Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary
Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
February 27, 2006
Gold closed at 561.00 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 1.0% from $555.20 the week before. The dollar closed at 0.8420 euros Friday, up 0.5% from 0.8375 for the week. The Euro closed at 1.1876 dollars on Friday, compared to 1.1940 dollars at the previous Friday's close. Gold in euros would be 472.38 an ounce, up 1.6% from 464.99 the week before. Oil closed at 62.91 dollars a barrel, up 5.1% from $59.88 at the end of the week previous week. Oil in euros would be 52.97 a barrel, up 5.6% from 50.15 euros for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 8.92, down 3.9% from 9.27 at the end of the week before. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 11,061.85, down 0.5% from 11,115.32 for the week. The NASDAQ closed at 2,287.04 up 0.2% from 2,282.36 at the end of the previous week. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note was 4.57, down one from 4.58 for the week.
The mainstream media's economic news was particularly positive until the end of last week, when no one could hide the bad news for the U.S. empire. The shocks on Thursday and Friday drove the price of gold and oil up and made even optimists uneasy.
In particular, the false flag suicide bomb attempt in Saudi Arabia by Al-CIAduh, as Kurt Nimmo puts it, benefitted Texas-based oil companies, the Neocons, and even perhaps the Saudi Royal Family by raising oil prices in spite of high supplies. So, too, did the attacks in Nigeria, which may also have been false flag ops.
Oil climbs 4 percent on Saudi attack
By Margaret Orgill
Fri Feb 24, 3:10 PM ET
Oil jumped more than $2 on Friday after news of a suicide bomb attack at the huge Abqaiq oil facility in Saudi Arabia, which triggered worries about supply from the world's top crude producer.
At least two cars exploded at the gates of the Abqaiq site when security forces fired on suicide bombers trying to storm the facility in the country's eastern province.
"It's all about perception. Just the idea of an attack in Saudi Arabia is enough to make the market jumpy," said Glenn Murray, an oil broker at GM Oil.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi described the raid as a "terrorist attempt" but said oil exports had been unaffected. He said a limited fire at the site was being brought under control.
"This incident had no impact on oil and gas production in the kingdom," Naimi said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. "The plant continued production at full levels and export operations are as usual."
Most Saudi oil is exported from the Gulf via Abqaiq which handles about two thirds of the country's output.
"This just emphasizes fears over global oil supply security when we're already facing major ongoing risks in Nigeria, Iran and Iraq," said Gary Ross, CEO at PIRA Energy consultancy in New York.
…Oil prices had risen a dollar earlier Friday as fears of deeper disruptions to Nigerian exports overshadowed the comfort drawn from brimming fuel stockpiles in the United States.
Attacks on Nigeria's oil network have already forced Shell to cut output by 455,000 barrels a day, shutting in a fifth of the country's exports. Militants holding foreign oil workers hostage say they will continue attacks in the next few days.
But oil's upside may be limited by brimming U.S. fuel tanks. Gasoline stocks rose to 225.6 million barrels, the highest level in seven years, according to weekly data. Crude stocks rose 1.1 million barrels to 326.7 million barrels.
"The market is being tugged by two forces -- data are pulling it down and political forces are pulling it up," said independent oil consultant Geoff Pyne.
Aside from tension in Nigeria, traders said Iran's nuclear ambitions and the possible ramifications for the nation's oil production also remained a worry.
The board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meets on March 6 to discuss the next step in resolving Iran's nuclear row with the West.
Iraq, which has been struggling to get oil output back to pre-war levels, is suffering the worst sectarian violence since the fall of Saddam Hussein, compounding the geopolitical risks in the Middle East.
Add to this the horrific bombing of the Samarra Mosque, most likely also a false-flag attack carried out by the neocons to dismember Iraq, and it is getting increasingly hard for the imperial optimists to maintain their sunny outlook.
Pentagon-Controlled Iraqi National Guard Implicated in Samarra Mosque Bombing
Thursday February 23rd 2006, 1:36 pm
As the "non-partisan" Council on Foreign Relations assures us, Iraqi National Guard troops are trained and fully "vetted" by the Pentagon. "National guard troops receive three weeks of formal training and then on-the-job training by working with U.S. forces," a CFR backgrounder explains. "The National Guard has replaced the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps as the largest security force in Iraq," reports the World Tribune. "The 45,000-member force has been trained and equipped by the United States, with help from Britain and Jordan." In short, the Iraqi National Guard is a subsidiary of the Pentagon, organized and trained to do the bidding of the Anglo-American occupation forces and their installed minions. Thus it should come as no surprise the Iraqi National Guard may play an important role in the recent bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, according to locals.
Since it is unreasonable to expect Baghdad hotel-bound corporate media hacks to report anything beyond what is read from a Pentagon script inside the Green Zone, most Americans remain unaware of details implicating the Iraqi National Guard in the bombing. According to reports appearing on the humanitarian Iraqi League organization's Iraqi Rabita website and translated into English by the Iraqi blogger Baghdad Dweller (see original Arabic here and here), at least two witnesses saw "unusual activities by the ING [Iraqi National Guard] in the area around the mosque." Two mosque guards reported four men in ING uniforms had blindfolded them and planted explosives. A second witness, Muhammad al-Samarrai, the owner of an internet cafe in the area, was told to stay in his store and not leave the area. From 11 pm until 6:30 am, ten minutes before two bombs were detonated, the area surrounding the mosque was patrolled by "joint forces of Iraqi ING and Americans," according to al-Samarrai.
In addition to apparently facilitating the mosque bombing, Iraqi National Guard troops provided assistance to "more than a dozen masked Shia gunmen" attacking the Sunni al-Quds mosque in western Baghdad in the wake of the Samarra attack, according to the Times Online. In addition, "gunmen arrived [at the Maakel prison in Basra] in a fleet of cars and showed documents which claimed that they were from the Interior Ministry… and lynched at least eleven Sunni inmates, among them at least two Egyptians."
Last month, according to the Washington Post, the Iraqi Interior Ministry was implicated in the operation of death squads targeting Sunnis. Moreover, according to John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets, as cited by Robert Dreyfuss in an article for the American Prospect, a 2004 Iraqi appropriation bill contained $3 billion for paramilitary units. The "bulk of the covert money" went to "support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force" and also "an Iraqi secret police staffed mainly by gunmen associated with members of the puppet Iraqi Governing Council," thus revealing the situation in Iraq is not precisely as the hand-fed corporate media would have us believe.
Of course, two eye witnesses should not be considered conclusive evidence the Pentagon puppet Iraqi National Guard is behind the mosque bombings in Samarra. However, when added to the wealth of evidence from various sources detailing the existence of a Anglo-American "counterinsurgency" program in Iraq (including the now largely forgotten and never referenced by the corporate media story of two British covert operatives caught red-handed in terrorist behavior last September) the incident should at least stir a modicum of suspicion.
One piece of good news for the rest of us, last week, was the resignation of the vile pathocrat Lawrence Summers from the presidency of Harvard University:
Lawrence Summers resigns as Harvard president
By Bill Van Auken
24 February 2006
The resignation this week of Lawrence Summers from the post he has held for the last five years as president of Harvard has provoked an extraordinary firestorm of political controversy far from the ivied halls of what has long been considered one of the premier US universities.
Summers, who served as Clinton's treasury secretary before taking the helm at Harvard, announced on February 21 that he will resign at the end of the current school year. The decision came on the eve of a "no confidence" vote called by the faculty and amid widespread demands within the university for him to step down.
The Wall Street Journal lamented the fall of an individual who, during his eight years in the Clinton administration, had identified himself fully with the interests of American corporations and financial institutions. The Journal's right-wing editorial board portrayed him as the victim of a "largely left-wing faculty that has about as much intellectual diversity as the Pyongyang parliament."
The ostensibly more liberal Washington Post published an editorial with the provocative title, "Prejudice Wins." It referred to the university faculty's "complaints that he was acting like a corporate chief executive—as though there were something wrong with that." The paper warned, "Because of the prestige of Harvard, his defeat may demoralize reformers at other universities."
Notice how the neoliberals and neoconservatives have hijacked the term 'reform'. Germans should beware of this when they read about Angela Merkel's drive to institute what the neoliberal press calls "much-needed reform" for Germany
Even the Financial Times of Britain weighed in with a mournful editorial entitled "Larry Summers Concedes to his Foes." The voice of the City of London praised him for "challenging established fiefdoms and implementing uncomfortable changes," while declaring his "blunt style of management" a "virtue" necessary for pursuing such a struggle.
The reference to "fiefdoms" here is significant. The term refers to feudalism, a mode of production wiped out by capitalism. So, for the neoliberals, "fiefdoms" are bad and "reform" that gets rid of them and makes universities run like corporations is good. But what the feudal aspects of universities, such as tenure, for example, do is protect intellectual freedom from political interference.
The reaction indicates that the departure of Summers represents for decisive sections of the ruling elite, in the US and beyond, a significant setback. Clearly, major political issues are involved in the so-called "reforms" and "uncomfortable changes" that these forces deem to be necessary in American academia.
Summers was brought in as Harvard's president in 2001 with a mandate from the university's governing body to "shake up" the institution. While he had taught economics at the school in the 1980s, his subsequent career left little doubt as to what kind of changes were contemplated.
In 1991 he left for Washington to become the chief economist at the World Bank, where he oversaw the implementation of "structural adjustment" programs that meant the impoverishment of masses of working people in Latin America, Africa and elsewhere around the globe.
It was during this phase of his career that Summers drafted an infamous secret memo proposing a "free market in toxics." He wrote that the World Bank should be encouraging the "migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]."
"Health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages," he declared. He continued by arguing that the low life expectancy in impoverished countries meant that people would not live long enough to contract diseases from pollution.
Ah, the logic of the Pathocrat!
The memo provoked worldwide outrage and calls for his resignation. Brazil's secretary of the environment, Jose Lutzenberger, wrote to Summers that his proposal was "perfectly logical but totally insane" and reflected the "social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional 'economists' concerning the nature of the world we live in... If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility."
That such an individual was tapped by President Bill Clinton for high office was testimony to the right-wing character of the Democratic administration. Clinton first attempted to install Summers as the head of his Council of Economic Advisors, but was forced to withdraw the nomination in the face of protests. Instead Summers was appointed to the Treasury Department, where he was mentored by former Wall Street financier Robert Rubin, whom he succeeded as Treasury Secretary in 1999.
As Harvard's president, Summers deliberately staged a series of provocations that were clearly designed to shift the university's political atmosphere to the right and to more closely align the institution with the political philosophy of the Republican administration of George W. Bush.
He staged a confrontation with African-American Studies professor Cornel West, browbeating him for spending too much time on political activism. West responded by leaving Harvard for a post at Princeton University.
By 2002 he had made a well-publicized denunciation of the campaign, in protest against Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories, for Harvard and other universities to sell off investments in companies with significant holdings in Israel. Smearing the students and faculty members who had supported the campaign, Summers declared that the demands for divestment were "anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent," and linked the movement to "disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally."
He called for the reintroduction of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) at Harvard, a program for training military officers that was closed down on the campus by the protests of the Vietnam War era. The proposal, which was not implemented, was widely seen as an attempt to curry favor with the Bush administration.
Indeed, the series of provocative acts on Summers's part led the right-wing Weekly Standard, the house organ of the Republican neo-conservative right, to declare him its "favorite university president."
The affinity of the most predatory sections of the American establishment for Summers has a definite social content. Summers is representative of an avaricious social layer that enriched itself off of the economic transformations—many of which he helped direct—that have led to a lowering of the living standards for the vast majority of the world's population, including the American working class, over the past two decades. His tenure at Harvard exhibited the repugnant characteristics of the social type that has risen to the summit of the ruling elite and its institutions: shallowness, arrogance, egotism.
As university president he was paid an annual salary of $563,000. He was provided a chauffer-driven black stretch limousine. In one of his first appointments, he hired a former press secretary of British Prime Minister Tony Blair to serve as his own spokesman.
His interactions with the university's faculty were frequently described as bullying and autocratic.
Resentment and opposition boiled over following a speech that Summers delivered at a January 2005 conference on workforce diversity, in which he attributed the under-representation of women in science and engineering to gender differences in "intrinsic aptitude," describing "socialization and continuing discrimination" as "lesser factors."
While he at first attempted to defend this ignorant contention, he was subsequently forced to acknowledge that his assertions were unsupported by research or scientific evidence.
…While Summers's tenure at Harvard will end with the current school year—making it the shortest for any president in the university's history—the political and social pressures that his policies expressed will certainly persist.
These pressures are directed at subordinating academic institutions and intellectual inquiry as a whole to government policies and the corporate economic interests which they defend. It is a process that inevitably involves the shattering of humanities programs that do not directly further these interests.
