that the war on Iraq was planned long before 9-11, that there were no weapons of mass destruction in that pitiful, unarmed country, and that thousands of US citizens and tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children are being blown to pieces, maimed, and poisoned with depleted uranium -- all because of a lie.

But Joe refused to move. He responded by penning an op-ed in the Nov. 29, 2005 Wall Street Journal entitled "Our Troops Must Stay." In that piece, Lieberman "catapaulted the propaganda" that Iraq was experiencing a great deal of progress, underscored by "continuing security and growing prosperity." The Shiite south, he said, "remains largely free of terrorism, receives much more electric power and other public services than it did under Saddam, and is experiencing greater economic activity." And Lieberman said even the Sunni triangle -- Baghdad on the East, Tikrit to the North, and Ramadi to the West, where most American troops are slaughtered, is showing progress...

Warming to his subject, Lieberman wrote, "None of these remarkable changes in Iraq would have happened if Coalition Forces, lead (sic) by the U.S., had not overthrown Saddam Hussein ...The question is whether the American people and enough of their representatives in Congress from both parties understand this."

Lieberman then chided war naysayers on both sides of the aisle with, "I am disappointed by Democrats who are more focused on how President Bush took America into the war in Iraq almost three years ago, and Republicans who are more worried about whether the war will bring them down in next November’s elections, than they are concerned about how we continue the progress in Iraq in the months and years ahead."

Lieberman underscored his stance in December by hitting the talk-show circuit to wrap himself in the flag and scold his anti-war constituents -- "It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that in matters of war we undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril."

But Connecticut yankees are hard to fool. They know civil war is raging throughout Iraq. They know we are there under false pretenses. They know in November, while Lieberman was polishing his commentary, 88 American servicemen were killed. In December - 67, January - 65, and 15 in the first seven days of February - for a total of 235. They know there was never any reason for even one of the nearly 2,300 U.S. servicemen and women to die. They know a lie is not good enough reason to destroy an entire generation of Americans -- nor to remain silent to keep from embarrassing the man who sent them to their deaths.

In January, Democrats in Manchester attempted to get Lieberman's attention by overwhelmingly passing a resolution opposing his "unconditional support of President Bush." The measure stated that Lieberman was not acting in the best interest of the American public or the Democratic Party by supporting Bush in the handling of the Iraqi conflict. Dorothy Brindamour, one of the many Democrats to speak out, said, "I think it is one thing to be an independent thinker. It's another thing to be a Democratic senator who is acting as a lobbyist for King George and his chancellor, Cheney."

Lieberman responded by trotting to the annual State of the Union speech on Jan. 31 and, when Bush defiantly claimed that the only exit plan from Iraq was "victory" in his noble war on terror, Lieberman was the lone Democrat to rise with the Republicans and give Bush a cheering, standing ovation.

Four days later, Windsor Democrats joined their Manchester counterparts and, with a mighty swing, bashed Lieberman right between the ears with a Vote of No Confidence "for embracing Bush's position on the war, including denying that the United States wrongly entered the war and that it was not accomplishing the objectives set out by the president."

Windsor Democratic town Chairman Tim Fitzgerald admitted the resolution was a "practical way" to get Lieberman's attention, but added he was "not delusional that this is going to change his fundamental way of thinking."

According to the Los Angeles Times, Lieberman's approval ratings in Connecticut are at a weak 52%, which puts him in a shaky political position, and sharks are beginning to circle for the upcoming August primary -- something the Democrats don't need right now. To make matters worse, Keith Crane, from Branford, not only created a "Dump Joe" Internet site, but shows up at meetings with fists full of anti-Lieberman buttons and bumper stickers.

What Lieberman's constituents don't understand is that his stubborn defense of the Iraq war in all probability goes much deeper than mere support of Bush's war on terror. Rising numbers of innocents sent to early graves in an unending war is the price that Lieberman and others within the U.S government -- willingly or unwillingly -- are committed to pay in order to keep Israel safe from madmen such as Iranian President Mahmooud Ahmadinejad who has openly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map."

Lieberman, like so many of his congressional peers, has sworn to do whatever it takes to protect Israel, and all appear to be blinded by ideology. Therefore, they are condemned to show up for work morning after morning in a chamber that reeks of blood.

U.S. politicians have removed their fingers from the pulse of the nation. They have forgotten who's the boss. Face it -- if you're an elected political animal who refuses to move, refuses to pay attention; refuses to pull the state wagon -- you could likely find yourself "put out to pasture" in the next election.

Especially if you're a Connecticut donkey.

Sheila Samples is an Oklahoma writer and a former civilian US Army Public Information Officer. She is a regular contributor for a variety of Internet sites. Contact her at: rsamples@sirinet.net


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Return oil profits to American people
By GAR ALPEROVITZ February 9, 2006

WASHINGTON - It's nearly impossible for the average citizen to grasp the scale of ExxonMobil Corp.'s huge profits.

In the quarter ended Dec. 31, the giant company made $10.7 billion, the equivalent of more than $115 million for every one of its 92 days, nearly $5 million each hour, more than $80,000 every minute, nearly $1,350 each second.

ExxonMobil's overall 2005 revenues of $371 billion amounted to more than $1 billion a day! The total was larger than the entire economies of all but 16 of the 184 countries ranked by the World Bank. It was 40 percent greater than the gross national product of Indonesia, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries with a population of 242 million.
Some of this gigantic financial flow, of course, is because of intelligent investment, efficiency and hard work. A very large part, however, occurred simply because ExxonMobil happened to be standing in the right place at the right time holding a bushel basket (or a huge oil drum) collecting surplus profits resulting from chance and other people's misfortune.

First, the Iraq war helped add billions to ExxonMobil's windfall gains by raising the price of crude oil, gasoline and natural gas. Then Hurricanes Katrina and Rita disrupted domestic production and refining, pushing prices even higher.

All of us pay for the huge profits, but poor Americans living in colder regions and working people who must commute long distances are the ones whose contribution to ExxonMobil's profits are the most painful.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that home heating oil prices this year will be 23 percent higher than last year; throughout the Northern states, this means not only discomfort but real hardship, even death for some of the elderly.

As to people who must drive to work: A 2005 CNN poll found 58 percent of drivers experiencing severe or moderate hardship when gasoline was at $2.22 a gallon. Now the government is predicting $2.41 a gallon for this year.

Some experts believe the gigantic profits result not from chance but from limited refining capacity - possibly deliberate - reducing supply and boosting prices. Although demand has grown dramatically in recent decades, Jamie McCourt, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, observes: "We haven't had a refinery built since 1976."

In the best of all possible worlds, ExxonMobil might recognize the sources of its good fortune and give something of reasonable scale back to the American people (beyond the relatively modest amount it donates to the arts, education and other causes).

It might, for instance, help make heating oil available to low-income citizens, as Venezuela is doing in Massachusetts, New York and Maine.

Or it could simply contribute money to help offset the pain: Appropriations for the Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program for this fiscal year are only $2.1 billion, nearly $3 billion short of what Congress authorized.

Beyond this, ExxonMobil could make a major contribution to helping rebuild New Orleans, where it has an important refinery. Private citizens have donated about $3.2 billion so far to the rebuilding effort. The $13 million contribution ExxonMobil touts on its Web site is a mere one-eighth of 1 percent of the increase in its 2005 profits.

Actually, given its New Orleans refinery, ExxonMobil might do very well by doing good: It could protect its investment by getting serious about helping the city build strong Category 5 levees and restoring hurricane-slowing wetlands. The estimated total cost is $31 billion - $5 billion less than ExxonMobil's 2005 huge profit flows.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a world where significant, voluntary "give-backs" to American society are common.

The obvious alternative is some form of taxation, something we have done many times in the past when chance and misfortune have combined to produce unwarranted gains.

Last fall, the Republican-controlled Senate approved a one-year tax increase of $5 billion for the nation's largest oil companies.

Another Senate-approved measure would effectively remove the foreign tax credit that the nation's three largest oil companies receive for taxes paid in other countries. At the moment, however, even these tiny steps are unlikely to pass the House of Representatives.

It will take an aroused citizenry to demand what should be given freely. Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, and six other senators have introduced windfall profits tax legislation. This direction would inevitably have to be at the center of a serious agenda for change as the pain continues to increase.

Gar Alperovitz, the Lionel R. Bauman professor of political economy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is author of "America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy." His e-mail is garalper@ncesa.org.


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Educators face blowback for protesting Iraq war in schools
Carlos Miller RawStory February 9, 2006

Just over three years ago, as the nation readied for war with Iraq, elementary school teacher Deb Mayer stood in front of her class and uttered the word that would get her blacklisted from her profession.

It was a word that got her deemed “unpatriotic” by an angry parent. A word that led to her termination from the Bloomington, Indiana school district. A word that got her labeled as a potential sex offender and ruined her chances of finding work elsewhere.

That word was “peace.”
Today, after spending more than $50,000 in legal fees in a lawsuit against the Monroe County Community School Corporation, Mayer awaits a decision from a Reagan-appointed federal judge as to whether or not she will be granted a jury trial.

“If Judge [Sarah E.] Barker doesn’t grant us a jury trial, it would really be criminal,” Mayer said from her son’s home in Wisconsin, where she was forced to live after finding herself unable to support herself. “It means I would have spent all this money for nothing.”

Mayer is one of at least three teachers in the country who have filed lawsuits against their employers since the beginning of the war, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated after they were fired for what they said was an opposition to the war.

So far, one case has been settled out of court in favor of the teacher. In 2004, former New Mexico high school teacher Bill Nevins received a $205,000 settlement from the Rio Rancho School District. A year earlier, one of his students recited a poem over the school’s intercom system that questioned the war in Iraq. Nevins, a 10th-grade Humanities teacher, was also the coach of the Rio Rancho High School poetry team. His contract was terminated within months of the incident.

Professor says he was denied tenure for body count

In November 2005, Alan Temes, an assistant professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit against the college after he failed to get tenure. Temes said he would post the body count of US soldiers and Iraqi civilians next to a bulletin board filled with pro-military imagery, which included the words “Operation Iraqi Freedom” next to a picture of the burning twin towers.

In the lawsuit, Temes claims he was warned by the department chair that he would not get tenure if he continued posting the body count next to the pro-war bulletin board. His last day at the college is in May and he’s been looking for work for several months with no luck. He has no regrets about what he did.

“If you’re going to push the war, at least be aware that the count of Iraqi civilians is growing at a phenomenal rate,” Temes said. “I figured the American people need to know the facts. I didn’t think the mainstream press was doing enough of a job.”

In Mayer’s case, she says it was an article in Time Magazine for Kids that lead to her termination. In January 2003, she was teaching a Current Events class to fourth, fifth and sixth graders at Clear Creek Elementary School. They had been discussing the articles in the magazine, which dedicated an issue to the situation in Iraq. One student asked Mayer if she had ever participated in a peace march.

“I said that peace marches are going on all over the country and that whenever I pass the courthouse square where the demonstrators were, I honk for peace because they hold up signs that say honk for peace.”

That night, a sixth-grade student girl told her parents that Mayer was encouraging them to protest against the war, igniting a furor that Mayer said she'd never before experienced in her 20-year teaching career.

Three days later, the girl’s father showed up to the school for a meeting with Mayer and principal Victoria Rogers. Mayer explained that she had simply explained to the children that there are two sides to the story. When the father asked if she had any children in the military, she told him her son had recently enlisted. But that only seemed to antagonize him even further.

“He kept getting angrier and angrier,” she said. “He stood up and started pointing his finger in my face. I felt very threatened.”

The father turned to Rogers with a request.

“I want her to promise never the mention the word peace in her class again,” Mayer remembered him saying.

Rogers assured him that could be done, and Mayer reluctantly agreed never to mention the word “peace” in her class again.

“I wanted to calm the parent down,” she said. “I didn’t want to be insubordinate.”

Later that afternoon in a faculty meeting, Rogers circulated a memo announcing the cancellation of “Peace Month,” a traditional month-long series of activities beginning on Martin Luther King Jr. Day that taught children how to settle differences through mediation.

“She said that we can talk about war, but not about peace,” Mayer said. “That for now on, nobody is allowed to have a stance on the war.”

Rogers, who declined to go into specifics about Mayer’s case, said that Peace Month was never cancelled but that it “died a natural death.”

“We felt we were working on it all year round,” said Rogers, who has since retired as principal of the school. “We were already working on life skills throughout the year so it became incorporated into what we were doing every day.”

But Peace Month was scheduled to begin less than two weeks before she sent out the original memo on Jan. 13, 2003 announcing the cancellation of the five-year tradition. Over the next few months, as President Bush declared Mission Accomplished and the country became increasingly divided, the angry father rallied other parents against the teacher.

Complaint filed on sexual harrassment form

At least two parent complaints against Mayer were typed up on Title IX Sexual Discrimination and Harassment grievance documents and placed in her personnel file.

“There was no substance to it,” Mayer said. “This complaint was very mysterious. I never saw it until I was disposed (in September 2005).”

That likely explains why she had been unable to find work since losing her teaching job on the Gulf Coast of Florida in 2005, where she had been hired as a teacher in Boca Grande, an upscale community and long-time retreat for the Bush family.

Mayer, who is certified to be an administrator, applied to be a principal when a position came open within the Boca Grande school district. But when they checked on her references, the sexual harassment complaint came to light.

“I did not get the principal’s job. I got fired again,” she said.

Even though it was typed on an official sexual harassment document, the actual complaint against Mayer accused her of “harassing” children because she would put up her hand to silence a child if the child had interrupted a conversation between herself and another student.

“The parent had signed it, but nobody on the school administration has signed it,” she said. “When we tried to find out who did it, nobody admitted to it.”

She then found another complaint against her on the same sexual harassment form, this one accusing her of announcing to the class about a student’s medication. Mayer denies the allegation.

When Mayer’s attorney looked into why the complaints were typed up on Title IX forms, they told him they had been writing all complaints against teachers on the federal forms for a decade.

Mayer contacted the ACLU about her case three years ago, but was told to hire an attorney if she could afford it.

“At the time I could afford it, but now I’m out of money,” she said. And when Indiana author Kurt Vonnegut heard of her case, he contacted the Indiana chapter of the ACLU on her behalf, but they refused to intervene. If anything, history is on her side. Not only did the teacher in New Mexico receive a $205,000 settlement in 2004, but a Wisconsin teacher had a similar victory in 1991.

During the first war in Iraq, high school teacher and wrestling coach Jim Low, opposed plans for a ceremony supporting the war in Iraq to be held before a wrestling match. When the ceremony continued as planned, Low walked out of the building, delegating his coaching duties to an assistant. When his contract was terminated two months later, Low sued the Lakeland Union High School District in Minocqua, claiming his First Amendment free speech rights had been violated. He subsequently received a settlement of $140,000 from the northern Wisconsin school district.

If Judge Barker grants Mayer a trial by jury, it would begin on Mar. 6. “Usually they give you at least a month’s notice as a courtesy, but February 6th already passed and I haven’t heard anything,” she said. “So I’m still waiting to hear from her.”

Mayer said her case is such a clear cut example of a First Amendment violation that she can not comprehend why it has not already been settled. “At first, the contention of the school was that my speech wasn’t protected because the war in Iraq wasn’t a matter of public concern,” she said. “Then they changed their contention and said that my speech wasn’t protected because the classroom wasn’t a public forum.”

She believes small-town politics may play a role. The teacher’s union refused to help her; Mayer notes that the principal comes from an “old family” and that she was married to the former president of the union.

But others have kept her spirits up. Mayer says Howard Dean, whom she had volunteered for in 2004, has taken an interest in her case and checks up on it periodically. And the local Air America affiliate in Wisconsin has set up a legal fund to help Mayer raise money for her court battle.

“If the judge rules against me, she will be saying that a teacher doesn’t have a right to free speech at school,” Mayer said. “If the classroom is not a public forum, then a teacher has no right to free speech.”


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A Dangerous Professor Speaks
By Robert Jensen AlterNet February 9, 2006.

In an "urgent" email last week, right-wing activist David Horowitz hyped his latest book about threats to America's youth from leftist professors.

The ad for "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America" describes me as: "Texas Journalism Professor Robert Jensen, who rabidly hates the United States and recently told his students, 'The United States has lost the war in Iraq, and that's a good thing.'"

I'm glad Horowitz got my name right (people often misspell it "Jenson"). But everything else is distortion, and that one sentence teaches much about the reactionary right's disingenuous rhetorical strategy.
First, I'm not rabid, in personal or political style. I'm a sedate, nondescript middle-aged academic who tries to approach political and moral questions rationally. I articulate principles, provide evidence about how those principles are often undermined by powerful institutions, and offer logical conclusions about how citizens should respond. I encourage people to disagree with my principles, contest my evidence and question my logic -- all appropriate activities in a university where students are being trained to think for themselves and in a nominally democratic society where citizens should to do the same.

Second, I offer such critiques without hate. Sometimes my assessments are harsh, such as in evaluating George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and concluding the attack was unlawful and, therefore, our president is guilty of crimes against peace and should be prosecuted. Similarly harsh was the judgment that Bill Clinton's insistence on maintaining the harsh economic embargo on Iraq in the 1990s resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and, therefore, Clinton was a moral monster who was unfit to govern. None of this has to do with hating either man, but instead with assessments and judgments we should be making.

Third, these critiques are not of the United States, but of specific policies and policymakers. No nation is a monolith with a single set of interests or political positions, and it's nonsensical to claim that harsh critique constitutes rejection of an entire nation.

Why would anyone suggest that I rabidly hate the United States? It's easier to defame opponents using emotionally charged language than engage on real issues. Accuse them of being irrational and hateful. Ignore the substance of the claims and just sling mud. By even minimal standards of intellectual or political discourse, it's not terribly honorable, but it often works.

Beyond these junkyard dog tactics, Horowitz's email also makes one crucial factual error. I did write that the United States losing the Iraq war was a good thing -- not in celebration of death and destruction, of course, but because the defeat temporarily restrains policymakers in their dangerous attempts to extend the U.S. empire. But that was the first sentence of an opinion piece I published in various newspapers in 2004, not a statement to students. The distinction is important.

Horowitz and similar critics argue that professors like me inappropriately politicize the classroom, forcing captive student audiences to listen to radical rants. No doubt there are professors who rant -- from the left, right and center; there's a lot of bad teaching in universities.

But I'm constantly attacked by people who have no knowledge of -- and as far as I can tell, no interest in learning about -- how I teach. Because they hear me express strong opinions at political rallies or read my newspaper opinion pieces, they assume I treat my classroom like a pulpit and students as targets for conversion.

I teach journalism, and in the course of that teaching, I regularly discuss how journalists cover controversial topics; it's hard to imagine teaching responsibly without doing that. When appropriate, I have talked in class about how journalists cover war -- explaining that many people around the world believe the U.S. invasion of Iraq violated international law, observing that U.S. journalists in the corporate commercial media rarely write about that and suggesting reasons for the omission.

There's always a politics to teaching; the choices professors make about what readings to assign and how to approach a subject are influenced by their politics -- left, right, or center. But that does not meaning teaching is nothing but politics.

No one knows that better than professors who hold views challenging the conventional wisdom, those of us who don't rabidly hate the United States but do passionately love learning and the promise of an open, independent university.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of, most recently, "The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege" (City Lights Books).


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The Man Who Terrorized America For Five Years
John Walsh 09 February 2006

The film Good Night and Good Luck contains many striking performances - by George Clooney, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jnr and especially the lean-faced, perma-smoking David Strathairn as crusading TV news anchor Ed Murrow.

But one performance doesn't quite fit with the others. It's simply a face, mouthing lazy threats from a TV screen, but what a face - a boxer's mug, hostile and pugnacious, the eyes deep-set and hooded, a witch's peak of hair arrowing across a pasty brow.

The performance failed to impress some of the preview "test" audiences. They thought the actor was, they said, overacting. What they didn't realise was, this was real. They'd been looking at a real-life broadcast, taken from archive footage, by Senator Joe McCarthy, the man who terrorised America for five years.
It's quite a statement by Clooney (who directed the movie) and his casting directors not to have got an actor to play McCarthy. But they made the right decision. No actor could quite convey the aura of menace that emanates from this Republican Torquemada. This was what confronted hundreds of government officials, State department civil servants, army officers, librarians, journalists and broadcasters in the early Fifties. McCarthy brought them all under his pitiless gaze and told the nation they were dangerous subversives, bent on enslaving America beneath a Communist yoke. He scared the life out of Americans, and convinced them that the land of freedom was pullulating with Soviet spies and Commie sympathisers.

The drama of Good Night lies in watching Murrow and his team on the TV show See It Now take on McCarthy and suffer the consequences. The film opens in 1953,when the country was already in the grip of red-baiting fever. But how did it get that way? How did this junior senator from Nowheresville rise to such a position of power that, in the words of his biographer, "no man was closer than he to the centre of American consciousness, or more central to the world's consciousness of America".

Modern US perspectives on McCarthy are so extreme - to the Left he is Satan incarnate, to the Right he's an admirably direct militant patriot - that the basic facts of his life are often in dispute. He was born in November 1908 in either Appleton or Grand Chute, Wisconsin. Some commentators stress his seditious Irish Catholic roots, some his Hunnish German grandmother. He dropped out of school to help on the family farm, work as a chicken farmer and run a grocery store. At 20, he returned to high school, crammed four years' study into a single year and went on to take a law degree at Marquette university, Milwaukee. He worked for a Wisconsin law firm, supplementing his income by playing poker.

At 28 he campaigned to be district attorney as a Democrat. When that didn't work, he became Republican candidate in an election to be a circuit judge. An early marker of his bruising style was to send out flyers claiming his 66-year-old opponent, Edgar Werner, was 73, senile and mired in financial corruption. He won, and became the youngest judge in Wisconsin's history.

When America went to war, McCarthy enlisted in the Marines, became an intelligence briefing officer in the Solomon Islands, flew 11 (or possibly 30) missions as an aerial photographer and tail gunner, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, and commended for bravery by Admiral Nimitz. Or did he? Many historians claim he embellished his war record - that he had a desk job, flew only in training exercises and got the Nimitz commendation by deception.

It didn't stop him using photos of himself in full fighting gear when campaigning for the Senate against Robert La Follette, a four-term senator and Republican star. He attacked La Follette for not serving his country (at 46, he'd been too old to join up) and for war profiteering. La Follette lost by 5,000 votes, retired from politics and committed suicide.

And so McCarthy launched himself into politics. In the general election he beat his Democratic opponent and entered the Senate. In a typically restrained maiden speech he addressed the problem of a coal strike. He suggested the striking miners should be drafted into the Army. Then if they refused to go back to work, they could be tried for insubordination and shot. Simple.

McCarthy's first three years in power were quiet; he was considered friendly but unimpressive and without influence. What made him start demonising Communists? The move was prompted by fear of losing his seat. In 1949 he was under investigation for taking bribes and dodging tax. His war record was also under scrutiny. What should he do? His advisers suggested he attack the Democrats and accuse them of harbouring Red subversives.

Two key figures helped McCarthy build a case. One was Jack Anderson, a journalist who would listen in as McCarthy grilled fellow senators on the phone about recent meetings and political loyalties. McCarthy got his senate peers to spill the beans. Anderson got stories, and supplied McCarthy with information. The second aide was J Edgar Hoover, the FBI boss who fed McCarthy all manner of ammunition.

The explosion came in 1950. On 9 February McCarthy made a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He held up a piece of paper and said, "I have here in my hand a list of 57 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping the policy of the State department." Some, he said, were passing secrets to the Soviet Union. Eleven days later, in a six-hour speech on the Senate floor, he repeated his claims and named four of the alleged subversives. When Democrat senators accused him of lying and smear tactics, he accused them of being Communist sympathisers.

There was nationwide consternation. Despite McCarthy's refusal to publish his list and his chronic inability to stick to one figure (were there 57, 81 or 205 card-carrying Reds?) people were ready to believe in Commie infiltration. A month earlier, Alger Hiss had been jailed for perjury after being accused of being an accomplice to a former member of an underground Communist network. The war was going badly in Korea. In China, the Kuomintang regime had been replaced by a Communist government. The shadow of Soviet Russia was lengthening across Europe, and there was much talk of an atomic arsenal, of spying, brainwashing and what McCarthy called "the traitorous actions of those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer". The following year, when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians, McCarthy seemed to be vindicated.

Was there any truth in his claim? Surprisingly, there was a list - of sorts. It was sent in 1946 by the Secretary of State James Byrnes to a Congressman, and contained the names of 284 people declared unfit to hold jobs in the Department because of Communist connections or other reasons. The "other reasons" included incompetence, homosexuality and alcoholism. (As some have pointed out, if McCarthy had been screened, he'd have gone on the list himself.) Of card-carrying Communists, there was little evidence. McCarthy's claims were investigated by the Tydings Committee, to whom he was obliged to give the list (by now 110 names). The Committee concluded, after 31 days of hearings, that the senator's charges were a "fraud" and a "hoax." Three days later, the FBI arrested Julius Rosenberg for spying.

It's hard for us to imagine the scale of hysteria in the next three years, as McCarthy spread his net of accusations, taking in top politicians, leading academics, and the owner of Encyclopaedia Britannica. As chairman of the Government Committee on Operations of the Senate, McCarthy was inviolable. Anyone who criticised his claims was branded a traitor. Hostile journalists were attacked, sometimes physically. Drew Pearson, for months a thorn in McCarthy's side, was branded "a Moscow-directed character assassin" and kicked in the groin by McCarthy in the cloakroom of a Washington club.

McCarthy began to add books to his witch-hunt. His underlings checked out the library system, and the Overseas Library Program looking for anti-American propaganda, and found 30,000 titles by "communists, pro-communists, former communists and anti-anti-communists". They were removed from US libraries.

The interrogations continued. In 1953, McCarthy's committee examined 653 individuals - first in private closed session (rumours spread about "abuse" and "browbeating" on some occasions); then, if a witness invoked the Fifth Amendment, they'd be examined in public court and their names publicised. If, the logic ran, you had ever publicly held left-wing views, you were probably a Communist; the only way to prove you'd changed was to shop other left-wingers. Such was the climate of fear, hundreds of people lost their jobs. By 1954, 81 of the 110 names put before Tydings subcommittee had resigned or been dismissed.

McCarthy even attacked the president, accusing Harry S Truman of being a woolly liberal, "soft" on Communists and keen to protect Soviet agents. Truman lost the 1952 election, and the Republican Eisenhower moved into the White House. He disapproved of McCarthy's tactics but was pressured by his party not to denounce the popular demagogue.

Then McCarthy over-reached himself. He took on the Army, investigating a New York dentist called Peress, drafted as a captain in 1952 and supposedly a Party member. The Army retaliated by feeding journalists with stories that would embarrass the senator - such as, that he and his Committee sidekick Roy Cohn had conspired to prevent their friend David Schine from being drafted, and that Cohn had put pressure on Army personnel to give Schine special privileges.

The Army-McCarthy Hearings lasted 36 days and were watched on new-fangled televisions by 20 million Americans. They were especially struck by one interchange, when the Army's attorney-general Joseph Welch listened to McCarthy bad-mouth yet another junior lawyer and exploded: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?"

By now the American media had stopped being too frightened of McCarthy to speak. Columnists went on the offensive. Ed Murrow openly criticised McCarthy's methods on See It Now on 9 March 1954. Three weeks later, McCarthy responded by attacking Murrow on the programme. The public, seeing their anti-Red champion as a sneering roughneck, withdrew their support. In July, a senator accused McCarthy of 46 counts of "conduct unbecoming a member of the US Senate", a rap-sheet later reduced to two. It was enough. On 2 December 1954, the Senate voted to "condemn" McCarthy by 67 votes to 22. He lost the chairmanship of the Government Committee that had been his throne since 1950. His power base had vanished. His public support dwindled away. The press wouldn't touch a McCarthy story. He was finished. A chronic heavy drinker, he suffered from cirrhosis and died of hepatitis in May 1957 at 48.

What had it all been for? To modern-day supporters, like the right-wing pundit Anne Coulter, he represented an expression of popular dissatisfaction. To Anatole Lieven, the historian of modern US nationalism, he nursed an Irish-Catholic hatred of the intellectual élites of the Wasp establishment. But the best summation is from his biographer, Richard H Rovere: "He was not totalitarian in any significant sense, or even reactionary. The social and economic order didn't interest him. If he was anything at all in the realm of ideas, principles, doctrines, he was a species of nihilist; he was an essentially destructive force, a revolutionist without any revolutionary vision, a rebel without a cause."


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Records show White House knew of New Orleans levee break but failed to act
Associated Press February 10, 2006

The earliest official report of a New Orleans levee breach came at 8:30 a.m., hours after Hurricane Katrina roared ashore. Word of the possible breach surfaced at the White House less than three hours later, at 11:13 a.m.

In all, 28 federal, state and local agencies reported levee failures on Aug. 29, according to a timeline of e-mails, situation updates and weather reports that Senate Democrats say raise questions about whether the government moved quickly enough to rescue storm victims from massive flooding.

The documents were released in advance of a Senate hearing Friday at which Michael Brown, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was set to testify.
Brown is widely considered the public face of the government's sluggish response to Katrina. But he signaled earlier this week that he was prepared to discuss his storm communications with President Bush and other top White House officials _ a possible signal that his testimony would assign blame elsewhere.

The White House has barred some top advisers and staffers from answering Senate investigators' questions about the administration's response, saying that certain discussions and documents must remain confidential. But Brown, who quit FEMA shortly after the storm and left the federal payroll Nov. 2, is no longer covered by that confidentiality protection.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the president and his top aides were fully aware of the massive flooding _ and less concerned whether it was caused by levee breaches, overtoppings or failed pumps, all three of which were being reported at the time.

"We knew there was flooding and that's why the No. 1 effort in those early hours was on search and rescue, and saving life and limb," Duffy said.

Shortly after the disaster, Bush said, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." He later said his comment was meant to suggest that there had been a false sense of relief that the levees had held when the storm passed, only to break a few hours later.

The Bush administration has said it knew definitively early Tuesday, Aug. 30, the day after the storm, that the levees had been breached, based on an Army Corps of Engineers assessment.

Democrats said the documents showed there was little excuse for the tardy federal response.

"The first communication came at 8:30 a.m.," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "So it is inexplicable to me how those responsible for the federal response could have woken up Tuesday morning unaware of this obviously catastrophic situation."

The first internal White House communication about levee failures came at 11:13 a.m. on Aug. 29 in a "Katrina Spot Report" by the White House Homeland Security Council.

"Flooding is significant throughout the region and a levee in New Orleans has reportedly been breached sending 6-8 feet of water throughout the 9th ward area of the city," the internal report said.


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Stealing A President's Spotlight - The eviction of two women from Bush's speech echoes a spirited protest by suffragists.
by Catherine Lanctot Philadelphia Inquirer 9 Feb 06

Muzzling dissent has a surprisingly long history in a nation that presses commitment to freedom of expression. But that history also teaches us that the government cannot keep silent forever a message whose time has come. The real lesson may be that of another nonviolent protester, Mohandas Gandhi, when he described the course of movements for social justice: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Last week's furor over the eviction of two women from the State of the Union address is reminiscent of a long-forgotten controversy when women's suffrage took center stage during Woodrow Wilson's 1916 speech.

Wilson had no intention of addressing women's suffrage. But militant suffragists from the National Woman's Party, led by Swarthmore graduate Alice Paul, had other plans. The NWP had campaigned vigorously against Wilson and the Democrats in 1916 because they failed to support a suffrage constitutional amendment.

Not only did Wilson narrowly win reelection, but the NWP suffered the untimely death of one of its best-known young speakers, the flamboyant activist Inez Milholland, who had collapsed at a campaign rally after shouting out a soon-to-be famous battle cry against Wilson. Paul's strong instinct for political theater led her to capitalize on the publicity surrounding Milholland.

On Dec. 5, six NWP members sat in the front row of the House gallery, waiting for Wilson's expected appeal for greater voting rights for men in Puerto Rico. Suddenly, they leapt to their feet and unfurled a large banner that had been hidden under their clothes. It echoed Milholland's final battle cry: "Mr. President: What will you do for woman suffrage?"

The Capitol Police hurried to the gallery to arrest the demonstrators, but they were blocked by a crowd of NWP supporters and eventually abandoned the effort. Wilson, smiling slightly, caught only a glimpse of the offending banner before it was torn down. The New York Times later scoffed that "no aggregation of male minds... would ever think of anything so supremely small and cheap."

Despite mockery and opposition, Paul believed it was essential to pressure Wilson on suffrage. In early January 1917, she sent her first wave of suffrage pickets to stand silently before the White House, where they would remain for most of the year. Wilson could not leave the Oval Office for his daily automobile ride without facing the demand: "Mr. President: What will you do for woman suffrage?"

Grudging toleration of these "Silent Sentinels" evaporated in the hysteria that enveloped the nation after Wilson took the nation to war in April. Dissent became suspect, and protesters became enemies of the state. Suffrage pickets who refused to cease their demonstrations were soon imprisoned.

Castigated by the press, beaten and chased by mobs as pro-German traitors, and abandoned by their sisters in the mainstream suffrage organization, the militants struggled to keep suffrage in the public eye. By November 1917, Paul was in solitary confinement in a psychiatric prison ward, suffering the horrors of forcible feeding as she led a hunger strike. After federal court intervention, all the prisoners were released, and their convictions later overturned. Three years later, Paul and millions of other American women would finally have the right to vote.

Muzzling dissent has a surprisingly long history in a nation that presses commitment to freedom of expression. But that history also teaches us that the government cannot keep silent forever a message whose time has come. The real lesson may be that of another nonviolent protester, Mohandas Gandhi, when he described the course of movements for social justice: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Catherine Lanctot is a professor at of law at Villanova University. Email to: lanctot@law.villanova.edu


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Report Says Number of Attacks by Insurgents in Iraq Increases
By JAMES GLANZ New York Times 9 Feb 06

WASHINGTON — Sweeping statistics on insurgent violence in Iraq that were declassified for a Senate hearing on Wednesday appear to portray a rebellion whose ability to mount attacks has steadily grown in the nearly three years since the invasion.
The statistics were included in a report written by Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office, who testified before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee during a hearing on Iraq stabilization and reconstruction.

The American military declassified the statistics so he could present them to the hearing in his report, Mr. Christoff said in an interview. The figures cover attacks on American and Iraqi forces and civilians.

The curve traced out by the figures between June 2003 and December 2005 shows a number of fluctuations, including several large spikes in insurgent activity — one as recently as October of last year. But while American and Iraqi officials have often pointed to the downward edges of those fluctuations as evidence that the steam was going out of the insurgency, the numbers over all seem to tell a different story, Mr. Christoff said. "It's not going down," he said. "There are peaks and valleys, but if you look at every peak, it's higher than the peak before."

Officials have recently noted that the numbers of attacks in the final two months of last year dropped after an October peak, which occurred around both Ramadan and a referendum on Iraq's constitution. But Mr. Christoff's chart shows that the number of attacks in December, nearly 2,500, was almost 250 percent of the number in March 2004.

But the trend line began even before March 2004, when the number of attacks was already nearly double what it had been in July or August 2003. Mr. Christoff's paper cites a senior United States military officer saying that "attack levels ebb and flow as the various insurgent groups — almost all of which are an intrinsic part of Iraq's population — re-arm and attack again."

Attacks against Iraqi security forces have grown faster than the overall count; by December 2005 they had grown more than 200 percent since March 2004. Of course, as more Iraqis are trained and put into the field, more of them are targets.

The paper, citing a contracting office in Iraq, said that as attacks had fluctuated downward in the final two months of last year, attacks on convoys related to rebuilding efforts had risen. Twenty convoys had been attacked, with 11 casualties, in October 2005, while 33 convoys had been attacked, with 34 casualties, in January 2006, the paper says.


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company


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Bush head of 'pack of killers'say Indian leftists
AFP 10 Feb 06

The US envoy to India has become embroiled in a new row after he objected to a communist leader calling President George W. Bush the leader of a "pack of killers," a report says.

Ambassador David Mulford, already under attack from India's powerful leftists over recent remarks, drew fresh fire after writing a protest letter to the head of Marxist-ruled West Bengal state about his comments on Bush, The Indian Express said.

West Bengal's chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee riposted with a "strong letter" to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, saying the envoy breached protocol by writing directly to a state government, the newspaper said.
The support of the communist parties, which have accused Mulford of "directly interfering" in India's affairs, is vital to the minority Congress government's survival in the national parliament.

Bhattacharjee called Bush the leader of the "most organised pack of killers in the world" at a rally last month where he also accused the Congress government of pursuing a pro-US foreign policy.

The Indian Express said Mulford told Bhattacharjee in his letter that the eastern state of West Bengal was a key foreign investment destination and such remarks could be detrimental, especially in drawing US investment.

Last month, leftists demanded Mulford's recall after he made comments that prompted a protest from the Indian government.

Mulford had suggested New Delhi could lose out on a landmark nuclear deal with Washington if it did not vote against Iran at a meeting of the UN atomic watchdog, which took place early this month. Mulford later told the government he regretted the Iran comments.

India voted along with 26 other nations to report Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme.

The envoy has also raised hackles for questioning leftists' opposition to the opening of India's retail sector to foreign investment.


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Iraq Coalition Shrinking
AP 9 Feb 06

VIENNA, Austria - The Ukrainians are long gone. So are the Norwegians. The Italians and South Koreans are getting ready to leave, and the Britons and Japanese could begin packing their bags later this year.

Slowly but steadily, America's allies in Iraq are drawing down or pulling out as Iraqi forces take more responsibility for securing the country. By year's end, officials say, the coalition - now 25 nations supporting a dwindling U.S. contingent of 138,000 - may shrink noticeably.
The withdrawals and reductions will test the Iraqis' ability to tamp down attacks and rebuild, said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, warning in a new report: "It is too soon to predict the extent to which Iraqi forces can eventually replace coalition forces."