Under conditions of aggressive war abroad and increasing social and economic polarization at home, the drive to ideologically discipline academia becomes all the more acute. This is why the failure of Lawrence Summers at Harvard has provoked such cries of outrage from the establishment press.
Fascism cannot tolerate truly free inquiry, and universities are clearly in the fascists' sights.
In case anyone has any doubts as to the fascist sympathies of multinational corporations, take a look at what the Ford Motor Company did in Argentina during the Dirty War of the 1970s. Given how U.S. corporations cooperated with the Nazis before and even during World War II, and given their thuggish behavior in the labor struggles of the 1930s, the burden of proof is on those who would say things are somehow different now. Since the U.S. economy will soon resemble Argentina's, the following article is particularly chilling:
Ford Motor charged as accomplice in Argentina's "dirty war"
By Bill Van Auken
25 February 2006
Ford Motor Company has been charged in an Argentine court with playing a direct part in the illegal detention, torture and "disappearances" of its own workers under the dictatorship that ruled the South American country from 1976 to 1983.
The US automaker is accused in both a criminal and a civil lawsuit filed this week of carrying out "management terrorism" under the military regime in order to suppress worker militancy at its Argentine production plants.
The lead plaintiff in the case, Pedro Norberto Troiani, was a union delegate at the automaker's plant in General Pachecho, outside Buenos Aires, in 1976, when the Argentine military seized power in a US-backed coup. He is suing on behalf of more than two dozen of union committee members and other workers who were seized at gunpoint by security forces, many of them as they worked on Ford's assembly lines, others at their homes.
"Some of us were kidnapped by the security forces inside the factory and transferred to a makeshift clandestine detention center set up at a sports area of the factory," Troiani, now 64 years old, recalled. "There, they hooded us and beat us; we suffered mock executions and were tortured," he said, adding that their captors shocked them with an electric probe.
The case, which was initiated three years ago, has gathered documentary evidence as well as testimony establishing that Ford management collaborated intimately with the dictatorship in identifying militants and providing direct assistance in their abduction and torture.
"After evaluating all of the material, we reached the conclusion that the company wanted to get rid of the delegates who were bothering it," explained Tomas Ojea Urquiza, the lawyer in the case.
Witnesses testified that their kidnappers had received detailed files from the company's personnel office and used company identification card photographs to identify them. In a number of cases, the workers were paraded through the plant surrounded by military personnel in a clear attempt to intimidate the rest of the workforce.
Some 5,000 workers were employed at the plant at the time. One of the principal vehicles that they produced was the Ford Falcon, which became infamous as the car of choice for the so-called 'task forces" that were used in rounding up perceived opponents of the military, nearly 30,000 of whom "disappeared" under the dictatorship.
Ford, the suit charges, in addition to providing the space for the clandestine detention center, donated vehicles to the military for the express purpose of carrying out the roundup of its own employees.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Hezbollah and Condi's Double Standard
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
Sunday February 26th 2006, 8:25 pm
"Lebanon has refused to extradite to the United States four suspected Shia Hezbollah members believed to have carried out attacks against Americans in Beirut during the 1980s, judicial sources said on Saturday," reports the Khaleej Times. "Local media said that during her visit to Beirut earlier this week US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had made the demand to Prime Minister Foaud Seniora." It is interesting Condi would make such a demand, but then Straussian neocons know no bounds, ethically or legally, especially when it comes to pushing around small countries.
It's too bad Ronald Reagan is dead and buried. If alive, he might be held accountable for a few crimes of his own, crimes that make those allegedly committed by Imad Moughaniyeh, Hassan Ezzeddine, Ali Atwe, and Mohammed ali Hamadeh pale by way of comparison.
First, Reagan would be asked to answer for his decision to order the USS New Jersey, parked off the Lebanese coast, to hurl shells into towns around Beirut where refugees were fleeing the Israelis, who had illegally invaded the country and would ultimately slaughter 30,000 Lebanese. "The Lebanese did not forget [Reagan's] little gesture and not long after, on October 23, 1983, 264 US Marines in our security force paid with their lives for Reagan's act when a car bomb exploded next to their barracks," writes Edward Miller for the Coastal Post.
Second, another dead war criminal, CIA director William Casey, would be asked about the attempted murder of Sheik Muhammed Fedlallah, the spiritual leader of Lebanese Shi'ites and Hezbollah. Like the mob boss Casey was, he arranged to hit Fedlallah in retaliation for the Beirut Marine barracks bombing mentioned above. "Casey contracted out the job of retaliation to Saudi intelligence, which sent a car packed with explosives into a Beirut slum near Fadlallah's headquarters. A city block was devastated and more than 90 people were buried under the rubble," explains Robert I. Friedman. Of course, covertly killing people is nothing new for the CIA and the United States-the list of successful and failed assassinations include Iraqi General Abdul Karim Kassem, Congolese president Patrice Lumumba, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh, Cuban ruler Fidel Castro, democratically elected Chilean president Salvador Allende, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, and others.
A few years later, apparently suffering from pangs of guilt, ex-president Jimmy Carter told the New York Times: "You have only to go to Lebanon, to Syria, to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many peoples for the United States, because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers, women and children and farmers and housewives, in those villages around Beirut… as a result, we have become a kind of Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks."
Rice not only attempted to negate this history, not easily forgotten or forgiven by many Lebanese, by demanding the arrest and extradition of Moughaniyeh, Ezzeddine, Atwe, and Hamadeh, but also refused to accept the political situation in Lebanon by refusing to meet with the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, who is considered too close to Syria. "It's up to the Lebanese people to decide who will lead Lebanon," Rice said, ever so magnanimous, and then added she believes the Lebanese "want a state that is forward-looking," that is to say looking in the same direction the United States, under the control of belligerent Straussian neocons, is looking.
Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: The Caricatures in Middle East Politics
By James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya
Feb 25, 2006
What is the political background of "Flemming Rose" the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who solicited, selected and published the cartoons?
What larger issues coincide with the timing of the cartoons publication and reproduction?
Who "benefits" from the publication of the cartoons and the ensuing confrontation between the Arabs/Islam and the West?
What is the contemporary political context of the Arab/Islam protests?
How is the Israeli secret service, Mossad, implicated in provoking the Western-Islamic/Arab conflict, and how do the consequences measure up to their expectations?
A starting point for analyzing the cartoon controversy, which has been a focus for attacking Muslims and Muslim countries as intolerant of Western 'freedom of expression' is the long-standing role of Denmark as a major operation point for Mossad activity in Europe. Re-phrased: How could a tiny Scandinavian country of 5.4 citizens and residents (200,000 or less than 3% of whom are Muslim), renowned for fairy tales, ham and cheese, have become a target for the fury of millions of practicing Muslims from Afghanistan to Palestine, from Indonesia to Libya and into the streets of cities all over the world with significant Muslim populations? Why, after the bombing of Baghdad, the tortures of Abu Ghariab, the massacres in Fallujah and the utter destitution of the entire Iraqi and Afghan people…would Moslems turn their anger at symbols of Denmark from its tinned cookies to its Embassies and overseas business offices?
The story, presented with straight faces, by television news-people, is of, Mr. 'Flemming Rose', a crusading cultural editor of a widely read Danish daily newspaper who wanted to counter the growing 'political correctness' of Europeans about criticizing Moslems and which he compared to the 'self-censorship' he had witnessed in his native Soviet Union. The oddly named Ukrainian-born editor of the culture page of the Jyllands-Posten commissioned Danish cartoonists to submit a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as they (the Danish cartoonists) might imagine him. However four of the twelve cartoons selected for publication were illustrated by 'Rose's' own staff including the most controversial 'bomb in the turban' one. Braving Denmark's anti-blasphemy laws Mr. Rose published the cartoons on September 30, 2005 and the rest is history…
A huge world wide attack on the West's "sacred right to free expression" erupted in the Moslem world with millions of shocked Europeans and North Americans rushing to defend their cherished freedoms in this 'clash of civilizations'. Syria and Iran were prominently blamed for the stirring up of furious believers in the streets of Damascus and Teheran, Beirut and in the slums of Gaza. According to US Secretary Rice, "Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes and the world ought to call them on it." The Pakistani and Libyan authorities allied to the US fired on demonstrators killing and wounding scores while numerous religious leaders were arrested. The Western governments urged their Arab and Moslem allies to prevent more attacks on Danish products and property and blamed those unable to quell the fury with complicity and instigation. All of this was over a series of cartoons, or so we are told.
The cultural editor, 'Flemming Rose', who soon tired of being surrounded by a team of Danish police and security to protect him from assassination and missing his daily jogs through his tranquil Copenhagen neighborhood, chose to seek safe haven in Miami, Florida (rather than his native Ukraine) among the Cuban exiles, Israeli sayanim*(see footnote) and Mah Jong-playing retirees as the drama plays on.
Denmark Center of Mossad Activity
Why Denmark? Could this crudely manufactured controversy have been generated on the pages of any major London or New York paper? Who would wish to put Denmark at the center of this 'clash of civilization' – appearing as a script from some grade B Islamophobic thriller?
An interesting chapter in former Israeli Mossad agent, Victor J. Ostrovsky's book, By Way of Deception (1990 St. Martin's Press), outlines the close relationship between the workings of the Danish intelligence services and the Israeli Mossad over decades:
"The relationship between the Mossad and Danish intelligence is so intimate as to be indecent. But it is not the Mossad's virtue that is compromised by the arrangement; it's Denmark's. And that's because the Danish are under the mistaken impression that because they saved a lot of Jews in World War II, the Israelis are grateful and they can trust the Mossad."
The Mossad has the capacity to monitor the entire population of Arabs and especially Palestinians (presumably including those with Danish citizenship) through their special relations with the Danes:
"…a Mossad man monitors "all Arabic and Palestinian-related messages(among Denmarks Arab community) coming into their (the Danish Civil Security Service)headquarters…an extraordinary arrangement for a foreign intelligence service."
The Danish Intelligence officers' high regard for their Israeli Mossad office mates is apparently not, according to Ostrovsky, reciprocated:
"The Mossad have such contempt for their Danish counterparts that they refer to them as 'fertsalach', the Hebrew term for a small burst of gas, a fart…they tell the Mossad everything they do." Pp. 231-232
In return for their servility, the Danes get valuable 'training' from the Israelis:
Once every three years, Danish intelligence officials go to Israel for a seminar conducted by the Mossad"… which generates useful contacts for the Mossad "while perpetuating the notion that no organization deals with terrorism better than they (Mossad) do."
In the wake of the US debacle in Iraq and the world's resistance to a massive 'preemptive military attack' or economic and diplomatic embargo of Iran, which could send oil prices to over $100 a barrel, Israel needed to turn the war of ideas on its head. It would make sense that a campaign, aimed to further whip up justifications to attack countries like Iran and Syria (Israel's current enemy du jour), would emanate from one of the US strongest European ally in the invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan and whose national intelligence apparatus (so fondly known as 'fertsalach') would be eager to serve Israel's interest.
Flemming ( or Flaming) Rose: Journalist with a cause
Given Mossad's long-standing penetration of the Danish intelligence agencies, and their close working relations with the right wing media, it is not surprising that a Ukranian Jew, operating under the name of "Flemming Rose" with close working relations with the Israeli state (and in particular the far right Likud regime) should be the center of the controversy over the cartoons. "Rose's" ties to the Israeli state antedate his well-know promotional "interview" with Daniel Pipes (2004), the notorious Arab-hating Zionist ideologue. Prior to being placed as a cultural editor of a leading right-wing Danish daily, from 1990 to 1995 "Rose" was a Moscow-based reporter who translated into Danish a self-serving auto-biography by Boris Yeltsin, godchild of the pro-Israeli, post-communist Russian oligarchs, most of whom held dual citizenship and collaborated with the Mossad in laundering illicit billions. Between 1996-1999 "Rose", the journalist, worked the Washington circuit (traveling with Clinton to China) before returning to Moscow 1999-2004 as a reporter for Jyllands-Posten. In 2005 he became its cultural editor, despite few or any knowledge of the field and over the head of other Danish journalists on the staff. In his new position "Rose" found a powerful platform to incite and play on the growing hostility of conservative Danes to immigrants from the Middle East, particularly practicing Moslems. Using the format of an 'interview' he published Pipes' virulent anti-Islamic diatribe, probably to "test the waters" before proceeding to the next stage in the Mossad strategy to polarize a West-East confrontation.
Political Context for Action
There is a great body of evidence demonstrating that Iraq war was largely a result of a massive disinformation campaign by civilian militarists in the Pentagon and US Zionists in and out of high places in the Pentagon and civil society, in coordination with the Israeli state, which wanted Iraq to be destroyed as a viable nation. There is no evidence that the major US oil corporations pressured Congress or promoted the war in Iraq or the current confrontation with Iran. There is plenty of evidence that they are very uneasy about the losses that may result from an Israeli attack on Iran.
The Zionist succeeded in their goals in Iraq: establishing a beachhead in the northern Kurdish enclave ('Kurdistan'), and securing assets in the new "Iraqi" regime via Chalabi and others.
The major Jewish organizations mobilized to oppose any critics of the Zionist policymakers, predictably accusing them of 'anti-Semitism'. Nevertheless, over time, FBI investigations, CIA reports and judicial indictments have pointed to key Israeli operatives and their domestic collaborators as Israeli spies. While Israel benefited from the Bush-Blair invasion in Iraq, the same cannot be said for the United States. As thousands of casualties mounted, and war spending skyrocketed to hundreds of billions of dollars, opposition to the war escalated.
Israeli strategic plans to extend US military operations to Iran and Syria faced major challenges, from within the US military and public and even sections of the mass media. Mossad assets in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and elsewhere had to settle for puff pieces on Iran's non-existent nuclear weapon threat, right after the same plot with regard to Iraq was exposed as a total fabrication. Another line of propaganda was needed to silence war critics and heighten animosities to the Islamists/Arabs in general and Iran in particular. This is where the "Flemming Rose"-Mossad operation came into the picture. The Islamic-hate cartoons were published in Denmark in September 2005 as Israeli and US Zionists escalated their war propaganda against Iran. The initial response from the Islamic countries however was limited. The story wasn't picked up in the International Herald Journal until late December 2005. By early January 2006, Mossad "Katsas" (Hebrew for case officers) activated sayanim (volunteer Jewish collaborators outside of Israel) throughout Western and Eastern European media to simultaneously reproduce the cartoons on Feb. 1 and 2, 1006. One such sayanim operation would have been the decision by France-Soir Senior Editor, Arnaud Levy and Editor in Chief Serge Faubert, to publish the cartoons. The paper's French Egyptian owner almost immediately fired the paper's Managing Editor, Jacques Lefranc, who, according to an interview with CNN, had initially opposed their publications, without touching Levy and Faubert.
A strident campaign was launched in practically all the pro-Western mass media condemning the initial, relatively moderate Islamic protests, which had occurred between September to December 2005 and rapidly provoked the subsequent massive escalation, doubtlessly aided by covert Mossad operatives among Arab populations. Mossad's 'little farts', the Danish intelligence fanned the fires by advising Denmark's rightwing Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen not to give way by refusing to apologize as the pro-Western Arab regimes requested and even refusing a request for a meeting with a group of Denmark-based diplomats from Arab and Moslem countries to discuss the 'situation'.
"Flemming Rose"-Mossad tried one more gambit – to further heighten East-West tension. He publicly offered to publish any Iranian cartoons which would mock the Holocaust in 'his' paper'. The senior editor of Jyllands-Posten, apparently belatedly caught on to "Flemming Rose" hidden agenda and vetoed the 'offer' and asked Rose to take a leave of absence. Rose left for Miami, not Tel Aviv – where his residency might raise suspicions about his claim to be merely an opponent of "self-censorship". In Miami, he no doubt will have the protection of the locally based sayanin, armed and train for "self-defense" of threatened Zionists.
Sayanim – Defenders of Western Civilization
The sayanim, derived, according to Victor Ostrovsky, from the Hebrew word 'to help' are a huge world-wide network of Jews in strategic or useful places (real estate, mass media, finance, car dealerships etc…) who have been agreed to help in Israeli Mossad actitivies within their own countries. This has been ascribed to the supra-national loyalty sayanim offer to Israel, above and not always in the interest of their home country. According to Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, in their detailed biography, Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy (Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2002), the notorious media mogul, Robert Maxwell, was a super-sayanim, providing cover, offices, political connections, money-laundering services and planted stories in the service of Israel at the Mossad's beheast. Jonathan Pollard, the American Naval Researcher jailed for espionage, is another notorious sayanim. The activities of these 'helpers' really range from the spectacular to the more mundane and, according to Victor Ostrovsky, in his 1990 biography By Way of Deception, the sayanim represent a pool of thousands of active and inactive individuals who can provide services discretely out of loyalty to 'the cause of Israel' as defined by any current Mossad operation. The cynicism of this arrangement is clear: It makes little difference to the Mossad if an operation, such as 'Flemming Rose', jeopardizes the national and economic interests of the sayanim's own country and , if exposed, might harm the status of Jews in the diaspora. The standard response from the Mossad would be: "So what's the worst that could happen to those Jews? They'd all come to Israel? Great." This recklessness clearly has ramifications for Jews who have refused to be recruited as Mossad helpers in affected countries.
Mossad War Propaganda and the "Cartoon Controversy"
Israeli leaders expressed their opposition to the Bush Administration's diplomatic efforts to engage the European powers in the Iran negotiations. Automatically and without question all the major Zionist and Jewish organizations in the US (AIPAC, Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, ADL and others) unleashed a sustained national campaign to mobilize congress and their "friends" in the executive branch to take immediate military action or to impose economic sanctions on Iran. The Bush Administration however while in agreement, lacked public support in the US and among his European allies and their national electorates. The Mossad policy was to create a pretext to polarize public opinion between the Middle East (and beyond) and the West in order to escalate tensions and demonize Islamic adversaries to its Middle East hegemonis pretensions. "Rose" cartoons served the Mossad perfectly. The issue could be presented as a free speech issue, a conflict of "values" not "interests", between the "democratic West" and the fundamentalist "totalitarian" (as characterized by Pipes-Rose) Islamists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rose had solicited and selected the Islamic caricatures while his paper had rejected similar cartoons of Jesus Christ in an earlier context. The image of Rose as a "cultural iconoclast" - while working for a right wing daily whose daily fare was publishing anti-(Mid-East)immigrant "news stories" and favorable interviews with Zionists extremists - is prima facie not credible, although that image has been purveyed by all the major media outlets. While "Rose" initiated the international tensions, liberal and neo-con colleagues and his comrades in and out of the Mossad publicized his transgressions and provoked the ire of the Arab and Islamic world.
The cartoons, the subsequent insults and calumnies attacking the Islamic protestors and their secular allies throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe eventually provoked major peaceful and then violent protests by millions of people. Visual images of violent protests and demonstrations were featured by the Western mass media, successfully creating the intended fear and apprehension against Muslim countries and minorities in Europe. Islamophobia gained momentum. Zionist propagandists in Europe and the US linked the defense of "free speech" issue to Israeli "security" policies. While the West turned its fury against the Islamic protestors, Israel blockaded Gaza and the US and Europe cut off all funding to the Palestinians, threatening the population with mass starvation for exercising its democratic right to elect its own leaders! "Rose's" free speech charade revived the discredited ZionCon doctrine of "Clash of Civilizations". Playing on European Islamophobia and the increasing sensibility of practicing Moslems and Arab nationalists to Western abuses, it is likely that Israeli psych-war experts pinpointed the "free speech" issue as the ideal detonator for the conflict.
The democratic electoral victory of Hamas – dubbed by Israel as a terrorist movement – accelerated Israeli efforts to convince Western governments to insist that regimes in Muslim countries repress the 'irrational Islamic masses' or face Western censure or elimination of aid. (The failure to crack down violently on demonstrators was presented by the media as official approval or instigation) The major US Zionist organizations were able to influence Secretary of State Rice into blaming Iran and Syria for fomenting the worldwide demonstrations, from Gaza to the Philippines. The Israeli strategy was to use European outrage to weaken opposition to a military attack or economic sanctions on Iran and Syria.
Beyond Religious Blasphemy
While most establishment analysts have narrowly focused on the cartoon as the source and target of the massive global demonstrations, in fact it is at best the immediate detonator of a whole series of ongoing events of much greater political significance. From the "shock and awe" carpet bombing of Iraq, to the mass torture and routine everyday humiliation in occupied countries, from the utter destruction of Fallujah (an American example as Guernica was for the Nazis), to Israeli devastation of Jenin and Palestine, from the everyday assassinations of Palestinians by the Israeli occupiers, to the smearing of the Koran with filth at Guantanamo, Israel, the US and Europe have attempted to demonstrate that no Moslems are safe anywhere- not in their schools, home, offices, fields, factories or mosques- and that nothing is sacred.
The reasons that millions are demonstrating against a caricature of Mohammed published in an insignificant Scandinavian rightwing newspaper is that this is the last straw – the detonator – of a series of deliberate violations of fundamental social and political rights of Muslim, Arab and colonized peoples. While the Western media have focused exclusively on the religious content of the demonstrators, almost every country, where massive sustained demonstrations have taken place, has been subject to recent Western intervention, large-scale pillage of raw materials and/or experienced the destruction of their secular rights: countries invaded, homes, schools, hospital, systems of health and clean water demolished, agriculture and natural resources looted, museums, libraries and archeological sites pillaged and mosques desecrated. The present condition for material existence has been a Western inferno for all the people (both secular and observant) living in Arab or Islamic countries. Now their most profound, historic, spiritual reference point, the prophet Mohammed – the most cherished religious figure – has been repeatedly trampled with impunity by arrogant imperialists, their media servants, aided and abetted by the Israeli state and its overseas 'sayanin' operatives. It is cynical to suggest that practicing Moslems could desecrate the figure of Jesus Christ with impunity when that too is forbidden by the Koran.
As the Israeli strategists well knew in advance, the vilification of Islam was not taking place in a political vacuum: The material conditions for an Islamic-Arab uprising were ripe: Hamas had swept the Palestinian elections, the US military were aware that they were losing the war in Iraq, Iran was refusing to capitulate, Bush was losing public support for ongoing and future Middle Eastern wars, AIPAC, Israel's main political instrument for influencing US policy was under criminal investigation…Israel's strategy of having the US fight its wars was boomeranging. There was a need to revive the political-military tensions which they had exploited after September 11, 2001 to Israel's advantage: hence the "Flemming Rose" provocation, hence the coordinated, wide promotion of the act, hence the free speech agitation among Western 'sayanin', liberals, conservatives and neocon ideologues, hence the predictable explosion of protest, hence the 'recreation' of Mid-East tension…and the advances of Israel's agenda.
Clearly the burgeoning confrontation is more than a religious or free speech issue, more than the crude provocations of an errant cultural editor coddled by the 'little farts' of a penetrated Danish intelligence agency. What is at stake is the deliberate racist stereotyping of Arab, Islamic and Third World people in order to sustain and deepen their oppression, exploitation and subordination.
The most pervasive, prolific and influential source of racist Arab stereotypes are Israel and its overseas (particularly US and European) academics, terror 'experts', psychologists at the most prestigious universities and think tanks, who have provided the "psychological profile" to torture, humiliate, provoke and repress the millions struggling for self-determination against colonial and imperial dominance.
Once again Israel and especially its overseas operatives have placed the expansion and militarist interests of Israel above the interests of the people of the US and Europe. "Is it good for the Jews?": A criterion as defined by the Israeli state, has led to the blind alley of massive confrontations, deepening animosity between Arabic/Muslim peoples and Western regimes. What appeared so clever to the 'Roses' of the world and their Katsas and docile Sayanim, in provoking confrontation may once again boomerang: The uprisings may go beyond protesting symbols of vilification to attacking the substance of power, including the Arab and Moslem pro-consuls and collaborators of the Euro-American political and economic power. While the Mossad is very astute in infiltrating and provoking oppressed groups, it has been singularly inept in controlling and containing the resultant uprisings as the recent victory of Hamas demonstrates and the success of the Iraqi resistance illustrates. The next controversial cartoon may show Moses leading his people into the desert.
Epilogue
While the Mossad-provoked 'free speech versus blasphemy' controversy between the West and the Islamic peoples continues to deepen, Israel proceeds to impose a Nazi-like economic siege over 4 million Palestinians, intended to starve them into surrendering their democratic freedoms. Intended is the concise term, Gideon Levy, star reporter for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (19/02/06) records Dov Weissglas, advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, jokingly telling top officials "Its (the economic blockage – which may include electricity and water, as well as food) like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won't die." The Israeli officials "rolled with laughter". As Levy points out "more than half of all Palestinians are already living in poverty…last year 37% had difficulties obtaining food… 54% of the residents of Gaza cut back the amount of food they consume…child mortality rose by 15%…unemployment reached 28%." Planned pre-meditated mass starvation of a ghettoized population, jokingly discarded by its executioners as a 'visit to the dietician', is an exact replica of the internal policy discussion of the Nazi high command over the population in the Warsaw Ghetto. Israel's capacity to impose and implement a genocidal policy has been greatly facilitated by the symbolic sideshow, which the Mossad-'Rose' orchestrated in Western Europe. "Cultural" conflict at the service of genocide – is hardly a clever ruse or merely a violation of Islamic sensibilities, it is a crime against humanity.
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Iran And "The International Community "
By Brkić Sulejman
26/02/2006
Here we go again! Now it's Iran.