Britain, with about 8,000 troops in Iraq, is the United States' most important coalition ally. Officials repeatedly have said they hope to begin bringing home some of their troops this year, though Defense Secretary John Reid has played down recent reports that Britain has settled on a timetable for withdrawal.

"We are going to hand over to the Iraqi security forces ... whenever they are ready to defend their own democracy. We are there as long as we are needed and no longer," Reid told The Associated Press in a recent interview in London, stressing that any withdrawal would be done in stages.

On Tuesday, however, he also made clear that "if things in Iraq continue to progress as they are, there will be significantly fewer British forces there by next year."

Poland's new president, Lech Kaczynski, told the AP his country might keep its scaled-down contingent of 900 troops in Iraq into 2007.

But other countries have abandoned the coalition, shrinking the overall size of the force to 157,500, including the 138,000 U.S. troops. The Pentagon says the American contingent has been cut to its lowest level since last summer, when a buildup for election security expanded the U.S. force to about 160,000.

In the months after the March 2003 invasion, the multinational force peaked at about 300,000 soldiers from 38 nations - 250,000 from the United States, about 40,000 from Britain, and the rest ranging from 2,000 Australians to 70 Albanians.

Among the larger contributors to pull out of Iraq was Ukraine, which withdrew its last contingent of 876 troops in December.

Bulgaria also brought home its 380 infantry troops, and though it plans to send in 120 soldiers by mid-March to help guard a refugee camp north of Baghdad, those will be non-combat forces with limited rules of engagement.

Many of the non-U.S. forces are in heavily Kurdish and Shiite regions that are relatively peaceful, unlike Sunni Arab flashpoints where American troops are concentrated.

Key coalition members such as South Korea and Italy - the United States' No. 2 and 3 partners in Iraq after Britain - will begin drawing down this spring.

South Korean officials say they plan to bring home about 1,000 of their 3,270 troops in phases this year from their current base in the northern region of Irbil, where they help train Iraqi security forces and provide security for U.N. officials stationed in the area.

Although a timeframe and details have not been set, the South Korean parliament in December approved the staged drawdown while extending the overall deployment to the end of the year. The South Koreans have not engaged in combat with insurgents, but their deployment nonetheless has been highly unpopular back home.

Italy, which has about 2,600 troops based in the southern city of Nasiriyah, announced last month it would withdraw all its forces by the end of 2006. Officials say the troops will be pulled out gradually and that the current contingent will be roughly halved by June, with civilians replacing soldiers in some tasks.

Japan, which has 600 non-combat troops in Samawah to purify water and carry out other humanitarian tasks, has officially denied media reports that it plans to begin bringing its forces home as early as March, with the withdrawal completed by May.

A staunch supporter of U.S. policy in Iraq, Tokyo dispatched troops there in 2004 in its largest military deployment since World War II, and in December, it extended the mission for a year. However, Japan's Kyodo news agency quoted a senior government official last weekend as saying the country was planning an "exit from Iraq."

Pulling out "is this year's biggest theme," Kyodo quoted Kyoji Yanagisawa as saying in a speech, adding: "At any rate, (Japan's military) will withdraw within several months."

Kyodo also reported, citing Japanese government sources, that diplomats and defense officials from Australia, Britain, Japan and the United States reached a basic agreement on the timing of withdrawals at a secret meeting in London last month.

Reid, the British defense secretary, denied "we've got sneaky plans to cut and run," though he acknowledged meeting with Japan's defense minister last month and that Britain's military has "planned for all contingencies."
Comment: There is a strange disconnect between this report and the recently declassified report (published by the NY Times) that says "Sweeping statistics on insurgent violence in Iraq that were declassified for a Senate hearing on Wednesday appear to portray a rebellion whose ability to mount attacks has steadily grown in the nearly three years since the invasion."

Now, how can it be both that the "Coalition" is withdrawing as the "Iraqi" forces get better, AND that the insurgency is getting worse? Something doesn't compute here.

Notice the last paragraph which very well may reveal the truth: "Reid, the British defense secretary, denied "we've got sneaky plans to cut and run," though he acknowledged meeting with Japan's defense minister last month and that Britain's military has "planned for all contingencies."

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Army Effort to Enlist Hispanics Draws Recruits, and Criticism
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ New York Times 9 Feb 06

DENVER As Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Army's "special missions": to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers.

He approaches a couple of sheepish looking teenage boys in the automotive aisle and seamlessly slides into Spanish, letting loose his pitch: "Have you ever thought about joining the Army?" "Did you know you can get up to $40,000 in bonuses?" "I'm from Mexico, too. Michoacán."

In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Army's top priorities. From 2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent.
The increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years.

Not all Latinos, though, are in step with the military's recruitment goals. In some cities with large Hispanic populations, the focus on recruitment has polarized Latinos, prompting some to organize against recruiters and to help immigrants learn their rights.

Critics say recruiters, who are under pressure to meet quotas, often use their charm and an arsenal of tactics, including repeated calls to a recruit, lunch at a favorite restaurant and trips to the gym. The Army also parades rigged-out, juiced-up Hummers wherever youths gather as promotional tools.

"We see a lot of confusion among immigrant parents, and recruiters are preying on that confusion," said Jorge Mariscal, a Vietnam veteran who is director of the Chicano/Latino Arts and Humanities Program at the University of California, San Diego, and is active in the counterrecruitment movement.

While the military emphasizes that it works to enlist all qualified people, not just Hispanics, military experts say that bringing in more Latinos is overdue. Hispanics have long been underrepresented in the Army and in the military as a whole. While Latinos make up 10.8 percent of the Army's active-duty force, a better rate than the Air Force or Navy, they account for 14 percent of the population as a whole.

Hispanics also make up the fastest-growing pool of military age people in the United States, and they are more likely to complete boot camp and finish their military service, according to a 2004 study on Marine recruitment by CNA, a research group that operates the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research. Recruitment studies show that Hispanics' re-enlistment rates are also the highest among any group of soldiers.

"They are extremely patriotic," said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Brodeur, commanding officer of the Recruitment Battalion covering Colorado, Wyoming, parts of Montana and Nebraska.

That many Latinos in the military are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, typically engenders a sense of gratitude for the United States and its opportunities, something recruiters stress in their pitch.

Poorer and less educated than the average American, some Hispanics view the military as a way to feel accepted. Others enlist for the same reasons that may attract any recruit: the money, the job training, the education benefits and the escape from poverty or small-town life.

Edgar Santana, a skinny 17-year-old senior who recently hovered around the Army recruiting table at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs, said he was attracted by all those reasons, despite the war in Iraq. "I get the freedoms, and I can enjoy them, so I believe I have to pay back that debt," Mr. Santana said.

Tony Mendoza Jr., 18, a senior at North High School in Denver, has already enlisted in the Army and will enter boot camp this summer. For him, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were what drove him into boots. "My parents think I'm going to go in the Army and die, but I wanted to do it," Mr. Mendoza said.

Patriotism alone, though, does not account for the rise in Hispanic enlistment. The increase has gone hand in hand with a vast Army marketing campaign that includes Spanish-language advertisements on Univision and Telemundo, the country's two largest Spanish-language networks, and on the radio and in Hispanic publications. The budget for this campaign has increased by at least $55 million in four years.

The Army has also expanded a small pilot project that allows 200 Latinos each year to undergo rigorous English language classes and then retake the Army qualifications tests. Ten cities now offer that option, up from five.

Recruiters have noticeably stepped up their presence in schools and neighborhoods with Hispanic populations. "You see them today where you would never see them three or four years ago," said Rick Jahnkow, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and non-Military Opportunities in San Diego.

In addition, the Army has made better use of bilingual recruiters to reach out to Latino communities. In the Colorado area, the number of bilingual recruiters has increased in the past 18 months to 13 from 4.

Recognizing the importance of family and its weight in the process is crucial in Hispanic families, recruiters say. Since a mother's approval can make or break a deal, recruiters spend considerable time with Latino families. They have dinner, chat often on the telephone and remain patient. They even attend local Latino churches.

Sgt. First Class Luis M. Galicia, a bilingual recruiter based in Colorado Springs, is always quick to say he was born in Mexico and raised, on little money, in California. He and his family picked grapes for extra cash. He says that his experience helps him connect.; "there is a trust issue."

One incentive meant to appeal to this community, President Bush's 2002 executive order that permits legal residents in the military to apply for citizenship within one year, as opposed to three years, has actually done little to entice Latinos. In fact, the number of Army soldiers who are not citizens has declined since 2002 to 2,447 last year from 3,312. The same is true for enlistments.

Simply speeding up the application process for people already in this country legally does not seem to provide enough incentive to counter the risks of joining up in a time of war.

The recruitment campaign has in fact divided the Latino community. Some of the country's high-profile Latino organizations, like the League of United Latin American Citizens, support the military's efforts, viewing it as an important path to socioeconomic advancement.

"The fact that Latinos are underrepresented in the service causes us concern because the service is often a way to the middle class for many immigrants," said Brent Wilkes, national director of the league. "If you don't have a lot of options, would you rather go into the service and get a middle-class career, or stay in the fields all these years?"

But community activists in places like California and Puerto Rico call that logic wrongheaded. "This is not the time to sign up," said Sonia Santiago, a psychologist and a counterrecruiter in Puerto Rico who founded Mothers Against the War after her son, a marine, was sent to Iraq in 2003. Dr. Santiago has routinely confronted recruiters outside schools. "Those benefits don't mean anything, if they are buried or sick for the rest of their lives," she said.

Critics also say that Latinos often wind up as cannon fodder on the casualty-prone front lines. African-Americans saw the same thing happen during the 1970's and 1980's, an accusation that still reverberates. Hispanics make up only 4.7 percent of the military's officer corps.

"The fear is that the military is going to try to replace, consciously or unconsciously, African-Americans with Hispanics," said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland.

For bilingual recruiters, tapping into the Latino population has its own set of frustrations. Often, Latinos are willing to join the Army, but cannot. During his rounds at the Wal-Mart, Sergeant Barron encountered a number of illegal immigrants; they are immediately disqualified. Other Latinos lack adequate English skills or high school degrees, he said.

In the past year, a Latino counterrecruitment movement has arisen in several major cities with the goal of blunting what organizers call overly aggressive and suggestive recruitment in Latino neighborhoods. Some critics say recruiters sometimes gloss over the risks and mislead potential recruits and their parents. Latino parents, especially those who speak little English and know little about the military, are especially susceptible to a recruiter's persistence and charm, critics say.

Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son was a marine and died in Iraq in 2003, founded Aztec Warrior Project for Peace to help counsel Latinos on the military. He said he often encountered parents who did not understand the intricacies of the process. One set of parents in Southern California, he said, mistakenly signed papers allowing their 17-year-old to join the military on his 18th birthday, believing that the government required military service, something the recruiter did not clarify.

Michael I. Marsh, a lawyer who represents migrant workers in Oxnard, Calif., said he wrote a letter to a local recruitment battalion last year after a 17-year-old's parents signed off on his Army Reserve enlistment at 18. The parents told him they were under the impression that they were signing to authorize a physical exam and blood work. When the youth later tried to nullify the contract, he was told it was too late and that if he tried to pull out, he would be ineligible for school money and federal employment.

After Mr. Marsh sent the letter, the teenager was allowed to withdraw his enlistment, Mr. Marsh said. Military contracts are not binding until a person takes a second oath of enlistment.

"The recruiter does not lie, but he does not tell the whole truth," Mr. Suarez said. "If you don't know the question to ask, you don't get the information. With language and cultural differences, it's complicated."

S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army's recruiting command, said that the Army investigated allegations of misconduct and that, while recruiters were expected to encourage people to enlist, they must be honest about risks and benefits.

"Given the fact that we are a nation at war, recruiters have to be up front about the risks," he said.


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Iraq rebuilding costs 'much higher' than $56B
By Judy Mathewson Bloomberg News Service 9 Feb 06

WASHINGTON -- Iraq will need more money to rebuild than the $56 billion forecast by the World Bank and the United Nations in 2003, two government watchdogs said.

"That number in fact will be much higher," Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, told a congressional panel Wednesday. He didn't cite a new estimate.
Insurgent attacks, looting, and sabotage are increasing war recovery costs. Iraq's water, sewer, and electricity systems are in worse shape than previously thought, Bowen and Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs for the U.S. Government Accountability Office, both said. Iraq's oil refineries and pipelines also need repairs, they told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The World Bank, the United Nations and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority estimated in 2003 that Iraq's reconstruction needs through 2007 would be about $56 billion. The U.S. authorized $18.4 billion for Iraq rebuilding, with an expectation that other countries and companies would contribute to the total, along with Iraqi oil revenue.

Iraq's ability to help pay for rebuilding will depend on the new government's success in boosting revenue from crude oil exports, reducing energy and food subsidies, paying for a growing security force and making payments to international creditors and victims of the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Christoff said.

Iraqi officials are having problems producing and refining oil and protecting refineries and pipelines from attacks and estimate that the country will need more money to achieve its production goals, Christoff said.

"The irony is that the oil, which was prophesied by many who came before this committee as the way you pay for all of it, doesn't pay for all of it," Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., the committee's chairman, said of the invasion and reconstruction costs.

Iraq pumped 1.53 million barrels of crude a day in January, according to Bloomberg estimates. The average output during the past five years was 1.92 million barrels a day because of higher production before the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's dictatorship.

International donors have provided about $2.7 billion of $13.6 billion pledged for Iraqi reconstruction, Christoff said.

"We're pushing real hard on the Kuwaitis and the Saudis, for example, who between them pledged $1 billion, and we haven't seen very much of that yet," James Jeffrey, a senior State Department adviser on Iraq, testified.

Jeffrey said that when Japan, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and "just two or three of the Arab countries that have pledged the most" make good, there will be an additional $3 billion or $4 billion flowing into Iraq.


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Iraq's basic services are worse now than before war began
By James Glanz The New York Times 9 Feb 06

WASHINGTON Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below pre-invasion values, even though $16 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses have told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Of seven different measures of infrastructure performance presented Wednesday at the committee hearing by the inspector general's office, only one was above pre-invasion values.

Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production and the numbers of Iraqis with drinkable water and sewage service.

In addition, two of the witnesses said they believed that an earlier estimate by the World Bank that $56 billion would be needed for rebuilding over the next several years was too low.

At the same time, as Iraq's oil exports are plummeting and the country remains saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt, it is unclear where that money will come from, said one of the witnesses, Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office.

And those may not be the most serious problems facing the physical infrastructure, said Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office.

In one sense, focusing on the plummeting performance numbers "misses the point," Bowen said. The real question, he said, is whether the Iraqi security forces will ever be able to protect the infrastructure from insurgent attack.

"What's happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs," Bowen said. He added that some of the performance numbers had fluctuated above prewar values in the past, only to fall again under the pressure of insurgent attacks and other factors.

The chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, began by billing the session as a way of deciphering how much of America's original ambitions in the rebuilding program were likely to be fulfilled with the amount of money that Iraq, the U.S. Congress and international donors were still prepared to spend.

This downsizing of expectations was striking given that $30 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, according to an analysis by Christoff of the GAO.

Bowen's office has pointed out that another $40 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets of Saddam Hussein's regime had also been made available for reconstruction at one time or another.


Last week, Robert J. Stein Jr., one of four former U.S. government officials in Iraq who have been arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving that money, pleaded guilty to federal charges.

WASHINGTON Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below pre-invasion values, even though $16 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses have told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Of seven different measures of infrastructure performance presented Wednesday at the committee hearing by the inspector general's office, only one was above pre-invasion values.

Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production and the numbers of Iraqis with drinkable water and sewage service.

In addition, two of the witnesses said they believed that an earlier estimate by the World Bank that $56 billion would be needed for rebuilding over the next several years was too low.

At the same time, as Iraq's oil exports are plummeting and the country remains saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt, it is unclear where that money will come from, said one of the witnesses, Joseph Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office.

And those may not be the most serious problems facing the physical infrastructure, said Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office.

In one sense, focusing on the plummeting performance numbers "misses the point," Bowen said. The real question, he said, is whether the Iraqi security forces will ever be able to protect the infrastructure from insurgent attack.

"What's happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs," Bowen said. He added that some of the performance numbers had fluctuated above prewar values in the past, only to fall again under the pressure of insurgent attacks and other factors.

The chairman of the foreign relations committee, Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, began by billing the session as a way of deciphering how much of America's original ambitions in the rebuilding program were likely to be fulfilled with the amount of money that Iraq, the U.S. Congress and international donors were still prepared to spend.

This downsizing of expectations was striking given that $30 billion of U.S. taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, according to an analysis by Christoff of the GAO.

Bowen's office has pointed out that another $40 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets of Saddam Hussein's regime had also been made available for reconstruction at one time or another.

Last week, Robert J. Stein Jr., one of four former U.S. government officials in Iraq who have been arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving that money, pleaded guilty to federal charges.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune


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Gasoline Crisis in Iraq
by Pratap Chatterjee Special to CorpWatch February 8th, 2006

Contract mismanagement and possible corruption in the Iraqi government are fueling a crisis over international gasoline delivery into Iraq. Citing a mountain of unpaid bills, the governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia have shut off gasoline exports to Iraq. With its options dwindling and beleaguered Iraqis demanding fuel, Baghdad has begun to negotiate with former arch-rival, Iran. Meanwhile, hundreds of irate Iraqi security guards, who work for the gasoline delivery companies, are threatening to protest along the Kuwait border to demand payment.

Government officials in Baghdad and Washington claim that the cause of the gasoline shortage is "insurgent" or "terrorist" activity but the trucking companies say that the problem is often corruption and common criminal activity.
Iraq's gasoline comes from two sources: domestic refineries process a limited amount of the nation's crude into gasoline, but it is imports from neighboring nations that run most of the country's vehicles and generators. Saudi Arabia and Turkey supply more than half of Iraq's domestic needs. In August 2005, after Iraq's debt rose into the millions, Saudi Arabia turned off the spigot. On January 21st, after Baghdad's unpaid bill topped a billion dollars, Turkey stopped loading gasoline for Iraq.

The supply from Kuwait is also drying up. Lloyd-Owen International (LOI), a Florida-based company, had arranged to truck in 1.3 billion liters of gasoline from the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation to gas stations throughout Iraq over the last 19 months. On February 2, Alan Waller, chief executive officer of LOI, stopped supplies to Baghdad because of payment arrears. By this weekend, Iraq's imports had plummeted from the previous norm of 12 million liters a day to three million.

In a strongly worded letter he emailed to this weekend to Thomas Delare, the economic counselor at the United States embassy in Baghdad, Waller wrote: "The government of Iraq is unwilling to pay what is correctly owed us or even meet to discuss and that we cannot get any assistance from the U.S. administration in order to help. As such, I can only step back and pull all my international staff out of Iraq for their own safety and let the Iraqi people deal with the situation in their own way."

Waller claimed that the government of Iraq has illegally canceled his contract and is now negotiating with a different U.S. company, Global Network Transportation, to deliver fuel in Iraq. The non-payment has infuriated the Iraqi security guards on LOI's payroll, who threaten to line 400 trucks along the one-lane highway from Iraq to Kuwait to blockade the border.

In late 2003, local suppliers were charging 96 cents a gallon to purchase and deliver gasoline while Halliburton of Houston, Texas, charged an average of $2.65 a gallon for the same service via its sub-contractor Altanmia Commercial Marketing Company. In spring 2004, shortly before the country was handed over to the Iraqis, the U.S. military said the contract was too expensive and canceled it.

The new Iraqi government then awarded an identical gasoline supply contract to LOI and its partners, Geotech Environmental Services of Kuwait. LOI charged one-seventh of Altanmia's price for delivery, a mere 18 cents a gallon compared to the premium that the military had paid Halliburton previously.

Waller says LOI has delivered 37,000 tankers of gasoline throughout Iraq over the last 19 months "without losing a single tanker to insurgent or terrorist activity," unlike Halliburton 's convoys which were frequently attacked. LOI/Geotech's contract was supposed to run through June 2006, but is now in doubt.

Production Slump

To make matters worse, sabotage and cold weather have plunged Iraq's own oil production and refining into crisis. Despite sitting on the world's third biggest oil reserves, Iraq's exports slumped from a high of 2.1 million barrels per day just 1.1 million barrels a day in December, their lowest level since the war in 2003.

This slide, together with the delivery crisis, has led to major gasoline shortages in Baghdad, where vulnerable drivers wait in quarter-mile-long lines. The capital's erratic electricity has exacerbated the problem by forcing people to run to gas-hungry generators to keep the lights on and the air conditioning running in their houses and stores.

No matter what else was wrong under Saddam Hussein, gasoline and kerosene cooking oil were always available and cheap. The U.S. government maintained this policy of supplying gasoline at just 20 cents a gallon, well below its actual cost. But the cash-strapped Iraqi government has recently changed that policy, tripling gasoline prices at the end of the year, under pressure from the International Monetary Fund. This price hike has become a major source of anger but it bought Baghdad a $685 million IMF loan on December 24, 2005.

Contention over the price increase split the ministry of oil, which is supposed to oversee production and distribution. Iraq's oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum was first asked to leave his post in late December 2005, when he protested the fuel price increase.

Although al-Ulum returned to his job in early January, a week ago the government again asked him to resign.

Refinery Attacks

Blame for the crisis spreads as easily as oil in a puddle. Government officials in Baghdad and Washington charge that corrupt mid- and low-level officials are collaborating with "insurgents" who have created chaos by attacking domestic fuel convoys and pipelines and siphoning off supplies to sell at a profit.

Ali Allawi, Iraq's finance minister, was quoted in the February 4 New York Times saying that 40 to 50 percent of all oil-smuggling profits in the country are diverted away from the government. By infiltrating senior management positions at the major northern refinery in Baiji and threatening truck drivers, insurgents have been able to tap into pipelines, empty trucks, and sell the oil or gas themselves, he says.

Old fashioned corruption has made matters worse. Theft was rife at the Baiji refinery Radhi Hamza al-Radhi, said the chair of Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity. One example is an Iraqi member of parliament from the Conciliation and Liberation Bloc, Meshaan al-Juburi, who stole money earmarked for armed security he promised to provide, according to the New York Times.

Jubiri's tribe is powerful in Salahuddin Province, through which the oil pipeline from Baiji runs. He has since fled the country and is now believed living in Syria.

In another incident, the director of a major oil storage plant near Kirkuk was arrested this weekend with other employees and several local police officials. They were charged with helping to orchestrate a March 2 mortar attack on the plant, a Northern Oil Company employee told the New York Times.

But Waller told CorpWatch that while "terrorist" groups are responsible for many violent attacks, the main problem is criminal gangs and poor people trying to survive. "This country is like Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union."

"Members of the U.S. military have said on CNN that long fuel lines in Baghdad are due to insurgent activity - not true," the LOI executive says. The real problem is "very simple. Lack of payment is forcing Iraq into chaos and corruption."

Indeed al-Ulum, the former oil minister, told the London-based newspaper Al Hayat late last year that "oil and fuel smuggling networks have grown into a dangerous mafia threatening the lives of those in charge of fighting corruption" according to a BBC translation.

Working on a Resolution

With gasoline supplies dwindling and anger growing, Washington and Baghdad are scrambling to return Iraq to what passes for normal. Iraqi oil ministry officials say that the payments will resume soon. "The oil ministry is working with the government in order to speed up the payment process. There is no problem. It is just a matter of time and the money will be paid," ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told reporters.

U.S. embassy officials are more pessimistic. "I scheduled to have some high level meetings in the next several days with Ministry of Oil officials," Delare wrote to Waller on February 6. "I wish I had encouraging news for you, but despite our efforts to resolve the payments arrears problems, we have had no success so far," the embassy economic counselor in Baghdad added.

In an e-mail update to CorpWatch, Delare added: "The fuel situation is regarded as a very serious matter that is prompting daily contact between embassy and the government at all levels -- from the ambassador and his counterparts to more technical staff and their interlocutors."

But officials in Baghdad do have another fallback plan -- their one-time arch enemy, Iran, which is close to the current Iraqi government. Indeed this subject was discussed as far back as last July when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari visited Tehran, a prospect that mystifies Waller given the ongoing political disputes between Iran and the U.S. government.

"Due to payment issues and the fuel problems the U.S. backed government of Iraq is now seeking to purchase and import fuel from Iran, and Najaf is the new Iranian capital of Iraq," Alan Waller, chief executive officer LOI, wrote on February 4th, to the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.


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Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!
By revcom.us

Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan... testified that his government and the American government were OK with receiving intelligence reports that had been obtained by torture in Uzbekistan. His superiors in the British foreign service said to him that, "we don't mind as long as we didn't ask them to do that. We can still receive this information." Murray then added, "After I heard that, I understood how some clerk could sign off on these cattle cars that were going to Auschwitz."

That's really what is at stake, Judge Jabara pointed out. "The use of this torture, the beginning of all these black sites — all of these things are the road to Auschwitz."
It was a historic moment at the National Press Club in Washington, only blocks from the White House. On February 2, the preliminary findings of the International Commission on Crimes Against Humanity were read out by Ajamu Sankofa, executive director of the Physicians for Social Responsibility-NY and former national secretary of Blacks for Reparations in America.

Listening to the verdicts, Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, exclaimed: "This is what our German forbearers in the 1930s did NOT do. They sat around, blamed their rulers, said 'maybe everything's going to be alright.'... That is something we cannot do. Because I don't want my grandchildren asking me years from now, 'why didn't you do something to stop all this?'"

The findings were based on five days of public testimony in New York in October and January. The work of the Commission brought together a unique combination of former government officials, experts in international law, human rights monitors in the relevant areas, and victims of the crimes under investigation. It was a Commission of great legal, ethical, and moral credibility based on its integrity, its rigor in the presentation of evidence, and the stature of its participants.

On the first charge of committing wars of aggression, the Commission found: "The evidence is overwhelming that the Bush Administration authorized and is conducting a war of aggression against Iraq in violation of international law, including The Nuremberg Principles, Geneva Conventions of 1949, the United Nations Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In doing so, the Bush Administration has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity."

Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter was a compelling witness before the Commission on this issue. Ritter led the investigation into the defection of Sadam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel:

"Dick Cheney said because of Hussein Kamel's defection the United Nations, indeed the United States, received evidence that Iraq was actively reconstituting its nuclear weapons program... Dick Cheney was lying. Dick Cheney knew that he was lying.... But it is evidence that the Bush administration willfully exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq's WMDs, thereby negating any case they might make about the existence of a clear and present threat that warranted pre-emptive attack."

The actual conduct of the war was also a major issue investigated by the Commission, especially the destruction of the city of Fallujah using white phosphorous and hyperbaric bombs. The Commission saw film of the bombing of civilians in Fallujah that was truly damning. Shown was the pilot's camera trained on the ground where people were running in the street. The pilot asks his controller, "shall I take them out?" And the controller says, "Yes." The pilot kept a laser focused on the crowd until a guided bomb exploded in the middle of the running crowd.

The destruction of Fallujah, a city of over 300,000 people, in retaliation for the death of four U.S. mercenaries, was a vivid reenactment of a historic war crime — the destruction of the Czechoslovakian village of Lidice in 1942 by the Nazis in retaliation for the assassination of a high Nazi official.

On the indictment for illegal detention and torture, the Commission found: "There was substantial evidence submitted through testimony and documents that the Bush Administration committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in conducting its 'War Against Terror.' It did this by developing and implementing policies and practices that violated international law and international human rights to force information from detainees and to punish those whom it believes may be 'enemy combatants.'"

Barbara Olshansky, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Commission of an August 2002 memo written for Alberto Gonzales, now Attorney General: "It talks about what the traditional definitions of torture are... and it says that a very good case can be made for redefining torture. And the definition that is recommended in that memo is that torture really is only when someone is at the risk of complete organ failure or death. And that is a new definition of torture in the United States according to this administration. Then the memo proceeds to...examine all the ways that the government could avoid liability, even if its actions meet that definition of torture. It is a staggering document..."

The results of such "legal theories" by the U.S. government at the very top were described by Brig. General Janis Karpinski (U.S. Army ret.), the former commandant of the infamous Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq. After photographs of the torture of prisoners there were revealed, Gen. Karpinski entered the cell block where this happened and found a memo attached to the wall calling for harsher interrogation techniques and signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In the margin was handwritten: "Make sure this happens!!" Karpinski went on to testify that a high-ranking general demanded that Iraqi prisoners be "treated like dogs."

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, provided particularly chilling testimony on the horrible forms of torture used by the U.S.'s 'Coalition of Willing' and declared, in a very moving moment, "I'd rather die than have someone tortured to save my life."

On the indictment for destruction of the global environment: "The testimony of scientists and the scientific reports and other documents submitted during the inquiry support a conclusion that the Bush Administration has committed crimes against humanity by its environmental policies and practices."

Daphne Wysham, from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network gave a searing example: "On June 8, 2005, the New York Times, through whistle-blower Rick Pilz, exposed [White House official Philip] Cooney as the primary censor of climate change policy documents at the highest levels of government. Two days later, Cooney resigned... Cooney and his staff's edits were pervasive with 100 to 450 changes per report, and shameless. Among the topics the government doesn't want you to know about are the national and regional impacts from climate changes, consequences like glacial melting and floods."

On the indictment for the destruction of New Orleans: "The evidence of the Bush Administration's conscious and deliberate failings in preventing the foreseeable devastation, including death toll, caused by Hurricane Katrina, particularly in New Orleans, and its failure to respond efficiently and appropriately after the Hurricane was overwhelming. Its failures constitute crimes against humanity."

The Commission heard stunning testimony that the government knew full well that New Orleans would be inundated in a major hurricane, and the President himself knew two days in advance that Katrina would hit New Orleans. But no efforts were made to evacuate the predominantly poor and Black masses of the city. As a result, over 1,300 people died on the Gulf Coast with over 3,000 still missing.

Annette Addison, a Katrina survivor, told her personal story to the Commission: "So many Army trucks just was driving past us. We even waved for the Army trucks to help us because we were so desperate. We was dehydrated. They did not give us any assistance. We even asked the police for water, and where we could get gas to get out of the city. The police just looked at us like we was nobody, as though we were nothing. Many were going into the stores, and they said they were looters. But to be honest, they was going into stores to survive. It was people helping people.It was not the Army, it was not the police. It was not the ones that were in authority to help us. It was just the community helping each other to survive."

At the February 2 press conference to release the Commission's preliminary findings, three of the five Commission judges were present, along with Commission Convener C. Clark Kissinger. In presenting the preliminary findings (more findings will be presented later), the judges were emphatic about the criminality of the Bush administration.

Judge Ann Wright, 29-year Army reserve colonel with 16 years in the State Department as former deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, Mongolia, Sierra Leone, and Micronesia:

"I believe the Commission is incredibly important for the future of the United States and really the world, because it's the people of America who are speaking to these very serious indictments. It's the people who are coming forward with evidence, their personal testimony in many cases of things that have happened to them, or cases of their lawyers, cases they have worked, the human face of what torture is all about, what detention is about, what war is all about — a war that's conducted the invasion and occupation of a country that did nothing to the United States of America."

Judge Abdeen Jabara, board member of the Center for Constitutional Rights and past president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee:

"People who launch a war of aggression are in violation of international law, have committed crimes against humanity, and that is the kind of discourse we need to introduce into the United States... the use of torture in the press often reported as "abuse" rather than torture. Of course, there is no international convention for the prevention of abuse, but there is an international convention for the prevention of torture. So we need to change the way in which these items are talked about in order to get people to face up to the fact of what this government is doing."

Judge Jabara closed by pointing to the profound significance of what Craig Murray, the British ambassador to Uzbekistan, had said. Murray testified that his government and the American government were OK with receiving intelligence reports that had been obtained by torture in Uzbekistan. His superiors in the British foreign service said to him that, "we don't mind as long as we didn't ask them to do that. We can still receive this information." Murray then added, "After I heard that, I understood how some clerk could sign off on these cattle cars that were going to Auschwitz." That's really what is at stake, Jabara pointed out. "The use of this torture, the beginning of all these black sites — all of these things are the road to Auschwitz."


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House Committee Squashes Torture Queries - US "On the Road to Auschwitz"
By WILLIAM C. MANN Associated Press 8 Feb 06

Republicans easily defeated three resolutions seeking information about the Bush administration's policies on torture after a heated committee hearing.

Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said Democrats who submitted the resolutions should "at least silently confess to themselves that their actions pose real dangers to our country."
Hyde accused Democrats of playing politics, with an eye on November's congressional elections, by offering the three resolutions demanding:

-Information on a practice that has been called extraordinary rendition, or sending suspects abroad to countries where they would allegedly be tortured for information.

-Documents about U.S. policies regarding U.N. anti-torture conventions.

-Documents and records involving Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's December trip to Europe, during which she was dogged by reports of alleged secret European jails.

All three proposed resolutions were defeated on almost straight party-line votes.

The committee's senior Democrat, Rep. Tom Lantos of California, denied Hyde's accusations of partisan motivation.
Comment: And so will everything else go... There is no possibility whatsoever of defeating The Beast the the United States has become by political means. Remember that the Neocons own the press, the military, the judiciary, and the voting machines.

Yes, it really IS that bad.

See HERE for what YOU Can Do.

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Bush waged Iraq war by "cherry-picking" intelligence: former CIA official
AFP 10 Feb 06

A former CIA official who coordinated US intelligence on the Middle East has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, The Washington Post reports.

The newspaper said Paul Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, also accused the administration of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."
Pillar said mistakes made by US intelligence agencies in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction did not drive the administration's decision to invade, according to The Post.

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

The paper said Pillar was an influential behind-the-scenes player and was considered the agency's leading counterterrorism analyst.

By the end of his career, he was responsible for coordinating assessments on Iraq from all 15 agencies in the intelligence community. He is now a professor in security studies at Georgetown University.

In his article, he said he believes that the "politicization" of intelligence on Iraq occurred "subtly" and in many forms, but almost never resulted from a policymaker directly asking an analyst to reshape his or her results, the report said.

Instead, Pillar describes a process in which the White House helped frame intelligence results by repeatedly posing questions aimed at bolstering its arguments about Iraq, The Post said.

The Bush administration, Pillar wrote, "repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war," including information on the "supposed connection" between Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which analysts had discounted.


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The Bolivarian Revolution: A Movement of Hope and Threat
By Manuel Valenzuela ICH 9 Feb 06

The Winds of Change

The warming winds of true democracy have been spreading from the tip of Patagonia to the shores of the Rio Grande, traversing all lands in between, with the will of the People trumping the wishes of the Empire. These winds carry within them elections of hope and fury, marked by loud voices and uncompromised ballots, devoid of charades and mirages, lacking Diebold electronic voting machines and corporate media manipulation. In many nations the masses have spoken in symphony, their united desires echoing long suffering frustrations and near-extinct opportunities, their once-silent calls for justice and equality finally given resonance.
The Bolivarian Revolution these warming winds are called, becoming the last vestiges of People Power in the Americas. Rising in hope and hovering above the homes and lives of hundreds of millions of Latin Americans, the warming winds are giving comfort to a new day, making warm once cold societies, their speed gaining momentum, their power altering governments and economic policies, becoming, in the minds of millions in Latin America and billions worldwide, the inspiration for a new world, a new direction for human civilization, an opportunity to escape that which is destroying both planet and human societies.

Inside its borders exists the hope of positive change, of escaping the omnipotent and corrosive claws of American imperialism, with its devastating, unfettered capitalism, destroyer of Earth’s environments, exploiter of human flesh and energy, and corrupter of our minds, transforming us into selfish, consumerist, materialist, unthinking, psychologically fragile and unhappy greed mongers bred to pray to our new god, the Almighty Dollar. Inside the lands where the Revolution is spreading hope transcends past transgressions, becoming a movement to benefit all people, regardless of wealth, social class or skin color, using the resources of the land and the talents of the people to empower the nation and the communal aspirations of the citizenry.

Inside jungles and forests a movement of justice and equality has begun to replace the exploitation, corruption and abandonment inherent in American capitalism. Slowly eroding from the nations of the Revolution are the inherent injustices and pervasive inequality that befell the vast majority of the citizenry. Free of economic warfare hindering its growth and evolution, not chained by embargoes or sanctions, allowed to become a shining example to observe and follow, nations inside the Revolution have begun to showcase the benefits of 21st century social democracies, where priorities are given not to the profiteering of the military industrial complex or to the Swiss bank accounts of the white elite but rather to the empowerment of the lives of the masses through equality in education, healthcare, opportunity, infrastructure and resources, thereby eliminating the inequality and injustice that is branded on a child at birth, forever to scar him or her, robbing them of opportunity, eroding their talents and eviscerating fates and futures.

A new paradigm shift is occurring in Latin America with the resentment accumulated over decades of government rape, pillage and apathy of the citizenry creating a wave of desired change; the pilferage of their lands and resources, along with the exploitation and enslavement by American corporations has resulted in Revolution peaceful and evolved, with hundreds of millions strong using the ballot over the bayonet, their voices over violence. From the lands of South America a new movement grows, a new Revolution has risen, sweeping across the continent, embracing justice and equality, exterminating exploitation and enslavement.

A transformation of the Americas is upon us, beautiful to behold and admire, its winds of change flowing uninterrupted and powerful, its winds of change flowing from right to left, from American sponsored right-wing puppets to progressive, social democracy, gaining momentum, grasping peoples hopes and dreams, their lives and futures. The voices of the unheard, unwanted and undesirable have been listened to; their will finally allowed to be counted, their votes finally trumping the corruption of the elites and the clandestine manipulations of the Empire.