Bush, again mumbling something about Iran's being a threat to the world, the same crap as about Iraq. But this time, the west European countries (the "traditional" allies) are at it, too.
Isn't it strange how all these countries, the USA, Israel, England, France, Germany…with all their weapons of mass destruction, feel so easily threatened? Why shouldn't Iran be a nuclear power? The U.S, England, France, Israel, Russia, China, Japan (yes! Japan, too), India and Pakistan are.
These idiots are the cause of nuclear proliferation. If they are so concerned about the safety of the world they should lead by example and dismantle their nuclear weapons.
When the U.S, Israel, England France and Germany talk about the safety of the world being their main reason to object to Iran's possessing nuclear technology, what world are they talking about? They are the only ones (as always) who feel threatened. I don't hear about Thailand, Bhutan, Bulgaria, Latvia, Vietnam, Zambia… feeling threatened. I mean, really, what world is in question? The world comprised of the U.S, England, Israel, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Japan?
The world of GREED?
The O.E.C.D world? The world made up of the G7 the E.U the IMF, World Bank, WTO, N.A.T.O, the UN Security Council, NAFTA, Wall Street, OIL interests, cheap OIL. Is this the world we hear so much about? Because, if this is the world the West is worried about, then it is a world of SHAME that is in question, a world of deceit, greed, wars, theft, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism... An opulent white world born out of mainly colored peoples slave work, sweat and blood and their natural resources.
If this is the world that is in danger then it might as well be done away with!
We hear again words of shame, words like "the UN Security Council", "UNSC resolutions", "International community"… I thought all this didn't exist anymore. I thought the UN was finally dead, the coup de grâce being the (another) illegal US-UK-led war against the Iraqi people in order to rob them of their OIL. But let's face it, the UN was never very much alive. Actually, there never was a UN. All there was was the(UN) Security Council, a band of criminals bent on tearing the natural resources of the world at any cost.
Although I am far from being a fan of the ruling Mullahs in Teheran, I still remember the Shah, Reza Pahlavi, a friend of the West, which means "the International Community" and oppressor of the Iranian people, a vicious dictator who was propped up and kept in power by the West, robbed his people blind and made himself and the West even richer and who eventually gave birth to the Mullahs. So, I urge Iran not to put its fate into the hands of "the International Community". When you hear "International Community" on the news, what countries pop up in your mind? Albania, Burkina Faso, Burundi…? Of course not! The countries that pop up in our mind are usually the US and whoever follows (pretty much the same faithful dogs : Israel, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan…) or G7, EU, NATO, W.B., IMF, WTO… it's always the same gangsters anyway.
This "International Community" that is so worried about the safety of the "world", that claims the higher moral ground, a higher sense of justice and is so vociferous in its proclamations of being the defender of democratic values, human rights and protector of the "civilized" world, this "International Community" is the same one that has betrayed millions of people around the real world in need of human rights, democracy, justice…
Millions have been killed, tortured, oppressed, persecuted, exploited…as a result of the criminal policies of our angelic "International Community", because what mattered and still matters the most today is the economic interests of this "International Community" of SHAME!
Here are just a few names, a few peoples that were let down by our "International Community", the savior of the "world": East Timor (200 000 killed), El Salvador (75000 killed), Chile (between 10000 and 30000 killed), these murders (in Chile) started on September 11, 1973 with a coup against the democratically elected president Salvador Allende, orchestrated by the U.S and welcome by "the International Community" and brought to power the fascist general Augusto Pinochet. Although this tragedy took place on a September 11, too, "the International Community" seems to have a very selective memory when it comes to remember the victims of its criminal policies.
Vietnam (between 2 and 3 million killed), Laos, Cambodia, The Kurds, the Palestinians (robbed of their land and kept in huge prison camps by the only "democracy" in the middle East: Israel), Rwanda(close to 1 million) Zaire (the Congo), Sabra and Chatila (between 2 and 3 thousand Palestinians killed), San Su Kyi, Lumumba, Leila Zana, Nelson Mandela, the Tibetans, 1.6million Iraqis, including 600 000 Iraqi children, who were killed by US-imposed, West European-backed (read "International Community"), wrapped in the UN flag economic sanctions. For about 12 years, since the end of the Gulf War up to the current illegal war again against Iraq, the Iraqi people kept dying (600 000 children) like flies under the watchful eye of the humanists that comprise the " International Community".
And many more millions of others.
Now, just a few more words about N.Mandela. Mandela, a black South African man, had actually to fight in his own country for the liberation of his people against a white minority racist regime! : APARTHEID. He was labeled as a terrorist, arrested and thrown into jail and left to rot there right up to 1990! Meanwhile, our alrighteous "International Community" kept doing very profitable business with apartheid, that white minority racist regime that lasted until 1994. That was 12 years ago! Bravo the "International Community"!
When Mandela, at last, was to be released from prison in 1990, guess who was opposed to his release? No less than the current vice president of the United States of America: Dick Cheney (although, I'm sure he was not the only one). Mandela himself in an interview with the U.S. Magazine, Newsweek revealed this fact, published on Wednesday, 11 September 2002. Excerpts of this interview can also be found on BBC news world edition, Wednesday, 11 September 2002.
And let's not forget Srebrenica, a place located where I come from : Tito's Yugoslavia. Now that area is called Bosnia and Herzegovina. In July1995, between 7800 and8000 men and boys were executed, slaughtered by the Serb military and paramilitary forces during the 1992 – 1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in an area that was under the protection of the "United Nations. Srebrenica was even declared a "safe area" , a "haven". This massacre took place in the heart of Europe, it was the worst massacre since the end of World War2.
It occurred right under the noses of the leaders of the three European countries that are these days so concerned about the safety of the "world", so much so that they are even considering supporting a military action, undertaken by the U.S.A and its proxy Israel against Iran to stop it from developing nuclear technology. The three European countries I have in mind are: France, England and Germany, all members of the UN "Security Council" of which two are permanent, France and England. These hypocrites want to protect the "world" when they couldn't even stop 7800 to 8000 men and boys from being killed in a small town (located on their doorstep) like Srebrenica. Maybe the people of Srebrenica should have applied for EU membership before the massacre in order to get better protection.
When the "International Community" threatens Iran to force it to give up its nuclear program in order to make the world safer, I wonder if its thoughts of safety include the Chechens, the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Sudanese in Darfur, the campesinos and the Indios being massacred in Colombia by death squads backed by the cheap – natural resources - hungry U.S. and its west European vassals and Japan (read: "International Community") …or the 30 000 daily deaths caused by hunger due to economic policies of the "International Community"…Will all these peoples and many other oppressed ones feel safer once they find out that Iran has agreed to get rid of its nuclear technology? Who or What will really be safer? The flow of cheap OIL to the West and Japan (the "International Community")?
In light of this record of atrocities approved of by "the International Community", Iran should really speed up the development of its nuclear technology in order to defend itself against these vultures.
Iran shouldn't either count too much on the anti-war "movements" in the West or here in Japan. I mean, take a look at Iraq. Close to 200 000 Iraqis killed for OIL so far! You see any outrage? But two bombs go off in London or two buildings go down in New York with some collateral damage, then and only then there is outrage! "The International Community" goes into uproar, it is the end of the (white) world (of privilege), (white) civilization is in danger, "democracy" and "peace" are under fire. Yeah, sure, the anti – war "movements" in the West and here in Japan, we'll do our usual thing, just like with Iraq, get in the streets, parade, shout slogans "No war! Peace now! Don't attack Iran!", we'll walk, dance, sing "Blowing in the wind", carry banners (some with very "aggressive" messages). It will be very colorful, joyful… hell, it might even be better than Le Cirque du Soleil, and all of these "protests" will of course be non-violent! Peaceful, superpeaceful, ultra-peaceful! And then, if our governments despite our strongest objections don't back off and submit to our will and attack Iran all the same, well, we'll just have to… go home, I guess, and wait for the next war, as usual.
Therefore Iran should really hurry and develop whatever it needs to protect itself from us, I mean, "the International Community".
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Defeat is victory. Death is life
UK Independent
By Robert Fisk
02/26/06
Everyone in the Middle East rewrites history, but never before have we had a US administration so wilfully, dishonestly and ruthlessly reinterpreting tragedy as success, defeat as victory, death as life - helped, I have to add, by the compliant American press. I'm reminded not so much of Vietnam as of the British and French commanders of the First World War who repeatedly lied about military victory over the Kaiser as they pushed hundreds of thousands of their men through the butchers' shops of the Somme, Verdun and Gallipoli. The only difference now is that we are pushing hundreds of thousands of Arabs though the butchers' shops - and don't even care.
Last week's visit to Beirut by one of the blindest of George Bush's bats - his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - was indicative of the cruelty that now pervades Washington. She brazenly talked about the burgeoning "democracies" of the Middle East while utterly ignoring the bloodbaths in Iraq and the growing sectarian tensions of Lebanon, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the key to her indifference can be found in her evidence to the Senate Committee on International Affairs where she denounced Iran as "the greatest strategic challenge" facing the US in the region, because Iran uses policies that "contradict the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States".
As Bouthaina Shaaban, one of the brightest of Syria's not always very bright team of government ministers, noted: "What is the nature of the kind of Middle East sought by the United States? Should Middle East states adapt themselves to that nature, designed oceans away?" As Maureen Dowd, the best and only really worthwhile columnist on the boring New York Times, observed this month, Bush "believes in self-determination only if he's doing the determining ... The Bushies are more obsessed with snooping on Americans than fathoming how other cultures think and react." And conniving with rogue regimes, too, Dowd might have added.
Take Donald Rumsfeld, the reprehensible man who helped to kick off the "shock and awe" mess that has now trapped more than 100,000 Americans in the wastes of Iraq. He's been taking a leisurely trip around North Africa to consult some of America's nastiest dictators, among them President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, the man with the largest secret service in the Arab world and whose policemen have perfected the best method of gleaning information from suspected "terrorists": to hold them down and stuff bleach-soaked rags into their mouths until they have almost drowned.
The Tunisians learned this from the somewhat cruder methods of the Algerians next door whose government death squads slaughtered quite a few of the 150,000 victims of the recent war against the Islamists. The Algerian lads - and I've interviewed a few of them after their nightmares persuaded them to seek asylum in London - would strap their naked victims to a ladder and, if the "chiffon" torture didn't work, they'd push a tube down the victim's throat and turn on a water tap until the prisoner swelled up like a balloon. There was a special department (at the Chateauneuf police station, in case Donald Rumsfeld wants to know) for torturing women, who were inevitably raped before being dispatched by an execution squad.
All this I mention because Rumsfeld's also been cosying up to the Algerians. On a visit to Algiers this month, he announced that "the United States and Algeria have a multifaceted relationship. It involves political and economic as well as military-to-military co-operation. And we very much value the co-operation we are receiving in counter-terrorism..." Yes, I imagine the "chiffon" technique is easy to learn, the abuse of prisoners, too - just like Abu Ghraib, for example, which now seems to have been the fault of journalists rather than America's thugs.
Rumsfeld's latest pronouncements have included a defence of the Pentagon's system of buying favourable news stories in Iraq with bribes - "non-traditional means to provide accurate information" was his fantasy description of this latest attempt to obscure the collapse of the American regime in Baghdad - and an attack on our reporting of the Abu Ghraib tortures. "Consider for a moment the vast quantity of column inches and hours of television devoted to the detainee abuse [sic] at Abu Ghraib. Compare that to the volume of coverage and condemnation associated with, say, the discovery of Saddam Hussein's mass graves, which were filled with hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis."
Let's expose this whopping lie. We were exposing Saddam's vile regime, especially his use of gas, as long ago as 1983. I was refused a visa to Iraq by Saddam's satraps for exposing their vile tortures at - Abu Ghraib. And what was Donald Rumsfeld doing? Visiting Baghdad, grovelling before Saddam, to whom he did not mention the murders and mass graves, which he knew about, and pleading with the Beast of Baghdad to reopen the US embassy in Iraq.
With the usual press courtiers in tow, Rumsfeld has no problems, witness George Melloan's recent interview with the Beast of Washington in his Boeing 737: "He generously spares me time for a chat about defence strategy. Bright sunlight streams in and lights his face ... Sitting across from him at a desk high above the clouds, one wonders if the ability of this modern Jove to call down lightning on transgressors will be equal to the tasks ahead."
And so myth-making and tragedy go hand in hand. Iraq's monumental catastrophe has become routine, shapeless, an incipient "civil war". Note how the American framework of disaster is now being portrayed as an Iraqi vs Iraqi war, as if the huge and brutal US occupation has nothing to do with the appalling violence in Iraq. They blow up each other's mosques? They just don't want to get on. We told them to have a non-sectarian government and they refused. That, I suspect, will be the get-out line when the next deluge overwhelms the Americans in Iraq.
Winston Churchill, when the Iraqis staged their insurgency against British rule in 1920, called Iraq "an ungrateful volcano". But let's just sit back and enjoy the view. Democracy is coming to the Middle East. People are enjoying more liberties. History doesn't matter, only the future. And the future for the people of the Middle East is becoming darker and bloodier by the day. I guess it just depends whether "Jove" is up to his job when all that bright sunlight streams in and lights his face.
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War in Error
By Andrew J. Bacevich
27/02/2006
Sending a general to do a sheriff's job
Small events sometimes reveal large truths. Last month's U.S. missile strike in the remote Bajaur district of Pakistan was such an event. Aimed at taking out Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's chief deputy, the strike missed its intended target and killed as many as 18 residents of the small village of Damadola. But the episode did not end there: outraged Pakistanis rose up in protest; days of highly publicized anti-American demonstrations followed. In effect, the United States had handed Muslims around the world another grievance to hold against Americans.
In stark, unmistakable terms, the Damadola affair lays bare the defects of the Bush administration's response to 9/11. When President Bush in September 2001 launched the United States on a global war against terrorism, he scornfully abandoned the law-enforcement approach to which previous administrations had adhered. To all but the most militant true believers, it has become increasingly evident that in doing so Bush committed an error of the first order.
Underlying Bush's declaration of war were two assumptions: first, that terrorism is subject to defeat; second, that military power, aggressively employed, offers the shortest road to victory. The Damadola incident only adds to the mountain of evidence calling both of those assumptions into question.
As most Americans have come to understand, terrorism, as currently employed in Washington's political lexicon, is a code word. Seemingly referring to a tactic, it actually alludes to the violent Islamic radicals who perpetrated 9/11 and who if given the chance will attack us again.
In dealing with the radicals themselves, the old adage applies: it's kill or be killed. On this point there can be little room for debate and none for compromise. But for the killing to be purposeful, it must occur selectively: to employ violence indiscriminately is to replenish the ranks of al-Qaeda and its spawn faster than we can deplete them. That way lies not security but bankruptcy and exhaustion.
Although paying lip service to this principle, the Bush administration has violated it in practice, most egregiously in Iraq, where heavy-handed tactics fanned the flames of insurgency, but also in Afghanistan and now Pakistan. Using President Bush's conception of war as their mandate-and at times as a de facto grant of immunity-U.S. forces charged with bringing the guilty to book have too often ended up victimizing the innocent.
The fault lies less with the soldiers who pull the triggers, aim the missiles, and drop the bombs than with the nature of war itself. Even in a high-tech age, it remains a blunt instrument. Precision weapons have not made war precise, a truth brought home yet again by the events at Damadola.
It's hard to tell which more vividly testifies to this president's stupefying hubris: his self-proclaimed mission to democratize the Middle East or his claim that his administration is reinventing war. It's probably a toss-up. The truth is that war remains today what it has always been: fraught with risk, uncertainty, and chance. When the unexpected happens, bystanders with the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time are most likely to suffer the consequences.
Granted, in some circumstances, the penalty for killing innocent civilians is nil. The Anglo-American "Transportation Plan" of World War II-the 1944 strategic bombing of Occupied Europe in preparation for the Normandy invasion-caused the deaths of some 12,000 citizens of France and Belgium. Whatever moral questions this bombing campaign might have raised, most of which remain largely unexamined, the bloodletting in no way impeded the Allied march to final victory. In the brutal calculus of that war, sacrificing some number of those whom the Allies were promising to liberate was "worth it."
But outside of the bounds of total war, killing civilians-even unintentionally-becomes politically problematic. The attack at Damadola illustrates the consequences.
For the United States to unleash a salvo of missiles at a Pakistani village thought to house an al-Qaeda chieftain is the equivalent of the Mexican government bombing a southern California condo complex suspected of harboring a drug kingpin. Even if, as the Pakistani government has subsequently claimed, the missiles killed a handful of unidentified "foreign militants," that minor success can in no way justify the use of force that takes the lives of women and children. Morally, the arithmetic doesn't work. Politically, it's even worse.
For the United States government to shrug off those deaths with expressions of regret or offers of monetary compensation simply confirms the worst that others have come to believe: that Americans are callous and arrogant with little regard for the lives of Muslims.
In depicting the attack on the World Trade Center as the opening volley of a global war-a reprise of Dec. 7, 1941-the Bush administration spun the awful events of that day in the wrong direction. The Islamists may nurse bizarre dreams of restoring the caliphate, but their existing claim to political legitimacy is marginal. Al-Qaeda is not the Wehrmacht or the Red Army; it is an international conspiracy, one that committed a singularly heinous crime. Osama bin Laden is not Hitler or Stalin -as a historical figure he comes nowhere near their baneful significance. He is a Mafioso.
When gangs besiege a neighborhood, the authorities send in more cops. If the authorities are smart, they insist upon the cops playing by the rules. Winning back the streets means taking the thugs out of circulation while protecting those who obey the laws. Coercion wielded without restraint only makes matters worse.
So too with the threat posed by radical Islam. Preventing a recurrence of 9/11 requires not war on a global scale, but the sustained, relentless enforcement of international norms. The task requires not an army but a posse. Rather than invasions and stand-off missile attacks, we need police and intelligence agencies, backed by special-operations forces, bringing the perpetrators of terror to justice, while taking care not to incite more Muslims to join the Islamist cause.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the law-enforcement approach to dealing with the Islamist conspiracy did fail. Yet it failed not because such an approach is inherently defective but as a result of incompetence and ineptitude at the highest levels of the United States government, evident in both Democratic and Republican administrations.
By the time this essay appears, the Bush administration will have moved on. As far as official Washington is concerned, the nameless, faceless dead of Damadola are already forgotten. Our warrior-president will continue to insist that we have no choice but to press on, seemingly blind to the moral havoc wreaked by his war and oblivious to the extent to which he is playing into the hands of our adversaries.
But our own interests demand that we not forget those whom we have killed. At Damadola we have handed the Islamists a victory of considerable proportions, further enflaming antipathy toward the U.S. in Pakistan and among Muslims generally. And the lesson to be taken from this self-inflicted defeat is clear: four bloody years into President Bush's war, the time to think anew is at hand
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The Caricatures in Middle East Politics
By James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya
02/24/06 "ICH" -- -- The center piece of the current explosive confrontation between Islamic and Arab protestors, political leaders and governments and the US and Western European regimes and publishers is rooted in Israeli efforts to polarize the world in its favor and to promote isolation, economic sanctions and/or a military attack on Iran. There are several key questions, which almost all commentators and analysts have failed to address. These include:
Why did the "cartoons" get published in Denmark?
What is the political background of "Flemming Rose" the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, who solicited, selected and published the cartoons? What larger issues coincide with the timing of the cartoons publication and reproduction?
Who "benefits" from the publication of the cartoons and the ensuing confrontation between the Arabs/Islam and the West?
What is the contemporary political context of the Arab/Islam protests?
How is the Israeli secret service, Mossad, implicated in provoking the Western-Islamic/Arab conflict, and how do the consequences measure up to their expectations?
A starting point for analyzing the cartoon controversy, which has been a focus for attacking Muslims and Muslim countries as intolerant of Western 'freedom of expression' is the long-standing role of Denmark as a major operation point for Mossad activity in Europe. Re-phrased: How could a tiny Scandinavian country of 5.4 citizens and residents (200,000 or less than 3% of whom are Muslim), renowned for fairy tales, ham and cheese, have become a target for the fury of millions of practicing Muslims from Afghanistan to Palestine, from Indonesia to Libya and into the streets of cities all over the world with significant Muslim populations? Why, after the bombing of Baghdad, the tortures of Abu Ghariab, the massacres in Fallujah and the utter destitution of the entire Iraqi and Afghan people…would Moslems turn their anger at symbols of Denmark from its tinned cookies to its Embassies and overseas business offices?
The story, presented with straight faces, by television news-people, is of, Mr. 'Flemming Rose', a crusading cultural editor of a widely read Danish daily newspaper who wanted to counter the growing 'political correctness' of Europeans about criticizing Moslems and which he compared to the 'self-censorship' he had witnessed in his native Soviet Union. The oddly named Ukrainian-born editor of the culture page of the Jyllands-Posten commissioned Danish cartoonists to submit a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as they (the Danish cartoonists) might imagine him. However four of the twelve cartoons selected for publication were illustrated by 'Rose's' own staff including the most controversial 'bomb in the turban' one. Braving Denmark's anti-blasphemy laws Mr. Rose published the cartoons on September 30, 2005 and the rest is history…
A huge world wide attack on the West's "sacred right to free expression" erupted in the Moslem world with millions of shocked Europeans and North Americans rushing to defend their cherished freedoms in this 'clash of civilizations'. Syria and Iran were prominently blamed for the stirring up of furious believers in the streets of Damascus and Teheran, Beirut and in the slums of Gaza. According to US Secretary Rice, "Iran and Syria have gone out of their way to inflame sentiments and to use this to their own purposes and the world ought to call them on it." The Pakistani and Libyan authorities allied to the US fired on demonstrators killing and wounding scores while numerous religious leaders were arrested. The Western governments urged their Arab and Moslem allies to prevent more attacks on Danish products and property and blamed those unable to quell the fury with complicity and instigation. All of this was over a series of cartoons, or so we are told.
The cultural editor, 'Flemming Rose', who soon tired of being surrounded by a team of Danish police and security to protect him from assassination and missing his daily jogs through his tranquil Copenhagen neighborhood, chose to seek safe haven in Miami, Florida (rather than his native Ukraine) among the Cuban exiles, Israeli sayanim*(see footnote) and Mah Jong-playing retirees as the drama plays on.
Denmark Center of Mossad Activity
Why Denmark? Could this crudely manufactured controversy have been generated on the pages of any major London or New York paper? Who would wish to put Denmark at the center of this 'clash of civilization' – appearing as a script from some grade B Islamophobic thriller?
An interesting chapter in former Israeli Mossad agent, Victor J. Ostrovsky's book, By Way of Deception (1990 St. Martin's Press), outlines the close relationship between the workings of the Danish intelligence services and the Israeli Mossad over decades:
"The relationship between the Mossad and Danish intelligence is so intimate as to be indecent. But it is not the Mossad's virtue that is compromised by the arrangement; it's Denmark's. And that's because the Danish are under the mistaken impression that because they saved a lot of Jews in World War II, the Israelis are grateful and they can trust the Mossad."
The Mossad has the capacity to monitor the entire population of Arabs and especially Palestinians (presumably including those with Danish citizenship) through their special relations with the Danes:
"…a Mossad man monitors "all Arabic and Palestinian-related messages(among Denmarks Arab community) coming into their (the Danish Civil Security Service)headquarters…an extraordinary arrangement for a foreign intelligence service."
The Danish Intelligence officers' high regard for their Israeli Mossad office mates is apparently not, according to Ostrovsky, reciprocated:
The Mossad have such contempt for their Danish counterparts that they refer to them as 'fertsalach', the Hebrew term for a small burst of gas, a fart…they tell the Mossad everything they do." Pp. 231-232
In return for their servility, the Danes get valuable 'training' from the Israelis:
Once every three years, Danish intelligence officials go to Israel for a seminar conducted by the Mossad"… which generates useful contacts for the Mossad "while perpetuating the notion that no organization deals with terrorism better than they (Mossad) do."
In the wake of the US debacle in Iraq and the world's resistance to a massive 'preemptive military attack' or economic and diplomatic embargo of Iran, which could send oil prices to over $100 a barrel, Israel needed to turn the war of ideas on its head. It would make sense that a campaign, aimed to further whip up justifications to attack countries like Iran and Syria (Israel's current enemy du jour), would emanate from one of the US strongest European ally in the invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan and whose national intelligence apparatus (so fondly known as 'fertsalach') would be eager to serve Israel's interest.
Flemming ( or Flaming) Rose: Journalist with a cause
Given Mossad's long-standing penetration of the Danish intelligence agencies, and their close working relations with the right wing media, it is not surprising that a Ukranian Jew, operating under the name of "Flemming Rose" with close working relations with the Israeli state (and in particular the far right Likud regime) should be the center of the controversy over the cartoons. "Rose's" ties to the Israeli state antedate his well-know promotional "interview" with Daniel Pipes (2004), the notorious Arab-hating Zionist ideologue. Prior to being placed as a cultural editor of a leading right-wing Danish daily, from 1990 to 1995 "Rose" was a Moscow-based reporter who translated into Danish a self-serving auto-biography by Boris Yeltsin, godchild of the pro-Israeli, post-communist Russian oligarchs, most of whom held dual citizenship and collaborated with the Mossad in laundering illicit billions. Between 1996-1999 "Rose", the journalist, worked the Washington circuit (traveling with Clinton to China) before returning to Moscow 1999-2004 as a reporter for Jyllands-Posten. In 2005 he became its cultural editor, despite few or any knowledge of the field and over the head of other Danish journalists on the staff. In his new position "Rose" found a powerful platform to incite and play on the growing hostility of conservative Danes to immigrants from the Middle East, particularly practicing Moslems. Using the format of an 'interview' he published Pipes' virulent anti-Islamic diatribe, probably to "test the waters" before proceeding to the next stage in the Mossad strategy to polarize a West-East confrontation.