Like a domino effect each election result in distinct lands inhabited with diverse peoples has sent a resounding thunderbolt of rejection to the imperialistic bully named America, a clear message that its near enslavement and exploitation of both lands of peoples of the south has gone on for far too long. Election after election has demolished colonial proctors and puppets, so-called leaders catering only to their own wallets, that of the nation’s white elite and the market colonialist desires of the Empire. Like powerful blows to the midsection, each clear electoral victory has weakened the interests of America in the region, softening up its legions of exploiters and criminals and puppets now impotent to ruin millions of lives.

The power of the People has spoken, its triumph having become a victory for humanity and a strike against market colonialism, now seen as an inspiration for billions and a threat to America. Contrary to the interests of George W. Bush and his corporatist cabal, the region’s peoples have shown that, when given a real opportunity for true democracy, they will vote according to their own indigenous interests and not those of neoliberal principles and of market colonialist America. They have shown that it is not the evils of neoliberal and American imposed capitalism which they seek, but rather policies that will make their lives better, giving them meaning, happiness and an opportunity to push forward, past insurmountable barriers purposefully erected to hinder upper mobility and into futures full of promise.

The last few years have demonstrated that if allowed to escape the grip of American manipulation and meddling, democracy in Latin American nations results in the interests of the masses quashing those of the elite few, in elections clean and uncompromised, not those fixed and corrupt, altering the balance of power and giving hope to those tens of millions for decades subjugated by the rich few to the margins of society, relegated to live in shanty towns and shacks, making anywhere from two to eight dollars a day, their lives devoid of futures and opportunity, their existence marginalized and ignored, their children destined to never escape and always live in perpetual purgatory. Now, thanks to democracy true and honorable, there exists the hope, the possibility of a better life to millions upon million of Latin Americans, giving birth to new energy and vitality, new chances at escape from hell on Earth, becoming an opportunity for a better and more fruitful tomorrow.

Today there exist the winds of change, flowing freely from Caracas to Santiago to La Paz, from Argentina to Uruguay to Mexico, traversing mountains and canyons, forests and jungles, toppling puppets and criminals, becoming a power threatening to liberate an entire continent, eviscerating the shackles of labor exploitation and incessant poverty with the hammer of justice and equality, becoming the fire burning inside the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Latin Americans whose lives have forever been made destitute of life, energy and wallet both by the corrosive grip of American imperialism and the enslavement and marginalization by the minority white elite.

It has been through the ballot box, through the principle of one person, one vote – that great invention of times past – that today’s Bolivarian Revolution can be seen and felt, with little blood spilled on the streets, with little violence impregnating our humanity and with the human condition contained, its many insidious demons refrained from possessing the human animal. The Bolivarian Revolution is an enlightened revolution, an evolved form of human change, growing out of frustration and resentment and anger, yet achieved peacefully and in solidarity, using the power of the vote over that of armed resistance, toppling puppets and Empire’s proctors not by violence but through the united voice of the People. In nations where democracy is not yet a charade or a hollow mirage hiding inside the corruption of electronic voting, revolutions of this kind are still possible.

At the dawn of the 21st century the Bolivarian Revolution has been born, altering the landscape of Latin America’s tomorrow, growing out of economic deficiency, natural resource pillage, government inefficiency, human exploitation and near enslavement, the reality of life for hundreds of millions of human beings and from American imperialism, slowly but surely eroding the devastating scorched earth and people policy of American capitalism along with the neoliberal mechanisms that act only to institute market colonialism on the nations of the south, replacing it with a system designed to make better the lives of countless millions through policies paid for by the profits of the nation and the resources of the land, creating a society based on sustainable development and human prosperity, both of happiness and fate.

Having morphed from modern day socialist thought, from the reality of failed neoliberalism, from lessons learned and mistakes recorded, from untarnished democracy, from today’s communalism and yesteryear’s capitalism, the Bolivarian Revolution has become a beacon of hope to hundreds of millions whose lives and futures have never been allowed to prosper, perhaps replacing America’s ever-dimming light as the new oasis of optimism, becoming the new system of governance for the 21st century, one for the People, not the Powerful, for Humans, not Corporations.

This new beacon on a hill will in the next few years and decades change societies and the lives of millions, taking national profits and the wealth of resources and giving them, not to the elite, but to everyone, offering hope to the indigent, opportunity to the talented, a future to the innocent, health to the sick, education to the ignorant, food for the hungry, homes for the homeless, justice to the marginalized, equality to all and increased prosperity to the nation as a whole. Its evolution might one day take humanity on a voyage we never thought possible. This is the Bolivarian Revolution.


The Sorrows of the Americas


For five-hundred years Latin America has been the stomping ground of the region’s elite, the vast majority descendants of Europeans, white in skin color yet dark in empathy, lacking the will to care for tens of millions of fellow human beings living in destitute surroundings and insufferable consequences. For centuries this elite has been a slave driver, using and abusing the masses for its continued control and power, using the energy and labor of peasants to increase its wealth. For centuries the oppression has been relentless, only changing in its mechanisms and in its evolution. This is the story of Latin America since 1492, a region whose peoples and lands have for centuries been exploited for their energy and pillaged of their wealth for the benefit of the elite and northern colonial governments and businesses.

From the very beginning white elites, tracing their lineage to Europe, were granted the keys to prosperity, their ethnicity granting them preferences to wealth and power, access to business and governance, over the years passing down their wealth and power to new generations. Thus, white Latin Americans never saw poverty, never suffered hunger or thirst, never toiled in miserable work and never earned their wealth. From the beginning of their ascendancy, their wealth was born in sin, in the dispossession of land and the exploitation of human energy, in the destruction of land, in the abuse of human beings and the exportation of slave products. Given huge tracts of land, possessing enormous resources, owning all aspects of government and business, white Latin Americans became owners of the Americas and masters to its inhabitants, destined to forever expand wealth, exploit humanity, control government and have possession of all aspects of Latin American society. Since Conquest, nothing has changed.

Meanwhile those born with indigenous traces, in skin color or facial features, were condemned to become the slaves of the wealthy, toiling, bleeding, sweating and crying for the fortunes of the few, miserably surviving day to day, fed the crumbs and the bones left behind by the elite, chained to castes created to serve the interests of the rich, forever passing onto their descendants the burden of perpetual indigence and the fatalism that their kind would never leave the destiny placed at their door by governments whose sole function was enriching the white elite that controlled the nation.

Hundreds of millions of human beings have purposefully been kept indigent, both in mind and resources, the control over their lives as pervasive as the level of poverty they must endure, from cradle to grave. Like tranquil cattle they are corralled into shantytowns and cesspools of poverty, unable to escape thanks to enormous yet invisible walls of segregation designed to separate the elite few from the poor masses. Hundreds of millions in the region are kept in perpetual squalor through the inability to escape their allotted caste, whether through anemic education, brainwash Catholicism and incessant employment discrimination.

The system has always been and is still designed to maintain the delicate balance between a very small minority of elite and a giant wave of poor peasants. This balance is protected by government itself, created, controlled and operated by an elite that has never relinquished power and control. As such, the elite keep getting richer, with wealth coming from the sweat, blood and tears of the masses, while the poor keep getting poorer. In fact, the vast majority of Latin Americans live on an average of less than six dollars per day, with tens of millions living on less than two dollars per day.

Latin American societies are designed to give the masses as little education as possible, thereby enabling the elite complete control of the people of a nation. Education budgets are purposefully made anemic thanks to the pillaging of government money by corrupt officials, mismanagement of funds and misallocation of resources. The emphasis on educating the children of the masses is nonexistent, for they are to remain the indigent slaves to the elite, forever ignorant, servile and obedient. Thus, millions of people are from birth condemned to schools lacking adequate books, well trained and motivated teachers, and acceptable infrastructure, their short lived educations ending anywhere from the third to the sixth grade, in the end becoming but one more citizen abandoned by their government, forgotten by society, dependent on private television owned by the elite for information.

Granted a minute fraction of money compared to American per capita investment in education, schools and teachers naturally start off at the depths of learning, condemned to remain bottom dwellers in education and knowledge, seriously lacking the resources of the much richer north, doing as best they can to enlighten children, yet knowing that undereducated most students will leave, forever captured by indigence, slave labor and slave wages. By age ten millions upon millions of children stop attending school, forced by the circumstances of their lives to begin working in order to feed, shelter and clothe their families. Sadly, most will never again pick up a book or return to school, instead remaining loyal members of the lowest castes, living in shacks and inside shantytowns, becoming susceptible to the propaganda of the wealthy, maturing into the ignorance minds bred through under education.

Through immovable castes of indigence and the under funding of education the elite are able to contain the masses, making millions of poor dependent on the crumbs, morsels and bones thrown them by the rich. Imprisoned in the dungeons of rotting existence, millions of poverty-stricken Latin Americans will never escape their predetermined fates, becoming babies born unequal, living entire lives following the footsteps of parents, grandparents and great grandparents, repeating a cycle of indigence designed to exploit and subjugate their entire lives. This vicious circle is perpetual, creating an insurmountable barrier of escape, breeding ignorance with poverty and malnourishment, leading to the brainwashing by religion that condemns the poor to eternal fatalism and constant hardship, inevitably trapping tens of millions to lives of squalor and lost futures.

Through religion hundreds of millions are told to be fruitful and to multiply, for that is what God desires, not realizing that by having many babies women become servile and dependent creatures to their husbands, forced to rear and raise, remaining trapped housewives robbed of opportunity and enlightenment. Brainwashed by religion and lacking the reason, logic and knowledge that comes with education, both parents will invariably condemn both themselves and their children, forever remaining trapped in poverty, with more mouths to feed, more bodies to clothe, more resources needed to survive. Forced to subsist, they will pull their children out of school at any early age, sending them to work for long hours and meager wages. With little money to be spread to many family members, malnourishment increases, education is eroded, healthcare disappears, slave labor increases, misery is spawned and perpetual poverty triumphs. It is Catholicism, that enabler of primitive and conservative thought, that condemns the use of contraception and abortion among its followers while espousing the procreation of multiple children, thereby becoming a culprit in the ever-increasing numbers of human beings living in perpetual poverty, assisting in ruining lives, exacerbating hardship and tarnishing fates.

For those few that succeed in graduating from a state college, the discrimination inherent in the business world is omnipresent. Top business and government jobs are reserved for the children, relatives and close acquaintances of those already in power, with the elite controlling all levers of who is allowed entry and who is to be relegated to the lower echelons of employment. With employment and salary determined by nepotism and not merit, going to those of white skin and not brown, those of upper class and not lower, a large segment of barrier-escaping jobs that would otherwise be available to anyone become the sole possession of the elite.

It is this world of white collar employment that does not welcome brown-skinned individuals, extending not a welcome floor mat but a “Closed” sign, becoming an exclusive club for the elite and their progeny, a place not welcoming to the sub-human classes engineered to become the maids and gardeners and cooks and nannies of the rich. The mestizo masses are forced through discrimination and segregation to remain inside their allotted place, offered great opportunity not in money-making positions but in the world of blue-collar slave labor, forced to toil under extreme stresses, working unbearable hours in bottom-dwelling environs making the wages that offer only the most basic level of subsistence.

For the mestizo, this is a barrier that talent, ability, drive and mental strength cannot defeat. Even if able to escape the myriad of barriers to entry, driving a stake through indigence, under education, the imprisonment of slave labor, lack of resources, discrimination and ingrained racism, there exists the ultimate and most subjective barrier to entry: the elite themselves, possessing the keys to unlocking the gates of escape. They are the gatekeepers of society, always closing the door to the always long line of brown-skinned unwanteds and undesirables seeking a better future, yet always eager to allow easy access to the always short line of white-skinned elites and wealthy patrons seeking to maintain their past into the present.

For centuries this has been the reality in Latin America, a region of two different worlds, of two different groups, one born into privilege, the other into exploitation. Ten percent of the population owns or controls ninety percent of the region’s wealth, while ninety percent of the population lives in poverty, forced to live in shacks or tiny bee-hive looking homes, chained into shantytowns oftentimes lacking basic infrastructure and services, forced to share a small patch of land with an ever-increasing population, packed like sardines, competing for few jobs and low salaries.

Meanwhile, living like modern day feudal masters the elite few bask in enormous mansions of comfort, protected by twelve foot high walls and armies of security guards, living in exclusive and posh neighborhoods, possessing all the wealth in the world, able to afford maids, gardeners, cooks and nannies, seeing in their relationship to the mestizo the shadows of slavery, not the conviction of equality, the entitlement of exploitation, not the obligation of providing opportunity. To the elite, the mestizo has always been and will always remain a being to be considered below them, a person whose destiny is to serve the interests of the rich. The mestizo is to be forever restrained and shackled, unable to rebel or resist, his progeny engineered and molded to follow the dictates of wealth. He is, in short, to be the slave of the elite, remaining what he has been for 500 years.

For centuries both the fruits of the labors of the mestizo and the Indian, along with the resources the lands provided were owned and controlled by the white elites, to be shipped directly to the colonizing mother country and to markets abroad. Revenues and profits seldom, if ever, returned to the masses. Instead, they filled the pockets of the already rich, used by the elite to build feudal estates and personal empires, the wealth acquired exacerbating an ever-widening vicious cycle of social class and income disparity.

Using the mechanisms of governance and the acquired wealth of exploitation mestizo and Indian lands were expropriated and granted to the white elite. Lands seen promising or rich in natural resources were taken away from peasants, towns or Indians, used to further enrich the growing white aristocracy as well as make more comfortable the lives of European elites. Whether unpaid slave or seldom paid worker, the masses were impoverished and oppressed while their masters enjoyed the fruits of both free labor and resources. Over centuries the vast wealth of the Americas was pillaged, making certain European nations incredibly wealthy, transforming some into Empires, others into powers whose vast wealth would disappear with the arrival of Latin American independence in the first half of the 19th century.

Since Discovery and Conquest Latin America has been exploited and subjugated, its peoples of darker skin perpetually castigated and abused, enslaved, exploited and kept at the lowest margins of society, its beautiful lands torn and destroyed, its air polluted, its rivers made toxic, its resources stolen, their revenues and profits given to northern corporations and governments, its environmental regulations relaxed, enabling foreign corporations to pollute without hindrances.

From the very beginning Latin America has been, like most nations of the south, the supplier of natural resources and raw materials for the rich north, its people both the slave labor and the consumer for northern corporations, toiling under bottom dwelling working conditions for meager wages. The people, it must be told, work slave hours for slave wages, and are charged exorbitant prices to sustain their already anemic standard of living. They make third world wages and must pay first world prices. In truth, the great majority of Latin Americans see very little capital or wealth in return for their natural resources, the majority of it transferred by elites to bank accounts outside the nation or kept by multinational corporations under unfair and one-sided contracts signed by American controlled puppets.

While the nations and peoples of the north enjoy the benefits, and cheap prices, engendered from stolen resources, unfair trade agreements, market colonialism and slave labor of the south in order to sustain lives made excessive, gluttonous and greed infested, most citizens of Latin America subsist on what Americans would consider the crumbs, bones and morsels of a normal life. Millions are from birth destined to remain entrapped in the social caste social engineering has placed at their door, living from cradle to grave unable to penetrate the insurmountable barriers to escape. To the people of the north who have never seen, touched or lived in such poverty, empathizing with Latin Americans can become a very difficult endeavor.

This is the tragedy of Latin America’s past. Sadly, this is also its present. If left unchanged, it will also be its future. In this region, the more things change the more things stay the same.


The Seed of Revolution


In Venezuela a leader of vision and promise has risen from the shantytowns and the misery, born to poverty and to the masses, over the years rising through the ranks, reading and learning, gaining knowledge and philosophy, slowly yet surely engendering justice and equality, becoming a man of, by and for the People, not of the elite.

Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, has become the seed giving rise to the Bolivarian Revolution, a social democratic philosophy evolved into 21st century conditions, sweeping across Latin America, molding the interests of the people with those of the state, creating a new beacon on a hill for hundreds of millions of human beings for too long abandoned and forgotten.

Mr. Chavez, full of energy and optimism, has become a beloved man at home and an inspiration abroad, able, in the span of a few years, to introduce into the collective consciousness of humankind an entirely different political philosophy than what at present exists. He has lifted Venezuela out of the malignant mold for centuries infecting it, creating an example for the world to see and follow. His governance has inspired Latin America to shift away from neoliberalism and the unfettered capitalism of the American Empire and toward the balance of helping the masses, so many of whom live in perpetual levels of indigence.

A new paradigm shift is occurring in Venezuela, a nation rich in oil yet troubled by centuries of injustice, inequality and oppression by the few of the many. With a sudden shift of political tectonic plates, the voices of the poor and unwanted have become heard, their cries for justice and equality answered. In a few short years, Chavez has transformed Venezuela into a nation helping itself by helping its people, using the profits from its large oil fields, which once went into the pockets of the elite, to remake a society for too long familiar with Latin America.

Suddenly, profits and resources once thought extinct, or fatalistically thought of as stolen by elite officials, are making their way into Venezuela’s poorest districts, allocated to help the vast majority of Venezuelan citizens, most of whom are poor. Money flows once reserved for the elite are now making their way into the lives of the masses, giving hope and raising enthusiasm, constructing the bridges of optimism all nations need to thrive. Using benign forms of capitalism to his advantage, though embedded in principles of modern socialism, Chavez has – instead of pillaging money or misappropriating funds – shifted much needed capital into projects designed to help the masses. For the first time in the nation’s history, the majority of Venezuelan’s are reaping the rewards of the oil that lies below.

In a few short years education, once anemic and abandoned, left to rot by the elite, has been revamped, with investments being made to strengthen and improve the instruments of learning and the mechanisms of knowledge. High school and university educations are being offered free of charge to whomever wants to further their education, all the while all other grade levels are beginning to see vast improvements in infrastructure and attendance. Where once millions of children slipped through the cracks due to indifference, leaving school in order to work or simply to become troublemakers, now emphasis is being made to keep children in school, creating an intelligent populace that will help make Venezuela a better country. Slowly, ignorance is being replaced by enlightenment, and millions of citizens are freeing their minds for the first time, able to think for themselves, able to make wise decisions, able to escape the traps of society and humanity.

Venezuela is making great improvements in healthcare and in infrastructure, as well as in justice and equality. More and more people are receiving better medicines and are being examined by better trained doctors. Roads, sewage, electricity, potable water and buildings are being improved, as are government institutions and the malignant levels of corruption that affect every Latin American nation. People eager to work are able to find work, their chores not relegated to the slave labor that once permeated throughout the nation. Inefficient or run down private businesses are being nationalized by the government, with investments being made and expertise being introduced to reclaim these businesses with the hope that their profits can add to the growing economic viability of Venezuela, their revenues used to benefit all the people, not just a few. Land that has been mismanaged, abandoned or claimed illegally is being expropriated from businesses and incompetent landowners and being repartitioned to those with the skills to work soil and desire to own a small parcel of land. Huge tracts of property, once stolen or claimed by elites or corporations decades and centuries ago, having once belonged to indigenous peoples, are being given back to their rightful owners, making them stewards of the land.

All around Venezuela the Bolivarian Revolution is improving the lives of millions, creating what was once thought impossible in Latin America: prosperity for the masses. Through revenues acquired from oil sales – most of it coming from America – Chavez is transforming his nation’s economy, increasing its annual growth rate while improving the lives of ordinary citizens. By fighting the endemic corruption once prevalent in Venezuela, by taking power away from the white elite, by sharing the wealth of the nation’s resources and profits with all citizens, by improving healthcare, education, social services and infrastructure, by making more equal Venezuelan society, by fighting neoliberal policies of the north and by raising the standards of living of the masses Chavez is remaking the face of Venezuelan society, lifting it to new horizons through the emancipation of the masses.

Yet it is this very success that has become a most ominous threat to Latin America’s elite and to the Evil Empire itself. The very accomplishments of the Bolivarian Revolution, with its abundance of positive changes, have sent shockwaves of fright throughout the mansions and estates of the elite and the hallowed halls of power in Washington. For both Latin American elites and American corporatist officials, social democracy has always been a most ominous concept, for in their successful hold on power lies the exploitation and subjugation of the masses through American imposed capitalism, market colonization and neoliberal strangulation. It is through these mechanisms that the elite maintain control and increase their wealth. It is through these instruments that America pillages resources and exploits slave labor with reckless abandon.

The entire concept of control over Latin America rests on the premise that the masses must never be allowed to free themselves of the chains of bondage placed at their feet. They must always be made to remain in perpetual poverty and ignorance, impotent to exert any power over the elite and against American interests. The profits and revenues from the state must never be used for their benefit. Their wages must be exploited to pay the high prices of privatized utilities and of northern goods and services. The resources of their nation must be exported to the north, their profits stolen, never to be used for the common good.

The elite, along with American corporations, have for decades and even centuries placed insurmountable barriers to entry on the masses. Both entities have lived in symbiotic relationship with each other for many years, and have fought together for their shared interests as well. For years throughout Latin America, the elite few, in conjunction with America, have sponsored, protected and financed right-wing dictatorships whose sole purpose was the destruction of any power belonging to the masses and working classes. Their duty was always to enforce American imperialism and market colonialism, making sure the nation they governed and the people they ruled over obeyed the dictates of authoritarianism and of clandestine colonization. No left-wing dictator or leader was ever selected, for this went in direct contradiction to the interests of the elite and American corporatists.

In unison, both groups have for decades done a masterful job repressing the masses while enriching themselves at the expense of the state. The elite give comfort and support to American corporations, writing laws and rules favorable to the ceaseless pillage of resources and goods. In exchange, America helps to enrich the elite through neoliberal policies and capitalistic corruptions, using its power and influence to maintain the elite in power. To both groups, American imposed capitalism and neoliberalism, otherwise known as market colonialism, are the instruments used toward the attainment of wealth.

These corrosive systems are designed to further the interests of those enabling them, never those of the masses. Exploitation of the masses and the perpetual poverty of their lives is the mechanism used to maintain power and control. The policies that have for decades made miserable the lives of hundreds of millions of Latin Americans are designed to suppress, exploit, impoverish and oppress. They are not altruistic mechanisms designed to alleviate the problems of the majority. On the contrary, the masses are but pawns, easily expendable sub-humans replaced with ease by the assembly line called human procreation.

What Hugo Chavez is attempting to do is break away from the policies of the elite and of Washington, trying to free his country and his people from the bondage of the Evil Empire, finally escaping the exploitation of both man and land that has gone on for the last 500 years. Chavez is attempting to help the people through the same profits sought by the elite and by Washington, and herein lies the reason for conflict. While Chavez wants to empower the masses, the elite and Washington want to retain it. While Chavez wants to redistribute wealth through principles of equality, the elite and Washington want to keep it for themselves. While Chavez wants to improve his nation by maintaining revenues and profits inside Venezuela, the elite and Washington want the pillaging to continue. While Chavez seeks to distance his country away from the raping policies imposed by America, the elite and Washington want undying obedience to them only. While Chavez seeks to purge government institutions of the rampant elitist cronyism, incompetence and corruption that only favors the wealthy, Washington wants to destroy his mandate and return it to the elite.

The example of Venezuela is a grave and gathering threat to American corporatists, for if it is allowed to succeed a great, shining beacon will be created, and hundreds of millions of human beings will want to recreate in their own nations what they have seen in Venezuela. The danger to the Evil Empire is the threat the Bolivarian Revolution is having on American imposed capitalism and market colonialism. If Venezuela is able to successfully escape the claws of American imperialism other nations will want to follow suit, using Venezuela’s mold to free themselves of continued pillaging and exploitation by America. Bolivia is already one such example of this, yet it will not be the last. Venezuela is at present the exception and not the rule, yet the possibility exists that if it is allowed to continue on its successful journey, more and more nations will want to emulate it, thereby dealing severe blows both to American imperialism and the continued perceived wonders of capitalism.

Already other Latin American nations have jumped the Bolivarian Revolution bandwagon, with more sure to follow. Today South America, tomorrow Mexico, can Africa and Asia be far behind? Only time will tell but everyday that the Revolution continues is one more day social democracy thrives, spitting in the face of American imperialism and capitalism, proving that a nation can prosper by bringing prosperity to the masses. Every day Chavez is seen on the world stage extolling the virtues and successes of his Revolution is another blow to the Evil Empire’s dominion over peoples of the south.

With Venezuela prospering as it is, using social democracy as a model, eroding neoliberal policies and unfettered capitalism from its backbone, empowering its people through principles of justice and equality, there exists the possibility that like a domino effect nation after nation will want to replicate the Bolivarian Revolution inside their own borders. Slowly but surely the poor, the unwanted, the masses of the world are becoming aware of what is transpiring in Venezuela, opening their eyes to the possibility of the impossible, dreaming of the same opportunity now present in Hugo Chavez’s country, of replicating its growing prosperity, justice and equality, awakening to the wonderment of a nation actually empowering the majority of its people through the profits of its businesses and resources. In the movement and awakening of the masses, however, the elite and Washington see a tremendous threat.

For years both the elite and Washington have combined forces to try and eliminate Chavez from power. They have orchestrated a coup, only to have failed. They have used the vast resources of the elite controlled media to trash and tarnish Chavez. They have conducted acts of sabotage on vital infrastructure. They have waged a campaign of destabilization, orchestrating a massive strike inside the national oil company. They have sought for and received referendums on Chavez’s policies and leadership, only to be outvoted and outmaneuvered. They have conducted extensive spying operations inside the country, using America’s embassy as a CIA operations center, trying to recruit Venezuelan military personnel for important national security information. They have orchestrated a public and media smear and disinformation campaign designed to brainwash Americans and citizens of other nations, trying to stop Chavez’s popularity from spreading. They have plotted assassination attempts, only to be discovered. They have escalated the rhetoric and war of words, leaving Venezuela no choice but to purchase defensive weapons in case of an American invasion. Chavez is decried as a dictator yet he is the one democratically elected multiple times. He is accused of subverting and altering democratic institutions, yet he is doing nothing more than what George W. Bush has been doing in America.

The popularity levels in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez have never been higher. He is beloved by the masses – though hated by the elite and their lackeys – and has become a national hero, a man changing history and opening trenches. His movement has spread to various South American nations; his ideas are resonating with untold millions. He is defying the Evil Empire, unflinching in his desire to improve the lives of his people. Showing us that a better system is possible, he is bringing prosperity to Venezuela, proving that socialism and capitalism can function side by side, showing us that an evolved form of governance is the wave of the future.

Mr. Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution is a monumental attempt to introduce a new approach to humanity, proving that in the 21st century new ways of thinking are needed if we are to survive as a civilization. Venezuela is a shining example of what is possible if the desire exists to help all the citizens of a nation, not just those already made wealthy. The triumph currently taking place in Venezuela, in the wake of tremendous odds, is a triumph of the human spirit, a story of one man and an entire population seeking to rid themselves both of market colonialism that has for years robbed them of an opportunity at better lives and of a corrosive system of castes that gives wealth and privilege to one group while subjugating and oppressing another.

Never in Latin America has democracy tasted so sweet, its nectar helping to give birth to an enthusiasm and an optimism seldom, if ever, seen. The Bolivarian Revolution spawned by Hugo Chavez has given hope to countless millions, granting millions more the bravery to confront America and its vast tentacles of market colonialism that has devastated the entire region. No longer scared of America’s might, no longer afraid to challenge the status quo, many leaders adopting Chavez’s Revolution are changing the rules of the game, pursuing the interests of the nation, not the multinational conglomerate, thwarting the rules of trade imposed by America, establishing laws to protect the indigenous population, nationalizing what was once threatened to be privatized, rewriting contracts that were once one-sided and vastly exploitative, resulting in the complete pillage of natural resources and their revenues.

Chavez has stood up to the bully from the north, standing upright and never relenting, unafraid of Bush and his corporatist friends, becoming a pariah to millions and a hero to billions. He continues his Revolution under constant threat from America, sacrificing his energy and possibly his life for a movement he strongly believes in, furthering the cause of justice, fairness, solidarity and equality. It is those leaders that selflessly confront dangers and threats to both life and limb that are true heroes, becoming the torches chosen by destiny to carry the light that guides our way, becoming the messenger of a change in the human condition that must inevitable come. Chavez is one such leader.

Into history’s navel has Hugo Chavez been born into, becoming a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale and dank environment. Hated by the wealthy for being a brown-skinned mestizo and not a member of the European elite, hated by America for eroding its market colonialism, born into poverty and hardship, the democratically elected president of Venezuela has altered the landscape not only of Latin America, but of the world as well. His vision and movement continues to gain traction, becoming the domino effect always feared by America. He is pushing into new horizons, changing the landscape of social class and hierarchy, granting opportunity and education and health and escape to hundreds of millions of people.

Finally in Latin America a personality has emerged willing to alter the status quo, fighting for the rights of the majority, equalizing a field that for 500 years has been anything but equal. Into history has his Bolivarian Revolution entered, gaining traction, extending its existence, becoming a thorn in the side of America. Will it survive the attacks from the Evil Empire that will surely and inevitably come? Will it establish itself as a new philosophy for a new millennium or will it quietly disappear with the passage of time? Will Hugo Chavez live to see what becomes of his wonderful Revolution?

The answers to these questions are sure to come in what appears to be a grand moment of tectonic rumbling between two diametrically opposed plates of belief rapidly headed on a collision course that will in the next few years show us what we are and where, if anyplace, we are headed. In this coming clash of philosophies, either the one that has ruined the lives of billions will declare victory, or the one that offers hope and a future for all will triumph. Either the Revolution will continue to evolve, or it will cease to be televised.

We can only hope the will and the voices of the People prevail. After all, freedom and democracy are, according to George W. Bush, inherent rights guaranteed to every nation and every citizenry, even to those that do not obey and bow down to the decrees of Empire.

Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international affairs analyst and Internet columnist. His articles as well as his archive can be found at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com and at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info as well as at other alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela is also author of Echoes in the Wind, a fiction novel. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net


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Chávez tells Blair to go to hell
Simon Jeffery and agencies Thursday February 9, 2006

When Tony Blair left the Commons chamber after question time, he probably thought David Cameron's accusation that he was "flip-flopping" over school reform was the worst verbal jab he would face this week.

Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, had other ideas. In a characteristically forthright tirade, he described the prime minister as "a pawn of imperialism" and told him to "go right to hell".
Mr Chávez was inveighing against comments on Venezuela's attitude to democracy made by Mr Blair in the chamber. The prime minister's observation that Venezuela should abide by the rules of the international community if it wanted to be respected by it showed that he believed "we're still in times of imperialism and colonialism", Mr Chávez said.

"Go right to hell, Mr Blair," he told the prime minister during a speech in western Venezuela, using local slang to deliver the line. His exact words, "váyase largo al cipote", have no direct translation into English.

Mr Chávez described Mr Blair as "the main ally of Hitler" - an accusation that he is siding with the US president in its confrontation with Venezuela. Mr Chávez has taken to calling George Bush "Mr Danger" and "Danger Bush Hitler" among other epithets, and added that he would now need similar nicknames for Mr Blair.

"You messed with me, so put up with me," he told the prime minister. Quoting the lyrics of a Venuezuelan folk song that he also recited when he called Mexico's president Vicente Fox a "lapdog" of the United States, he added: "I sting those who rattle me, Mr Blair".

Relations between the Venezuela and US, whose lead Mr Chávez accused Mr Blair of following, are at their lowest point for several years after the two governments expelled each other's diplomats in a spying row last week.

The barney started when Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, compared Mr Chávez to Adolf Hitler. Speaking at a mass rally on Saturday commemorating the failed 1992 coup that he led as a lieutenant colonel, Mr Chávez then remarked that the Nazi leader "would be like a suckling baby next to George W Bush".

Venezuela, which supplies 15% of the US's foreign oil, has previously attempted to rattle Washington by offering humanitarian aid to the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and cheap heating oil to residents of Massachusetts, and forging relations with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Iran and Fidel Castro's Cuba.

The spark for his attack on Mr Blair was a question from Labour MP Colin Burgon on whether British policy in South America was shaped by a "rightwing US Republican agenda". The prime minister replied that Venezuela needed to take care when it formed a close alliance with a non-democracy such as Cuba.

"If they want to be respected members of the international community, they should abide by the rules of the international community," he told MPs. "I say with the greatest respect to the president of Venezuela that when he forms an alliance with Cuba, I would prefer to see Cuba a proper functioning democracy."

Mr Chávez said the remarks showed Mr Blair was "nothing but a pawn of imperialism trying now to attack us from Europe". He added that Mr Blair lacked the moral standing to make them.

"You, Mr Blair, do not have the morality to call on anyone to respect the rules of the international community," he said. "You are precisely the one who has flouted international law the most [...] siding with Mr Danger to trample the people in Iraq.

"I'm going to be closely watching what you say and what you do. Because the British government has no moral standing - and even less yourself - to get involved in Venezuela's affairs."

A Downing Street spokeswoman said Mr Chávez was "entitled to his views".

The president came to prominence in a failed coup attempt in 1992 but won a democratic election in 1998 and was re-elected in 2000.


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Venezuela hopes to increase oil exports to China
Chinaview 9 Feb 06

CARACAS, Feb. 8 (Xinhuanet) -- Venezuela hopes to nearly double its oil exports to China in the near future, Venezuelan Oil and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said here on Wednesday.
Ramirez, who is also the head of the state oil company Petroleode Venezuela (PDVSA), told reporters that "we are hoping to sell 300,000 bpd to this market (China) very soon."

According to two contracts signed between PDVSA and the China National Petroleum Corporation last year, Venezuela now sells 100,000 bpd of crude oil and 60,000 bpd of fuel oil to China.

"We will complete the construction of the Jose Complex's orimulsion module, which belongs to CNPC," said Ramirez.

Orimulsion is an artificial fuel blend, which results from a mixture of water and extra-heavy crude found in Venezuela's Orinoco River basin.

Ties between Venezuela and China have been strengthened since late 2004 after President Hugo Chavez visited China and signed a series of agreements on cooperation in petroleum, gas, telecommunications and trade.


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U.S. threats to Venezuela’s revolution escalate
By W. T. Whitney Jr. PWW 9 Feb 06

Aggressive maneuvers against Venezuela from the Bush government have reached new heights. Here are some indicators.

That a coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was under way when opposition parties opted out of Venezuela’s December parliamentary elections was not obvious. But at the time Vice President José Vicente Rangel alleged that the U.S. Embassy was “extremely active” behind the scenes.

During the elections, explosions went off, an oil pipeline was blown up and electric substations were burned. Almost 100,000 soldiers were deployed to protect polling places. Authorities unearthed caches of weapons and ammunition. Two U.S. warships were cruising off the Venezuelan coast.

In fact Venezuelan authorities already knew of a coup planning meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, attended by a U.S. government official named “Thomas,” plus dissident Venezuelan military figures and Colombian intelligence officers. Some 500 Colombian paramilitary troops crossed the Colombian-Venezuelan border prior to the elections....
On Jan. 27, the Venezuelan government expelled naval attaché John Correa, stationed at the U.S. Embassy. Security personnel had infiltrated the group of Venezuelan junior officers recruited by Correa. The Bush government retaliated by sending a Venezuelan diplomat back to Caracas.

Another item: the Bush administration is blocking Spain’s $1.7 billion sale of military aircraft and boats to Venezuela. It claims that U.S. technology was used in the planes’ manufacture. According to Chávez, Venezuela may end up buying planes from China or Russia. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has berated Venezuela for spending on military hardware rather than provide for people’s needs.

Rumsfeld on Feb. 2 compared Hugo Chávez to Hitler, declaring, “We’ve got Chávez in Venezuela. … He’s a person who was elected legally, just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally. ... He is working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others. It concerns me.”

Intelligence director John Negroponte is worried too. In recent Senate testimony, he warned that if Chávez wins re-election this year, he will “use his control of the legislature and other institutions to continue to stifle the opposition, reduce press freedom, and entrench himself through measures that are technically legal, but which nonetheless constrict democracy.”

Lawyer Eva Golinger, writing in venezuelanalysis.com, sees “a scary escalation of aggression ... Rumsfeld and Negroponte represent the two entities in the United States that wage war: Defense and Intelligence.”

She reports that the U.S. government will be sending $9 million this year to opposition groups in Venezuela. She refers to an October 2005 U.S. Army publication, “Doctrine for Asymmetric War Against Venezuela,” in which Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution were labeled as the “largest threat since the Soviet Union and communism.”

The Arabic news service Aljazeera has recently opened an office in Caracas and announced plans for cooperation with Telesur, the new Latin American news agency funded by Venezuela, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Florida Republican Rep Connie Mack (R-Fla.) could hardly contain himself: “Today Chávez has gone even further. It wasn’t enough for him to spread his socialist propaganda throughout Latin America. Now he’s in cahoots with the original terrorist TV.”

Mack introduced House Resolution 328 last month. In the name of “true democracy,” it asks for “assistance and material support” for opposition groups in Venezuela, the funding to be funneled through U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy.

The Bush administration has found one overseas ally. Former Spanish president and right-winger José María Aznar now heads up the Foundation for Social Studies and Analysis. That well-financed group recently announced that it is concentrating this year on “a region caught up in populism and indigenous stirrings in the dark shadow of an alliance between Fidel Castro and the Venezuelan Hugo Chávez,” something it called an “explosive situation.” That would be Latin America.

atwhit@megalink.net


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Chavez says Exxon Mobil did not meet requirements for project
Associated Press 02/09/2006

Exxon Mobil has been resisting tax increases and contract changes that are part of a so-called "re-nationalization" of Venezuela's oil industry. In 2004 Exxon Mobil was the only firm to publicly speak against a royalty increase on extra-heavy oil production in the Orinoco river basin.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said his government excluded U.S. oil company Exxon Mobil Corp. from a $3 billion petrochemical project because the company did not meet requirements.

"We excluded (the company) because it did not meet the requirements for the project," Chavez said during a televised address to petrochemical workers on Wednesday. "But there are other companies out there."

Exxon Mobil had planned to team up with Pequiven, the petrochemicals division of state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA, to spend $3 billion on a project to produce a million metric tons a year of ethylene and derivatives.

Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil said in a statement on Tuesday that it was notified by Pequiven on Jan. 20 that the Venezuelan partner would not be able to complete the project's feasibility study under the terms agreed to in August 2004.

Exxon Mobil has been resisting tax increases and contract changes that are part of a so-called "re-nationalization" of Venezuela's oil industry. In 2004 Exxon Mobil was the only firm to publicly speak against a royalty increase on extra-heavy oil production in the Orinoco river basin.

Other oil companies, including ConocoPhillips, Total, Chevron Corp. and Statoil, agreed to the new terms without a struggle, while Exxon Mobil threatened international arbitration.

Exxon Mobil was also alone in resisting contract changes for 32 privately run oil fields that will now be dominated by PDVSA under new joint-venture companies. Exxon sold Mobil its stake in one of the fields to avoid accepting the unfavorable terms.

Exxon Mobil sold the stake to its partner in the field, Spanish-Argentine oil major Repsol YPF.

"For us, it's more important to have South American oil companies than U.S. companies," Chavez said Wednesday.
Comment: God forbid that the oil companies should share some of their OBSCENE profits with the citizens countries from which they take the oil! Meanwhile, Bush is ranting for "permanent tax cuts" for the Rich in the U.S., and American citizens are going down the tubes with no services...

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Chávez hits back in war of words with Washington
Associated Press in Caracas Monday February 6, 2006 The Guardian

President Hugo Chávez extended his verbal war with Washington, likening George Bush to Adolf Hitler in an obvious rebuff to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who last week compared Mr Chávez himself to Hitler.

Speaking at a mass rally on Saturday commemorating a failed 1992 coup he led as a lieutenant colonel, Mr Chávez warned that Washington was considering invading Venezuela and the country needed more weapons to defend itself.

The president said he was considering buying enough rifles to arm a million Venezuelans to repel a possible US invasion.
Comment: If it wasn't so scary because these folks have their fingers on the war buttons, it would actually be better than watching a soap opera.


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Evo Morales says energy companies conspiring to destabilize government
By Bernd Radowitz Dow Jones Newswires 9 Feb 06

RIO DE JANEIRO - Bolivia's Hydrocarbons Chamber, which represents private oil firms in the country, said it was concerned about declarations by President Evo Morales that multinational energy companies were conspiring to destabilize his new leftist government.

"In the name of its more than 100 affiliates, the Hydrocarbons Chamber in a letter sent to the President of the Republic today (Wednesday), assures that the sector in no way is or was engaged in the aforementioned efforts (of a conspiracy)," the chamber said in a release dated Wednesday that was sent to Dow Jones Newswires Thursday.
To the contrary, the chamber always is respecting the democratic order and interested that the situation becomes fully cleared up, it continued.

Morales Tuesday said he had met the top military leadership who had given him information on the supposed conspiracy.

Bolivia's defense minister on Wednesday backed the accusations.

"There are indications that a foreign multinational could be financing a slow and gradual, but systematic, process of destabilization," said Defense Minister Walker San Miguel, without naming any companies.

The conspiracy accusation came after Morales recently had toned down his speech against foreign energy firms. In January, he assured Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that he wouldn't expropriate the assets of foreign oil firms despite his demand for a nationalization of the oil and gas industry. Morales has been in office just over two weeks.

Foreign energy firms have invested more than $3.5 billion in Bolivia's oil and gas sector since 1996. Brazil's state-run oil firm Petroleo Brasileiro alone has invested $1.5 billion.

- bernd.radowitz@dowjones.com


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U.S. cutting military aid to Bolivia 96 percent
By Joel Brinkley The New York Times FEBRUARY 9, 2006

WASHINGTON Less than a month after an assertively anti-American president took office in Bolivia, the Bush administration is planning to cut military aid to the country by 96 percent.

The amount of money Bolivia normally receives is small; much of it is used to train Bolivian military officers in the United States. But the cut holds the potential to anger the powerful Bolivian military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups.

Evo Morales, a Socialist leader, became president on Jan. 22 and has promised to end U.S.-financed programs to eradicate the Bolivian coca crop.
Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine. U.S. officials say if Bolivia ends the programs, farmers in Peru and other coca-producing states could demand the same. And that could lead to a flood of cocaine in the Americas and Europe.

The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration does not recognize the court as legitimate.

Under pressure, just over 100 countries have signed an agreement. The administration has in some cases waived the rule and provided military aid to countries that have not signed, but officials would not provide numbers.

Bolivia and five other countries - Romania, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Jordan - have signed the agreement, but have not ratified it in their legislatures. The administration waived the requirement for the other five countries, leaving their military aid at roughly the same level as in previous years.

Administration officials said some of those other countries won exemptions because they were allies while others were not members of the International Criminal Court system.

One senior State Department official said the administration had no choice but to cut Bolivia's aid. But another State Department official said the administration could choose, later, to provide the money. The officials declined to be named, citing department rules.

In the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 2005, Bolivia is to receive about $1.7 million. Next year, according to the budget proposal, Bolivia would get only $70,000. Just over half of the money this year would be used for civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment. About $792,000 would be used primarily to send Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American officers at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many Latin American countries, including Bolivia, the training is an important part of their military tradition. In recent years, Bolivia has sent between 50 and 100 officers a year to the school, said Adam Isacson, program director for the Center for International Policy, which tracks military aid to Latin America. Cutting the financing "would antagonize the Bolivian military," he added.

The Bolivian military was responsible for numerous coups and partial coups in the 1960s and 1970s. The last one was in 1980.


WASHINGTON Less than a month after an assertively anti-American president took office in Bolivia, the Bush administration is planning to cut military aid to the country by 96 percent.

The amount of money Bolivia normally receives is small; much of it is used to train Bolivian military officers in the United States. But the cut holds the potential to anger the powerful Bolivian military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups.

Evo Morales, a Socialist leader, became president on Jan. 22 and has promised to end U.S.-financed programs to eradicate the Bolivian coca crop.

Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine. U.S. officials say if Bolivia ends the programs, farmers in Peru and other coca-producing states could demand the same. And that could lead to a flood of cocaine in the Americas and Europe.

The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration does not recognize the court as legitimate.

Under pressure, just over 100 countries have signed an agreement. The administration has in some cases waived the rule and provided military aid to countries that have not signed, but officials would not provide numbers.

Bolivia and five other countries - Romania, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Jordan - have signed the agreement, but have not ratified it in their legislatures. The administration waived the requirement for the other five countries, leaving their military aid at roughly the same level as in previous years.

Administration officials said some of those other countries won exemptions because they were allies while others were not members of the International Criminal Court system.

One senior State Department official said the administration had no choice but to cut Bolivia's aid. But another State Department official said the administration could choose, later, to provide the money. The officials declined to be named, citing department rules.

In the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 2005, Bolivia is to receive about $1.7 million. Next year, according to the budget proposal, Bolivia would get only $70,000. Just over half of the money this year would be used for civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment. About $792,000 would be used primarily to send Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American officers at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many Latin American countries, including Bolivia, the training is an important part of their military tradition. In recent years, Bolivia has sent between 50 and 100 officers a year to the school, said Adam Isacson, program director for the Center for International Policy, which tracks military aid to Latin America. Cutting the financing "would antagonize the Bolivian military," he added.

The Bolivian military was responsible for numerous coups and partial coups in the 1960s and 1970s. The last one was in 1980.


WASHINGTON Less than a month after an assertively anti-American president took office in Bolivia, the Bush administration is planning to cut military aid to the country by 96 percent.

The amount of money Bolivia normally receives is small; much of it is used to train Bolivian military officers in the United States. But the cut holds the potential to anger the powerful Bolivian military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups.

Evo Morales, a Socialist leader, became president on Jan. 22 and has promised to end U.S.-financed programs to eradicate the Bolivian coca crop.

Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine. U.S. officials say if Bolivia ends the programs, farmers in Peru and other coca-producing states could demand the same. And that could lead to a flood of cocaine in the Americas and Europe.

The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration does not recognize the court as legitimate.

Under pressure, just over 100 countries have signed an agreement. The administration has in some cases waived the rule and provided military aid to countries that have not signed, but officials would not provide numbers.

Bolivia and five other countries - Romania, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Jordan - have signed the agreement, but have not ratified it in their legislatures. The administration waived the requirement for the other five countries, leaving their military aid at roughly the same level as in previous years.

Administration officials said some of those other countries won exemptions because they were allies while others were not members of the International Criminal Court system.

One senior State Department official said the administration had no choice but to cut Bolivia's aid. But another State Department official said the administration could choose, later, to provide the money. The officials declined to be named, citing department rules.

In the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 2005, Bolivia is to receive about $1.7 million. Next year, according to the budget proposal, Bolivia would get only $70,000. Just over half of the money this year would be used for civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment. About $792,000 would be used primarily to send Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American officers at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many Latin American countries, including Bolivia, the training is an important part of their military tradition. In recent years, Bolivia has sent between 50 and 100 officers a year to the school, said Adam Isacson, program director for the Center for International Policy, which tracks military aid to Latin America. Cutting the financing "would antagonize the Bolivian military," he added.

The Bolivian military was responsible for numerous coups and partial coups in the 1960s and 1970s. The last one was in 1980.


WASHINGTON Less than a month after an assertively anti-American president took office in Bolivia, the Bush administration is planning to cut military aid to the country by 96 percent.

The amount of money Bolivia normally receives is small; much of it is used to train Bolivian military officers in the United States. But the cut holds the potential to anger the powerful Bolivian military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups.

Evo Morales, a Socialist leader, became president on Jan. 22 and has promised to end U.S.-financed programs to eradicate the Bolivian coca crop.

Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine. U.S. officials say if Bolivia ends the programs, farmers in Peru and other coca-producing states could demand the same. And that could lead to a flood of cocaine in the Americas and Europe.

The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration does not recognize the court as legitimate.

Under pressure, just over 100 countries have signed an agreement. The administration has in some cases waived the rule and provided military aid to countries that have not signed, but officials would not provide numbers.

Bolivia and five other countries - Romania, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Jordan - have signed the agreement, but have not ratified it in their legislatures. The administration waived the requirement for the other five countries, leaving their military aid at roughly the same level as in previous years.

Administration officials said some of those other countries won exemptions because they were allies while others were not members of the International Criminal Court system.

One senior State Department official said the administration had no choice but to cut Bolivia's aid. But another State Department official said the administration could choose, later, to provide the money. The officials declined to be named, citing department rules.

In the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 2005, Bolivia is to receive about $1.7 million. Next year, according to the budget proposal, Bolivia would get only $70,000. Just over half of the money this year would be used for civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment. About $792,000 would be used primarily to send Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American officers at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many Latin American countries, including Bolivia, the training is an important part of their military tradition. In recent years, Bolivia has sent between 50 and 100 officers a year to the school, said Adam Isacson, program director for the Center for International Policy, which tracks military aid to Latin America. Cutting the financing "would antagonize the Bolivian military," he added.

The Bolivian military was responsible for numerous coups and partial coups in the 1960s and 1970s. The last one was in 1980.


WASHINGTON Less than a month after an assertively anti-American president took office in Bolivia, the Bush administration is planning to cut military aid to the country by 96 percent.

The amount of money Bolivia normally receives is small; much of it is used to train Bolivian military officers in the United States. But the cut holds the potential to anger the powerful Bolivian military establishment, which has been responsible for a long history of coups.

Evo Morales, a Socialist leader, became president on Jan. 22 and has promised to end U.S.-financed programs to eradicate the Bolivian coca crop.

Coca is the main ingredient in cocaine. U.S. officials say if Bolivia ends the programs, farmers in Peru and other coca-producing states could demand the same. And that could lead to a flood of cocaine in the Americas and Europe.

The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court.

The Bush administration does not recognize the court as legitimate.

Under pressure, just over 100 countries have signed an agreement. The administration has in some cases waived the rule and provided military aid to countries that have not signed, but officials would not provide numbers.

Bolivia and five other countries - Romania, Bahrain, Kyrgyzstan, Ethiopia and Jordan - have signed the agreement, but have not ratified it in their legislatures. The administration waived the requirement for the other five countries, leaving their military aid at roughly the same level as in previous years.

Administration officials said some of those other countries won exemptions because they were allies while others were not members of the International Criminal Court system.

One senior State Department official said the administration had no choice but to cut Bolivia's aid. But another State Department official said the administration could choose, later, to provide the money. The officials declined to be named, citing department rules.

In the current fiscal year that began Oct. 1 2005, Bolivia is to receive about $1.7 million. Next year, according to the budget proposal, Bolivia would get only $70,000. Just over half of the money this year would be used for civil defense supplies and other nonlethal equipment. About $792,000 would be used primarily to send Bolivian military officers to the School of the Americas, a combat training school for Latin American officers at Fort Benning, Georgia.

For many Latin American countries, including Bolivia, the training is an important part of their military tradition. In recent years, Bolivia has sent between 50 and 100 officers a year to the school, said Adam Isacson, program director for the Center for International Policy, which tracks military aid to Latin America. Cutting the financing "would antagonize the Bolivian military," he added.

The Bolivian military was responsible for numerous coups and partial coups in the 1960s and 1970s. The last one was in 1980.
Comment: Did you notice the REASON??!! "The State Department said the military aid is being cut because of a law that says Washington must end military assistance to countries that have failed to ratify a pledge not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court."

Now THAT is rich! The US wants to be able to commit War Crimes (which it does and continues to do) without being held responsible. When "payday" comes, I wonder if any of the countries that have made such an immoral agreement will consider that they must be bound by it?

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Castro invites Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Cuba
Agence France-Presse Havana, February 8, 2006

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accepted an invitation to visit Cuba from President Fidel Castro, in gratitude for Cuba's support of Iran's nuclear program, the official Granma newspaper said on Tuesday.

Ahmadinejad accepted the invitation in Tehran from Cuban Ambassador Felipe Perez Roque. During his visit, the Iranian leader will attend the September 11-16 Non-Aligned Summit in Havana, the daily said.
On Saturday in Vienna, Cuba, Venezuela and Syria voted against a resolution of the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the UN Security Council over a nuclear program the West suspects is weapons-oriented.

The Iranian President recently publicly thanked Cuba for its "dignified and principled" position during the IAEA's special meeting, which ended in a 27-3 vote in favour of reporting Iran to the UN council.

Separately, Granma announced that Iranian Parliament President Ghulam Ali Haddad Adel has accepted an invitation to visit Cuba from Cuba's National Assembly.


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Hand back Falklands, Venezuela tells Blair
By Jamie Lyons and Jon Smith, PA 10 February 2006

Downing Street today refused to be drawn into a fresh war of words with Venezuela's president after he called on Britain to hand over the Falklands to Argentina.

Hugo Chavez said the islands belonged to Argentina and demanded Prime Minister Tony Blair give them back.

Mr Blair infuriated Mr Chavez earlier this week when he said he should respect the rules of the international community.

The Prime Minister also said he would prefer to see Venezuela's ally Cuba function as a true democracy.

Mr Chavez responded to Mr Blair's comments by branding him "a pawn of imperialism" and "the main ally of Hitler" - a reference to US President George Bush.
In his latest attack on Mr Blair today, Mr Chavez said Britain had violated the sovereignty of various nations - citing the case of the Falklands.

"We have to remember the Falklands, how they were taken away from the Argentinians," he said.

Speaking in the western Venezuelan city of Maracaibo, he added: "Those islands are Argentina's. Return them, Mr Blair. Those islands are Argentina's."

Downing Street would not rise to the attack.

The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "I don't think it is to anybody's benefit to get into a war of words on this. The position of the Falkland Islands has been stated many times. That remains the position.

"I am not sure comments like this are helpful and I think it is better to draw a veil and move on."

Britain recaptured the Falklands after Argentinian troops invaded in 1982. Hundreds were killed on both sides in the three-month conflict.


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Iran: the next war
By John Pilger New Statesman 9 Feb 06

Has Tony Blair, our minuscule Caesar, finally crossed his Rubicon? Having subverted the laws of the civilised world and brought carnage to a defenceless people and bloodshed to his own, having lied and lied and used the death of a hundredth British soldier in Iraq to indulge his profane self-pity, is he about to collude in one more crime before he goes?
Perhaps he is seriously unstable now, as some have suggested. Power does bring a certain madness to its prodigious abusers, especially those of shallow disposition. In The March of Folly: from Troy to Vietnam, the great American historian Barbara Tuchman described Lyndon B Johnson, the president whose insane policies took him across his Rubicon in Vietnam. "He lacked [John] Kennedy's ambivalence, born of a certain historical sense and at least some capacity for reflective thinking," she wrote. "Forceful and domineering, a man infatuated with himself, Johnson was affected in his conduct of Vietnam policy by three elements in his character: an ego that was insatiable and never secure; a bottomless capacity to use and impose the powers of his office without inhibition; a profound aversion, once fixed upon a course of action, to any contradictions."

That, demonstrably, is Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest of the cabal that has seized power in Washington. But there is a logic to their idiocy - the goal of dominance. It also describes Blair, for whom the only logic is vainglorious. And now he is threatening to take Britain into the nightmare on offer in Iran. His Washington mentors are unlikely to ask for British troops, not yet. At first, they will prefer to bomb from a safe height, as Bill Clinton did in his destruction of Yugoslavia. They are aware that, like the Serbs, the Iranians are a serious people with a history of defending themselves and who are not stricken by the effects of a long siege, as the Iraqis were in 2003. When the Iranian defence minister promises "a crushing response", you sense he means it.

Listen to Blair in the House of Commons: "It's important we send a signal of strength" against a regime that has "forsaken diplomacy" and is "exporting terrorism" and "flouting its international obligations". Coming from one who has exported terrorism to Iran's neighbour, scandalously reneged on Britain's most sacred international obligations and forsaken diplomacy for brute force, these are Alice-through-the-looking-glass words.

However, they begin to make sense when you read Blair's Commons speeches on Iraq of 25 February and 18 March 2003. In both crucial debates - the latter leading to the disastrous vote on the invasion - he used the same or similar expressions to lie that he remained committed to a peaceful resolution. "Even now, today, we are offering Saddam the prospect of voluntary disarmament . . ." he said. From the revelations in Philippe Sands's book Lawless World, the scale of his deception is clear. On 31 January 2003, Bush and Blair confirmed their earlier secret decision to attack Iraq.

Like the invasion of Iraq, an attack on Iran has a secret agenda that has nothing to do with the Tehran regime's imaginary weapons of mass destruction. That Washington has managed to coerce enough members of the International Atomic Energy Agency into participating in a diplomatic charade is no more than reminiscent of the way it intimidated and bribed the "international community" into attacking Iraq in 1991.

Iran offers no "nuclear threat". There is not the slightest evidence that it has the centrifuges necessary to enrich uranium to weapons-grade material. The head of the IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, has repeatedly said his inspectors have found nothing to support American and Israeli claims. Iran has done nothing illegal; it has demonstrated no territorial ambitions nor has it engaged in the occupation of a foreign country - unlike the United States, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the on-Proliferation Treaty to allow inspectors to "go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel. The latter has refused to recognise the NPT, and has between 200 and 500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle Eastern states.

Those who flout the rules of the NPT are America's and Britain's anointed friends. Both India and Pakistan have developed their nuclear weapons secretly and in defiance of the treaty. The Pakistani military dictatorship has openly exported its nuclear technology. In Iran's case, the excuse that the Bush regime has seized upon is the suspension of purely voluntary "confidence-building" measures that Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany in order to placate the US and show that it was "above suspicion". Seals were placed on nuclear equipment following a concession given, some say foolishly, by Iranian negotiators and which had nothing to do with Iran's obligations under the NPT.

Iran has since claimed back its "inalienable right" under the terms of the NPT to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes. There is no doubt this decision reflects the ferment of political life in Tehran and the tension between radical and conciliatory forces, of which the bellicose new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is but one voice. As European governments seemed to grasp for a while, this demands true diplomacy, especially given the history.

For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran. In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Muhammed Mossadeq, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran. They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called Savak, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world - in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.

At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the "international community" has remained silent. Recently, one of Israel's leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, wrote: "Obviously, we don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don't know if they're developing them, but if they're not developing them, they're crazy."

It is hardly surprising that the Tehran regime has drawn the "lesson" of how North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, has successfully seen off the American predator without firing a shot. During the cold war, British "nuclear deterrent" strategists argued the same justification for arming the nation with nuclear weapons; the Russians were coming, they said. As we are aware from declassified files, this was fiction, unlike the prospect of an American attack on Iran, which is very real and probably imminent.

Blair knows this. He also knows the real reasons for an attack and the part Britain is likely to play. Next month, Iran is scheduled to shift its petrodollars into a euro-based bourse. The effect on the value of the dollar will be significant, if not, in the long term, disastrous. At present the dollar is, on paper, a worthless currency bearing the burden of a national debt exceeding $8trn and a trade deficit of more than $600bn. The cost of the Iraq adventure alone, according to the Nobel Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz, could be $2trn. America's military empire, with its wars and 700-plus bases and limitless intrigues, is funded by creditors in Asia, principally China.

That oil is traded in dollars is critical in maintaining the dollar as the world's reserve currency. What the Bush regime fears is not Iran's nuclear ambitions but the effect of the world's fourth-biggest oil producer and trader breaking the dollar monopoly. Will the world's central banks then begin to shift their reserve holdings and, in effect, dump the dollar? Saddam Hussein was threatening to do the same when he was attacked.

While the Pentagon has no plans to occupy all of Iran, it has in its sights a strip of land that runs along the border with Iraq. This is Khuzestan, home to 90 per cent of Iran's oil. "The first step taken by an invading force," reported Beirut's Daily Star, "would be to occupy Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan Province, securing the sensitive Straits of Hormuz and cutting off the Iranian military's oil supply." On 28 January the Iranian government said that it had evidence of British undercover attacks in Khuzestan, including bombings, over the past year. Will the newly emboldened Labour MPs pursue this? Will they ask what the British army based in nearby Basra - notably the SAS - will do if or when Bush begins bombing Iran? With control of the oil of Khuzestan and Iraq and, by proxy, Saudi Arabia, the US will have what Richard Nixon called "the greatest prize of all".

But what of Iran's promise of "a crushing response"? Last year, the Pentagon delivered 500 "bunker-busting" bombs to Israel. Will the Israelis use them against a desperate Iran? Bush's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review cites "pre-emptive" attack with so-called low-yield nuclear weapons as an option. Will the militarists in Washington use them, if only to demonstrate to the rest of us that, regardless of their problems with Iraq, they are able to "fight and win multiple, simultaneous major-theatre wars", as they have boasted? That a British prime minister should collude with even a modicum of this insanity is cause for urgent action on this side of the Atlantic.

With thanks to Mike Whitney. John Pilger's new book, Freedom Next Time, will be published by Bantam Press in June

First published in the New Statesman



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Russian MP Says US To Attack Iran Late March - Muslim riots a US psyop aimed at getting EU support for war
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com February 7 2006

A top Russian parliamentary leader has told Ekho Moskvy radio station that an attack on Iran is inevitable and that it will occur on March 28th. The leader of the Liberal Democrats Vladimir Zhirinovsky also believes that the Muslim riots were orchestrated by the US to garner European backing for the military strike.

Rhetoric has heated significantly in the past week with Donald Rumsfeld yesterday warning that a military option was on the table, echoing the comments of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist who said that the US was prepared to take military action.

Also, Israeli acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stated that Iran would pay "a very heavy price" if the Islamic Republic defiantly resumes full-scale uranium enrichment to build nuclear weapons.

Zhirinovsky told the Russian radio station that, "The war is inevitable because the Americans want this war. Any country claiming a leading position in the world will need to wage wars. Otherwise it will simply not be able to retain its leading position."

"The date for the strike is already known — it is the election day in Israel (March 28). It is also known how much that war will cost,” said Zhirinovsky.
Commenting on the Muslim riots sweeping the Middle East and Europe, Zhirinovsky said that the publication of the offensive cartoons was a planned psyop on the part of the US and aimed to “provoke a row between Europe and the Islamic world”.

“It will all end with European countries thanking the United States and paying, and giving soldiers,” said Zhirinovsky.

The possible inorganic manufactured nature of the riots has to be seriously considered. The three most offensive cartoons that caused the outrage were not even printed in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper but were added in and handed out by Danish imams who “circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries,” according to the London Telegraph.

It also appears highly suspicious that Muslims in Gaza City and other places had gained access to a plentiful supply of Danish flags to burn in front of the waiting world media as soon as the controversy broke out.

It now comes to light that Merete Eldrup, managing director of JP/Politikens Hus, the company that published the cartoons, is the wife of Anders Eldrup. Anders Eldrup is a Bilderberg member who has attended the last five Bilderberg meetings. The Bilderberg Group is a shadowy organization that meets once a year to steer global policy. It is now widely acknowledged that Bilderberg set the date for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The violent demonstrations, on the back of last November's French riots, are clearly having the effect of hardening European sympathy towards Muslims, even as the governments of major European countries open the floodgates to mass immigration. This greases the skids for an accelerated invasion of Iran who yesterday announced they were cutting trade with Denmark over the offensive cartoons.

Director of the Russian Political Research Institute Sergei Markov previously warned that Israel was likely to conduct air strikes against Iran in the spring.

The window of opportunity seems to be forming for the US and Israel. The White House meeting memo proves that UN consultations and possible sanctions are mere window dressing for a plan of action that has already been decided upon. What remains to be seen is if the US or Israel will attempt to manufacture a staged war provocation to goad the Iranians into signing their own death warrant. The memo, released by QC Philippe Sands, contained details of a discussion between Tony Blair and George Bush where a plan to paint a US spy plane in UN colors and fly it low over Iraq in the hope that Saddam would order it shot down was debated.


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War Pimp Hurd: Iran may need force
BBC 9 Feb 06

Former Foreign Secretary Lord Hurd has said Britain cannot "realistically" rule out using military force against Iran over its nuclear programme.

But any such action would involve "huge dangers" and governments must show "patient strength", he told peers.
On Tuesday, Tony Blair said using force against Iran was "not on our agenda".

Iran has said it will no longer allow snap inspections of its nuclear sites, after the UN nuclear atomic voted to report it to the Security Council.

'Peaceful means'

On Tuesday, Mr Blair told the Commons liaison committee Tehran was making "a very, very serious mistake" if it thought the international community would allow it to develop nuclear weapons.

But he said the issue could be dealt with by "peaceful and diplomatic means".

Opening a House of Lords debate, Lord Hurd said: "I don't think we can realistically and forever rule out the use of force.

"If the regime in Iran or its successor moved from words and piled up an unmistakeable danger then I don't think we can entirely rule out the use of force.

"But we shouldn't deceive ourselves than we can have some sort of strike without a war, or some sort of war that doesn't involve huge dangers and many, many thousands of casualties."

Lord Hurd added: "We have chosen to station our troops, whether in southern Iraq or southern Afghanistan, in very modest numbers where we are uniquely vulnerable to retaliation from nearby Iran."

He later told the BBc there was no such thing as a "surgical strike against a nuclear installation" because the country attacked would be likely to retaliate.

Iran, a "proud and ancient nation", had to be offered incentives to comply with international wishes, Lord Hurd added.


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U.S. shield blunts Israeli military option on Iran
By Dan Williams Reuters 9 Feb 06

JERUSALEM - Israel has long pursued a policy of preemptive attack as its preferred form of defence.

But when it comes to tackling arch-foe Iran, that option may have been put on hold under a protective "umbrella" on offer from the United States.

After years of speculation on whether Israel could launch unilateral strikes on the Iranian nuclear programme, some experts now see a major shift in the Jewish state's strategy.

At the core of the change was a vow by U.S. President George W. Bush, in a Reuters interview last week, to "rise to Israel's defence" in the face of increasingly tough talk from Tehran.
Bush's phrasing, with its overtones of Israeli dependency, departed from the language of past U.S. pledges that focused on preserving Israel's military superiority over Middle East foes. Given U.S. efforts to curb Iran's nuclear plans through international diplomacy, experts say Israel will have to shelve any plans for region-rattling, go-it-alone missions like its 1981 bombing sortie against Iraq's atomic reactor at Osiraq.

This thinking is bolstered by the Bush pledge's echoes of Cold War pacts -- NATO in Europe, the "nuclear umbrella" over Japan -- which defended U.S. allies against the Soviets while obligating them to get Washington's nod for any military moves.

"In political life there are no free lunches, and Bush's statements have a price. They remove the possibility -- if there ever was one -- of Israel taking matters into its own hands," wrote Aluf Benn, diplomatic correspondent for the influential Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

"The decision if and when to act against Iran will be made in the White House, not in the underground headquarters of the (Israeli military command) General Staff."

A senior Israeli official, who asked not to be named, acknowledged that Bush's pledge took bilateral ties to "a new level", but said Israel had not promised anything in return.

Asked if Israel was considering military action on Iran, he said: "Our policy is to follow the U.S. lead in this matter."

Iran says its nuclear programme is for energy, not arms.

According to Benn, the U.S. deal has already ushered in a rhetorical restraint among Israeli officials who had previously refused to rule out an Osiraq-style operation against Iran.

So guided, Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expunged mention of Iran from a recent major policy speech, Benn said.

LOGIC OF LIMITATION

Such reticence carries no great price for Israel, whose past veiled threats on Iran had rung hollow to many defence experts.

Unlike Saddam-era Iraq, Iran has numerous, dispersed and fortified nuclear sites -- a challenge perhaps beyond the means of Israel's military, and which only U.S. forces could handle.

"This (Bush's pledge) is a landmark bit of phrasing which I am sure was at least partly calculated," said Patrick Cronin of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

But he added that an agreement by Israel to forgo unilateral action on Iran "would not cost a lot, as while tactically (Israeli) military options are not nil, they are close to nil".

Weighed against such assessments are experts like David Ivry, the former Israeli air force chief who masterminded the Osiraq strike. He argues that even limited attacks on Iran's nuclear programme could be enough to set it back by years. "Launching such an action is a matter of Israel setting a 'red line' for when the threat posed by Iran is unbearable and, when it is crossed, giving the order," Ivry said.

Asked whether, in light of Bush's pledge, Israel would have to at least coordinate any military operation with its U.S. ally, Ivry said he thought it unlikely. "Coordinating would mean, essentially, asking for permission," he said.

David Hartwell, editor of Jane's Country Risk, disagreed.

"The strategic situation with today's Iran is not what it was with Iraq in 1981," he said. "U.S. policy in the region would be seriously undermined by an independent Israeli action."

While he noted that the U.S.-Israeli understandings had yet to be ratified like the defence pacts of the Cold War, Hartwell saw them as similarly circumscribing future actions by Israel.

"The assumption is that the provision of a nuclear umbrella means you forgo a certain amount of defensive action," he said.

Historical precedent suggests Israel could eventually, under an upgraded U.S. alliance, come clean on an atomic arsenal it has never confirmed having, and even agree to limitations on it.

In the 1960s, France pursued a nuclear programme in part because President Charles De Gaulle said he did not want to rely on U.S. protection from the Soviets. By submitting to a U.S. umbrella, some see Israel being drawn in the opposite direction.

"Part of the American strategy now may be to provide a nuclear umbrella to the Israelis, with the hope being that, one day, they disarm," Hartwell said.

Israeli officials, while maintaining a policy of ambiguity over the country's nuclear capabilities, have ruled out any open review of it in the absence of comprehensive Middle East peace.


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Iran poised to retaliate against UN referral
By Stefan Smith in TEHRAN middleeastonline 1 Feb 06

Iran said Wednesday it was poised to retaliate against the reporting of its disputed nuclear programme to the Security Council by kick-starting sensitive fuel work and blocking UN inspections.

In a barrage of threats that raise the stakes in the long-running dispute, firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also vowed his country would "continue on the road to victory" and labelled US President George W. Bush a warmonger who should be put on trial.
"If Iran's case is referred or reported to the Security Council ... Iran's cooperation will decrease," top national security official Ali Larijani told a news conference.

"The government will be obliged to remove suspensions, which includes industrial-scale enrichment, and it will do so," he said, asserting that a massive enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran was "ready for operation".

"Inspections will be restricted. They will not have the right to go to military sites which we had so far allowed them to go to. Some of their cameras will be taken down," Larijani said of the now three-year-old International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) investigation of the country.

Iran says it only wants to enrich uranium to make reactor fuel, but the process can be extended to make weapons-grade material. Tehran prompted the current crisis by resuming enrichment research on January 10.

The warnings came as world powers including Russia agreed on a draft IAEA resolution that would report Iran to the Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.

The Vienna-based IAEA's 35-nation board is to consider the resolution on Thursday.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Iran should "see this agreed position by the leaders of the international community not as a threat but as ... a final opportunity for Iran to put itself back on track".

But Larijani said Iran "does not see any rationale to stop nuclear fuel research, even for one day" -- ruling out the one move that could save it from ending up in New York.

"Those who possess stocks of nuclear arms meet together and take decisions and think that the Iranian people will submit to their decisions," Ahmadinejad fumed earlier in a speech in the south of the country.

"Our people will not bow to a few tyrannical countries who think they are the whole world," said Ahmadinejad, accusing world powers of treating Iranians like "a second-rate people with no culture".

He also lashed out at US President George W. Bush, who in his State of the Union address branded the Islamic republic "a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people".

"You who support the Zionist puppet regime, you who support the destruction of Palestinian homes, you have no right to talk about liberty or human rights," shouted Ahmadinejad, who has already called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" or moved as far away as Alaska.

"God willing, in the near future we will judge you in a people's tribunal," he said of Bush.

Larijani also appeared to be bracing for an escalation of the crisis, saying Iran was no longer even insisting on having more time for negotiation "because we have prepared ourselves for another scenario".

He said his talks earlier Wednesday with Russian and Chinese deputy foreign ministers also failed to bear fruit: "They had a point of view on solving the issue, but we had a different point of view."

"The last time they talked of sanctions, the price of oil increased," he said of the threat of tough UN action, adding: "Do not play with the national pride of Iranians. The situation will change and your interests in the region will be in danger."

In recent weeks Iran has been brandishing its close links with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah and firebrand Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

"Any aggression against Iran's peaceful nuclear installations will receive an extremely quick and destructive response from the armed forces," Iran's Defence Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar also warned.

The warning came just days after the head of the Revolutionary Guards also issued a reminder that Iran had ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel and US bases in the region.

Iran claims it is cooperating fully with an IAEA investigation, although the latest IAEA report shows Tehran refusing to give agency inspectors all the information or interviews they want and possessing a document whose only use would be in making nuclear weapons.

Larijani played down the importance of the document, saying it "can be found on the Internet".


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Iran dismisses US threat over nukes
The Daily Star 10 Feb 06

Iran dismissed as "tough words" the United States' refusal to rule out using military force against the Islamic republic over its controversial nuclear programme.

"We are not afraid of attacks by the United States or by other countries on Iran's nuclear installations because we have nothing to hide, we have no installations to produce nuclear weapons," Iranian Vice President Esfandyar Rahim Mashaee said here after meeting with his Indonesian counterpart.

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this week Washington would not rule out using military force against Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Washington accuses Iran of trying to build a nuclear weapon under the cover of a civilian atomic energy programme -- a charge vehemently denied by Tehran.

Mashaee reiterated Thursday that Tehran only possessed "nuclear technology" and did not own nuclear weapons.

"Therefore, what can they attack in Iran? What we have are not nuclear weapons but instead nuclear technology and science. Science cannot be destroyed by Western weapons," Mashaee said in Farsi through an Iranian interpreter.

The Iranian nuclear crisis escalated last week when the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) voted to report the Islamic republic to the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear programme.

Iran said on Monday that large-scale uranium enrichment work would begin in "due course" in response to the IAEA decision.

Mashaee described Rumsfeld as "Dracula" and said threats of military action against Iran "are all lies and mere tough words."

He said Tehran has always "clearly" shown that "all of Iran's nuclear actions and activity are for peaceful means."

The top Iranian official has travelled to Indonesia for meetings with Vice President Yusuf Kalla, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and others although the issues being discussed are unclear.

Kalla said Indonesia opposed any military action against Iran based simply on suspicion that Tehran was attempting to acquire nuclear weapons.

Jakarta abstained during last week's vote by IAEA board members in Vienna to report Iran to the UN Security Council.

Senior Iranian officials have warned that a referral to the council would bring "an end to diplomacy" as well as tough international inspections.

Earlier China said it welcomed nuclear talks between Iran and Russia planned for next week to defuse a crisis over Tehran's atomic programme.

"We hope that this Russian invitation to Iran to hold talks on the 16th about participating in an international uranium enrichment centre will help break, or encourage a break, in the current stalemate over the Iranian nuclear issue," Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a regular news conference.

The deputy head of Iran's National Security Council would lead Tehran's delegation to the talks in Moscow next week, Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported earlier.


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Russia confirms missile defence contract with Iran
Times of India 9 Feb 06

MOSCOW: Amid the escalating crisis around Iran's nuclear programme, Russia said on Thursday that it will still arm Tehran with missiles that can secure nuclear facilities from attacks.
"We concluded a contract for the supply of air-defence systems to Iran and there is no reason not to fulfil it," Mikhail Dmitriyev, the head of Russia's military-technical cooperation agency, said.

Worth an estimated $700 million, the deal for up to 30 Tor M-1 surface-to-air missiles is the largest since Russia in 2000 withdrew from an agreement with the US restricting the supply of military hardware to Iran.

Dmitriyev rejected media reports that talks were underway for the additional supply of heavier S-300 air-defence missiles.

Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov has stressed that the Tor is a defensive system and that the sale does not violate Russia's international obligations.