Political Context for Action
There is a great body of evidence demonstrating that Iraq war was largely a result of a massive disinformation campaign by civilian militarists in the Pentagon and US Zionists in and out of high places in the Pentagon and civil society, in coordination with the Israeli state, which wanted Iraq to be destroyed as a viable nation. There is no evidence that the major US oil corporations pressured Congress or promoted the war in Iraq or the current confrontation with Iran. There is plenty of evidence that they are very uneasy about the losses that may result from an Israeli attack on Iran.
The Zionist succeeded in their goals in Iraq: establishing a beachhead in the northern Kurdish enclave ('Kurdistan'), and securing assets in the new "Iraqi" regime via Chalabi and others.
The major Jewish organizations mobilized to oppose any critics of the Zionist policymakers, predictably accusing them of 'anti-Semitism'. Nevertheless, over time, FBI investigations, CIA reports and judicial indictments have pointed to key Israeli operatives and their domestic collaborators as Israeli spies. While Israel benefited from the Bush-Blair invasion in Iraq, the same cannot be said for the United States. As thousands of casualties mounted, and war spending skyrocketed to hundreds of billions of dollars, opposition to the war escalated.
Israeli strategic plans to extend US military operations to Iran and Syria faced major challenges, from within the US military and public and even sections of the mass media. Mossad assets in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and elsewhere had to settle for puff pieces on Iran's non-existent nuclear weapon threat, right after the same plot with regard to Iraq was exposed as a total fabrication. Another line of propaganda was needed to silence war critics and heighten animosities to the Islamists/Arabs in general and Iran in particular. This is where the "Flemming Rose"-Mossad operation came into the picture. The Islamic-hate cartoons were published in Denmark in September 2005 as Israeli and US Zionists escalated their war propaganda against Iran. The initial response from the Islamic countries however was limited. The story wasn't picked up in the International Herald Journal until late December 2005. By early January 2006, Mossad "Katsas" (Hebrew for case officers) activated sayanim (volunteer Jewish collaborators outside of Israel) throughout Western and Eastern European media to simultaneously reproduce the cartoons on Feb. 1 and 2, 1006. One such sayanim operation would have been the decision by France-Soir Senior Editor, Arnaud Levy and Editor in Chief Serge Faubert, to publish the cartoons. The paper's French Egyptian owner almost immediately fired the paper's Managing Editor, Jacques Lefranc, who, according to an interview with CNN, had initially opposed their publications, without touching Levy and Faubert.
A strident campaign was launched in practically all the pro-Western mass media condemning the initial, relatively moderate Islamic protests, which had occurred between September to December 2005 and rapidly provoked the subsequent massive escalation, doubtlessly aided by covert Mossad operatives among Arab populations. Mossad's 'little farts', the Danish intelligence fanned the fires by advising Denmark's rightwing Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen not to give way by refusing to apologize as the pro-Western Arab regimes requested and even refusing a request for a meeting with a group of Denmark-based diplomats from Arab and Moslem countries to discuss the 'situation' "Flemming Rose"-Mossad tried one more gambit – to further heighten East-West tension. He publicly offered to publish any Iranian cartoons which would mock the Holocaust in 'his' paper'. The senior editor of Jyllands-Posten, apparently belatedly caught on to "Flemming Rose" hidden agenda and vetoed the 'offer' and asked Rose to take a leave of absence. Rose left for Miami, not Tel Aviv – where his residency might raise suspicions about his claim to be merely an opponent of "self-censorship". In Miami, he no doubt will have the protection of the locally based sayanin, armed and train for "self-defense" of threatened Zionists.
Sayanim – Defenders of Western Civilization
The sayanim, derived, according to Victor Ostrovsky, from the Hebrew word 'to help' are a huge world-wide network of Jews in strategic or useful places (real estate, mass media, finance, car dealerships etc…) who have been agreed to help in Israeli Mossad actitivies within their own countries. This has been ascribed to the supra-national loyalty sayanim offer to Israel, above and not always in the interest of their home country. According to Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon, in their detailed biography, Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy (Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2002), the notorious media mogul, Robert Maxwell, was a super-sayanim, providing cover, offices, political connections, money-laundering services and planted stories in the service of Israel at the Mossad's beheast. Jonathan Pollard, the American Naval Researcher jailed for espionage, is another notorious sayanim. The activities of these 'helpers' really range from the spectacular to the more mundane and, according to Victor Ostrovsky, in his 1990 biography By Way of Deception, the sayanim represent a pool of thousands of active and inactive individuals who can provide services discretely out of loyalty to 'the cause of Israel' as defined by any current Mossad operation. The cynicism of this arrangement is clear: It makes little difference to the Mossad if an operation, such as 'Flemming Rose', jeopardizes the national and economic interests of the sayanim's own country and , if exposed, might harm the status of Jews in the diaspora. The standard response from the Mossad would be: "So what's the worst that could happen to those Jews? They'd all come to Israel? Great." This recklessness clearly has ramifications for Jews who have refused to be recruited as Mossad helpers in affected countries.
Mossad War Propaganda and the "Cartoon Controversy"
Israeli leaders expressed their opposition to the Bush Administration's diplomatic efforts to engage the European powers in the Iran negotiations. Automatically and without question all the major Zionist and Jewish organizations in the US (AIPAC, Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations, ADL and others) unleashed a sustained national campaign to mobilize congress and their "friends" in the executive branch to take immediate military action or to impose economic sanctions on Iran. The Bush Administration however while in agreement, lacked public support in the US and among his European allies and their national electorates. The Mossad policy was to create a pretext to polarize public opinion between the Middle East (and beyond) and the West in order to escalate tensions and demonize Islamic adversaries to its Middle East hegemonis pretensions. "Rose" cartoons served the Mossad perfectly. The issue could be presented as a free speech issue, a conflict of "values" not "interests", between the "democratic West" and the fundamentalist "totalitarian" (as characterized by Pipes-Rose) Islamists. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rose had solicited and selected the Islamic caricatures while his paper had rejected similar cartoons of Jesus Christ in an earlier context. The image of Rose as a "cultural iconoclast" - while working for a right wing daily whose daily fare was publishing anti-(Mid-East)immigrant "news stories" and favorable interviews with Zionists extremists - is prima facie not credible, although that image has been purveyed by all the major media outlets. While "Rose" initiated the international tensions, liberal and neo-con colleagues and his comrades in and out of the Mossad publicized his transgressions and provoked the ire of the Arab and Islamic world.
The cartoons, the subsequent insults and calumnies attacking the Islamic protestors and their secular allies throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe eventually provoked major peaceful and then violent protests by millions of people. Visual images of violent protests and demonstrations were featured by the Western mass media, successfully creating the intended fear and apprehension against Muslim countries and minorities in Europe. Islamophobia gained momentum. Zionist propagandists in Europe and the US linked the defense of "free speech" issue to Israeli "security" policies. While the West turned its fury against the Islamic protestors, Israel blockaded Gaza and the US and Europe cut off all funding to the Palestinians, threatening the population with mass starvation for exercising its democratic right to elect its own leaders! "Rose's" free speech charade revived the discredited ZionCon doctrine of "Clash of Civilizations". Playing on European Islamophobia and the increasing sensibility of practicing Moslems and Arab nationalists to Western abuses, it is likely that Israeli psych-war experts pinpointed the "free speech" issue as the ideal detonator for the conflict.
The democratic electoral victory of Hamas – dubbed by Israel as a terrorist movement – accelerated Israeli efforts to convince Western governments to insist that regimes in Muslim countries repress the 'irrational Islamic masses' or face Western censure or elimination of aid. (The failure to crack down violently on demonstrators was presented by the media as official approval or instigation) The major US Zionist organizations were able to influence Secretary of State Rice into blaming Iran and Syria for fomenting the worldwide demonstrations, from Gaza to the Philippines. The Israeli strategy was to use European outrage to weaken opposition to a military attack or economic sanctions on Iran and Syria.
Beyond Religious Blasphemy
While most establishment analysts have narrowly focused on the cartoon as the source and target of the massive global demonstrations, in fact it is at best the immediate detonator of a whole series of ongoing events of much greater political significance. From the "shock and awe" carpet bombing of Iraq, to the mass torture and routine everyday humiliation in occupied countries, from the utter destruction of Fallujah (an American example as Guernica was for the Nazis), to Israeli devastation of Jenin and Palestine, from the everyday assassinations of Palestinians by the Israeli occupiers, to the smearing of the Koran with filth at Guantanamo, Israel, the US and Europe have attempted to demonstrate that no Moslems are safe anywhere- not in their schools, home, offices, fields, factories or mosques- and that nothing is sacred.
The reasons that millions are demonstrating against a caricature of Mohammed published in an insignificant Scandinavian rightwing newspaper is that this is the last straw – the detonator – of a series of deliberate violations of fundamental social and political rights of Muslim, Arab and colonized peoples. While the Western media have focused exclusively on the religious content of the demonstrators, almost every country, where massive sustained demonstrations have taken place, has been subject to recent Western intervention, large-scale pillage of raw materials and/or experienced the destruction of their secular rights: countries invaded, homes, schools, hospital, systems of health and clean water demolished, agriculture and natural resources looted, museums, libraries and archeological sites pillaged and mosques desecrated. The present condition for material existence has been a Western inferno for all the people (both secular and observant) living in Arab or Islamic countries. Now their most profound, historic, spiritual reference point, the prophet Mohammed – the most cherished religious figure – has been repeatedly trampled with impunity by arrogant imperialists, their media servants, aided and abetted by the Israeli state and its overseas 'sayanin' operatives. It is cynical to suggest that practicing Moslems could desecrate the figure of Jesus Christ with impunity when that too is forbidden by the Koran.
As the Israeli strategists well knew in advance, the vilification of Islam was not taking place in a political vacuum: The material conditions for an Islamic-Arab uprising were ripe: Hamas had swept the Palestinian elections, the US military were aware that they were losing the war in Iraq, Iran was refusing to capitulate, Bush was losing public support for ongoing and future Middle Eastern wars, AIPAC, Israel's main political instrument for influencing US policy was under criminal investigation…Israel's strategy of having the US fight its wars was boomeranging. There was a need to revive the political-military tensions which they had exploited after September 11, 2001 to Israel's advantage: hence the "Flemming Rose" provocation, hence the coordinated, wide promotion of the act, hence the free speech agitation among Western 'sayanin', liberals, conservatives and neocon ideologues, hence the predictable explosion of protest, hence the 'recreation' of Mid-East tension…and the advances of Israel's agenda.
Clearly the burgeoning confrontation is more than a religious or free speech issue, more than the crude provocations of an errant cultural editor coddled by the 'little farts' of a penetrated Danish intelligence agency. What is at stake is the deliberate racist stereotyping of Arab, Islamic and Third World people in order to sustain and deepen their oppression, exploitation and subordination.
The most pervasive, prolific and influential source of racist Arab stereotypes are Israel and its overseas (particularly US and European) academics, terror 'experts', psychologists at the most prestigious universities and think tanks, who have provided the "psychological profile" to torture, humiliate, provoke and repress the millions struggling for self-determination against colonial and imperial dominance.
Once again Israel and especially its overseas operatives have placed the expansion and militarist interests of Israel above the interests of the people of the US and Europe. "Is it good for the Jews?": A criterion as defined by the Israeli state, has led to the blind alley of massive confrontations, deepening animosity between Arabic/Muslim peoples and Western regimes. What appeared so clever to the 'Roses' of the world and their Katsas and docile Sayanim, in provoking confrontation may once again boomerang: The uprisings may go beyond protesting symbols of vilification to attacking the substance of power, including the Arab and Moslem pro-consuls and collaborators of the Euro-American political and economic power. While the Mossad is very astute in infiltrating and provoking oppressed groups, it has been singularly inept in controlling and containing the resultant uprisings as the recent victory of Hamas demonstrates and the success of the Iraqi resistance illustrates. The next controversial cartoon may show Moses leading his people into the desert.
Epilogue
While the Mossad-provoked 'free speech versus blasphemy' controversy between the West and the Islamic peoples continues to deepen, Israel proceeds to impose a Nazi-like economic siege over 4 million Palestinians, intended to starve them into surrendering their democratic freedoms. Intended is the concise term, Gideon Levy, star reporter for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz (19/02/06) records Dov Weissglas, advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister, jokingly telling top officials "Its (the economic blockage – which may include electricity and water, as well as food) like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will get a lot thinner but won't die." The Israeli officials "rolled with laughter". As Levy points out "more than half of all Palestinians are already living in poverty…last year 37% had difficulties obtaining food… 54% of the residents of Gaza cut back the amount of food they consume…child mortality rose by 15%…unemployment reached 28%." Planned pre-meditated mass starvation of a ghettoized population, jokingly discarded by its executioners as a 'visit to the dietician', is an exact replica of the internal policy discussion of the Nazi high command over the population in the Warsaw Ghetto. Israel's capacity to impose and implement a genocidal policy has been greatly facilitated by the symbolic sideshow, which the Mossad-'Rose' orchestrated in Western Europe. "Cultural" conflict at the service of genocide – is hardly a clever ruse or merely a violation of Islamic sensibilities, it is a crime against humanity.
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Iran nuclear chief says 'basic agreement' reached on Russian enrichment plan
By Ali Akbar Dareini
ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 26, 2006
BUSHEHR, Iran – Iran's nuclear chief said an agreement was reached with Moscow on Sunday to set up a joint uranium enrichment facility on Russian soil, a deal that could assuage global concerns that Tehran wants to build atomic bombs.
The plan proposed by Russia is backed by the United States and European Union.
The agreement was announced after a meeting between Russian nuclear chief Sergei Kiriyenko and Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and the country's vice president.
The two countries "reached a basic agreement on the creation of a joint venture (to enrich uranium)," Aghazadeh told a news conference.
The International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-nation board of governors is scheduled to meet March 6 to consider what to do about Iran's recent resumption of nuclear activity. The meeting could start a process leading to punishment by the U.N. Security Council, which has the authority to impose economic and political sanctions on Iran.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was quoted by Russian media as saying Moscow will continue its talks with Iran until the March 6 IAEA board meeting in an effort to resolve the crisis.
Moscow has been struggling to persuade Tehran to reinstate a moratorium on uranium enrichment and agree to shift its enrichment program to Russian territory to ease world concerns it could divert enriched uranium to a weapons program. Enriched uranium can be used for both nuclear energy and weapons.
Kiriyenko said Moscow would insist on resolving the Iranian nuclear dispute within the IAEA, Russia's RIA Novosti news agency reported. Russia is one of the five permanent Security Council members with veto power over any resolution.
Russia has said its enrichment offer was contingent on Iran reinstating the moratorium on domestic enrichment, but Iran has rejected such a link and in the past insisted on its right to enrich uranium domestically.
Kiriyenko was quoted by Russian media as saying the joint enrichment venture in Russia was just "one of the elements in the complex of issues related to the Iranian nuclear problem."
After several days of talks with Iranian officials, Kiriyenko said "negotiations weren't going simply and easily." But he was quoted as saying that "there were practically no technical, organizational and financial problems left" in talks on the Russian proposal.
Aghazadeh and Kiriyenko, who together visited a nuclear plant being built by Russia in the Persian Gulf city of Bushehr, said nuclear talks would continue in Moscow over the next few days.
Also, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi confirmed than an IAEA team was in Tehran to discuss the country's nuclear program.
Iran has denied seeking atomic weapons and more than three years of IAEA probing have not produced concrete evidence to the contrary. But the agency discovered suspicious activity, including plutonium experiments and long-secret efforts to develop enrich uranium.
Asefi played down a secret nuclear project that U.S. intelligence has linked to warhead design, saying it would offer information on it to the IAEA.
"We will discuss the issue, and the rumors surrounding it, with the agency. It is not very sensitive or ambiguous," Asefi told reporters at a news conference when asked about the secret "Green Salt Project."
Public mention of the "Green Salt Project" first surfaced in an IAEA report drawn up earlier this month for a meeting of the agency's board of governors. The meeting ended with the board reporting Tehran to the Security Council over concerns it could be hiding a nuclear weapons program.
Asefi reiterated that Iran would continue its nuclear fuel research activities and would not give in its rights under pressure and "bullying language."
He said his country expects the next IAEA board session to be held on a "nonpolitical, independent and professional" basis.
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Two bombs hit Iranian oil cities, 6 wounded
By Parinoosh Arami
Reuters
February 27, 2006
TEHRAN - Two bombs exploded in the southern Iranian cities of Dezful and Abadan on Monday wounding at least six people, officials said.
The bombs were planted in the governor's office in both cities, which lie in the province of Khuzestan, the heartland of Iran's oil industry, that has seen tensions between Iranian authorities and the Arab minority over the last year.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombings, the latest in a string of attacks and violence this year in Khuzestan, which borders Iraq and contains most of Iran's Arabic-speaking minority.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaking to reporters in Kuwait, said: "The presence of occupation (forces) in Iraq leads to the deterioration of the security situation in the region, but Iran is a strong country and we will make those who try and mess with us regret it."
State television showed footage from a meeting at the Abadan governor's office which was in session when the bomb exploded. Disorientated officials picked their way through piles of debris and clouds of dust. One man was helped from the scene, his clothes spattered with blood.
"There were no fatalities but at least four people were wounded in Dezful and two in Abadan," a local official told Reuters by telephone.
Both blasts occurred far away from any oil facilities in the province, where small bombs damaged 15 pipelines and one oil well in September.
"The oil refinery has not been damaged," said a spokeswoman for the Abadan oil refinery.
"Hopefully, those behind the bombings will soon be found and punished," Hamid Ghanaati, governor-general of Dezful, told the official IRNA news agency.
Officials said the two blasts were ten minutes apart.
"The bombs were hidden in the washrooms of the two buildings," an unnamed provincial official told IRNA. "The buildings were heavily damaged and are closed."
Another official blamed foreigners for the blasts.
"Foreign elements aim to exploit the situation by fanning ethnic differences and separatist tendencies," Khuzestan's Deputy Governor General Hassan Farokhnejad told the semi-official Fars news agency.
"They are always inciting domestic elements to commit incidents such as the recent bombings," Farokhnejad added without giving details.
In recent months, officials have blamed violence on exiled separatist groups and have accused Britain of stirring unrest in Khuzestan. London denies the charge.
Violence erupted in Khuzestan in April when at least five people were killed during several days of anti-government demonstrations.
Seven people were killed in bombings in June and six died in a blast in October. Eight people were killed last month when bombs ripped through a bank and government building.
About three percent of Iran's 69 million people are Arabs. Authorities are sensitive about protests and discontent in the southwestern Arab territories.
Comment: "Foreign elements aim to exploit the situation by fanning ethnic differences and separatist tendencies."
Gee, to whom might the Iranians be referring??
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In Defense of Free Thought
By Robert Scheer, AlterNet. Posted February 24, 2006.
I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure.
My conscience decrees,
This right I must treasure.
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator,
No man can deny
- Die gedanken sind frei.
(Sixteenth-century German peasant song revived
as a protest anthem against the Nazi regime)
The news on Monday that an Austrian court has sentenced crackpot British historian David Irving to three years' imprisonment for having denied the Holocaust seventeen years ago should have alarmed free speech advocates -- particularly at a time when Muslim fundamentalists are being lectured as to the freedom of expression that should be afforded cartoonists. In the event, however, a lack of noticeable outcry has exposed a longstanding double standard in the West about who is entitled to free speech and why.
To be sure, Nazi propaganda is an extremely sensitive issue in Hitler's birth country, which for the most part endorsed the madman's vision of the Third Reich. But the repression of the free marketplace of ideas is an endorsement of tyranny rather than its repudiation. And it is not just Austria, and Germany itself, that have banned the views of Holocaust deniers: Eight other European states have joined in. Muslim fundamentalists outraged by the cartoons that have appeared widely in the European media thus have the right to question the conflicting standards of what is considered worthy of censorship.
The muted response of the Western media to the Irving decision is difficult to fathom. Not much has been reported on this case and what has appeared often assumes that this severe limit to free speech is obviously justified. For example, a BBC report over the weekend concluded with this ominous paragraph: "In a letter to the BBC from his prison cell, Mr. Irving said some of his views on the gas chambers had changed -- but he also expressed opinions which would be challenged by mainstream historians."
Since when has it been accepted as a crime to challenge mainstream historians, even when, as in this case, the challenge is without foundation? Should a deeply wrongheaded view, even one motivated by vile malice as Irving's critics claim motivates him, lead to incarceration? The case made for criminalizing speech in the West is usually based on the concept that it is not OK to yell fire in a crowded theater -- or incite violence. The argument for jailing Irving is that denying the Holocaust is equivalent to stoking the fires of anti-Semitic violence. "Holocaust denial is anti-Semitism dressed up as intellectual debate. It should be regarded as such and treated as such," stated the head of the UK's Holocaust Educational Trust, by way of defending the Austrian verdict.
But by that standard, the artists who drew the cartoons depicting Muhammad should also be arrested, as well as their editors and publishers. Critics of the Danish newspaper that commissioned the Muhammad cartoons claim that its editorial slant is anti-Muslim and that they were attempting a deliberate provocation. So should the paper's editors be prosecuted? After all, people have died protesting these inflammatory comics. Will Austria and the other nations that ban anti-Semitic books now ban expressions judged by Muslims to be unacceptably hostile to their religion? Unfortunately, they may do just that out of political opportunism, given the rioting and trade boycotts that followed the publication of those cartoons. But they would once again be wrong.
Speech that is not felt by some powerful group to be loathsome is hardly in need of protection. The value of an absolutist opposition to the censorship of speech, as enshrined in the US Constitution's First Amendment, is that it holds out the prospect that the right to speak will be honored even when the content of those utterances is not. What is disturbing in both the Irving and Muhammad cartoon situations is the stuttering hesitancy of many who claim to be committed to free speech to speak out in opposition to those -- be they Muslim clerics or Austrian judges -- who seek to limit the free expression of individuals expressing views they detest.
In both instances, the world has been presented with a teaching moment, in which the argument for free thought -- that die gedanken sind frei ("thoughts are free") that the Nazis and every other absolutist dictatorship have excelled in crushing -- was not advanced by those who know better. As a result, a world sorely in need of a crash course in the efficacy of free debate received nothing of the sort. Instead, the lesson has been that the suppression of ideas is valid, as long as the suppressors are convinced that they are in the right.
Comment: It is clear why the holocaust is the one issue that cannot be discussed. The media in many parts of the world is controlled by pathocratic supporters of Israel. This time around, it is the Muslim world that is being viciously attacked, not the Jews. But by playing the holocaust card over and over again - that is, the pity card, the hallmark of psychopathy - attention is diverted from the real victims today.
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IDF officer cancels UK study leave for fear of arrest
02.26.06
YnetNews
The IDF commander of the Gaza division, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, has cancelled plans to study in the U.K. after warnings from the military that he could be arrested for war crimes.
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Abbas is "irrelevant": Israeli FM
www.chinaview.cn
2006-02-2006
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Sunday evening that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was "irrelevant" because of Hamas' victory in last month's Palestinian legislative elections and the militant group's subsequent takeover of the Palestinianparliament.
Livni said that the Hamas-led Palestinian government must decide on Israel's demands for recognition and renunciation of violence, adding that Abbas "in this regard is not relevant.""Abu Mazen (Abbas) cannot serve as a fig leaf to a terrorist authority. He cannot be the pretty face of the ugly terror hiding behind him," Livni told the Israel Radio.
Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz met with U.S.envoy David Welch on Sunday morning, discussing U.S. and Israeli policies toward Hamas.
"Hamas is trying to mislead the international community, to sweet-talk it and to exhibit an appearance of responsibility," Mofaz was quoted by local newspaper Ha'aretz as saying to Welch Mofaz was referring to recent statements by Gaza-based senior Hamas leader Ismail Haneya, who has been formally tasked with the formation of the next Palestinian government.
Haneya was quoted by The Washington Post on Saturday as saying that the Hamas-led government would establish a "gradual peace with Israel" if the latter withdrew to its 1967 borders.Israel snatched the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Arab East Jerusalem during the 1967 Mideast War.
But Haneya has denied that Hamas would settle a peace agreement with Israel, saying his words were misunderstood. The Hamas premier-designate stressed that Hamas would consider a long-term political truce with Israel if the Jewish state withdrew to its 1967 borders, allowed Palestinian refugees to return and released Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.
Meanwhile, Mofaz also told Welch that Israel would not give tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinians to a Hamas-led government, but the Jewish state would not impede transfer of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian people.
Mofaz also warned that Hamas was trying to obtain support and create an alliance with Iran. "These attempts will create an axis of evil from Iran to Syria through Hezbollah to Hamas", said Mofaz.
Welch is to meet Israeli Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert later on Sunday to discuss U.S. and Israel stances regarding overtures and aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian government. The Army Radio reported that the two sides would agree on a "Hamas bypass route", which allows Washington to channel aid funds directly to humanitarian organizations in the Palestinian territories, or to Palestinian President Abbas, rather than to the Hamas-led government.