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Parallels Between Iran and Pre-War Iraq
By Rasool Nafisi, Washington DC Payvand's Iran News 9 Feb 06

Iran is not Iraq, and the year 2006 is not the same as year 2003 for George Bush; but one cannot stop wondering about the uncanny similarities between Iraq at the verge of war, and the present state of affairs in Iran.
Parallels abound:

* Ahmadinejad's administration, helped by the United States and the EU, has managed to isolate Iran internationally. Only three countries, all third and fourth rate powers, voted against the IAEA reporting of Iran to the Security Council. Iraq experienced a similar isolation in the period ending with war.
* Clamp down on internal opposition is on the increase, and the IRI is becoming increasingly a univocal system. Autocracy was also in full swing in Iraq before the war.
* Iranian dissidents feed their selective information and analyses into government agencies and powerful think tanks in DC, and get coverage from major networks. This is reminiscent of the role of Ahmad Chalabi and his cohorts in convincing America before its invasion of Iraq.

* Ahmadinejad sounds increasingly defiant. For example, in a recent speech, ridiculing the IAEA resolution, he said the resolution was meant to open the Iranian military sites to the Western spies for an estimate of the country's military capability (which might be true). The tenor of these intransigent statements is similar to the Iraqi communiqués in the last three years before the war.
* Ahmadinejad and his supporters talk frequently about their strategic strength in the Middle East. They feel they have the majority of Muslims behind them. They tend to forget that during the heydays of the revolution, with the exception of arms smugglers, Iranians had no allies in their war against Iraq. They ignore the fact that Iranians are Persian Shi'ites, and Sunni Arabs have never taken them into fellowship of Muslims. As of today, all Arabs including Syria take Iran for an imperialistic power in the Persian Gulf, which has illegally seized three islands from the Arabs. Iran at best is perceived as a rival (if not an enemy and aggressor) by its neighbors, and its decline will make them more happy than sad.
* Ahmadinejad's anti-Israeli rhetoric might have been intended to gain support from the Muslim masses, which indeed might have. However, aside from some demonstrations and embassy burnings, gaining active support from the Islamists in the region in a likely war against Iran is a different matter altogether. Balance of forces in the region is such that even the most radical groups are busy establishing a foothold in their own national politics. For example, both Hamas and the Iraqi Shi'ite leadership, the two allies that paid homage to Ahmadinejad recently, are hard at work to benefit from the democracy game in their home countries. Hamas is trying to form a government and would need financial and political support from the West. The Iraqi Shi'ites are also enjoying the lion's share of the state in Iraq and would need the backing of the U.S. forces for some times to come. The only remaining force is Hezballah of Lebanon, who has proved to be quite reasonable and calculating at the times of risk and danger. It seems that Iranians are making the same miscalculation as Saddam, who counted on the support from the Arab nationalists, a support that never materialized.
* Ahmadinejad and some of the military leaders refer to the "lightening speed" and retaliatory power of the Iranian military. The reference is most probably to Iran's large stockpile of Shahab III. Saddam and his military leaders also talked with the same hyperbolical language about their "secret" weapons before the war.
* On the other hand, the purported Iranian military strategy of sinking ships at the mouth of Persian Gulf and attacking Israel with Shahab III barrages, will definitely backfire and damages Iran the most. Those who advocate such strategy conveniently forget that this will primarily cut off Iran from the rest of the world, and hamper its oil exports. A stoppage of gasoline import alone would create massive unemployment and shortages, and a total halt of traffic and transportation in a country with little public transit capability. Sadly, this echoes the "scorched-earth" strategy of Saddam, and his exaggerated estimate of his military power.
* Ahmadinejad seems to be out of touch with reality at times. For example, he said, and later denied, that he was surrounded by a "halo" at the UN meeting. Ahmadinejad in this respect is closer to the former Iraqi Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahaf, than to Saddam himself. However, a Tariq Aziz is missing in his administration. A few days before the war, Aziz said realistically that only a "miracle" could save Iraq from war. Nobody has said that yet in Iran, possibly because they have the emissary of God among them, and he can stop a likely confrontation by a decree at the eleventh hour. May be this is the assigned role of the Supreme Leader who has lately been uncharacteristically silent. He can invoke the "expediency" principle and embrace the IAEA resolution. The late Ayatollah Khomeini surprised everyone when he accepted the UN resolution 598 for a ceasefire with Iraq. This time though accepting the resolution of the IAEA might prove to be more difficult. It could lead to other demands such as elimination of delivery systems capable of carrying nuclear weapons (such as Shahab III); a clause already embedded in the IAEA resolution. Such a demand of course would meet resistance from Iranians, and make the emulation of Ayatollah Khomeini's act of drinking "the challis of poison" even harder, and a compromise less reachable.

About the author: The author is the professor of sociology of development at Strayer University, Washington DC. Nafisi contributes to the VOA, BBC, NPR, and the RFERL.


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China says welcomes Iran-Russia nuclear talks
Reuters 9 Feb 06

BEIJING - China said on Thursday it welcomed talks between Iran and Russia next week on plans to defuse the crisis over Tehran's atomic programme, but refused to say whether it would join the meeting.

"We hope that this Russian invitation to Iran to hold talks on the 16th about participating in an international uranium enrichment centre will help break, or encourage a break, in the current stalemate over the Iranian nuclear issue," Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan told a regular news conference.

The deputy head of Iran's National Security Council would lead Tehran's delegation to the talks in Moscow next week, Russia's Itar-Tass news agency reported earlier.
The meeting will discuss a Kremlin proposal to process fuel for Iran's nuclear stations on Russian soil, offering Tehran a way to pursue atomic power but restricting any moves to divert radioactive fuel to weapons.

Asked about Russian reports that China -- a country with close ties to both Moscow and Tehran -- may also attend, Kong said China had not received a formal invitation and he refused to say how China would respond if asked.

But he said China still hoped the nuclear standoff could be solved through "peaceful negotiation".

Tehran insists its nuclear programme is aimed at generating electricity, but the United States and European countries have said Iran is seeking the ability to make atomic weapons.

The United Nations' atomic watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, voted on Saturday for its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, to report by March 6 on Iran's response to demands that it suspend nuclear enrichment activities and improve cooperation with nuclear inspectors.

The agency may then consider moves to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.

China is one of five permanent members of the Security Council that wields veto power over any decisions.

Beijing has repeatedly discouraged, but not flatly opposed, proposals from Washington and the European Union to refer Iran to the Security Council for possible sanctions.

"We support all efforts beneficial to strengthening international nuclear non-proliferation mechanisms, and we hope the international community will reach unanimity on the relevant proposals", Kong said.


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All cartoon politics are local
By Juan Cole Salon 9 Feb 06

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, "Dogs and Indians not allowed."
The global controversy over the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed continued to spin out of control this week, as Iraqis demonstrated for the withdrawal of Danish troops, and Afghans attacked NATO soldiers, leaving four dead and dozens wounded.

The dispute has typically been treated in the Western media as a further sign of the fanaticism of Muslims. But the tempest did not arise out of nowhere.

Muslim anger has been greatly heightened by the widespread belief that at best the West has treated the Islamic world unjustly and at worst launched a war against it. Moreover, the caricatures have most often been deployed by Middle Easterners and Muslims in disputes with each other -- disputes that have been sharpened by the Bush administration's blundering interventions in the region.

Western attempts to cast the issue as one of freedom of expression display an ignorance of the local context of these conflicts, which are not mostly about religion so much as they are about religious nationalism and about power struggles within Muslim societies.

After the cartoons were published on Sept. 30, right-wing Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen reacted to the angry response by refusing to meet with ambassadors from Muslim countries and sternly lecturing Muslims on their need to put up with the caricatures. He finally sounded a more conciliatory note this week, complaining of a global crisis. He was clearly worried, like another Dane, Prince Hamlet, about what would happen "if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me."

Muslim touchiness about Western insults to the prophet Mohammed must be understood in historical context. Most Muslim societies have spent the past two centuries either under European rule or heavy European influence, and most colonial masters and their helpmeets among the missionaries were not shy about letting local people know exactly how barbaric they thought the Muslim faith was. The colonized still smart from the notorious signs outside European clubs in the colonial era, such as the one in Calcutta that said, "Dogs and Indians not allowed."

Indeed, the same themes of Aryan superiority and Semitic backwardness in the European "scientific racism" of the 19th and early 20th centuries that led to the Holocaust against the Jews also often colored the language of colonial administrators in places like Algeria about their subjects. A caricature of a Semitic prophet like Mohammed with a bomb in his turban replicates these racist themes of a century and a half ago, wherein Semites were depicted as violent and irrational and therefore as needing a firm white colonial master for their own good.

(It is worth noting that in 2004 the Danish editor who commissioned the drawings, Flemming Rose, conducted an uncritical interview with the American neoconservative and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes. Pipes, an extreme right-wing supporter of the Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank, has warned of the dangers of Muslim immigration into Denmark, claiming that "many of them show little desire to fit into their adopted country" and that male Muslim immigrants made up a majority of the country's rapists.)

Muslim sensitivity about insults to Islam in Europe has a strong postcolonial context. But the decades since independence have also seen increased conflict between the often Westernized elites in Muslim societies and the traditional Muslim middle and working classes. (See Mark MacNamara's report from Morocco.) In several countries, most notably Egypt, the ruling elites took a hard line on the cartoons in an attempt to cover their flanks from the religious right.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit has been doggedly fanning the flames of the controversy since last fall, when he thundered that the drawings were an anti-Islamic "scandal" that must not be repeated. As recently as Feb. 5 he said, "The publication of cartoons by a Danish newspaper affronting Islam's Prophet Mohammed had triggered massive anger among Muslims worldwide," without acknowledging his own role in keeping the issue on the front pages.

Abul-Gheit's aggressive intervention has little to do with piety and a lot to do with Egyptian politics. The cartoons gave the relatively secular military Egyptian government a free -- and much needed -- opportunity to burnish its Muslim credentials. Egypt jailed 30,000 Muslim fundamentalists in the 1990s and killed some 1,500 in running street battles. Since 2000, the Egyptian government has continued to arrest members of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood and to repress the movement, perhaps the largest and most important dissident organization in Egypt. Despite extensive government intervention against it, the Brotherhood managed to win 88 seats in Parliament in the recent elections, and it would surely have won more if the elections had been truly free and fair. The Brotherhood's good showing was an indirect consequence of pressure from the Bush administration, which demanded fairer elections, thus helping polarize Egyptian politics. In response, Abul-Gheit and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak sought to increase their popularity and outflank the Brotherhood by posing as champions of Islam against a disrespectful West. The move was made all the more attractive because the only cost was to relations with a small country like Denmark.

On Tuesday, the grand sheik of the Al-Azhar Seminary in Cairo, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi -- the foremost Sunni authority -- led a procession of 20,000 students and others in a protest against the caricatures. He and other leading Egyptian clerical figures gave speeches. The Egyptian clerics are often criticized by the lay Muslim Brotherhood as mere stooges of the military government, so this controversy was a means for them, too, to assert their religious leadership.

Reactions in other parts of the Muslim world also reflected local politics. Kashmir Muslims, many of whom feel themselves wrongly dominated by Hindu India, demonstrated on Tuesday, and surely their real target was New Delhi rather than Copenhagen. In Iran, the now nearly decade-long struggle between hard-line clerics and liberal reformers has increasingly been won by the hard-liners, who want to keep Iran from falling under Western influence. The Iranian crowd that attempted to attack the Danish embassy was expressing the hard-liners' policy of isolationism. The standoff between Iran and the United States and its Israeli ally over Tehran's nuclear energy program was also clearly part of the dynamic. Wire services said that Iran's supreme jurisprudent, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the Danish caricatures an "Israeli conspiracy" set in motion by Zionist anger over the victory of the Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist party Hamas in recent elections. (Khamenei's timeline is off, since the drawings were published last September. But the absurdity of the charge should not obscure the powerful political emotions it appeals to.)

On Tuesday, as well, the Pakistani Parliament took up two major pieces of business. One was an attempt by the secular Pakistan People's Party to repeal an Islamic-law ordinance on adultery put into effect by the late dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. Religious-law courts had used the law to punish rape victims for coming forward, judging them to be adulteresses unless they could prove they had been unwilling. A woman's testimony is worth half that of a man in such cases, in accordance with Zia's version of Islamic law, and so few women could hope to convict their rapists. The other matter before Parliament was an overwhelming condemnation of the caricatures of the prophet. The obvious lesson: If you are going to try to repeal Islamic law in Pakistan, it is awfully convenient for you to have a Danish newspaper to vote against as a way of affirming your Islamic legitimacy.

Iraq witnessed similar struggles. A spokesman for the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, told Agence France Presse, "The ayatollah asks the government of Denmark to take measures to discourage those who knowingly harm the position of the Prophet." Sistani went on to say that "participation in the U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq by Danish forces with the said aim of helping the Iraqi people is contradictory with attacks against that which is most sacred to Iraqis and attacks on their most noble beliefs." The grand ayatollah was more or less inviting the Danish troops to leave, a radical step for him.

Although Sistani announced as early as 2003 that he viewed the foreign military occupation of Iraq as undesirable in the long run, he has not so far issued a ruling that the troops of the outsiders must depart. As a result, he has been attacked as a creature of the Americans by more hard-line Shiite groups, such as the Sadrist movement led by the young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. On Monday, the Sadrists mounted a demonstration some 5,000 strong in the southern city of Kut, famed in history as the graveyard of invading British troops during World War I, at which crowds burned Danish flags and demanded that the 530 Danish troops leave the country. A day earlier, Danish soldiers stationed in the Shiite south had been shot at.

Sistani could not afford to leave the defense of the prophet Mohammed to Muqtada al-Sadr. The competition for mantle of the best Muslim between more hard-line and more moderate leaders has helped provoke the strong reaction to the caricatures in Iraq, just as it has in Egypt.

Likewise, the demonstrations in the largely secular and cosmopolitan cities of Damascus and Beirut over the weekend, which turned violent and led to the burning of the Danish embassies in both cities, reflected strong divisions in Syria and Lebanon. In Damascus, the secular Baath government of President Bashar al-Asad has repressed the Muslim Brotherhood. In Beirut, it seems likely that pro-Syrian Sunnis demonstrating on Sunday resented the new assertiveness of the Lebanese Christians, who had successfully led a movement last spring to get Syrian troops out of the country. The Sunnis not only burned the embassy but also attacked a Christian church, over the objections of their Sunni clerical leaders.

In Afghanistan, rural tribespeople attacked NATO bases, demonstrating that they were far more impatient with the continued foreign military presence in the country than was their pro-American president, Hamid Karzai. The most important such attack came in Maimanah, in the northwest of the country near Turkmenistan, not an area that had seen strong support of the Pushtun Taliban.

Rather than merely an East-West issue or a clash of civilizations, the caricature controversy should be seen as part of a culture war within Muslim societies. Precisely because the issue is distant and not very important, it is a cost-free bandwagon on which everyone can jump in search of greater legitimacy among Muslim publics. There is no downside in the Muslim world to defending the prophet Mohammed from Western insults. Pro-American politicians such as Abul-Gheit can use it to burnish their nationalist image, while Sistani can embrace the campaign as part of his old rivalry with the Sadr movement. The cleric Tantawi can employ it to boost his popularity among the rank and file in Egypt and to offset the popularity of the lay fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. It can be used to mobilize Muslims in Kashmir who care a great deal more about Indian repression than about Danish newspapers.

The Bush administration's impulsive intervention in Middle Eastern affairs has heated up the internal Muslim culture wars to the boiling point -- and ironically strengthened those very radical, pan-Arab and Islamist forces that Bush wanted to check. Bush handed Muqtada al-Sadr his current platform, which calls for the withdrawal of U.S. and other foreign troops from Iraq immediately, and which promises that Iraqi Shiites will defend Iran and Syria from an American attack. (The ruling elites of both Iran and Syria are Shiite.) Sistani would not feel the same need to compete with Muqtada by attacking the West if the Americans had not occupied Iraq in so thorough-going, arrogant and incompetent a manner. Bush's pressure on the Syrian regime is an important background to the Damascus and Beirut riots. Pamphlets passed out before the Beirut demonstration denounced the U.S. presence in Iraq, and an attack on a church in Beirut is a symbolic strike at the United States, perceived as a foreign Christian power intervening in Muslim affairs.

The "global crisis" of which Rasmussen spoke has been exacerbated by the decision of the Bush administration to invade Iraq and throw the region into turmoil. It isn't just about some cartoons. It is about independence and the genuine liberty to define yourself rather than being defined by the imperial West.
Comment: "How Barbaric they thought the Muslim Faith was." Hmmm, now let me get this straight. Judaism and Christianity are based on myths and, as far as anyone has been able to prove, there is no historical evidence for the existence of either Moses or Jesus. Islam, acknowledges Judaism and Christianity as its close kin, but relies on the interpretation and further revelation of a REAL historical figure. So, whose faith is really Barbaric?

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An American Indian's View of the Cartoons - Such Depictions Have Been Used as a Weapon Against Oppressed Peoples for Centuries
By ROBERT ROBIDEAU counterpunch 9 Feb 06

ethnically hostile and abusive reporting by mainstream media was what helped to kill more than 60 American Indians and assault hundreds more during the federal governments reign of terror that occurred between 1973 and 1975 on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation.

The old adage that was popularized in Hollywood westerns," White man speaks with forked tongue" had a special meaning. It denoted the deceit of European settlers who often lied to North American Indian people as they stole coveted lands and nearly decimated them as a people. The recent split tongue approach used in defending Danish racist cartoons as freedom of speech must be loudly condemned as just more attacks on the rights of Muslims to defend their lands, culture and self determination.

Most European and North American newspapers support the editor of, Jyllands-Posten, the first paper to publish the offensively racist cartoons, expressed position, "we cannot apologize for freedom of expression."

The word "but" is a favorite transition of hypocrites who would have us believe on one hand that freedom of speech is a democratic principle to be defended at all cost, while on the other hand are quick to condemn when it attacks and incites hatred toward them and those they wish to protect.

Many "Democratic" European countries have laws against anti-Semitism, which are exclusive; they do not protect other cultures from racial attacks. You can insult the prophet of Islam with offensive cartoon messages that deface his image, to create an atmosphere of hatred for Muslims, but dare not tread on the special rights and protections they have formed laws around to protect anti-Semitism....
Reading the first news reports about the cartoons depicting Muhammid as a terrorist reminded me of the unfriendly media that printed the then Attorney Gerneral of for South Dakota, William Janklows` vigilante order, "The only way to deal with the Indian problem in South Dakota is to put a gun to the AIM leaders' heads and pull the trigger." Such ethnically hostile and abusive reporting by mainstream media was what helped to kill more than 60 American Indians and assault hundreds more during the federal governments reign of terror that occurred between 1973 and 1975 on the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota reservation.

The old adage that was popularized in Hollywood westerns," White man speaks with forked tongue" had a special meaning. It denoted the deceit of European settlers who often lied to North American Indian people as they stole coveted lands and nearly decimated them as a people. The recent split tongue approach used in defending Danish racist cartoons as freedom of speech must be loudly condemned as just more attacks on the rights of Muslims to defend their lands, culture and self determination.

Most European and North American newspapers support the editor of, Jyllands-Posten, the first paper to publish the offensively racist cartoons, expressed position, "we cannot apologize for freedom of expression."

The word "but" is a favorite transition of hypocrites who would have us believe on one hand that freedom of speech is a democratic principle to be defended at all cost, while on the other hand are quick to condemn when it attacks and incites hatred toward them and those they wish to protect.

Many "Democratic" European countries have laws against anti-Semitism, which are exclusive; they do not protect other cultures from racial attacks. You can insult the prophet of Islam with offensive cartoon messages that deface his image, to create an atmosphere of hatred for Muslims, but dare not tread on the special rights and protections they have formed laws around to protect anti-Semitism.

For years Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian Muslim, had exercised his right to free speech at his Finsbury Park mosque in London. The British authorities attempted to revoke his citizenship and for years never brought criminal charges against him. With the new atmosphere created around the global war on terrorism (GWT) an English tribunal recently convicted and sentenced Hamza to seven years in prison for allegedly "directly and deliberately stirring up hatred against Jewish people and encouraging murder of those he referred to as non-believers." Certainly the same could be said of the cartoonist.

Despite the fact that more then 10 people have died as a result of the Danish cartoons there has been no criminal charge laid against the offending papers nor the Danish cartoonist. Some countries say that they are looking for ways to prosecute.The cartoons, which many Danish and Scandinavian newspaper editors defended in the name "radical Islam" predictably, resulted in stirring the anger of the Muslim world, rightly so. In defense, they have taken to the streets in unified protests that will, I hope, send shock waves throughout the European Union for sometime to come.

With all the comparisons that have been made and continue to be made between the struggles of Muslim people and North American Indian people, it did not come as a surprise to find similar cartoons historically used to create racism, hatred and war against American Indians. Portraying the popular sentiment about Indians in the 1800`s. A cartoon by Grant Hamilton, called the, "The Nation's Ward" portrayed the Indian as a savage snake constricting a pioneer family. It shows further the American Indian being fed by Uncle Sam while the pioneers' home burns. This cartoon and others like it protested the U.S. treaty promise of giving out food rations to Indians through hard winters. Political propaganda fed through various printed media has helped to create the mentality that allowed wholesale, systematic and frenetic killings of Indian men, women and children. One example of such an atrocity took place at Sand Creek when Phil Sheridan gave U.S. soldiers permission to butcher women and children and to hang their sexual body parts on public display at the Denver opera house. Such atrocities have occurred in today,s modern wars currently being waged against Muslim people under Bush,s doctrine of ´preemptive strike´ that has killed more civilians then fighters.

More recently, the United States federal government began using the FBI as a national political police force to put down legitimate protest movements of the 1960´s. A program called the counter intelligence program (cointelpro) was developed to assist the FBI. This program used offensive cartoons as a method to fan the flames of racism that had been spoon-fed to the Euro-American public through newspapers, books, cartoons and Hollywood westerns became part of their standard bag of dirty tricks in putting down peaceful protest.

Today, the FBI, with a mad infinity for maintaining the imprisonment of now world famous American Indian activist, Leonard Peltier, not to long ago, used a cartoon posing him as an Indian terrorist killing their fellow agents. This cartoon is still today on their website, despite the fact that even prosecutors who tried the case admit they "do not know who killed the two FBI agents" during the Pine Ridge reign of terror on June 26, 1976. Leonard Peltier has been confined 30 years in federal prisons as a result of FBI manufactured evidence, much of which the federal government has since admitted to.

There is no question that sports teams who use Indian Mascots, cartoons that portray inaccurate images, symbols insulting to American Indians. One professor speaking out against the use of Chief Illiniwek by the U of I football team in the late 1990s, said," "I've often visited Germany and speaking to younger people there, they all feel great pain when they consider the recent past. Not one university in Germany would contemplate having a rabbi as a mascot."

Freedom of speech and of the press has been used as a weapon against oppressed people for centuries. It has been nothing more than a smokescreen to justify the actions of a few but in reality incite religious and ethnic hatred. The editors knew these cartoons were clearly drawn as deadly propaganda tools, created with malice and forethought, to neutralize Muslim groups in struggle and deny them "respectability" in the world community. Who now should be charged for inciting a riot? Who now should be held accountable to the Muslim communities for these slanderous, racist cartoons that has forced communities to take sides against each other? How can we share this world, respecting the diversity of ethnic origins if the powers on hand continue to pump the public with hate filled propaganda! It is time for the media to step up to the plate accepting responsibility for their actions and what better place is there to start than in Denmark!

ROBERT ROBIDEAU is co-director of the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. He can be reached at: americanindianm@telefonica.net


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New Evidence Suggests Cartoon Riots Are Staged Psyop
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com February 8 2006

As news breaks of four more demonstrators being shot dead in Kabul, fresh evidence has surfaced lending credibility to the assertion that the Muslim riots are a staged psyop or at the very least based on false pretenses.

Yesterday leading Russian MP Vladimir Zhirinovsky said that the riots were a manufactured psychological operation on the part of the US in an attempt to enlist hardened EU support for a military strike against Iran.

As first highlighted by this website and others, more evidence has come to light that confirms fake and misleading caricatures were bundled in with the more tame cartoons that were printed in Danish newspapers. Muslims were misled into believing that all the images were printed in newspapers when they were not.

World Net Daily reports,

"One of three especially inflammatory but undocumented Muhammad images distributed by a Danish imam as an example of an "anti-Muslim environment" in the European country turns out to be a poorly reproduced copy of an Associated Press photo taken at a French pig-squealing contest."
"The weblog NeanderNews pointed out the image used by Imam Ahmad Abu Laban was a faxed copy of AP's Aug. 15 photo of Jacques Barrot competing at the annual French Pig-Squealing Championships in Trie-sur-Baise."

Another two images which were erroneously added to the caricatures that were actually carried by the newspapers depict Muhammad as a pedophile demon and a dog raping a praying Muslim.

Were the misleading images intended to add fuel to the fire? Many have pointed out that depictions of Muhammad appear universally throughout the world. A stone sculpture in the US depicting Muhammad has been in place since the 1930's. An Australian newspaper piece lists depictions of Muhammad, both flattering and insulting that appear regularly in the West and beyond.

"From Ottoman religious icons to market stalls in Iran, from the US Supreme Court building to the South Park cartoon, Mohammed has been frequently portrayed in flattering and unflattering lights."

Many painters, including William Blake, Gustave Dore, Auguste Rodin and Salvador Dali, have depicted Mohammed in illustrations of Dante's Inferno, where the Muslim prophet ends up in hell with his entrails hanging out."

Why the outrage now? And why were more degrading images that were not even printed thrown into the mix?

The US government is no stranger to using falsely attributed paraphernalia to fan the flames of racial tension. During the Vietnam era civil rights struggle, the FBI mass mailed coloring books that were attributed to the Black Panthers. The books portrayed white people as pigs and encouraged blacks to violently attack and kill them. Primarily mailed to white neighborhoods, the books had the effect of turning middle class sentiment against the black rights movement and leading to support of enhanced authoritarian crackdown.

The feasibility of demonstrators in Gaza having immediate access to a plethora of pristine Danish flags as soon as the furore began has also been put under scrutiny.

A CNN International news anchor reported that the United Nations had foreknowledge that protests in Beirut were going to erupt on Sunday.

"ANTHONY MILLS, CNN INTERNATIONAL: My understanding is, as well, that UN sources were reporting this morning that this was going to be a chaotic day, if you will... Or, certainly they were reporting --they were suggesting -- their workers shouldn't go to work today."

So, indications in advance, I think, probably that something was going to happen here, that some form or sort of violent protest might erupt."

As we reported on Monday, images of Muslims with signs that read "freedom go to hell" and "Europe, take some lessons from from 9/11" are playing right into the hands of the Globalists by enabling them to hold up examples of how the Muslims are dangerous barbarians who wish to take away our liberties and need to be dealt with.

Violent Muslim demonstrators should be aware that they are sowing the seeds of their own destruction by allowing the media to portray them as freedom hating, brutal and out of control. This ensures increased support for future wars that primarily target Muslim and Persian majority countries.

The seemingly artificial origins of the protests betray the true agenda behind the very real chaos that we now see engulfing the Middle East and Europe.


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Asian Muslims vent anger over cartoons
AFP 10 Feb 06

Muslims across Asia have vented their anger over satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, as a leading politician blamed Western nations for a "huge chasm" between the West and Islam.

The protests on Friday over the drawings first published in a Danish newspaper showed no sign of easing, but there was no repeat of the violence that has so far left 13 people dead worldwide in rallies against the cartoons.
In Malaysia, where Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was hosting an international conference on Islam, between 2,000 and 3,000 protesters marched on the Danish embassy chanting "God is great!"

"There is definitely something rotten in the state of Denmark," said Hatta Ramli from the opposition Pan-Malaysia Islamic party.

Abdullah told Muslim leaders and scholars that Western nations wanted to control the world's oil and gas, and blamed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the establishment of Israel, for a rift with the West.

"They think Osama bin Laden speaks for the religion and its followers. Islam and Muslims are linked to all that is negative and backward," said Abdullah.

"The demonisation of Islam and the vilification of Muslims, there is no denying, is widespread within mainstream Western society," he said, adding that there was a "huge chasm that has emerged between the West and Islam."

Meanwhile nearly 20,000 people took to the streets to protest the cartoons in Bangladesh, where Prime Minister Khaleda Zia called for an apology for the "extremely arrogant" drawings.

"We have firm faith in freedom of speech ... but all should remain conscious about their responsibility so this freedom does not hurt anyone's sentiment, faith (and) dignity," she said.

Mohiuddin Ahmed, leader of the Islamic group Hizbut Tahrir, which organised the biggest demonstration in Dhaka, said: "The cartoons are part of the West's crusade against Islam. No Muslim can tolerate these cartoons."

Some 4,000 demonstrators took to the streets of the Pakistani capital Islamabad, marching from a mosque in the centre of the city to the main Abpara commercial centre, under heavy police surveillance.

"Crush Denmark, crush America," the protesters chanted as they torched an effigy of US President George W. Bush.

One protester was injured in another demonstration in the northwestern city of Peshawar when he was hit by a teargas shell and smaller rallies were held in the cities of Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Multan.

In neighbouring India, thousands of Muslims shouting "Denmark Die, Die!" burnt Danish flags in the streets of New Delhi after prayers at the country's largest mosque.

"Islam and Muslims have been challenged," said the mosque's chief cleric, Ahmed Bukhari, who called on the Indian government to demand an apology from Denmark.

"For 1,400 years, Islam has fought its evil enemies and now it will not bow before the Satanic designs of France, Germany, Norway and Denmark," he said, citing some of the other countries where the drawings have appeared.

Protesters spat on giant Danish flags which were spread on the ground outside the 17th-century Jama Masjid mosque.

In Afghanistan, about 300 men, some armed with large wooden sticks, marched through the capital Kabul after Friday prayers after a week of similar protests left at least 11 people dead.

Muslim leaders in the predominately Roman Catholic Philippines urged restraint as a group of 200 Muslims staged a rally outside a mosque in the capital Manila to denounce the cartoons.

In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, police said they had charged the chief editor of a weekly tabloid with blasphemy for reprinting the cartoons.

Imam Tri Karso Hadi, chief editor of Peta, could face a maximum sentence of five years in prison if convicted, a police officer said.

More than 1,000 Muslims rallied in the town of Cirebon in West Java, urging the government to sever diplomatic ties with Denmark. About 300 protestors picketed the Danish consulate in Medan city in North Sumatra.

Denmark has temporarily closed its missions in Indonesia and has warned its nationals to leave the country.

Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said European newspapers had been "provocative and wrong" in publishing the cartoons.

"We would not have allowed it in Singapore," Lee said. "We must not deliberately insult or desecrate what others hold sacred because if we want to live peacefully together, then we must live and let live."


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Hamas joins call for calm in cartoon row
AFP 10 Feb 06

The Palestinian group Hamas has joined calls for calm amid international furore sparked by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, as a Taliban commander in Afghanistan said 100 suicide bombers had volunteered.

Hamas "is prepared to play a role in calming the situation between the Islamic world and Western countries on condition that these countries commit themselves to putting an end to attacks against the feelings of Muslims," the organisation's leader Khaled Meshaal told a news conference Thursday.

His conciliatory tone came a day after he warned the Western press was "playing with fire" by publishing the cartoons which have led to riots around the world.
As Muslim protests over the cartoons subsided on Thursday, a Taliban commander in Afghanistan warned that 100 militants had enlisted as suicide bombers and Denmark said it feared for the safety of its troops in Iraq.

Mullah Dadullah, one of the Taliban's most senior military commanders, said his Islamic extremist group had also offered a reward of 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of gold to anyone who killed people responsible for the drawings.

Meanwhile Afghan authorities arrested more than 40 Pakistani workers for inciting violence Wednesday during a protest against the cartoons in which four people were killed.

The deaths in Qalat raised the death toll to 11 in five days of protests in Afghanistan against the cartoons. Two people have also died in protests in Somalia and Lebanon.

The cartoons, including one showing the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb in his turban, were first published in the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in September, but have since been widely reprinted.

The newspaper's chief editor, Carsten Juste, said Thursday the culture editor who had decided to publish the cartoons, Flemming Rose, had been sent on holiday for an indefinite period "because nobody can bear the weight that is on his shoulders," according to the online edition of the Danish daily Politiken.

Most Danes hold Muslim religious leaders responsible for the furore over the cartoons, according to a poll published in Denmark Thursday.

A total of 58 percent of respondents to the tMegafon poll blamed the imams while 22 percent placed the responsibility on the Jyllands-Posten daily.

A further 11 percent put the blame on Middle East governments.

Denmark's biggest tour operator, Star Tour, said it had scrapped all its trips to Egypt and Morocco until April due to mass cancellations over fears of violence related to the Mohammed cartoons.

Meanwhile Danish military officials said the country's troops deployed in Iraq were keeping a low profile Thursday to avoid any clashes with Shiites during their holy mourning festival of Ashura.

Calls for calm came from many quarters after days of violent protests.

A senior figure at Al-Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, said it was time to move on from high emotion to constructive dialogue.

"Quiet debate and dialogue, without passion" is the way forward, Ali al-Samman, who heads an interconfessional dialogue committee at the prestigious seat of learning in the Egyptian capital, said.

UN chief Kofi Annan again slammed the violence. "It is unfortunate that we all need to take steps to calm the situation and whatever the anger of those concerned, violence is not the answer," the secretary general told reporters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin also called for cool: "The situation should be brought under control as soon as possible."

In Brussels, European Union justice commissioner Franco Frattini called for an urgent "relaunch of dialogue" with the Islamic world in response to the wave of protests.

In Paris, close to 100 Arab and European academics, political and religious figures also issued a joint appeal for "moderation and wisdom" in the row.

However in Lebanon, the head of the country's Shiite movement Hezbollah insisted on an apology for the cartoons, as hundreds of thousands of Shiites gathered in southern Beirut to mark the Ashura festival.

"There will be no compromise before we receive an apology," Hassan Nasrallah told the crowds at the Shiite gathering.

Up to 15,000 South African Muslims also took to the streets in Cape Town, and handed over a petition to the Danish consulate.

The United States warned of potential violence during protests planned this week in Kenya's capital.

Kenyan Muslims have called for demonstrations, including a possible march on the Danish embassy in Nairobi.

The White House, meanwhile, insisted US President George W. Bush would go ahead with his planned trip to Pakistan next month despite widespread outrage over the cartoons there. Protesters burned his effigy Wednesday.

Egyptian writer and Nobel literature prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz said a boycott of Danish products was "the only option" for Muslims to retaliate.

A boycott of Danish goods in Muslim countries in reaction to the cartoons has been gaining ground, with the EU threatening retaliatory action against countries involved.


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How a meeting of leaders in Mecca set off the cartoon wars around the world
By Daniel Howden, David Hardaker in Cairo and Stephen Castle in Brussels 10 February 2006

A summit of Muslim nations held in Mecca in December may have played a key role in stoking outraged protests across the Islamic world against a series of caricatures of the Prophet Mohamed.

A dossier of the cartoons, which was compiled by Danish Muslims, was handed around the sidelines of the meeting, attended by 57 Islamic nations including leaders such as Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Saudi King, Abdullah.


The meeting in Islam's holiest city appears to have been a catalyst for turning local anger at the images into a matter of public, and often violent, protest in Muslim nations. It also persuaded countries such as Syria and Iran to give media exposure to the cartoon controversy in their state-controlled press.

Muhammed El Sayed Said, the deputy director of the Al Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, an independent studies centre, said the Mecca meeting was a turning point in internationalising the cartoons issue. "Things started to get really bad once the Islamic conference picked it up," he said. "Iran and Syria contributed to fomenting reaction. It came to the point where everyone had to score a point to be seen as championing the cause of Islam."

The emergency summit of the Organisation of the Islamic conference (OIC) on 6 December was originally called to address terrorism and sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims, but came to be dominated by the cartoons, originally published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September.

The OIC issued a condemnation of the cartoons: "[We express our] concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Mohamed."

The communique went on to attack the practice of "using the freedom of expression as a pretext for defaming religions".

After the expanded media coverage in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, the violent protests began. At least 10 people have been killed across the Islamic world as a result of these protests.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said the cartoons had provided Arab governments under pressure from the West for democratic reforms with an opportunity to hit back in the public opinion stakes.

"[Demonstrations] started as a visceral reaction - of course they were offended - and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look this is the democracy they're talking about'," he told The New York Times.

Ahmed Akkari, a Lebanese-born Dane and spokesman for a group of Danish Muslims, said the Mecca summit had been the culmination of campaign to publicise the offending cartoons.

The group assembled a 43-page dossier that included several unpublished caricatures. However, Mr Akkari denies allegations that the second set of cartoons - which were faxed to Muslim groups by far-right extremists after they protested against the original images - were presented to Muslim leaders without distinction.

The published cartoons in the dossier were in colour and the unpublished ones were clearly marked and in black and white, Mr Akkari said.

After a number of failed attempts to highlight the issue to Muslim ambassadors in Denmark, Mr Akkari was part of a delegation that flew to Cairo in early December where they met the Grand Mufti and the Foreign Minister, Abdoul Gheit.

"We thought we would mobilise influential people so that they could give us their voice in Denmark," he said.

Ahmed Abu Laban, a radical cleric and leading critic of the cartoons in Denmark, said the purpose of the delegation to the Middle East was to raise awareness, not to stoke anger.

"We have been addressing the issue with a cool head; we were trying to seek academic and religious help from the Middle East. We are not professional enough to know what would be the response of media, nor the interest of politicians there," he said.

Mr Akkari said that the violent fallout was not their intention when they compiled the dossier. "We did not expect it to end up in such a situation, and with violence and for people to use it politically. This has now gone further than we had expected."

Image that launched 1,000 protests

* 17 SEPTEMBER 2005: Danish newspaper Politiken reports a writer failed to find an artist for a book about Mohamed because of fear of reprisals.

* 30 SEPTEMBER: Twelve cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohamed are published in Jyllands-Posten as a protest against self-censorship.

* 2 OCTOBER: Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, hears complaints from 10 Arab ambassadors.

* 14 OCTOBER: 5,000 people march through Copenhagen to protest against the cartoons.

* 21 OCTOBER: Mr Fogh Rasmussen refuses to meet the 10 ambassadors, saying his government is unable to interfere with press freedom.

* 27 OCTOBER: Danish Muslim groups file a criminal complaint against Jyllands-Posten.

* DECEMBER 2005 - JANUARY 2006: The coalition of Danish Muslim groups travels to the Middle East. Delegates at the Islamic Conference in Mecca talk of boycotting Danish goods.

* 7 JANUARY: Prosecutors decide there is no case to answer against Jyllands-Posten.

* 10 JANUARY: Norwegian Christian magazine Magazinet reprints the cartoons.

*27 JANUARY: Saudi Arabia calls for a boycott of Danish goods and recalls ambassador.

* 28 JANUARY: Danish-Swedish dairy giant Arla places adverts in Middle Eastern papers to calm the row.

* 29 JANUARY: Libya recalls its envoy.Jyllands-Posten prints an Arabic editorial saying the cartoons were printed as a test of public expression.

* 30 JANUARY: Editor of Jyllands-Posten apologises as masked gunmen briefly storm the EU's offices in Gaza.

* 31 JANUARY: Denmark advises its citizens not to travel to Saudi Arabia.

* 1 FEBRUARY: Seven newspapers across Europe republish the cartoons in solidarity with Jyllands-Posten.

* 2 FEBRUARY: Jordanian paper Shihan becomes the first in the Arab world to reprint the cartoons saying its decision was made to show their readers "the extent of the Danish offence". The editor is fired.

* 3 FEBRUARY: As 50,000 people protest in Gaza, a small group of Muslim radicals hold a demonstration in London.

* 4 FEBRUARY: Violent protests spread to Damascus.

* 5 FEBRUARY: Danish embassy in Beirut set alight as Iran recalls its ambassador in Copenhagen.

* 6 FEBRUARY: Protests spread to Indonesia, Malaysia and Afghanistan.

* 7 FEBRUARY: Denmark's embassy in Tehran is attacked.

* 8 FEBRUARY: George Bush accuses Iran and Syria of exploiting the cartoons.


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Disinfo Alert! Fanning the flames
By ANN McFEATTERS Block News Alliance 10 February 06

Wars have been started this way.

A group gets riled up over a perceived slight (often religious in nature). Violence breaks out. Alliances are called into play. Reason departs. People die.

To us in America, used to seeing our president portrayed with huge ears, our flag burned, our religious leaders apologize on TV for their transgressions, freedom itself is more important than what some people choose to do with it.

But not in some countries.
The inflamed passions, violence and false allegations stoked by some sophomoric cartoons satirizing the revered Muhammad, such as one with his headdress drawn as a bomb with a lit fuse, first published four months ago in a Danish newspaper, should worry every rational human. It is not farfetched that the religious fervor of outraged Islamic fundamentalists could ignite even more hatred that would take generations to wipe out.

There is nothing that any one government can immediately do to stop this from flaming into widening protests and disinformation. Even if President Bush could deliver a great tempering speech for the ages that would be heard (and listened to) by billions of people, it would not be enough in the short term to re-regulate hearts engorged by self-justifying rage. The United Nations itself is a cauldron of conflicting beliefs and passions. Denmark's protest that its government had nothing to do with the perceived insult to Muslims fell on millions of deaf ears.

While much of the Islamic world is consumed in righteous bitterness over the satiric Western portrayals of its prophet _ Islam teaches that illustrations of its prophet are blasphemy _ in the West justifiable anger continues over terrorism. Bush just announced that, in 2002, al Qaeda, not satisfied with the carnage of 9/11, planned to blow up a West Coast skyscraper.

Bush speaks almost daily of the expanding fronts of the war against enemies of freedom, and calls on us to join in the fight. We feel our justifiable rage grow. Western publications reprint one Dane's cartoon, widely available on the Internet, and outrage mounts against the "infidels," including the entire United States. There is no conversation here, only diatribes.

Because of the cartoons and their reproduction by journalists who feel their duty is to inform readers what is happening, Europe has become a breeding ground for religious death threats and turmoil over free speech. Millions of Muslims are growing ever angrier, insisting that because of a few cartoons they are witnessing a tidal wave of sacrilegious behavior.

It is to be hoped that historians someday will not be engulfed in pondering how ridiculous cartoons in a newspaper in Copenhagen led to chants in Damascus of "Death to Denmark" and fomented a killing spree. But it's far from certain. The West is now thought by millions to be insensitive to tenets of Islam. Some radicals have called for any journalists involved to be beheaded. Some insist the cartoons are government-ordered.

The Bush administration, sensitive to the criticism rained on it for warrantless wiretapping, civil-rights abuses and prisoners held for four years without trial in Guantanamo, responded that while the cartoons are offensive, one of democracy's underpinnings is a free press.

The administration also has widened its reaction to accuse Iran and Syria of helping to perpetuate the violence. But the legitimacy of the demand to end the senseless violence has been lost amid the furor. Blind rage spurts out of once-peaceful neighborhoods.

Like a forest fire, this inferno has to die out from lack of combustible material and wind. And that will happen unless another event further infuriates Muslim sensitivities.

But the fear has been planted that another cultural clash, possibly more significant and imminent, will ignite passions that can't be controlled. Our world isn't just getting smaller, it's getting more frightening.

Understanding is not spreading; intolerance is. Our challenge is to guard against being consumed by prejudice clothed as nationalism.

An American conservative group called the Family Research Council, which claims to "defend" faith, family and freedom, implies that "jihadists" are only pretending to be offended by the cartoons. The council appears to call for more widespread publication of the cartoons: "Let's be honest: the reason liberal editors stick it to Christians while avoiding criticisms of Islam is that they know we won't cut off their heads or burn their news rooms _ and they fear jihadists will."

Cartoon violence has awakened us to the realization that while we have always known the world is dangerous, we've been in a fog over how extensive and explosive that danger is. And there are those in America as well as the Middle East who contribute to the ill will that threatens to engulf us all.

There is a well-known saying from the Bible: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

(Ann McFeatters is Washington Bureau chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Toledo Blade. E-mail amcfeatters(at)nationalpress.com.)
Comment: This woman hasn't got a clue.

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Israel plans to build 'museum of tolerance' on Muslim graves
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem Published: 09 February 2006

Skeletons are being removed from the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to make way for a $150m (£86m) "museum of tolerance" being built for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
Palestinians have launched a legal battle to stop the work at what was the city's main Muslim cemetery. The work is to prepare for the construction of a museum which seeks the promotion of "unity and respect among Jews and between people of all faiths".

Israeli archaeologists and developers have continued excavating the remains of people buried at the site - which was a cemetery for at least 1,000 years - despite a temporary ban on work granted by the Islamic Court, a division of Israel's justice system. Police have been taking legal advice on whether the order is legally binding. The Israeli High Court is to hear a separate case brought by the Al Aqsa Association of the Islamic Movement in Israel next week.

The project, which a spokesman said had been conceived in partnership with the Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli government, was launched at a ceremony in 2004 by a cast of dignitaries ranging from Ehud Olmert, who is currently the acting Prime Minister, to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre declined to comment yesterday and has had no role in the project.

Durragham Saif, the lawyer who brought the Islamic Court petition on behalf of three Palestinian families, Al Dijani, Nusseibeh and Bader Elzain, all of whom have members buried at the cemetery, said: "It's unbelievable, it's immoral. You cannot build a museum of tolerance on the graves of other people. Imagine this kind of thing in the [United] States or England. And this is the Middle East where events are sensitive. If this goes ahead in this way it is going to cause the opposite thing to tolerance."

Mr Saif said he had written to the Israeli State Attorney, Menachem Mazuz, seeking police enforcement of the original order. He said on a visit to the site he had entered three out of five tents where excavations were being carried out. "I was shocked to see open graves and tens of whole skeletons there," he said.

Ikrema Sabri, the Mufti of Jerusalem, demanded a halt to the excavations and said the Muslim religious authorities had not been consulted on the dig. Saying that the cemetery was in use for 15 centuries and that friends of the Prophet Mohamed were buried there, the Mufti declared: "There should be a complete cessation of work on the cemetery because it is sacred for Muslims."

Under Israel's "absentee property" law the cemetery was taken over by the Custodian of Absentee Property after the 1948 war. Mr Saif said the Custodian had no right to sell the cemetery to the Jerusalem municipality in 1992. While parties to the work are resting part of their case on what they say was an 1894 ruling by the then Sharia court that the sanctity of a cemetery could be lifted, Mr Sabri said that ruling meant that only a Muslim could make such a decision.

Osnat Goaz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority, which is carrying out the excavations, said it was common in Jerusalem to build on cemeteries. Adding that in such cases the bones were reburied, she said: "Israel is more crowded with ancient artefacts than any other country in the world. If we didn't build on former cemeteries, we would never build."



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Israel, Russia clash over moves on Hamas
By Adam Entous Reuters 10 Feb 06

JERUSALEM - Israel on Friday protested a plan by Russia to have talks in Moscow with Hamas, the Islamist militant group that swept recent Palestinian elections and whose charter calls for Israel's destruction.

But Russia stood its ground and predicted other countries would follow its lead in dealing with Hamas.
Israeli President Moshe Katsav and others said Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened peacemaking prospects if he followed through on his invitation to Hamas to visit after its victory in parliamentary elections on January 25.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni warned against what she called a "slippery slope" that could lead other international powers to compromise with Hamas.

Meir Sheetrit, an Israeli cabinet minister and political ally of interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said Israel should consider recalling its ambassador to Russia in protest, and accused Putin of "stabbing Israel in the back."

Putin's surprise overture to Hamas came as a blow to Israel, which wants major powers to boycott Hamas at least until it recognized the Jewish state and renounced violence.

Israel has ruled out negotiating with the group, which masterminded more than 60 suicide bombings against Israelis since 2000 but has largely adhered to a truce declared in March.

"Any weakness... will result in a negative effect -- not only for Israel, but also for the Palestinian people and for the international community," Livni said in an interview with The New York Sun.

Katsav told Israel Radio that Putin's invitation to Hamas was liable to undermine peace prospects.

Senior Israeli officials said Russia, as a member of the Quartet of major powers trying to broker Middle East peace, had a responsibility to shun Hamas.

"It's not just a slap in the face to Israel. It's a slap in the face to Western countries," said one Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because talks with Russia were going on.

The official said the government was "waiting for an explanation" from Russia's ambassador in Israel.

But Russian Defense Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov defended Russia's offer of talks with Hamas.

"Hamas is in power, this is a fact, and secondly, it came to power as a result of free democratic elections," Ivanov told reporters at a NATO-Russia meeting in Italy.

He said Moscow was not happy with all of Hamas's policies, but predicted the West had no choice but to deal with it.

"I hazard the prediction that sooner or later certain countries, including those of the Quartet, will be favorable to contacts with Hamas," he said.

France appeared to side with Russia in the diplomatic row.

When asked about Russia's invitation to Hamas, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Denis Simonneau said: "As long as we stay within the framework of the objectives and principles that we have fixed, we think that this initiative can contribute toward advancing our position."

"We share with Russia the goal of leading Hamas toward positions that permit reaching the objective of two states living in peace and security," Simonneau said.

At a meeting in London on January 30, Quartet representatives said the Palestinians risked losing international aid if Hamas did not renounce violence and recognize Israel. Hamas has rejected the demand.

In a bid to shore up international resolve, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz will travel to Cairo on Tuesday for talks with President Hosni Mubarak and other officials.

"The rise of Hamas is not just a local problem for Israel, but a strategic threat for all states that seek peace in the middle east," a Mofaz spokeswoman said.

Hamas, which is considered a terrorist organization by Washington, has suggested it could be extended further if Israel gave up land it captured in the 1967 Middle East War.

Senior Hamas official Ismail Haniyeh has said leaders of the group "would be delighted" to visit Russia if Putin tendered a formal invitation.


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Israel 'may rue Saddam overthrow'
BBC 9 Feb 06

The head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has said his country may come to regret the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Yuval Diskin said a strong dictatorship would be preferable to the present "chaos" in Iraq, in a speech to teenage Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
He also said the Israeli security services and judiciary treated Arabs and Jewish suspects differently.

A Shin Bet veteran, Mr Diskin took over as Shin Bet's chief in May.

His speech to the students at the Eli settlement as they prepared for military service was secretly recorded and broadcast on Israeli TV.

When asked about the growing destabilisation of Iraq, Mr Diskin said Israel might come to rue its decision to support the US-led invasion in 2003.

"When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," he said.

"I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."

Inequality

The security chief was also asked to compare the treatment of Jews and non-Jews by Israel's security and judicial establishments.

"I do not see equality in the way the system handles them when they are guilty of the same type of offence," he said.

"If I had arrested a terrorist from Nablus and Eden Nathan Zaada [an Israeli army deserter who shot dead four Israeli Arabs on a bus in August], they wouldn't have received similar treatment in interrogation or court."

Mr Diskin also said he thought Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made a mistake when he withdrew the Israeli army from the Gaza Strip last year without ensuring the Palestinian Authority could fill the security vacuum.

"From a security perspective, I am opposed to handling over territories to the Palestinians unless we know there are officials there who will take control and commit themselves to upholding the law," he said.

"If there are no such officials, then I am against handing over territories to Palestinian control."

But Mr Diskin criticised militant Israelis who have used violence to oppose further withdrawals from the West Bank.


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Israel plans to build 'museum of tolerance' on Muslim graves
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem 09 February 2006

Skeletons are being removed from the site of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem to make way for a $150m (£86m) "museum of tolerance" being built for the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Palestinians have launched a legal battle to stop the work at what was the city's main Muslim cemetery. The work is to prepare for the construction of a museum which seeks the promotion of "unity and respect among Jews and between people of all faiths".

Israeli archaeologists and developers have continued excavating the remains of people buried at the site - which was a cemetery for at least 1,000 years - despite a temporary ban on work granted by the Islamic Court, a division of Israel's justice system. Police have been taking legal advice on whether the order is legally binding. The Israeli High Court is to hear a separate case brought by the Al Aqsa Association of the Islamic Movement in Israel next week.
The project, which a spokesman said had been conceived in partnership with the Jerusalem municipality and the Israeli government, was launched at a ceremony in 2004 by a cast of dignitaries ranging from Ehud Olmert, who is currently the acting Prime Minister, to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Israeli branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre declined to comment yesterday and has had no role in the project.

Durragham Saif, the lawyer who brought the Islamic Court petition on behalf of three Palestinian families, Al Dijani, Nusseibeh and Bader Elzain, all of whom have members buried at the cemetery, said: "It's unbelievable, it's immoral. You cannot build a museum of tolerance on the graves of other people. Imagine this kind of thing in the [United] States or England. And this is the Middle East where events are sensitive. If this goes ahead in this way it is going to cause the opposite thing to tolerance."

Mr Saif said he had written to the Israeli State Attorney, Menachem Mazuz, seeking police enforcement of the original order. He said on a visit to the site he had entered three out of five tents where excavations were being carried out. "I was shocked to see open graves and tens of whole skeletons there," he said.

Ikrema Sabri, the Mufti of Jerusalem, demanded a halt to the excavations and said the Muslim religious authorities had not been consulted on the dig. Saying that the cemetery was in use for 15 centuries and that friends of the Prophet Mohamed were buried there, the Mufti declared: "There should be a complete cessation of work on the cemetery because it is sacred for Muslims."

Under Israel's "absentee property" law the cemetery was taken over by the Custodian of Absentee Property after the 1948 war. Mr Saif said the Custodian had no right to sell the cemetery to the Jerusalem municipality in 1992. While parties to the work are resting part of their case on what they say was an 1894 ruling by the then Sharia court that the sanctity of a cemetery could be lifted, Mr Sabri said that ruling meant that only a Muslim could make such a decision.

Osnat Goaz, a spokeswoman for the Israel Antiquities Authority, which is carrying out the excavations, said it was common in Jerusalem to build on cemeteries. Adding that in such cases the bones were reburied, she said: "Israel is more crowded with ancient artefacts than any other country in the world. If we didn't build on former cemeteries, we would never build."
Comment: Now puhleeeeze! Can you imagine what would happen if Muslims - or ANYBODY - started digging up Jewish bones? Yes, we here at SOTT think that cemetaries are a waste of space, a representation of the fantasy of immortal physical life. But for many people who are not yet able to let go of their idealization of the material world, they are memorials of love and devotion. Those feelings are valuable and can lead a person to higher thought and emotion. To destroy such a connection, to violate those feelings is, we are afraid, a grievous wrong. It strikes that it is a "sin" against those less fortunate. For the fundies, Jesus did have something to say about that:

Luke 16:19 - 17:2 There was a certain rich man, which was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day: And there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores, 16:21 And desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table: moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham's bosom: the rich man also died, and was buried; And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom.

And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.

But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.

And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence.

Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father's house: For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.

Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them. [An obvious reference to the Jews]

And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.

And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

Then said he unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him, through whom they come!

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

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U.S. Jews block conference set to include anti-Israel professors
By Tamara Traubmann Haaretz 10 Feb 06

Pressure exerted by Jewish organizations in the United States has succeeded in preventing an American Association of University Professors (AAUP) conference, in which a number of supporters of an academic boycott on Israel were scheduled to take part.

The AAUP announced Thursday that it was indefinitely postponing the conference, which was scheduled to take place in Italy next week.

Some twenty professors were invited to take part in the conference, less than half of whom openly oppose an academic boycott of Israel.

Ahead of the conference, the AAUP distributed a collection of articles, which included an article that had been published in Barnes Review, a publication that denies the Holocaust.
A number of attempts were made by Jewish groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish American Congress, to cancel the conference due to the article and the planned itinerary. The groups condemned the AAUP as well as the Ford Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation for financing the conference.

AAUP General Secretary Roger Bowen apologized Thursday and explained that, "The article had been collected during our research for the conference. But it was never intended for distribution to the participants or indeed to anyone else."

The AAUP recalled the article, informed all conference participants of the move and promised that, "nothing of this sort will happen again."

The article in question was pubished in the Barnes Review and claims that Zionist movement leaders tried to advance the establishment of the Nazi regime in the 1930's, in hopes that "the tension between the Germans and the Jews would lead to massive immigration to Palestine."

The Jewish organizations expressed satisfaction with the apology, but called for the cancellation or postponement of the conference.


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Yuri Lutsenko, Ukraine Minister, Israeli Citizen!
compromat.ru 9 Feb 06

The story is in Russian, but the gist of it is:

A rabid fighter against the regime of Kuchma, the "Orange" minister of Interior Affairs of Ukraine, Yuri Lutsenko, has been revealed to be a citizen of Israel.

Go HERE to see the Document.

Notice that it was issued on 7 June 2004.

Do you suppose that Lutsenko expects to have to flee to Israel at some point, from where he cannot be extradited?



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Flashback: Lutzenko is sure that Kravchenko shot himself TWICE!
mignews (Israeli propaganda rag pretending to be Russian) 9 March 2005

The Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine - Mr. Yuri Lutzenko is convinced that the former chief of the ministry - Yuri Kravchenko had committed suicide. "The investigation is being held by the General Procuracy, though in my view that was the suicide”, - told the Minister in the interview to the journalists. - Although it is well-known to many that no person is likely to shoot him/herself twice, the references on criminology state such cases".

Answering the question about the requests on the part of VIP officials, particularly ex-president of Ukraine - Leonid Kuchma, for the additional security, Mr. Lutzenko underscored that he was not addressed in this matter.



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Architects threaten to boycott Israel over 'apartheid' barrier
By Oliver Duff, Rob Sharp and Eric Silver in Jerusalem 10 February 2006

A group including some of Britain's most prominent architects is considering calling for an economic boycott of Israel's construction industry in protest at the building of Israeli settlements and the separation barrier in the Occupied Territories.

Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine, whose members include Richard Rogers and the architectural critic Charles Jenckes, met for the first time last week in secret at the London headquarters of Lord Rogers' practice. He introduced the meeting, and the 60 attendees went on to condemn the illegal annexation of Palestinian land and the construction of the vast fence and concrete separation barrier running through the West Bank and Jerusalem.
The group said that architects, planners and engineers working on Israeli projects in the occupied territories were "complicit in social, political and economic oppression", and "in violation of their professional code of ethics".

It said that: "Planning, architecture and other construction disciplines are being used to promote an apartheid system of environmental control."

The meeting discussed a boycott of Israel - targeting Israeli-made construction materials and Israeli architects and construction companies - as well as possibly calling for the expulsion of Israeli architects from the International Union of Architects.

A spokesperson for the Israeli Embassy said: "Whoever supports a just solution should refrain from any manner of boycott. It just puts more obstacles in the way of reconciliation in our region.

"If these people care about the Palestinian cause they should help to build bridges not destroy."

Israeli architects denounced the initiative. Ofer Kolker, a leading, London-trained Israeli architect, said it would target a whole group, whether or not individuals were involved in the occupied territories.

"What will they boycott?" Mr Kolker asked. "British architects have never cooperated with their Israeli colleagues. British architects have always had a preference for the Arabs."

There have been several attempts to organise boycotts of Israel, from the virtually defunct Arab League boycott to the attempts to organise an academic boycott at the height of the Intifada. Amnesty International has campaigned against the Irish cement company CRH, which it claims held a large shareholding in a company supplying cement to build the separation barrier.

Earlier this week, the Church of England's general synod voted to divest church funds from companies profiting from Israel's illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The main target of the plan will be Caterpillar, whose diggers have been used to demolish Palestinian homes. Caterpillar says the US military sold them to Israel, but the church which sell its £2.5m of shares anyway.

Any boycott would aim to embarrass Israel into halting the building of the barrier and settlements, and the "unrestrained destruction" in historic West Bank cities.

Members said that final tactics were not yet decided but they stressed that all options up to an industry-wide boycott were open.

Eyal Weizman, the Israeli director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmith's College in London, urged action. "A boycott would be totally legitimate," he said. "The wall and the settlements have been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice and we should boycott any company which does business, any architects that participate - anyone facilitating these human rights violations and war crimes."

Charles Jenckes told The Independent: "There reaches a certain point where an architect can't sit on the fence. Not to stand up to it would be to be complicit."

He said the separation barrier built by Israel was "a contorted, crazy, mad, divisive, drunken thing".

"In 10 years' time its builders will see it as a great folly," he said. "Architecturally it is madness. I understand fully that security is the problem for Israel and they have the right to protect themselves. But this is not the solution.

"It is an extremist measure which forments extremism, by incarcerating and intimidating Palestinians." He called for architects to gradually increase pressure on Israeli. George Ferguson, former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who was not at the meeting, said: "It is right that architects should not play a part in building communities and structures that drive people apart."

The biologist Steven Rose, who led the British academic boycott of Israel from 2002, said: "Architecture and planning are an integral part of the fascist apartheid state."


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Bush Plays Terror Card With Bogus LA Attack Plot - Bootlicking news networks follow suit with dramatic images of Library Tower being destroyed
Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet.com February 10 2006

In an orchestrated set-up, George W. Bush announced that a plan to fly a plane into the LA Library Tower was thwarted in 2002 and within minutes news networks were showing footage of the same building being destroyed in the movie Independence Day.

Bush stated that the attack was prevented only with the help of NSA surveillance of communications, an attempt to shut up critics of the spying scandal in a move about as sophisticated as a 300lb Pittsburgh Steelers fan after a heavy drinking session.

The mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa, immediately went public with comments of his absolute bewilderment concerning the alleged plot.

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I don't expect a call from the president — but somebody."

Within minutes of the President's speech, news networks were showing images from the movie Independence Day (pictured), where the Library Tower is destroyed as part of the alien invasion.
We have to understand that the Mayor being completely oblivious to the supposed terror plot most likely means that it was completely invented by Karl Rove and his fellow scriptwriters. That meant that a target had to be chosen and they chose the Library Tower knowing full well that news networks would show images of it being destroyed from the movie Independence Day.

In the mind of the passive viewer this information enters the brain as if it is real, and they suspend disbelief to embrace the notion that the building was destroyed by terrorists. This residue remains in the viewer's psyche and the validity of the government's response to the 'attack,' in this instance passing the soon to expire Patriot Act and justifying spying on Americans, is unquestionable.

This isn't another tin-foil hat conspiracy theory, the suggestibility of television is a scientific fact that has been accepted for decades.

This represents an organized campaign of mind control and fearmongering. They have played the terror card so many times that the fingerprints of deception can be lifted and verified almost immediately.

These are the same people that brought you fake fat bin Laden 'confession' tapes found in a shack in Jalalabad and could psychically predict tapes tying Osama to Saddam airing on Al Jazeera days before they surfaced.

Furthermore, as Kurt Nimmo points out, one of the supposed ringleaders of the operation, Riduan Isamuddin, was “operations chief” of Jemaah Islamiyah, which was a creation of Indonesian intelligence and is widely acknowledged to wholly controlled by the CIA.

If the government has really thwarted an attack on LA you can bet your bottom dollar that they would have waved it in front of the anti-war crowd's face before invading Iraq in March 2003.

This is as obvious a political points scoring move as you're ever going to see. It has been deliberately and synthetically concocted to stifle heated criticism of the NSA spying.

This, despite the fact that the spying debate still circles around foreign phone calls, when the real issue is the admitted fact that the Pentagon and other government agencies have been caught and continue to spy on peaceful anti-war and activist groups entirely made up of American citizens.


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Bush "sexes up" story about al-Qaida plot to fly jet into tallest building in Los Angeles
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Friday February 10, 2006 The Guardian

President George Bush, on the defensive over controversial measures in the war on terror, yesterday gave new details of a foiled al-Qaida plot to use Asian recruits and shoebombs to hijack an airliner and fly it into the tallest building on America's west coast.

In a speech to the National Guard Association in Washington, Mr Bush claimed that the conspiracy was evidence of al-Qaida's determination to launch a new attack on US soil. "We cannot let the fact that America hadn't been attacked in four-and-a-half years since September 11, lull us into an illusion that threats to our nation have disappeared," he said.
He offered as his most compelling example a plot hatched by the architect of the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to fly hijacked aircraft into the 72-storey Library Tower - since renamed the US Bank Tower - in Los Angeles.

Within a month of the 9/11 attacks, in October 2001, "the mastermind of the September 11 attacks had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoebombs to breach the cockpit door and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast", the president said.

Mohammed, who is in US custody at an undisclosed location, recruited the leader of an al-Qaida affiliate known as Jemaah Islamiyah, for the mission. Jemaah Islamiyah's most prominent operations chief, Hambali - also known as Riduan Isamuddin - was chosen because it was thought that south-east Asian hijackers would be less likely to arouse suspicions than Arab Muslims. "Hambali recruited several key operatives who had been training in Afghanistan," Mr Bush said. "Once the operatives were recruited, they met with Osama bin Laden, and then began preparations for the west coast attack."

Hambali is believed to have gathered a cell of four men for the mission, including a pilot, and collected funds to pay them. The plot was thwarted in 2002 with the arrest of plotters in Malaysia. Hambali, who also planned the Bali bombings, was arrested in August 2003 in Thailand with two of his top lieutenants.

The scenario outlined by Mr Bush yesterday was the fullest public acknowledgement to date of the ambitions of al-Qaida in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 2001 attacks - and their deadly ingenuity.

Originally, Mohammed had planned to stage bicoastal attacks in New York as well as Los Angeles, but was forced to scale back because of the complexity of the operation. Instead, he sought to bypass new security measures by using shoebombs and not the box cutters used by the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon - and recruiting outside the Middle East.

"This was going to be the follow-up to September 11," said Vincent Cannistraro, the former director of the CIA's counter-terrorism centre. "We weren't looking in south-east Asia. We were looking at the stereotype of Arab Muslims, so yes it showed creativity on their part."

Since September 11, Mr Bush has issued periodic reminders to Americans of the continued threat of an al-Qaida attack. In a speech last October he said the US and its allies had thwarted at least 10 al-Qaida plots against western targets.

Yesterday's warning, as in the past, comes at a time of mounting public unease about some of the methods the president has adopted in his pursuit of the war on terror - specifically his decision to authorise the National Security Agency to monitor the telephone calls and email of American citizens without resort to a court warrant. Mr Bush has also struggled to force through Congress a renewal of his Patriot Act, the post 9/11 anti-terror legislation. Last night there were signs in Congress that key Republicans who were wary about extending the authorities' powers had swung behind a White House compromise version.

Mr Cannistraro said the plots outlined by Mr Bush were foiled by human intelligence and not the NSA surveillance, and Mr Bush did not refer directly to the domestic spy programme yesterday. Instead he opted for a more general defence of his stewardship of the war on terror, saying that Washington had worked with its allies to block the attack on Los Angeles. "It took the combined efforts of several countries to break up this plot," the president said. "By working together, we took dangerous terrorists off the streets. We stopped a catastrophic attack on our homeland."


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Intel pros say Bush is lying about foiling 2002 terror attack
By DOUG THOMPSON 10 Feb 06

Outraged intelligence professionals say President George W. Bush is "cheapening" and "politicizing" their work with claims the United States foiled a planned terrorist attack against Los Angeles in 2002.

"The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world," says a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency. "He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington."

Within hours of the President’s speech Thursday claiming his administration had prevented a major attack, sources who said they were current and retired intelligence pros from the CIA, NSA, FBI and military contacted Capitol Hill Blue with angry comments disputing the President’s remarks.

“He’s full of shit,” said one sharply-worded email.
Although none were willing to allow use of their names, saying doing so would place them in legal jeopardy, we were able to confirm that at least four of the 23 who contacted us currently work, or had worked, within the U.S. intelligence community.

But Los Angeles Mayor Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is willing to go on the record, claiming Bush blind-sided his city with the claims.

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor says. "I don't expect a call from the president — but somebody." Villaraigosa also said he has twice requested meetings with Bush to discuss security issues for Los Angeles and was turned down both times.

Intelligence pros say much of the information used by Bush in an attempt to justify his increased spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, trampling of civil rights under the USA Patriot Act, and massive buildup of the Department of Homeland Security, now the nation’s largest federal bureaucracy, was “worthless intel that was discarded long ago.”

“A lot of buzz circulated in the months following the September 11, 2001, attacks,” says an NSA operative. “Snippets here and there were true but most were just random information that could never be confirmed. One thing we do know about al Qaeda is that they seldom use the same technique twice. They tried a car bomb to bring down the World Trade Center and it failed. Then they went to planes. The next time will be something different because we’ve geared up to prevent hijacking planes and using them as flying bombs.”

In August 2004, just as the Presidential campaign was about to heat up, the Bush White House raised the terror alert, claiming attacks were imminent on major financial institutions. The alert, apparently timed to steal thunder from Democrat John Kerry’s nomination for President, was withdrawn after administration officials admitted it was based on old information from a discredited informant.

The discredited information dated back to the same period when intelligence agencies began receiving reports of a planned attack against Los Angeles.

Former DHS secretary Tom Ridge admits the U.S. raised terror alerts for the wrong reasons and now says he often disagreed with the timing of such alerts but was overruled by the White House.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge says. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on alert, There were times when the White House was really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' We often lost the argument."

Ridge left DHS in February 2005 and Bush replaced him with Michael Chertoff who agrees with the “cry wolf” strategy of the White House.

“Chertoff is a lackey,” says Kevin Riley, a retired New York City Detective who knew Chertoff during his days as a U.S. Attorney in New York. “He’ll do whatever Bush tells him to do.”

Intelligence pros at established Washington agencies laugh at DHS operatives, calling them “Keystone Kops” and “overpaid rent-a-cops,” saying they lack any real expertise in dealing with terrorism.

“DHS is a political police force,” says a retired CIA agent. “They exist to enforce the political propaganda program of George W. Bush. That’s all they’re good for and they’re not very good at that.”

© Copyright 2006 by Capitol Hill Blue


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LA skyscraper plot never got beyond talk say analysts
AFP 10 Feb 06

Bush said that instead of using Arab hijackers, as in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the plot called for "young men from Southeast Asia whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion."

"I think he is gilding the lily a little," said Clive Williams, adjunct professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University.
An alleged Al-Qaeda plot to crash an airplane into a Los Angeles skyscraper but foiled with the help of Asian nations never got beyond the discussion stage, security analysts said.

President George W. Bush and other US officials could have revealed new details of the plot Thursday in an effort to forge tighter international cooperation in the so-called "war against terror", the analysts said.

Bush said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed planned to have operatives hijack an airplane, use shoe bombs to breach the cockpit doors and fly the jet into Los Angeles' tallest building, the 310-metre (1,017-foot) US Bank Tower, also known as Library Tower.

Bush said that instead of using Arab hijackers, as in the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the plot called for "young men from Southeast Asia whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion."

"I think he is gilding the lily a little," said Clive Williams, adjunct professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University.

He said that although Al-Qaeda had thought about such an attack, "I don't think they got very far in their planning process."

Bush said the operatives met with Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden before beginning preparations for the attack, which started to unravel in early 2002 when "a Southeast Asian nation" caught a key Al-Qaeda operative.

The president did not name the operative or the country. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is sometimes called the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

Bush said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's key co-conspirator was Hambali, a leader of the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) which authorities have blamed for numerous attacks in Southeast Asia, including the 2002 Bali bombings which killed more than 200 people.

White House counterterrorism adviser Frances Townsend said all four members of the cell had been caught, but declined to name the two South Asian countries and two Southeast Asian countries that helped foil the plot.

Hambali was arrested in Thailand in 2003.

Rohan Gunaratna, head of terrorism research at Singapore's Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, said Hambali was certainly assisting Al-Qaeda "and they were discussing the operation to strike in the United States ... but it didn't move beyond the discussion stage."

Indonesian analyst Kusnanto Anggoro said that while it is very likely Southeast Asian radicals inspired by Al-Qaeda could become involved in such a plot, it was difficult to verify Bush's allegations.

"The problem is why Bush at this time made this kind of statement," said Anggoro, a researcher with Jakarta's Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Bush is likely using the plot to help push for wider cooperation with Asia in the "war on terror," Anggoro said.

Williams also saw it as an effort to underline the co-operative nature of the "war".

"I think it's all part of US policy to try and underline that it's a global threat and not just a threat that's directed against the United States and Israel," he said.

Williams and Anggoro suspected that Pakistan, India and Singapore were the Asian countries Bush said helped to foil the skyscraper plot. "And maybe Indonesia," Willams said.

Gunaratna, the Singapore analyst, said he did not know which countries but added he did not think Bush was exaggerating details of the plot.

"Hambali was a very capable man," he said.

Williams said Al-Qaeda and JI clearly had very close links.

The situation in Southeast Asia in the early part of this decade "provided a very significant breeding ground" for potential attackers, Kusnanto said.


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Propaganda Alert! Malaysia holding LA attack plotters
By Simon Cameron-Moore Reuters 10 Feb 06

ISLAMABAD - Malaysia is holding several members of an al Qaeda suicide cell that U.S. President George W. Bush says planned to launch a September 11-style attack on Los Angeles, a security official familiar with the case told Reuters.

The plot to hijack a plane and fly it into Los Angeles' tallest building was set in motion a month after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and was thwarted in early 2002, according to Bush.

A Southeast Asian intelligence official said at least three members of a Southeast Asian cell earmarked to carry out the attack on the West Coast were being held in Malaysia under the Internal Security Act, which allows detention without trial.

"One guy was given money to go for pilot training," said the official, who has proven reliable in the past.
He said the would-be pilot, Zaini Zakaria, was arrested in 2002, and the others were probably chosen to play supporting roles in the hijacking.

Members of the cell fled to Malaysia from Afghanistan after the United States began bombing al Qaeda and Taliban forces there in October 2001.

"They were told to... await instructions. They were supposed to meet up again to carry out a second (suicide airliner) operation," the official said.

MALAYSIA HOLDING 66

Diplomats say security agencies in mostly Muslim Malaysia were very cooperative in sharing counter-terrorism intelligence information with their U.S. counterparts after September 11, 2001.

Malaysia is holding 66 detainees suspected of links to al Qaeda and its Southeast Asian branch, Jemaah Islamiah.

The Malaysian government declined to comment.

"We don't comment on detainees or divulge information concerning detainees," a spokesman for the office of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said.

According to Frances Townsend, Bush's homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, the West Coast plot was initially to have been part of the September 11 attacks.

But al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden decided to focus on the East Coast as it was too difficult to get operatives for both.

The planned attack on Los Angeles was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is in U.S. custody.

The hijack team was recruited by Jemaah Islamiah commander Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who was arrested in August 2003 near Bangkok and is also in U.S. custody.

The hijackers were to use bombs hidden in shoes to breach the cockpit door of an airplane before flying it into Los Angeles' 1,017-feet (310-meter) high Library Tower, now the US Bank Tower.

The cell was broken and the arrests made between 2002 and 2003.

MORE ALERT TO ARABS

"It was a legit plot," said Ken Conboy, a Jakarta-based security expert who has written several books on defense, intelligence and security issues. "Whether they would have been able to get these guys actually in the States is another deal.

"It was envisioned as a second wave after 9/11, and he (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) wanted to use Southeast Asians because he thought they could get into the U.S. and hijack the planes more so than Arabs because the U.S. would be more on alert to Arabs after 9/11," Conboy said.

In December 2001, Malaysia made its first breakthrough against al Qaeda in Southeast Asia with the arrest of Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain, who recently returned from Afghanistan.

Sufaat hosted two of September 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, when they passed through Kuala Lumpur almost a year before the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

He is also believed to have supplied money and travel documents in Malaysia to Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who was arrested in the United States before the September 11 attacks.

Moussaoui denies he was to have participated in the September 11 strikes but says he was part of a broader conspiracy to conduct subsequent attacks.

(Additional re[porting by Jerry Norton in Jakarta)
Comment: This is what your tax dollars are paying for. A nice example of the Pentagon's "info wars" propaganda.

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Bush at the Funeral: Trapped Like a Rat
By William Rivers Pitt t r u t h o u t 09 February 2006

The central tenet of the civil rights movement has, is and will always be one simple truth: one must speak truth to power in order to affect change. This was the maxim by which Coretta Scott King lived her life, and the maxim by which her husband lived and ultimately died by. Had her funeral not involved speaking truth to power, the ceremony would have been incomplete. George W. Bush heard on Tuesday some hard truths that his fanatical insulation has to date spared him from. It may have been the healthiest moment this republic has absorbed in years.
The funeral for civil rights leader Coretta Scott King on Tuesday was quite a sight to see. The depth of sadness in the room could not be overcome by the happiness that came with the celebration of her life and accomplishments. It was the measure of Mrs. King's impact upon our society that four presidents - Carter, Bush, Clinton and Bush - sat before her flower-draped casket and spoke of her life.

And then, of course, the foolishness began. The nattering nabobs of network nonsense blithered into their cable news studios to deplore all the political statements that were served up before the appreciative crowd in that church. It was the Wellstone funeral all over again.

Let's be clear. The life of Coretta Scott King was one that involved politics from every angle. Any lifelong struggle against poverty, racism and war is going to be a life immersed in politics. That is simply the way it is; because so many politicians and political ideologies center around statements and legislation that directly add to the burdens of the poor and minorities, any person choosing to fight poverty and racism is going to wind up dealing in politics.

Gandhi was elected to no office in his entire lifetime, but every action he took involved politics. The same can be said for Martin Luther King Jr., who won no elections but changed politics in America forever. Coretta Scott King held no office, but her work affected the politics of this country in every way. Ask Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan, who received a warm telephone call from Mrs. King while standing vigil outside George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford last August. If this was not a political act, then political acts do not exist.

Politics belonged in that church on Tuesday. Period.

A good deal of the humbug arising from the political statements at the funeral are based upon the fact that George W. Bush changed his schedule to appear at the event. Because he did this, the thinking goes, he should be above the pointed criticism he absorbed up on that stage. Smart money says he came to the funeral only to avoid the criticism he would have received had he not shown up with those three other presidents. Smart money likewise says he came to try and shore up his poll numbers with African Americans; his support among this constituency stands in the low single digits, well within the margin of error in any poll, suggesting his actual support among this group is zero. This is, however, an issue for another day.

The central tenet of the civil rights movement has, is and will always be one simple truth: one must speak truth to power in order to affect change. This was the maxim by which Coretta Scott King lived her life, and the maxim by which her husband lived and ultimately died by. Had her funeral not involved speaking truth to power, the ceremony would have been incomplete. George W. Bush heard on Tuesday some hard truths that his fanatical insulation has to date spared him from. It may have been the healthiest moment this republic has absorbed in years.

President Jimmy Carter, who has come to be one of the harshest critics of Mr. Bush, hurled fire across the stage over the deplorable administration response to Hurricane Katrina. "This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over," said Carter. "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans."

Carter also took a moment to drop a brick over the recent revelations that the NSA has been spying on Americans, without court approval or warrants, at the behest of Mr. Bush. "It was difficult for them personally," said Carter, "with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance, and as you know, harassment from the FBI."

By far, the harshest criticism came from Rev. Joseph Lowery, a King protégé, who spoke of Mrs. King's staunch opposition to the occupation of Iraq. "She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar," said Lowery. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there. But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance. Poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor."

Would Coretta Scott King have approved of this? One can be certain that the woman who said "If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children" would have certainly approved.

This was a day for speaking truth to power, but it was more than that. Mr. Bush and his people have worked incredibly hard to keep this president from hearing anything that rubs against what he believes to be true. He speaks before hand-picked crowds of adoring supporters, never once seeing the face of someone who thinks he is running the nation into the ground. Millions upon millions of protesters have followed his every move, and yet it is almost certain he has never laid eyes upon a single one of them.

On Tuesday, by his own design. George W. Bush was trapped like a rat on that stage. He was forced to listen to eloquent denunciations of his politics and his policies, perhaps for the first time since he took office. The effect upon him was clear; during the speeches delivered by Rev. Lowery and president Carter, Bush looked as if he was sucking on a particularly bitter lemon.

When one speaks truth to power, especially arrogant power, that is usually the effect. Coretta Scott King would have approved.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.


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Propaganda Alert! Surveillance Program Gains Support
newsmax (propaganda rag) 9 Feb 06

President Bush's monthlong campaign to convince the public that the government's eavesdropping program is an essential anti-terrorism tool appears to have made an impact, a new AP-Ipsos poll suggests.
Some 48 percent now support the administration's program to monitor - without a court warrant - some U.S.-based calls with suspected links to terrorists. That's up from 42 percent last month. Half now say the administration should have to get a warrant, down from 56 percent one month ago.

Bush has been particularly successful at making his case for the National Security Agency's controversial monitoring among men and core segments of his base.

After weeks of insisting that divulging details would harm the program, the White House relented Wednesday and briefed House intelligence committee lawmakers. Thursday, the Senate learned more about the NSA program.

Press secretary Scott McClellan said the White House will listen to ideas that lawmakers have about legislation, but Bush has indicated that he would resist any move that would compromise the program.

"There is a high bar to overcome on such ideas," McClellan said.

The decision to give Congress more information came as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., announced he was drafting legislation that would require the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review the constitutionality of the administration's monitoring of terror-related international communications when one party to the call is in the United States.

It also came as Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., chairwoman of a House intelligence subcommittee that oversees the NSA, broke with the Bush administration and called for a full review of the NSA's program, along with legislative action to update the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

She and others also wanted the full House Intelligence Committee to be briefed on the program's operational details. Although the White House initially promised only information about the legal rationale for surveillance, administration officials broadened the scope Wednesday to include more sensitive details about how the program works.

Questions from Congress about the monitoring abound. Once publicly mum on the subject, House Judiciary Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., sent a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales with 51 questions he wants answered by early March.

As part of his upcoming bill, Specter said he wants the FISA court to review the program to weigh the nature of the terrorist threat, the program's scope, the number of people being monitored and how the information is being handled.

Since the monitoring program's existence was first revealed in a newspaper report more than 50 days, senior administration officials have argued that Bush and Cheney were within the law when they chose to brief only the eight lawmakers who lead the House and Senate and their intelligence committees.

Several lawmakers want to hearings to review whether the FISA law should be updated.
Comment: This is the most typical and blatant kind of propaganda. The "poll" is supposed to convince the average American that all his friends and neighbors think it is okey, so if he is thinking otherwise, then there must be something wrong with him. So, if you want an example of the kind of writing that the Pentagon is paying for in its expansive "information wars" program, this is a good one.

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The president, the stripper and the attorney general
Sidney Blumenthal Thursday February 9, 2006 The Guardian

The extraordinary legal defence of George Bush's domestic spying reads like a blend of Kafka, Le Carré and Mel Brooks


In 1996, Governor George W Bush received a summons to serve on a jury, which would have required his admission that 20 years earlier he had been arrested for drunk driving. Already planning his presidential campaign, he did not want this information made public. His lawyer made the novel argument to the judge that Bush should not have to serve because "he would not, as governor, be able to pardon the defendant in the future". (The defendant was a stripper accused of drunk driving.) The judge agreed, and it was not until the closing days of the 2000 campaign that Bush's record surfaced. On Monday, the same lawyer, Alberto Gonzales - now attorney general - appeared before the senate judiciary committee to defend "the client", as he called the president.
Gonzales was the sole witness called to explain Bush's warrantless domestic spying, in obvious violation of the foreign intelligence surveillance act (Fisa) and circumvention of the special court created to administer it.

The scene at the Senate was acted as though scripted partly by Kafka, partly by Mel Brooks, and partly by John le Carré. After not being sworn in, the absence of oath-taking having been insisted upon by the Republicans, Gonzales offered legal reasoning even more imaginative than that he used to get Bush off jury duty: a melange of mendacity, absurdity and mystery.

The attorney general argued that Fisa did and did not apply; that the administration was operating within it, while flouting it; and that it didn't matter. The president's "inherent" power, after all, allowed him to do whatever he wanted. It was all, Gonzales said, "totally consistent". His explanation, observed Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the judiciary committee, "defies logic and plain English".

Congress, Gonzales elaborated, had no proper constitutional role, but in any case had already approved the president's secret programme by voting for the authorisation of the use of military force in Afghanistan - even if members didn't know it; or even, when informed years later that they had approved the secret programme, objected that they hadn't known that that was what they were doing.

The legislation that was ignored, Gonzales declared, shouldn't be amended to bring this domestic spying under the law because the secret programme was already legal, or might be legal; and anyway it doesn't matter if Congress says it's legal. The all-powerful president should be trusted, but when Bush states wrongly that he goes to court for warrants, it's all right that he doesn't know what he is talking about. "As you know," said Gonzales, "the president is not a lawyer."

Who was or wasn't being spied on couldn't and wouldn't be explained. When Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked whether the programme could be used to "influence United States political processes, public opinion, policies or media", Gonzales replied: "Those are very, very difficult questions, and for me to answer those questions sort of off the cuff, I think would not be responsible." When Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, asked for assurances that only al-Qaida or suspected terrorists were subjected to surveillance, Gonzales answered: "Sir, I can't give you absolute assurance."

Nor would he say what the programme really was. "I am not comfortable going down the road of saying yes or no as to what the president has or has not authorised," Gonzales said. "I'm not going to respond to that. I'm not going to answer."

Gonzales's ultimate argument was an appeal to history. George Washington, he pointed out in a display of erudition, "intercepted British mail", footnoting a 1997 CIA report on the subject. In the civil war, the telegraph was wiretapped. And during both the first and second world wars, communications were intercepted. Gonzales's ahistoricism about technology aside (George Washington had no cell phones to tap, no computers to hack), Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt could not have broken a law that did not exist.

Through his convoluted testimony, the attorney general represented "the client" as a useful factotum again. But in his tour of history, he neglected the disclosure by the Associated Press on February 3 of about 200 pages of documents from the White House of President Gerald Ford. These papers highlighted the objections made by Ford's secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his chief of staff, Dick Cheney, to getting court warrants for domestic surveillance. It was partly to thwart such unaccountable executive power that Congress enacted Fisa in 1978.

Once again Cheney, the power behind the throne, has found a way to relieve the frustrations of the past. But he is fulfilling more than the curdled dreams of the Nixon and Ford era. The Bush presidency is straining to realise a pre-Washington ideal - unconstitutional monarchy.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is the author of The Clinton Wars. Email: sidney_blumenthal@yahoo.com


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A terrorist on every corner?
By James Bovard Los Angeles Times 8 Feb 06

PRESIDENT BUSH and Atty. Gen. Alberto Gonzales insist that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping of American citizens is a necessary "terrorist surveillance program." And polls show that most Americans support permitting the government to tap the phone calls and e-mails of those considered "suspicious."

But what exactly does that mean? A close look suggests that the feds' definition of a "suspected terrorist" may not meet the laugh test.
In the mass roundup of more than 1,200 people shortly after 9/11, for example, it took very little for a Muslim or Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a "suspected terrorist," according to a 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general. Arab students were locked up as suspected terrorists for working at pizza parlors (in violation of their student visas); a Pakistani immigrant was jailed after attracting attention because he and his Queens housemates let their grass grow long and hung their underwear out to dry on the fence; and one Muslim was arrested because "he had taken a roll of film to be developed and the film had multiple pictures of the World Trade Center on it but no other Manhattan sites," the inspector general noted. Some FBI agents were even instructed to look in phone books to find Arab- or Muslim-sounding names, according to Newsweek columnist Steven Brill.

The Department of Homeland Security in May 2003 urged 18,000 local and state police departments to treat critics of the war on terror as potential terrorists, according to a confidential DHS memo made public in 2004. Suicide bombers, the feds told local lawmen, could be detected by such traits as a "pale face from recent shaving of beard"; they "may appear to be in a 'trance' "; their eyes may "appear to be focused and vigilant"; and their clothing may either be "out of sync with the weather" or just "loose."

The Transportation Security Administration is also extremely arbitrary in how it designates names for its "no-fly" list. There are an estimated 70,000 names in the registry — many of them stuck there for reasons that even the government cannot explain. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) were placed on the list. Everyone with the common name of "David Nelson" is treated like a would-be bomber — as are 4-year-old children unlucky enough to have a name matching one on the list.

Since December, according to media reports, TSA agents have been chatting up airline passengers to determine if they are terrorists, looking for such warning signs as "involuntary physical and psychological reactions" — including whether people appear stressed out, frightened or deceptive. The number of people who fear flying outnumber Al Qaeda associates by at least a few thousand-fold, yet visible anxiety will be enough for the TSA to justify taking people aside for far more intensive examination.

And the Pentagon has its own catchall definitions of suspicious and/or terrorist-related behavior. Its "counterintelligence field activity" program, ostensibly set up to protect domestic military bases and personnel, has been covertly gathering information on Americans who have done nothing more suspicious than protest against the Iraq war, including at last year's antiwar rally at Hollywood and Vine. Names gathered in such fishnets are being added to a Pentagon database involving the "terrorism threat warning process," according to Newsweek.

When Americans hear Bush say "terrorism surveillance program," they should recognize that the crosshairs may very well be on them. The more expansive and arbitrary the definition of "suspected terrorist," the more of our rights the feds can violate. Invoking the word "terrorism" must not raze all limits on the government's power to target citizens who pose no threat to public safety.

JAMES BOVARD is the author of "Attention Deficit Democracy" and eight other books.


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US plans massive data sweep - Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?
By Mark Clayton The Christian Science Monitor 9 Feb 06

The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.
"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."

The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.

DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. "I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."

Data-mining is a key technology

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.

But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.

For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.

At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which along with other "visualization" software tools can give human analysts a graphical view of data. Viewing data in this way could reveal patterns not obvious in text or number form. Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places, and things - using social-behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data-mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Dr. Kielman wrote in his November report. He declined to be interviewed for this article.

One data program has foiled terrorists

Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."

As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists. "All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, says the 2004 workshop report.
Some antiterror efforts die - others just change names

Defense Department

November 2002 - The New York Times identifies a counterterrorism program called Total Information Awareness.

September 2003 - After terminating TIA on privacy grounds, Congress shuts down its successor, Terrorism Information Awareness, for the same reasons.

Department of Homeland Security

February 2003 - The department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announces it's replacing its 1990s-era Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS I).

July 2004 - TSA cancels CAPPS II because of privacy concerns.

August 2004 - TSA says it will begin testing a similar system - Secure Flight - with built-in privacy features.

July 2005 - Government auditors charge that Secure Flight is violating privacy laws by holding information on 43,000 people not suspected of terrorism.

A program in the shadows

Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.

"We just don't know enough about this technology, how it works, or what it is used for," says Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It matters to a lot of people that these programs and software exist. We don't really know to what extent the government is mining personal data."

Even congressmen with direct oversight of DHS, who favor data mining, say they don't know enough about the program.

"I am not fully briefed on ADVISE," wrote Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania, vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in an e-mail. "I'll get briefed this week."

Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.

Echoes of a past controversial plan

ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."

But Mr. Sand, the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. "Before a system leaves the department there's been a privacy review.... That's our focus."

Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.

"This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."

Others are less sure.

"It isn't a bad idea, but you have to do it in a way that demonstrates its utility - and with provable privacy protection," says Latanya Sweeney, founder of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. But since speaking on privacy at the 2004 DHS workshop, she now doubts the department is building privacy into ADVISE. "At this point, ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology."

She cites a recent request for proposal by the Office of Naval Research on behalf of DHS. Although it doesn't mention ADVISE by name, the proposal outlines data-technology research that meshes closely with technology cited in ADVISE documents.

Neither the proposal - nor any other she has seen - provides any funding for provable privacy technology, she adds.


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Bush faces Republican revolt over spying
By Edward Alden and Holly Yeager Financial Times February 9 2006

Congressional Republicans are threatening to force a legal showdown with President George W. Bush over his claim that he has the constitutional power to order domestic surveillance of Americans in the name of national security.

Arlen Specter, Republican chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, said on Wednesday he was drafting legislation that would require the administration to seek a ruling from a special US intelligence court on whether the spying programme was legal.
The move could put the Republican-controlled Congress on a collision course with the administration, which has insisted that it is acting legally in monitoring calls and e-mails that might help disrupt future terrorist plots.

The US has been embroiled in a contentious debate over security versus civil liberties since the revelation in December that the National Security Agency had been intercepting communications on US soil since early 2002. The administration says the effort is aimed narrowly at communications involving suspected members of al-Qaeda or their supporters, but in order to identify such suspicious conversations many suspect that the NSA is combing through a far broader range of ordinary calls and e-mails.

On its face, the programme appears to violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), in which Congress required that domestic eavesdropping for intelligence purposes could only be done with warrants from a special court set up under Fisa. Alberto Gonzales, the attorney-general, failed to persuade Democrats and many Republicans in all-day Senate testimony on Monday that the president has inherent wartime powers that allowed him to bypass that requirement.

Mr Specter said his proposed legislation would require the administration to take that issue to the Fisa court. He said the administration’s claim “may be right, but on the other hand they may be wrong”.

He said the Fisa court should determine whether the programme is legal, and if it is not what changes would be required.

Mr Specter’s threat is only the latest sign that the NSA spying revelations have divided Republicans, with some in the party fearing that Mr Bush’s expansive claims may pose a danger to civil liberties. The administration has also been criticized for briefing only congressional leaders and senior members of the intelligence committee on the programme.

But on Wednesday, Mr Gonzales and Michael Hayden, deputy director of national intelligence, gave their first briefing on the surveillance effort to all members of the House intelligence committee, according to Heather Wilson, a Republican on the committee who had called for more complete briefings.

Ms Wilson, who chairs a subcommittee that oversees the NSA, said she was still learning the facts of the programme. But she said it might be time to update the 1978 law on foreign intelligence surveillance.

“Technology is changing, and we have to keep up and keep pace with that technology to make sure our intelligence agencies have the tools they need to keep us safe,” she said.
Comment: We aren't holding our breath. We see what happened to the motion to demand information on the Torture Scandal.

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Uganda secretly draining Lake Victoria, says environmental report
AFP 10 Feb 06

A study commissioned by an environmental group has accused Uganda of secretly draining water from Lake Victoria, in the midst of a bad regional drought, to help maintain power for its electricity grid.

The lake, which provides the livelihood for some 30 million people in the shoreline countries of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, has suffered a dramatic fall in water levels since 2003.

Levels have plummeted 1.2 metres (3.9 feet), bringing the lake to its shallowest since 1951, exposing muddy banks that have stranded ferry boats and fishing vessels and causing water shortages for shoreline towns and farmers.

A total of 75 cubic kilometres (18 cu. miles) of water, equivalent to about three percent of the lake's normal volume, has been lost in just three years.
The report, released Thursday, says that more than half of the lake's drop in 2004 and 2005 is attributable to the Owen Falls dams in Uganda, across the only outlet for the mountain-fringed lake.

In breach of an international agreement, the dam's operators have been releasing more water than the lake can sustain, it charges.

The reason, says the report, is to maintain sufficient flows of water over the dam's turbines and keep the lights on in Uganda.

"The resultant over-release of water... is contributing to the severe drop in water level in Lake Victoria," says the report, written by Daniel Kull, a hydrological engineer based in Nairobi, for International Rivers Network, a US green group.

The Owens Fall hydroelectric project dates back to 1954.

Until then, the lake spilled out over a natural rock weir, to form the Victoria Nile, which eventually becomes the White Nile.

Britain, Uganda's colonial power, blasted out the weir and replaced it with the first dam, now called the Nalubaale dam, thus effectively transforming Lake Victoria into a vast hydroelectric reservoir.

At the time, engineers agreed a common-sense formula that the flow going through the dam should mimic that of the flow that went over the weir, a rate that ranged from 350 to 1,700 cubic metres (12,250-59,500 cu. feet) per second depending on the water depth in the lake.

The formula, called the "Agreed Curve", remains in force today under a treaty with Egypt, the downstream user of most of the water from the Nile.

In 2000, Uganda built an extension to the Nalubaale dam, called the Kiira extension, to generate more power. The scheme was backed with money by the World Bank, a favourite target for environmentalists for its traditional favouring of big hydro projects.

The turbines are located below those of Nalubaale, using the same "head", or water drop, which is channelled via a 1.3-kilometre (one mile) long canal.

But the demands of the Kiira extension, magnified by a reduction of inflow to Lake Victoria caused by a 10 percent fall in regional annual rainfall and tributary flow, have made it "difficult, if not impossible" to adhere to the Agreed Curve, says Kull.

According to his calculations, 55 percent of the severe drop in Lake Victoria's levels in 2004 and 2005 was due to letting out too much water to feed the Nalubaale and Kiira turbines. Only 45 percent of the fall could be blamed on the drought.

The report raises serious doubts about Uganda's overwhelming dependence on the big dams, given that global warming may lead to drier conditions and lower the lake levels further still.

"It is unknown if Lake Victoria will recharge to the high levels and outfloow experienced during 1961-2000, and if such a recharge could occur, whether it would be in the next years or only in 100 years," it says.

Frank Muramuzi, a member of a Ugandan NGO, the National Association of Professional Environmentalists (NAPE), said the dam complex "is now pulling the plug on Lake Victoria, with implications for millions."

Asked to respond to the report, Ugandan Information Minister James Nsaba Buturo said on Wednesday: "We have no evidence at all that the second dam is the cause of the low water levels. What we have from experts is the prolonged drought as the reason for the low water level."

He added: "Uganda is open to any advice if what we think is the cause is not what it is."


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Doctoring the past - Wiki style
Patrick Barkham Friday February 10, 2006 The Guardian

We are all Alastair Campbells now. Spin doctors' antennae whirred around this week when the volunteers who run Wikipedia discovered that staff of US senators and congressmen had been busy burnishing their bosses' entries in the internet encyclopedia.

Millions of people turn to the reference site to look up facts - and change them. The non-profit making project to build an internet encyclopedia is the 19th most-visited site in the world. Three per cent of all webpages visited are Wikipedia pages. Its guiding, and democratic, principle: anyone can anonymously edit it. Increasingly, it seems, politicians and their staff are among the most dedicated editors.
Patrolling the 962,652 entries in the English Wiki - more than double the number a year ago - its idealistic volunteers found other examples of "politically motivated editing" emanating from Washington. In one case, an intern for Democratic representative Marty Meehan deleted a reference to his broken promise to only serve four terms. In another, the office of Senator Norm Coleman deleted an unflattering reference to voting with President George Bush 98% of the time in 2003, despite running as a moderate the year before. Wikipedia took draconian action: all computers connected to servers at the House of Representatives were temporarily denied access to the site.

Computers linked to Canada's House of Commons and the German Bundestag also fiddled with entries, according to Wikipedia. But Jimmy Wales, the Florida-based founder who was embarrassingly exposed for tweaking his own entry, said no suspicious activity had yet been recorded on the computers of Westminster and Whitehall.

Why do our slow-witted special advisers twiddle their thumbs while websavvy idealists write their bosses' biographies? The Guardian could help. I bring up Tony Blair's entry. It appears a perfect example of a Wiki entry: accurate, informative, well-sourced and neutral in tone. But every choice of fact is a subjective act. And there's one our Tone wouldn't like: "Euan Blair received widespread publicity after police found him 'drunk and incapable'." C'mon guys, the kids are off limits. Snip. I cut it out.

"While the Blairs have stated that they wish to shield their children from the media, they have not always been able, or willing ... " Hang on, "willing"? What does that imply? Cut. Save. Refresh page. Tony's Wiki entry is now a lot shinier.

Time to buff up the Guardian. The stereotypical Guardian reader is, Wikipedia explains, a lentil-munching, sandal-wearing lefty. "Like most stereotypes, to some extent this one is both inaccurate and outdated." Let's get rid of "to some extent", eh?

I add some positive spin about our rising circulation. Hang on, there is someone missing from the list of "notable regular contributors (past and present)". Ian Aitken, Julian Borger, Emma Brockes: excellent, excellent. But no "Patrick Barkham". I slip the name in. It looks nice, if suspiciously anomalous.

Ah, the sweet power of the spin doctor (tempered by the growing anxiety that a volunteer will hunt me down and attack me with worms or bots or turn my Mac into a zombie computer). Wikipedia records the internet protocol address of the computer on which every edit occurs. They could easily trace my edits to the Guardian. Its volunteers cleverly trapped the US spinners by sending emails to their offices. When they received replies, they found the IP addresses contained in the emails matched those of the dodgy editors.

Time to phone Wikipedia. Does the furore over the politicians gilding their own lilies undermine its credibility? "It's more damaging to the persons involved," says Mr Wales. "We were able to catch these bad edits very quickly and good edits were incorporated very quickly."

The site is still smarting from bad publicity about the biography of the US journalist John Seigenthaler, which incorrectly linked him to the Kennedy assassinations. The libellous allegations were not spotted for months before they were removed, leading to criticism about its reliability.

Mr Wales says the "whitewashing" editors from Washington are treated "just like editors from a grammar school. If they behave themselves, that's fine. If not, they get blocked."

What does Wikipedia rule on people adding gloss to their own entries? "It's not absolutely forbidden to edit an article you're involved in but it's not considered good practice," says a UK spokesman, David Gerard.

Marty Meehan recanted. "It was a waste of energy and an error in judgment on the part of my staff to have allowed any time to be spent on updating my Wikipedia entry," he said.

And so must I. Shamed by my crass attempts to subvert the democratic goal of a free encyclopedia on the internet, I return and remove my "bad edits" to leave the pages just as they were. Will the world's spin doctors suffer similar pangs of conscience?


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Chinese democracy activist disappears during protest
By Clifford Coonan in Beijing Published: 10 February 2006

A Chinese democracy activist, protesting at being beaten up by government-hired thugs, went missing yesterday after he tried to stage a hunger strike outside Beijing's central leadership compound.

As news broke that human rights campaigner Yang Maodong - also known as Guo Feixiong - had gone missing from outside a police station, the US internet giant Yahoo was accused of giving evidence to Chinese authorities that led to a pro-democracy journalist going to jail. It is the second case of its kind involving Yahoo.

The internet is a central medium for human rights campaigners in China to exchange ideas and organise themselves. As a result, the ruling Communist Party has intensified its crackdown on freedom of speech, both on the internet and in traditional media, and clamped down on civil rights campaigners.
Chinese human rights defenders have been fasting to show support for Yang, a rural campaigner, taking turns at not eating for 24 or 48 hours. An Aids campaigner, Hu Jia, one of the leading figures in the protest, said Yang went missing after he tried to protest at Zhongnanhai, China's heavily guarded seat of power near Tiananmen Square.

Mr Hu said: "We know that at six o'clock yesterday he was at the Xicheng district police station, but we do not know where he is now. We cannot get hold of him."

Another protester, Qi Zhiyong, who lost a leg in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, had gone to look for his colleague but was dragged to his home by police. Mr Hu's own home was under surveillance.

The Beijing government has been trying to contain increasing social unrest, sparked by public anger over issues ranging from land grabs without adequate compensation to official corruption and a yawning wealth gap. The hunger strike takes place as pressure mounts on human rights campaigners. The latest furore over Western web firms in China comes shortly after Google bowed to Beijing by blocking politically sensitive terms on its new China site.

The veteran rights activist Liu Xiaobo said Yahoo had co-operated with Chinese police in a case that led to the arrest in 2002 of Li Zhi, who was charged with subverting state power and jailed for eight years. Yahoo said it had to obey local laws.

Press freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders insisted Yahoo knew it was helping to arrest dissidents.

In September, Yahoo was accused of helping authorities identify Shi Tao, who was sentenced last April to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets abroad.

The recent clampdown has seen the dismissal of the editor of the outspoken Beijing News. Chen Jieren, the chief editor of the Public Interest Times, was reportedly sacked this week over criticism of authorities.


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Internet fuels epidemic of group suicides among young Japanese
By David McNeill in Tokyo 10 February 2006

Young Japanese people are still joining group-suicide pacts in record numbers despite efforts to crack down on the bizarre internet-led phenomenon.

Japanese police said yesterday that a record 91 people had committed suicide together after meeting via the web in 2005, up from 55 people the previous year. The figure has tripled since the police began keeping records in 2003. Most of the victims were in their teens, twenties and thirties and sought each other out via websites that allow the suicidal to swap e-mail addresses, share stories and offer advice on the surest, least painful ways to die.
Many opt for carbon monoxide poisoning in sealed vehicles, often in secluded or scenic areas, like four young men who died while watching the sun rise from a car at the foot of Mount Fuji. The men met for the first time just hours before their death.

The latest statistics will likely lead to more demands for monitoring of cyberspace, including renewed calls to ban the word "suicide" from search engines. Net service providers already work with the police and there are signs the group-suicide phenomenon may have peaked. But Yukio Saito, who runs Japan's largest telephone helpline, cautions against complacency. "People will always find a way to end their lives if they want to. The wider issues must be tackled."

In Japan, 94 people took their own lives every day in 2003, setting a record of 34,427 that broke the previous high of 33,048, in 1999. Since the Asian crash of 1997-8, when the statistics jumped 35 per cent, suicides have claimed more than 220,000 lives, approximately the population of Derby. A suicide manual that lists effective ways of ending it all - including hanging, electrocution and pills - has sold more than a million copies. In true Japanese style it rates these methods in terms of the pain and trouble they cause to others; predictably, jumping in front of a train is given a maximum rating of five.

The dramatic rise in suicides forced the health ministry to bring out a package of proposals at the end of 2002, including a drastic boost in mental healthcare facilities. But Japan still has far fewer psychiatrists than other advanced countries, and family doctors routinely misdiagnose mental illness. A health ministry survey found that more than half of the workers recognised as having committed suicide due to work-related stress between 1999 and 2002 had been working at least 100 hours overtime a month. "This is a suicide epidemic," says Mr Saito. "We are not doing enough to help people who are suffering in silence."

Japan is not unique. South Korea has also experienced a wave of suicide pacts, and Ireland has seen a 45 per cent increase in suicides over the past decade. But, at 24.1 per 100,000 people, Japan has the highest per-capita suicide rate in the developed world.

Nearly 8,000 people in their twenties and thirties killed themselves in 2003, making suicide one of the leading causes of death for young Japanese. Many of these youngsters are drawn from the ranks of hikkikomori, social recluses who have locked themselves in their rooms, sometimes for years on end.

Many are linked to the outside world only through the electronic umbilical cord of their computers, which they use to find like-minded folk. Dozens of young Japanese can be found every day discussing suicide on online chat rooms. A typical message reads: "If you are thinking about killing yourself, please reply." Another says: "I'm in my early twenties and I want to die easily. I can go anywhere in Japan." Fittingly, perhaps, one of the last acts of the suicidal is often to e-mail a friend or relative. Several times in the past two years the police have stumbled on semi- asphyxiated young people just in time, after similar messages were sent.


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Mummies found just yards from Tutankhamun's tomb
By Peter Popham 10 February 2006

The newly discovered 18th-dynasty tomb contains five mummies in intact sarcophagi with coloured funerary masks, along with more than 20 large storage jars sealed with pharaonic seals, according to Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The sarcophagi are carved in human form, like Tutankhamun's. The tomb is rectangular, and the wooden sarcophagi are surrounded by the jars, which seem to have been placed haphazardly, suggesting that the burial had been completed quickly, according to Dr Hawass.
More than 80 years after the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities has stunned the world of Egyptology by revealing that another tomb has been found, just four metres away from Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings.

For a long time it was thought that the valley, opposite the modern city of Luxor and the source of many of the most famous discoveries, had given up all of its secrets.

The discovery was the work of a team of American archaeologists from the University of Memphis led by Otto Schaden.

"It's very, very exciting," said Patricia Podvorzski, curator of Egyptian Art at the University of Memphis. "It was completely unexpected, so long after the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb. Many archaeologists said the valley was done 100 years ago." Dr Schaden's find is the 63rd tomb to be opened in the valley.

The newly discovered 18th-dynasty tomb contains five mummies in intact sarcophagi with coloured funerary masks, along with more than 20 large storage jars sealed with pharaonic seals, according to Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The sarcophagi are carved in human form, like Tutankhamun's. The tomb is rectangular, and the wooden sarcophagi are surrounded by the jars, which seem to have been placed haphazardly, suggesting that the burial had been completed quickly, according to Dr Hawass.

Dr Schaden has been working in the valley on the Amenmesse Tomb Project, a minor tomb of the 19th dynasty, for many years. "They had finished clearing up that tomb and had started to dig down to the bedrock in front of the entrance," said Dr Podvorzski. "They were looking for foundation deposits - the models of tools, vessels and other things that were put around the tomb of a king to assure the permanence of the structure. While doing that they found workmen's huts made of dry stone and dating from the 19th dynasty. I believe they were in the process of dismantling the huts when they found the new tomb."

It was a very similar chain of events that led to the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. That, too, had been covered by ancient workmen's huts. "That was why the tombs didn't get robbed," added Dr Podvorzski. "The ancient Egyptian tomb robbers saw the huts and assumed there was nothing underneath them."

Although the discovery came as a huge surprise, there had been a suspicion that something else might be found. "Some time ago a British team did remote sensing around the tomb and said they thought there might be something down there," said Dr Podvorzski.

Details of the find are expected to be announced officially by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities today, including possibly the identities of the occupants.

Kent Weeks, an American archaeologist, said the tomb was a single chamber, probably intended for a single mummy. Some or all of the other sarcophagi could have been put in later. He added that photographs of the tomb suggested it did not belong to a king. "It could be the tomb of a king's wife or son, or of a priest or court official," he said. "It clearly proves that the Valley of the Kings is still not exhausted. There are probably many more tombs to be found in it."

Whatever the new tomb may contain, its fate is certain: Egypt's policy on undisturbed tombs is clear. "This stuff will stay in Egypt," said Dr Podvorzski.


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Ark's Quantum Quirks
SOTT February 10, 2006

Ark

The Black Sheep
The Black Sheep



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Modern nutrition: Forget all you ever knew about diets
Published: 09 February 2006 UK Independent

An eight-year scientific study in America has concluded that you might as well eat a bacon sandwich as a low-fat yoghurt if you want to stay healthy. David Usborne reports

Medical researchers in the United States who set out to demonstrate that a low-fat diet will reduce the risks of cancer and heart attacks were struggling yesterday to hide their disappointment. The results from their eight-year, government-funded study are in - and they show no such thing.


While this may be good news for lovers of butter and fans of bacon sandwiches for breakfast, it will surely befuddle the millions of health-conscious consumers around the globe who for years have skipped from one low-fat fad to the next in search of the perfect recipe for health, longevity and, of course, a tauter tummy. Just started the F2 diet? Don't bother. Freezer filled with low-fat yoghurt? Run for some Häagen-Daz.

That would seem - at first glance, at least - to be the only sensible lesson to be drawn from the study, which no one could describe as half-baked or skimpy. "It was the Rolls Royce of studies," agreed Dr Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. The results, far removed from what the experts had expected, were reported yesterday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But before everyone dives for the chocolates, some sceptics - and some of its authors - point to potential problems with the study, notably that it did nothing to distinguish between different kinds of fat. They also question whether eight years was a long enough period to make the results meaningful.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US, the sprawling experiment cost $415m in taxpayers' money and involved no fewer than 48,000 post-menopausal women, aged between 50 and 79 years old. The idea at the outset was straightforward: to prove scientifically what most of us instinctively believe to be true (or have been brainwashed to believe): that eating less fat is good for us.

Specifically, the team of researchers wanted to demonstrate a link between a low-fat diet and a reduced incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer and of cardiovascular problems, such as heart attacks and strokes. But when the numbers were in, they found nothing to prove the connection. Those women told to follow a low-fat diet had more or less the same rates of these diseases as those who continued to eat whatever they fancied.

In the words of Dr Thun, the results were "completely null over the eight-year follow-up for both cancers and heart disease". His organisation, for one, will as a consequence be be making no recommendations regarding reducing the intake of fat in your daily eating habits to protect against cancer.

"The results, of course, are somewhat disappointing," conceded Dr JoAnn Manson, a respected authority on nutrition and the chief of preventative medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. "We would have liked this dietary intervention to have had a major impact on health."

It is also a bit of a blow to all the women - enough to populate a small city - who volunteered for the study, like 66-year-old Judy LaCour who lives close to Seattle and who was recruited in 1993. "I was surprised," she said, "I thought there would be more definitive answers about the value of the low-fat diet."

About 40 per cent of the women were randomly chosen for the low-fat regime. Their challenge was to cut the percentage of fat in their daily calorie intake to 20 per cent and up their consumption of fruit, vegetables and grains. "I was raised in a farm family where high-fat food was the norm, " Ms LaCour said. "It was a real culture shock for me when I first started." Everybody else stuck to their usual eating habits.

The women on the low-fat regime did show a rate of breast cancer that was 9 per cent lower than the control group, but the researchers considered the difference statistically unimportant. As far as cardiovascular issues were concerned, the one risk factor that did seem to change involved so-called LDL cholesterol. Known as "bad cholesterol", it can lead to heart disease. Women in the control group did show more of it, but not to an extent that would significantly increase their risk of a heart attack.

But otherwise, the health benefits for Ms LaCour and others who struggled to reduce their fat intake appeared to be zero. Not only did they have just as much breast, colon cancer and heart disease as the other women, they didn't lose weight either. In fact, their weights generally stayed the same. (Trimming waists and thighs, it should be pointed out, was never a goal of the study.)

Dr Manson was among those cautioning against reading too much into the study's disappointing findings. "These results do not suggest that people have carte blanche to eat fatty foods without health problems," she insisted. In other words, don't jettison your low-fat diet books just yet.

Part of the problem with the study may be that the women asked to reduce their fat intake to 20 per cent didn't quite manage that. In fact, by year six, they had on average slipped to a fat percentage level of 27 per cent. The control group was at 35 per cent at the start of the study and at 37 per cent by the end. The gap in fat intake between the two groups was not, therefore, as wide as the researchers hoped.

Then there is the whole tricky issue of bad fat versus good fat. This is an area of dietary science that was still in its infancy when the study began and today, most nutritional experts believe that what we really need to avoid is fried and processed foods that are often heavy in saturated and trans fats. Fats from nuts, fish and olive oil, we are now told, can even be good for us. Hence the heavy promotion recently of the Mediterranean Diet, which positively encourages the consumption of these types of fat.

"Just switching to low-fat foods is not likely to yield much health benefit in most women," Marcia Stefanick, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, commented yesterday. "This shows that you can't rely on using low-fat substitutes to make a difference. You really need to think about what kinds of fats you're eating and the foods that should be part of your diet, such as vegetables."

By now, most of us might be ready to throw up our arms in despair. We loved the Atkins Diet - meat and cheese are great, potatoes and pasta are a disaster - until its founder, Robert Atkins, keeled over weighing 258lbs. Suddenly he looked like a charlatan. We have had the South Beach Diet, the Tapeworm Diet (honestly - Maria Callas apparently ate parasites to get herself slim) and the fibre-all-day diet. Eventually all of them are either debunked or fall from favour. It was long thought that lots of fibre would protect us from colon cancer. Wrong, say the newest studies. Certain vitamins were meant to block cancer too. Wrong again.

But surely nothing is as discombobulating as this latest news: that everything we thought we knew about fat might be codswallop too. What are we to do?

Dr Peter Libby, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, may have a commonsense answer. He thinks we should be far more worried about the volume of food on our plate than about what food groups, vitamins, proteins or fats are represented on it. Nothing, he says, fascinates us "so much as the notion that what you eat - rather than how much you eat - directly affects your health".

In other words, when you sit down to dinner tonight, be it fish dinner, steak or tofu, simply eat less. Oh yes, and chuck out the cigarettes, forego the whisky and Red Bull and do a bit of exercise from time to time.
Six 21st-century diets and what they claim to do

You Are What You Eat

Who's behind it? Gillian McKeith

How does it work? "Good" carbohydrates like brown rice and wholewheat bread and pasta are included, as are "good" fats (known as essential fatty acids), such as the ones found in nuts, seeds, fish and avocados. These are essential for breaking down other types of fat which would otherwise be stored in the body.

What the critics say: "I think what I found most objectionable was the bullying, patronising tone... In my professional opinion, anyone following her advice to the letter will be permanently hungry, thoroughly miserable and most probably will suffer from perpetual indigestion," said one disgruntled biochemist.

Celebrity fans: Gwyneth Paltrow, Madonna, Michelle McManus, Kerry Katona

The Atkins Diet

Who's behind it? Robert Atkins

How does it work? Dr Atkins believed that too much carbohydrate causes the body to produce too much insulin, and this in turn leads to hunger and weight gain. On the diet, you're allowed 15-60g of carbohydrates a day - including pasta, bread and fruit - but you're encouraged to eat protein and fat. The diet works on the principle that by reducing high-carbohydrate foods, we can alter our metabolism and shed weight.

What the critics say: Dr Atkins was clinically obese when he died. Nutritionist Dr Susan Jebb condemned the diet as "nonsense and pseudo science". Health psychologist Dr Jane Ogden described fans of the diet as "delusional".

Celebrity fans: Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Aniston, Geri Halliwell and Robbie Williams.

The South Beach Diet

Who's behind it? Dr Arthur Agatston, who says: "Forget low carbs and low fat and think right carbs and right fats."

How does it work? The principle is that the more weight you carry, the higher the risk that your body will become insulin-resistant. The side effect of this is that the body stores more fat, particularly around the tummy, hips and thighs. The diet works by teaching you to rely on the right carbohydrates (fruits, vegetables and wholegrains) and reduce the intake of " bad" carbohydrates (cakes, biscuits).

What the critics say: Dieters who avoid carbohydrates often experience significant weight loss during the initial stages of this diet, but it has a diuretic effect and this may be due to water loss, not fat loss.

Celebrity fans: Nicole Kidman

The Hay Diet

Who's behind it? Dr William Howard Hay

How does it work? The underlying cause of many health problems is the wrong chemical condition in the body. Dr Hay classified foods into three types (protein, neutral and starch) according to their requirements for efficient digestion. Mixing protein and starchy carbohydrates at the same meal, for example, leads to them being incompletely digested, leading to toxicity and weight problems. Vegetables and fruit form a large part of the diet, but fruit must be eaten in isolation.

What the critics say: A University of East Anglia study found "no scientific evidence or reason to believe the 'protein fights carbohydrates' theory".

Celebrity fans: Liz Hurley, Catherine Zeta-Jones.

The Gl Diet

Who's behind it? It started as a clinical trial, when Dr David Jenkins of the University of Toronto looked at the effects of different types of carbohydrates on diabetes patients. It was launched in 2004.

How does it work? GI stands for glycaemic index, a scale of 1 to 100 that describes the speed at which we digest carbohydrates. Foods with a low glycaemic index, such as porridge or beetroot, release glucose slowly and evenly. High GI foods provide a quick hit and encourage the body to release insulin, which then converts the excess glucose into fat.

What the critics say: Very little. The medical industry considers the GI diet to be one of the most sensible and healthy plans around.

Celebrity fans: Kylie Minogue and Anthony Worrall Thompson.

The Zone Diet

Who's behind it? Nutritionist Dr Barry Sears.

How does it work? A strict low-fibre, low-carb regime. Sears believes that by regulating insulin, we maximise fat loss and reduce the chances of heart disease. One of the most complicated diets around, it relies on a ratio of 40% protein, 30% carbs and 30% fats.

What the critics say: You have to eat six complicated meals a day, so even in Hollywood, where it initially proved a big hit among celebs, models and those with time on their hands, it had little staying power.

Celebrity fans: Jennifer Aniston - "I got addicted to it. It wasn't a good thing."

Medical researchers in the United States who set out to demonstrate that a low-fat diet will reduce the risks of cancer and heart attacks were struggling yesterday to hide their disappointment. The results from their eight-year, government-funded study are in - and they show no such thing.

While this may be good news for lovers of butter and fans of bacon sandwiches for breakfast, it will surely befuddle the millions of health-conscious consumers around the globe who for years have skipped from one low-fat fad to the next in search of the perfect recipe for health, longevity and, of course, a tauter tummy. Just started the F2 diet? Don't bother. Freezer filled with low-fat yoghurt? Run for some Häagen-Daz.

That would seem - at first glance, at least - to be the only sensible lesson to be drawn from the study, which no one could describe as half-baked or skimpy. "It was the Rolls Royce of studies," agreed Dr Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society. The results, far removed from what the experts had expected, were reported yesterday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

But before everyone dives for the chocolates, some sceptics - and some of its authors - point to potential problems with the study, notably that it did nothing to distinguish between different kinds of fat. They also question whether eight years was a long enough period to make the results meaningful.

Funded by the National Institutes of Health in the US, the sprawling experiment cost $415m in taxpayers' money and involved no fewer than 48,000 post-menopausal women, aged between 50 and 79 years old. The idea at the outset was straightforward: to prove scientifically what most of us instinctively believe to be true (or have been brainwashed to believe): that eating less fat is good for us.

Specifically, the team of researchers wanted to demonstrate a link between a low-fat diet and a reduced incidence of breast cancer and colon cancer and of cardiovascular problems, such as heart attacks and strokes. But when the numbers were in, they found nothing to prove the connection. Those women told to follow a low-fat diet had more or less the same rates of these diseases as those who continued to eat whatever they fancied.

In the words of Dr Thun, the results were "completely null over the eight-year follow-up for both cancers and heart disease". His organisation, for one, will as a consequence be be making no recommendations regarding reducing the intake of fat in your daily eating habits to protect against cancer.

"The results, of course, are somewhat disappointing," conceded Dr JoAnn Manson, a respected authority on nutrition and the chief of preventative medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. "We would have liked this dietary intervention to have had a major impact on health."

It is also a bit of a blow to all the women - enough to populate a small city - who volunteered for the study, like 66-year-old Judy LaCour who lives close to Seattle and who was recruited in 1993. "I was surprised," she said, "I thought there would be more definitive answers about the value of the low-fat diet."

About 40 per cent of the women were randomly chosen for the low-fat regime. Their challenge was to cut the percentage of fat in their daily calorie intake to 20 per cent and up their consumption of fruit, vegetables and grains. "I was raised in a farm family where high-fat food was the norm, " Ms LaCour said. "It was a real culture shock for me when I first started." Everybody else stuck to their usual eating habits.

The women on the low-fat regime did show a rate of breast cancer that was 9 per cent lower than the control group, but the researchers considered the difference statistically unimportant. As far as cardiovascular issues were concerned, the one risk factor that did seem to change involved so-called LDL cholesterol. Known as "bad cholesterol", it can lead to heart disease. Women in the control group did show more of it, but not to an extent that would significantly increase their risk of a heart attack.

But otherwise, the health benefits for Ms LaCour and others who struggled to reduce their fat intake appeared to be zero. Not only did they have just as much breast, colon cancer and heart disease as the other women, they didn't lose weight either. In fact, their weights generally stayed the same. (Trimming waists and thighs, it should be pointed out, was never a goal of the study.)

Dr Manson was among those cautioning against reading too much into the study's disappointing findings. "These results do not suggest that people have carte blanche to eat fatty foods without health problems," she insisted. In other words, don't jettison your low-fat diet books just yet.

Part of the problem with the study may be that the women asked to reduce their fat intake to 20 per cent didn't quite manage that. In fact, by year six, they had on average slipped to a fat percentage level of 27 per cent. The control group was at 35 per cent at the start of the study and at 37 per cent by the end. The gap in fat intake between the two groups was not, therefore, as wide as the researchers hoped.

Then there is the whole tricky issue of bad fat versus good fat. This is an area of dietary science that was still in its infancy when the study began and today, most nutritional experts believe that what we really need to avoid is fried and processed foods that are often heavy in saturated and trans fats. Fats from nuts, fish and olive oil, we are now told, can even be good for us. Hence the heavy promotion recently of the Mediterranean Diet, which positively encourages the consumption of these types of fat.

"Just switching to low-fat foods is not likely to yield much health benefit in most women," Marcia Stefanick, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, commented yesterday. "This shows that you can't rely on using low-fat substitutes to make a difference. You really need to think about what kinds of fats you're eating and the foods that should be part of your diet, such as vegetables."

By now, most of us might be ready to throw up our arms in despair. We loved the Atkins Diet - meat and cheese are great, potatoes and pasta are a disaster - until its founder, Robert Atkins, keeled over weighing 258lbs. Suddenly he looked like a charlatan. We have had the South Beach Diet, the Tapeworm Diet (honestly - Maria Callas apparently ate parasites to get herself slim) and the fibre-all-day diet. Eventually all of them are either debunked or fall from favour. It was long thought that lots of fibre would protect us from colon cancer. Wrong, say the newest studies. Certain vitamins were meant to block cancer too. Wrong again.

But surely nothing is as discombobulating as this latest news: that everything we thought we knew about fat might be codswallop too. What are we to do?

Dr Peter Libby, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, may have a commonsense answer. He thinks we should be far more worried about the volume of food on our plate than about what food groups, vitamins, proteins or fats are represented on it. Nothing, he says, fascinates us "so much as the notion that what you eat - rather than how much you eat - directly affects your health".

In other words, when you sit down to dinner tonight, be it fish dinner, steak or tofu, simply eat less. Oh yes, and chuck out the cigarettes, forego the whisky and Red Bull and do a bit of exercise from time to time.
Comment: If they have spents years lying to us about the benefits of "low fat" diets, why should be believe them about whisky and cigarettes??

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Serial snogging puts teens at deadly risk
David Batty and agencies Friday February 10, 2006

Snogging many partners almost quadruples a teenager's risk of contracting two potentially deadly infections, researchers warned today.

According to a study in the British Medical Journal, kissing with tongues was a major factor in spreading the meningococcal bacteria, which can cause meningitis (an inflammation of the lining around the brain and spinal cord), and septicaemia (a form of blood poisoning).
French kissing with at least seven partners in a fortnight increased the risk of contracting meningitis or septicaemia fourfold, researchers said.

They found that teenagers who regularly attended religious ceremonies were at less risk of contracting meningococcal disease, probably because they were less likely to snog many partners.

The team said teenagers should change their behaviour to reduce their risk of infection, but accepted this was unlikely.

The study examined the reasons for the steep rise in cases of, and deaths from, meningitis and septicaemia among teenagers in the UK during the 1990s. The introduction of the meningitis C vaccine in the UK in 1998 helped to lower numbers, but other forms of the infection remained a major problem.

The researchers looked at the cases of 144 15- to 19-year-olds who were admitted to hospital with meningitis or septicaemia in England between January 1999 and June 2000.

The team, including researchers from the Institute of Child Health in London and the Health Protection Agency, which monitors infectious diseases, took blood samples and nose and throat swabs. They also asked patients about potential risk factors for meningitis.

They found that those who were students, who mixed with large numbers of young people, were at a greater risk of meningococcal infection.

The researchers wrote in the BMJ: "Intimate kissing has been shown to be a risk factor for the carriage of meningococci in university students and it is likely that intimate kissing with multiple partners increases the risk of transmission."

They recommended that public health campaigns warn teenagers about the snogging risk. But because this was "unlikely to have a major impact" on their behaviour, development of more vaccines remained the most effective way to combat meningococcal infections.

Linda Glennie, of the Meningitis Research Foundation, which funded the study, said: "While we recognise that lifestyle factors are the reason why young people are more at risk of contracting meningococcal meningitis and septicaemia than other age groups, we would certainly not advocate they refrain from kissing."

But she said the charity still advocated distributing health advice tailored for older teenagers to colleges and universities.


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Altruistic Love Related to Happier Marriages
By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor 09 February 2006

Altruism may breed better marriages, a new study suggests. Or, the data might mean that good marriages make people more altruistic.

Whatever, altruism and happiness seem to go together in the realm of love.

"Altruistic love was associated with greater happiness in general and especially with more marital happiness," concludes Tom Smith of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in a report released today.
I do

Study participants were asked whether they agreed with statements that define altruism, such as, "I'd rather suffer myself than let the one I love suffer," and "I'm willing to sacrifice my own wishes to let the one I love achieve his or hers."

Those who agreed with the statements tended to also report happiness with their spouses.

Among the more altruistic, 67 percent rated their own marriage as "very happy." Among those who were profiled as the least altruistic, only 50 percent said they were very happy in marriage.

And here's one for those of you who're still waiting for your partner to commit: Forty percent of the married people ranked near the top for altruistic responses, while only 20 percent of those who had never married did so. The divorced and separated came in at around 25 percent.

The study asked dozens of questions to gauge both altruistic intentions and behaviors. How often do you give blood? Do you return money when a cashier makes a mistake in your favor?

Rising altruism

In a separate finding, Smith looked at a similar study from 2002 and found that altruistic feelings are on the rise. The number of people having "tender, concerned feelings toward the less fortunate" rose 5 percent, to 75 percent.

Smith speculated why:

"People have been suffering more negative life events than in the past and as such there is greater need for caring and assistance," he said. "Likewise, there is greater disparity between the rich and the poor with the lot of the former, but not of the latter, improving in recent years."

It's not known if altruism begets a good marriage or vice versa.

But Smith said connection between romantic love and altruistic behavior probably comes from an appreciation of love developed in a healthy marriage and reflects the connection between marriage and love in general, which is part of the teachings of many religions.

The study found that people who pray every day performed, on average, 77 acts of altruism a year vs. 60 for those who never pray.

Men vs. women

Altruistic love scores were higher for women who are homemakers than women who work outside the home. Men scored higher than women. "This may be because there is an element of heroic stoicism and being a protector," Smith writes in the report.

Altruism runs higher among older people and those with college educations.

Smith also analyzed empathy, described as feeling protective of others or concerned for the less fortunate. Some of the findings:

* Women have a greater feeling of empathy than men.
* Children from two-parent homes are more empathetic.
* Girls raised by a single father are the least likely to develop empathy.
* Financial status bears little on altruism or empathy.
* People who vote are more empathetic and altruistic.
* Empathy is higher among those who fear crime.
* Empathy is higher among those who support increased spending on social programs.

The research was based on data from in-home surveys conducted every two years with support from the National Science Foundation. Smith used data from the 2004 survey, of 1,329 adults, and compared it to the 2002 results.


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Kids are Depressing, Study of Parents Finds
By Robert Roy Britt LiveScience Managing Editor posted: 07 February 2006

Any parent will tell you kids can be depressing at times. A new study shows that raising them is a lifelong challenge to your mental health.

Not only do parents have significantly higher levels of depression than adults who do not have children, the problem gets worse when the kids move out.

"Parents have more to worry about than other people do—that's the bottom line," said Florida State University professor Robin Simon. "And that worry does not diminish over time. Parents worry about their kids' emotional, social, physical and economic well-being. We worry about how they're getting along in the world."
Simon knows from experience.

"I adore my kids," she said in a telephone interview. "I would do it over again. There are enormous emotional benefits. But I think [those benefits] get clouded by the emotional cost. We worry about our kids even when they're doing well."

The depressing results seem to be across the board in a study of 13,000 people. No type of parent reported less depression than non-parents, Simon said.

Some parents are more depressed than others, however. Parents of adult children, whether they live at home or not, and parents who do not have custody of their minor children have more symptoms of depression than those with young children all in the nest, regardless of whether they are biological children, step children or adopted.

Other research has shown there's a bright side to raising kids, too. One study of people with younger children found the parents have greater social networks and higher levels of self-confidence than non-parents.

"Young children in some ways are emotionally easier," Simon said. "Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems."

The research, announced today, was published in the American Sociological Association's Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

Simon also found that married parents are less depressed than the unmarried. But, surprisingly, the effects of parenthood on depression were the same for men and women.

Part of the problem, Simon figures, is that Americans don't get as much help at parenting as they once did, or as is the case in other countries.

"We do it in relative isolation. The onus is on us," she said. "It's emotionally draining."

The primary data was pulled from a study done in the late 1980s. But Simon checked the results against a repeated version of the study from the mid-90s and reached the same conclusions, and she said there is little reason to expect a new survey would yield much different results.

"People should really think about whether they want to do this or not," Simon said of parenting.


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9/11 Special - Dutch Television Documentary
ICH

“Was 9/11 more than just an attack? Could the Bush administration have had anything to gain from the attack? Two prominent European politicians, Michael Meacher and Andreas von Bülow, express their serious doubts about the official version of the 9/11 story.”

Michael Meacher - MP - Former UK Government Minister. "The war on terror is bogus"

Andreas Von Bulow, Former German Secretary Of Defense "The official story is so inadequate and far fetched that there must be a different one"

Click link to watch this fascinating special.



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BYU’s Dr. Steven Jones Blows the Roof off a Utah Auditorium
by Philip Sherman Gordon Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth

On Wednesday, February 1, a quiet, “churchy-looking” gentleman in a white shirt and tie walked into a packed auditorium on the campus of Utah Valley State College and electrified the room like a rock star. The 150-seat auditorium was filled to capacity, with every seat occupied, and people sitting in the aisles from the stage floor to the back of the room. Video cameras on tripods lined the back row. Two documentary-film crews were in attendance, in addition to the school’s camera crew, and various independent journalists. Seven “spill-over” rooms, with seating for 40-50 each, were also filled to capacity.

On this very conservative campus (in the most conservative county in the most conservative state in the union), where community leaders pulled out all the stops in 2004 to prevent Michael Moore from speaking as part of his anti-Bush, pro-Kerry “Slacker Uprising Tour,” Dr. Steven Jones, this pious professor from the Mormon Church-owned Brigham Young University, calmly, gently, gave a simple physics lesson on the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings, the implications of which awed the audience with a sense of world-historical significance, and implied an indictment of the present administration so utterly devastating that it made Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 look like a Bush apologia.
Dr. Jones argues that the physics behind the government’s explanation of the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11 do not make sense, and that a better (and perhaps only) explanation for their collapse was that they were demolished, exactly the way structural engineers bring down large buildings, by pre-positioned explosive devices set off in precise sequences. He argues that the 650 degree Celsius temperature of burning jet fuel would not have been hot enough to even bend the steel girders of the WTC Towers, let alone to melt or evaporate them, as recovered beams indicate. And even if it was hot enough to evaporate the steel, the towers should not have collapsed as they did, pancaking so perfectly into their own footprints. On the rare times when such structures have failed (always due to earthquakes), they have toppled over sideways. The towers would have had to have been perfectly sliced, at every point along a horizontal plane at exactly the same instant, for something even resembling a pancaking effect to occur. And even if they did somehow pancake perfectly into their own footprints due to a structural failure, they would not have done it in the time it took for them to collapse, falling at essentially the speed of an apple dropped from the top of one of the towers, with nothing between it and the ground but thin air. The steel and concrete in the floors that collapsed should have taken some measurable time to break, and thus slowed the collapse somewhat as it unfolded. And even if it did collapse, at super speed, phwack phwack phwack, floor by floor, as fast as an apple falling through the air, impelled by the weight of the decapitated structure above it, its solid steel frame severed like a head by a flaming guillotine, that does not explain the molten steel seen at the Ground Zero clean-up site many days after the event. What could have caused such heat? asked Professor Jones.

And on it went, point by point, for almost two hours. Nothing about the physics of “what we know” about 9/11 seemed to add up. And all that’s not to mention the mysterious collapse of the forgotten WTC-7, the third steel-frame building that imploded due to fire, not only that day, but in the history of architectural design--the building that was not hit by a plane, that was surrounded by other buildings equally impacted but structurally undamaged by the collapse of the towers, that, with no jet fuel or violent impact, but allegedly due to a small number of scattered “debris fires,” collapsed, pancaking perfectly into its own footprint, looking exactly like video images of buildings being demolished by pre-positioned explosive devices. Playing the one available video of WTC-7 collapsing at slow speed, Dr. Jones used his laser pointer to indicate the explosive “squibs” clearly seen shooting their way up the sides of the building as it collapsed from the top center down. He showed still images of similar micro-explosions on the sides of the Twin Towers, with steel beams clearly visible, ejected out of the sides of the buildings, ahead of the dust, blown out before the above portions collapsed.

It is a devastating presentation, and one could feel the disequilibrium of 150 minds reeling at once. The defining moment of contemporary American experience suddenly lost its definition. What is the meaning of 9/11? What really happened that day? If these things are true, the implications clearly point to some kind of “inside job” involving the government of the United States of America. (The Department of Defense, the FBI, and the CIA all had offices in the mysteriously collapsed WTC-7. Is it reasonable that outside terrorists could have infiltrated that building and filled it with explosives? ) If the WTC was brought down by pre-positioned explosive devices, somehow facilitated and covered up by the government, it would be the most audacious conspiracy in human history. When before have so many people been so spectacularly bamboozled, with so much death and destruction, and such massive implications for geo-politics? Never, that’s when.

And that is the problem Dr. Jones is facing with his research. People have knee-jerk reactions to “conspiracy theories,” at least to the ones that do not make it into their established and trusted news outlets. And the mainstream media, so far, despite a blip or two in the New York Times, is taking a pass on this story. Yes, my skeptical friends believe that the Bush administration cynically smeared the war records of both John Kerry and John McCain during the 2000 presidential election through the use of shill agencies. Yes, they believe there was suppression of black voters in Florida, and other schemes to cheat their way into the White House in the 2000 election. Yes, they believe the administration conspired to rig the intelligence they used to justify their invasion of Iraq. Yes, if they are regular readers of The New Yorker, they believe that the election fraud was worse in 2004, with rigged ballot machines, in Ohio in particular, being used to great effect. And, yes, they believe in massive wrong-doing and cover-up regarding October Surprise and the Iran/Contra affair, as well as the CIA-orchestrated overthrows of democracies in Chile and Iran, to name only two well-known examples. But no, they don’t believe in conspiracy theories.

These are hardcore leftists who refuse to even entertain the question of whether science supports the conclusion that the planes brought the towers down. “Too many people would have to know about it for them to get away with it,” one friend said. “They’re not that smart,” said another. “It’s just not plausible,” said a third. The issues raised by Professor Jones are not breaking along standard political fissures. People’s relative amounts of skepticism and credulity, rather than their political affiliations, seem to determine their openness to giving the professor’s analysis a hearing. Jones himself claims to have been a lifelong Republican, but now affiliates with no political party. The audience Wednesday night was definitely not the usual suspects of progressive professors and pierced and tattooed activists and students who regularly gather to share criticism of the President, although there were a few of those, too. Mostly, they looked like a cross-section of average middle-Americans. But by the end of the evening, it is no exaggeration to say that most had become political radicals, not of the left and the right, but of the right and the wrong.

If Dr. Jones’s work ever breaks into the mainstream media, and the rest of the country reacts the way the Utah County audience reacted, traditional political divisions will evaporate like steel beams exploded with thermite, and the whole lot of them, the Democrats and the Republicans, will be swept away, along with the military-industrial complex that has apparently managed to subvert the constitution of these United States and to con the American public, mesmerized by the shock of 9/11 and hypnotized by spell-binding incantations of freedom and patriotism, into going along with their mad plans for world domination.


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Cheney Spearheaded Effort to Discredit Wilson
By Jason Leopold t r u t h o u t 09 February 2006

Vice President Dick Cheney and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led a campaign beginning in March 2003 to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for publicly criticizing the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, according to current and former administration officials.

The officials work or had worked in the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Council in a senior capacity and had direct knowledge of the Vice President's campaign to discredit Wilson.
In interviews over the course of two days this week, these officials were urged to speak on the record for this story. But they resisted, saying they had already testified before a grand jury investigating the leak of Wilson's wife, covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, and added that speaking out against the administration and specifically Vice President Cheney would cause them to lose their jobs and subject their families to vitriolic attacks by the White House.

The officials said they decided to speak out now because they have become disillusioned with the Bush administration's policies regarding Iraq and the flawed intelligence that led to the war.

They said their roles, along with several others at the CIA and State Department, included digging up or "inventing" embarrassing information on the former Ambassador that could be used against him, preparing memos and classified material on Wilson for Cheney and the National Security Council, and attending meetings in Cheney's office to discuss with Cheney, Hadley, and others the efforts that would be taken to discredit Wilson.

A former CIA official who has worked in the counter-proliferation division, and is familiar with the undercover work Wilson's wife did for the agency, said Cheney and Hadley visited CIA headquarters a day or two after Joseph Wilson was interviewed on CNN.

These were the first public comments Wilson had made about Iraq. He said the administration was more interested in redrawing the map of the Middle East to pursue its own foreign policy objectives than in dealing with the so-called terrorist threat.

"The underlying objective, as I see it, the more I look at this, is less and less disarmament, and it really has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists," Wilson said in a March 2, 2003, interview with CNN.

"So you look at what's underpinning this, and you go back and you take a look at who's been influencing the process. And it's been those who really believe that our objective must be far grander, and that is to redraw the political map of the Middle East," Wilson added.

This was the first time that Wilson had spoken out publicly against the administration's policies. It was two and a half weeks before the start of the Iraq war.

But it wasn't Wilson who Cheney was so upset about when he visited the CIA in March 2003.

During the same CNN segment in which Wilson was interviewed, former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright made similar comments about the rationale for the Iraq war and added that he believed UN weapons inspectors should be given more time to search the country for weapons of mass destruction.

The National Security Council and CIA officials said Cheney had visited CIA headquarters and asked several CIA officials to dig up dirt on Albright, and to put together a dossier that would discredit his work that could be distributed to the media.

"Vice President Cheney was more concerned with Mr. Albright," the CIA official said. "The international community had been saying that inspectors should have more time, that the US should not set a deadline. The Vice President felt Mr. Albright's remarks would fuel the debate."

The officials said a "binder" was sent to the Vice President's office that contained material that could be used by the White House to discredit Albright if he continued to comment on the administration's war plans. However, it's unclear whether Cheney or other White House officials used the information against Albright.

A week later, Wilson was interviewed on CNN again. This was the first time Wilson ridiculed the Bush administration's intelligence that claimed Iraq tried to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger.

"Well, this particular case is outrageous. We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger, and for something like this to go unchallenged by US - the US government - is just simply stupid. It would have taken a couple of phone calls. We have had an embassy there since the early '60s. All this stuff is open. It's a restricted market of buyers and sellers," Wilson said in the March 8, 2003, CNN interview. "For this to have gotten to the IAEA is on the face of it dumb, but more to the point, it taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq."

What Wilson wasn't at liberty to disclose during that interview, because the information was still classified, was that he had personally traveled to Niger a year earlier on behalf of the CIA to investigate whether Iraq had in fact tried to purchase uranium from the African country. Cheney had asked the CIA in 2002 to look into the allegation, which turned out to be based on forged documents, but was included in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address nonetheless.

Wilson's comments enraged Cheney, all of the officials said, because they were seen as a personal attack against the Vice President, who was instrumental in getting the intelligence community to cite the Niger claims in government reports to build a case for war against Iraq.

The former Ambassador's stinging rebuke also caught the attention of Stephen Hadley, who played an even bigger role in the Niger controversy, having been responsible for allowing President Bush to cite the allegations in his State of the Union address.

At this time, the international community, various media outlets, and the International Atomic Energy Association had called into question the veracity of the Niger documents. Mohammed ElBaradei, head of IAEA, told the UN Security Council on March 7, 2003, that the Niger documents were forgeries and could not be used to prove Iraq was a nuclear threat.

Wilson's comments in addition to ElBaradei's UN report were seen as a threat to the administration's attack plans against Iraq, the officials said, which would take place 11 days later.

Hadley had avoided making public comments about the veracity of the Niger documents, going as far as ignoring a written request by IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei to share the intelligence with his agency so his inspectors could verify the claims. Hadley is said to have known the Niger documents were crude forgeries, but pushed the administration to cite it as evidence that Iraq was a nuclear threat, according to the State Department officials, who said they personally told Hadley in a written report that the documents were bogus.

The CIA and State Department officials said that a day after Wilson's March 8, 2003, CNN appearance, they attended a meeting at the Vice President's office chaired by Cheney, and it was there that a decision was made to discredit Wilson. Those who attended the meeting included I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff who was indicted in October for lying to investigators, perjury and obstruction of justice related to his role in the Plame Wilson leak, Hadley, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove, and John Hannah, Cheney's deputy national security adviser, the officials said.

"The way I remember it," the CIA official said about that first meeting he attended in Cheney's office, "is that the vice president was obsessed with Wilson. He called him an 'asshole,' a son-of-a-bitch. He took his comments very personally. He wanted us to do everything in our power to destroy his reputation and he wanted to be kept up to date about the progress."

A spokeswoman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak is ongoing. The spokeswoman refused to give her name. Additional calls made to Cheney's office were not returned.

The CIA, State Department and National Security Council officials said that early on they had passed on information about Wilson to Cheney and Libby that purportedly showed Wilson as being a "womanizer" and that he had dabbled in drugs during his youth, allegations that are apparently false, they said.

The officials said that during the meeting, Hadley said he would respond to Wilson's comments by writing an editorial about the Iraqi threat, which it was hoped would be a first step in overshadowing Wilson's CNN appearance.

A column written by Hadley that appeared in the Chicago Tribune on February 16, 2003, was redistributed to newspaper editors by the State Department on March 10, 2003, two days after Wilson was interviewed on CNN. The column, "Two Potent Iraqi Weapons: Denial and Deception" once again raised the issue that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

Cheney appeared on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003, to respond to ElBaradei's assertion that the Niger documents were forgeries.

"I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said during the interview. "[The IAEA] has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past."

Cheney knew the State Department had prepared a report saying the Niger claims were false, but he thought the report had no merit, the two State Department officials said. Meanwhile, the CIA was preparing information for the vice president and his senior aides on Wilson should the former ambassador decide to speak out against the administration again.

Behind the scenes, Wilson had been speaking to various members of Congress about the administration's use of the Niger documents and had said the intelligence the White House relied upon was flawed, said one of the State Department officials who had a conversation with Wilson. Wilson's criticism of the administration's intelligence eventually leaked out to reporters, but with the Iraq war just a week away, the story was never covered.

It's unclear whether anyone disseminated information on Wilson in March 2003, following the meeting in Cheney's office. Although the officials said they helped prepare negative information on Wilson about his personal and professional life and had given it to Libby and Cheney, Wilson seemed to drop off the radar once the Iraq war started on March 19, 2003.

With no sign of weapons of mass destruction to be found in Iraq, news accounts started to call into question the credibility of the administration's pre-war intelligence. In May 2003, Wilson re-emerged at a political conference in Washington sponsored by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. There he told the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff that he had been the special envoy who traveled to Niger in February 2002 to check out allegations that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the country. He told Kristoff he briefed a CIA analyst that the claims were untrue. Wilson said he believed the administration had ignored his report and were dishonest with Congress and the American people.

When Kristoff's column was published in the Times, the CIA official said, "a request came in from Cheney that was passed to me that said 'the vice president wants to know whether Joe Wilson went to Niger.' I'm paraphrasing. But that's more or less what I was asked to find out."

In his column, Kristoff Had accused Cheney of allowing the truth about the Niger documents the administration used to build a case for war to go "missing in action." The failure of US armed forces to find any WMDs in Iraq in two months following the start of the war had been blamed on Cheney.

What in the previous months had been a request to gather information that could be used to discredit Wilson now turned into a full-scale effort involving the Office of the Vice President, the National Security Council, and the State Department to find out how Wilson came to be chosen to investigate the Niger uranium allegations.

"Cheney and Libby made it clear that Wilson had to be shut down," the CIA official said. "This wasn't just about protecting the credibility of the White House. For the vice president, going after Wilson was purely personal, in my opinion."

Cheney was personally involved in this aspect of the information gathering process as well, visiting CIA headquarters to inquire about Wilson, the CIA official said. Hadley had also raised questions about Wilson during this month with the State Department officials and asked that information regarding Wilson's trip to Niger be sent to his attention at the National Security Council.

That's when Valerie Plame Wilson's name popped up showing that she was a covert CIA operative. The former CIA official who works in the counter-proliferation division said another meeting about Wilson took place in Cheney's office, attended by the same individuals who were there in March. But Cheney didn't take part in it, the officials said.

"Libby led the meeting," one of the State Department officials said. "But he was just as upset about Wilson as Cheney was."

The officials said that as of late May 2003 the only correspondence they had had was with Libby and Hadley. They said they were unaware who had made the decision to unmask Plame Wilson's undercover CIA status to a handful of reporters.

George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, took responsibility for allowing what is widely referred to as the infamous "sixteen words" to be included in Bush's State of the Union address. Tenet's mea culpa came one day after Wilson penned an op-ed for the New York Times in which he accused the administration of "twisting" intelligence on Iraq. In the column, Wilson revealed that he was the special envoy who traveled to Niger to investigate the uranium claims.

Tenet is working on a book titled At the Center of the Storm with former CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, which it is expected will be published later this year. Tenet will reportedly come clean on how the "sixteen words made it into the President's State of the Union speech, according to publishersmarketplace.com, an industry newsletter.

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who has been investigating the Plame Wilson leak for more than two years, questioned Cheney about his role in the leak in 2004. Cheney did not testify under oath, and it's unknown what he told the special prosecutor.

On September 14, 2003, during an interview with Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney maintained that he didn't know Wilson or have any knowledge about his Niger trip or who was responsible for leaking his wife's name to the media.

"I don't know Joe Wilson," Cheney said, in response to Russert, who quoted Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. "I've never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson - I don't who sent Joe Wilson. He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back ... I don't know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn't judge him. I have no idea who hired him."

Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.


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Libby claims Cheney approved classified media leaks
AFP 10 Feb 06

Indicted former top White House aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby will argue that Vice President Dick Cheney authorized him to leak classified information in 2003 to bolster the case for the US-led war against Iraq, US news media reports.

Libby, who has been charged in a federal investigation into the outing of a CIA agent, will in part base his defense on the claim that Cheney had encouraged him to share classified information with reporters, NBC television news said, citing sources familiar with the case.
Libby's attorneys discussed Cheney's authorization with federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and the judge handling the case in a recent teleconference call, NBC News reported.

The online edition of the magazine National Journal reported that Libby had testified to a federal grand jury that Cheney and other White House "superiors" had "authorized" him in mid-2003 to leak classified information to defend the administration's prewar intelligence assertions in making the case to go to war with Iraq.

The magazine quoted attorneys familiar with the matter and court records as sources.

Libby also argued that Cheney authorized him to release details of the classified National Intelligence Estimate, the magazine reported, citing sources with firsthand knowledge.

Senator Edward Kennedy of the opposition Democrats called the new revelations, if true, "a new low" in the "sordid case".

"The vice presidents vindictiveness in defending the misguided war in Iraq is obvious. If he used classified information to defend it, he should be prepared to take full responsibility. President (George W.) Bush has clearly said he would clean house of everyone who had anything to do with the Plame leak," Kennedy said in a statement.

Libby, Cheney's former chief of staff, denies charges of obstruction of justice, perjury and making false statements in an intrigue bound up in the US drive to war with Iraq.

His trial will be held in January 2007, after November's crucial mid-term US elections.

The case arose from a federal probe into the outing of Central Intelligence Agency spy Valerie Plame, during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003.

Critics charge that senior US officials deliberately blew Plame's cover to punish her husband, ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, for criticising the White House's rationale for war.

Both NBC and the National Journal say that much of Libby's defense will be based on Cheney's alleged authorization to discuss the documents.

The president's top political guru, Karl Rove, is still under investigation over the leaking of Plame's name.


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