Welch held talks with Abbas on Saturday, during which the U.S. envoy promised that the U.S. would not cut off humanitarian aid to the Palestinians even after a Hamas government took over.It was the first high-level meeting between the U.S. and the Palestinians since Hamas landslide election victory. Welch also assured Abbas that Washington supported him and his policies, praising his speech during the inauguration session of the Hamas-dominated Palestinian parliament earlier this month,according to Israel Radio.
"The United States has long been a supporter of the Palestinian people, through a substantial contribution of our foreign assistance funds... we continue to be devoted to the humanitarian needs of the Palestinian people and it shall remain so," Welch was quoted as saying.
"It is our belief that it is important for the people in the Palestinian territories ... to have a good life in safety and security with economic well-being," Welch added.
Hamas, or the Islamic Resistance Movement, garnered 76 seats in the 132-member Palestinian parliament, defeating Abbas long dominant Fatah movement.
The group, sworn to Israel's destruction and labelled by Israel and Washington as a terrorist group, is expected to form a new government in the coming weeks.
The U.S., together with the European Union, the United Nations and Russia, which form the Mideast peacemaking Quartet Committee, has threatened to cut off aid to the Palestinians if Hamas does not renounce violence, recognize Israel and accept previous Palestinian agreements with Israel.
Palestinian President Abbas has also called upon Hamas to open talks with Israel and respect previous deals with Israel, but rejected by the group.
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Mansour: Israel's Aggression Violates International Law
International Press Center
26/02/2006
GAZA, Palestine, February 26, 2006 (IPC) - - The Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine to the United Nations, Reyad Mansour confirmed that the latest Israeli aggressions included the killing extra-judicially five residents in Nablus and two others in the Gaza Strip were violations against the principles of international law.
Mansour acquainted during his meeting with the United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on Africa Ibrahim Gambari with the latest developments in the Palestinian territories and the dangers of the Israeli escalation in the area.
Mansour called on the UN Secretary General, Kofi Anan to intervene in order to stop the Israeli aggressions against the Palestinian people.
On his part, Gambari pointed out that Anan would discuss in the coming days with the world and Arab leaders the latest developments in the area.
The Palestine Permanent Observer at the UN, Reyad Mansour sent a letter to Anan, Security Council, and the General Assembly over the Israeli ongoing aggressions against people, particularly, the latest IOF military operations in Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus.
Mansour warned Israel of exploiting their internal elections to validate its aggressions against Palestinians, particularly, after Israeli chief of intelligence had threatened to assassinate Palestinian officials.
He mentioned that The President Mahmoud Abbas confirmed the PNA commitment to the peace process and all accords assigned between Israelis and the Palestinians, calling on Israel to stop aggressions and return to the negotiations table.
Dr. Mansour also met with his Austrian counterpart and other EU officials to discuss the economic situation in the Palestine after Israel has blocked tax revenues of USD 55 million it was supposed to transfer to the PNA.
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Six hurt in blast at Israeli arms development centre
27/02/2006
An explosion went off today during a test at an Israeli arms development centre, injuring at least six people.
The loud blast at Rafael, the weapons development arm of Israel's Defence Ministry, was heard across Haifa Bay in northern Israel.
Moshe Weizman, a regional police spokesman, said: "We are not talking about a suicide attack.
"It is a work accident. We don't know exactly what, a chemical that blew up in a bottle," he told Israel Army Radio.
Officials at Rafael declined to comment.
Rafael makes sophisticated weapons, including missiles, tank armour and electronic warfare systems.
Local fire officials said there had not been an accident at the site in the past 20 years.
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US leader crashed by trying to 'pedal, wave and speak at same time'
MURDO MACLEOD POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
HE MAY be the most powerful man in the world, but proof has emerged that President George Bush cannot ride a bike, wave and speak at the same time.
Scotland on Sunday has obtained remarkable details of one of the most memorably bizarre episodes of the Bush presidency: the day he crashed into a Scottish police constable while cycling in the grounds of Gleneagles Hotel.
The incident, which will do little to improve Bush's accident-prone reputation, began when he took to two wheels for a spot of early-evening exercise during last year's G8 summit at the Perthshire resort.
After a hard day's discussion with fellow world leaders, the president was looking for some relaxation. Instead, he ended up the subject of a police report in which the leader of the free world was described, in classic police language, as a "moving/falling object".
It was "about 1800 hours on Wednesday, 6 July, 2005" that a detachment of Strathclyde police constables, in "Level 2 public order dress [anti-riot gear]," formed a protective line at the gate at the hotel's rear entrance, in case demonstrators penetrated the biggest-ever security operation on Scottish soil.
The official police incident report states: "[The unit] was requested to cover the road junction on the Auchterarder to Braco Road as the President of the USA, George Bush, was cycling through." The report goes on: "[At] about 1800 hours the President approached the junction at speed on the bicycle. The road was damp at the time. As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting 'thanks, you guys, for coming'.
"As he did this he lost control of the cycle, falling to the ground, causing both himself and his bicycle to strike [the officer] on the lower legs. [The officer] fell to the ground, striking his head. The President continued along the ground for approximately five metres, causing himself a number of abrasions. The officers... then assisted both injured parties."
The injured officer, who was not named, was whisked to Perth Royal Infirmary. The report adds: "While en-route President Bush phoned [the officer], enquiring after his wellbeing and apologising for the accident."
At hospital, a doctor examined the constable and diagnosed damage to his ankle ligaments and issued him with crutches. The cause was officially recorded as: "Hit by moving/falling object."
No details of damage to the President are recorded from his close encounter with the policeman and the road, although later reports said he had been "bandaged" by a White House physician after suffering scrapes on his hands and arms.
At the time Bush laughed off the incident, saying he should start "acting his age".
Details of precisely how the crash unfolded have until now been kept under wraps for fear of embarrassing both Bush and the injured constable. But the new disclosures are certain to raise eyebrows on Washington's Capitol Hill.
Jim McDermott, a Democrat Congressman, last night quipped: "Not only does he break the law over here on eavesdropping and spying on our own citizens, but it seems he can't even keep to your law when it comes to riding a bike. It's another example of how he can't keep his mind on the things he should be thinking about."
Bush often takes to two wheels for exercise, after pain in his knees forced him to give up running. He regularly rides at secret service training facilities near Washington, and the G8 accident is just one in a long list of mishaps. In May 2004, he fell off his mountain bike, grazing his chin, upper lip, nose, both knees, and his right hand, while riding on his ranch in Texas. In June 2003, he fell off his hi-tech Segway scooter.
In Scotland, an accident such as the one at Gleneagles could have led to police action. Earlier this year, Strathclyde Police issued three fixed penalty notices to errant cyclists as part of a crack-down on rogue riders. Legal experts also suggested lesser mortals could have ended up with a fixed penalty fine, prosecution, or at least a good ticking-off from officers.
John Scott, a human rights lawyer, said: "There's certainly enough in this account for a charge of careless driving. Anyone else would have been warned for dangerous driving.
"I have had clients who have been charged with assaulting a police officer for less than this. The issue of how long the police officer was out of action for is also important. He was away from work for 14 weeks, and that would normally be very significant in a case like this."
No-one was available for comment from the White House.
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On the Brink in Iraq
By Robert Dreyfuss
TomPaine.com
Friday 24 February 2006
With Iraq perched at the very precipice of an ethnic and sectarian holocaust, the utter failure of the Bush administration's policy is revealed with starkest clarity. Iraq may or may not fall into the abyss in the next few days and weeks, but what is no longer in doubt is who is to blame: If Iraq is engulfed in civil war then Americans, Iraqis and the international community must hold President Bush and Vice President Cheney responsible for the destruction of Iraq.
The CIA, the State Department, members of Congress and countless Middle East experts warned Bush and Cheney - to no avail - that toppling Saddam could unleash the demons of civil war. They said so before the war, during it and in the aftermath, and each time the warnings were dismissed. Those warnings came from people like Paul Pillar, the CIA veteran who served as the US intelligence community's chief Middle East analyst, from Wayne White, the State Department's chief intelligence analyst on Iraq and from two CIA Baghdad station chiefs who were purged for their analysis. Pillar, who wrote this month in Foreign Affairs that pre-war intelligence on Iraq was distorted by the Bush-Cheney team, is being excoriated by the right.
For the most radical-right neoconservative Jacobins amongst the Bush-Cheney team, the possibility that Iraq might fall apart wasn't even alarming: they just didn't care, and in their obsessive zeal to overthrow Saddam Hussein they were more than willing to take the risk. David Wurmser, who migrated from the Israeli-connected Washington Institute on Near East Policy to the American Enterprise Institute to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans to John Bolton's arms control shop at the State Department to Dick Cheney's shadow National Security Council in the Office of the Vice President from 2001 to 2006, wrote during the 1990s that Iraq after Saddam was likely to descend into violent tribal, ethnic and sectarian war.
In a paper for an Israeli think tank, the same think tank for which Wurmser, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith prepared the famous "Clean Break" paper in 1996, Wurmser wrote in 1997 : "The residual unity of the nation is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state." After Saddam, Iraq would "be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families," he wrote. "Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq's] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition." Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to "expedite" such a collapse. "The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance."
Such black neoconservative fantasies - which view the Middle East as a chessboard on which they can move the pieces at will - have now come home to roost. For the many hundreds of thousands who might die in an Iraqi civil war, the consequences are all too real.
The bankruptcy of the Bush-Cheney Iraq policy is revealed in the fact that the United States has succeeded in pitting itself now against two major "resistance" groups in Iraq. The first is the Sunni-led, mostly Baathist and military resistance, which has battled US forces in Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north and west. The second, which is growing in the ferocity of its anti-Americanism, is the Shiite religious forces led by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army, and their allies, who have begun routinely to denounce the United States for its opposition to their plans to create a Shiite-dominated, Iranian-allied Islamic Republic of Iraq. Abdel Aziz Al Hakim, SCIRI's chieftain and former commander of its Badr Brigade paramilitary force, has all but declared war on the United States, blaming Ambassador Khalilzad for giving a "green light" to the bombers by insisting that Shiite militias be disarmed. Proclaimed Hakim:
"For sure, the statements made by the ambassador were not made in a responsible way and he did not behave like an ambassador. These statements were the reason for more pressure and gave green lights to terrorist groups. And, therefore, he shares in part of the responsibility."
And even the oracle-like Ayatollah Ali Sistani, whose supposedly nonpolitical stance looks more and more like a cover for shrewd and calculating political ambition, overtly threatened this week to order the unleashing of Shiite militias in a civil war mode.
But the escalating political rhetoric is built on a foundation of escalating inter-communal violence. Ethnic cleansing is proceeding apace. The bombing of the Golden Dome in Samarra ought not to be seen as a conspiratorial effort to provoke civil war, but merely as a symptom of that incipient war. As a Sunni city north of Baghdad, it is likely that ethnic cleansers planned the attack as a means of terrifying Shiites in that part of Iraq to flee southward to the Shiite enclaves. Scores of Iraqi cities, towns, and neighborhoods are undergoing a similar pattern of terrorism and death squads aimed at ethnic cleansing.
What is especially scary to Shiites is that the destruction of the Golden Dome follows an historic pattern first laid down by the Wahhabi conquerors of the Arabian peninsula in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the Wahhabi Arab army made demolition of Shiite mosque domes its signature and launched a crusade against alleged idolatry by Shiites, who were disparaged by the Wahhabis as heretics. The Kurds, too, standing back from the Sunni-Shiite battles, are engaging in their own, anti-Arab ethnic cleansing in and around the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, which President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, a Kurd, has called "the Jerusalem of Kurdistan."
It is all ugly and likely to get much uglier. So far, hundreds of Iraqis on all sides have died since Tuesday, scores and perhaps hundreds of mosques attacked, execution-style slayings proliferated, and ordinary Iraqis driven into hiding or into exile. A weekend curfew has Iraq on the knife's edge.
Like the Sarajevo assassination that precipitated World War I, the attack on the mosque may trigger a war, but it won't be the cause. The cause is far more deep-rooted, embedded in the chaos and bitterness that followed the US invasion of Iraq and America's deliberate efforts to stress sectarian differences in creating the Iraqi Governing Council and subsequent government institutions. If the current crisis doesn't spark a civil war, be patient. The next one will.
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Whose side are we on?
02/26/06
By Ron Fullwood
The AP has reported that the number of Iraqi army units that are able to stand alone, without our soldier's help, has dropped from one to zero.
But, the report states, the number of Iraqi battalions capable of leading the battle, with U.S. troops in a support role, has grown by nearly 50%, from 36 to 53, and the number engaged in combat has increased 11%, from 88 to 98.
Our soldiers now stand with the Shiite-dominated authority that they helped to achieve power with the force of our nation's military. We know that our troops are still being sent out on search and destroy missions and all sorts of 'anti-insurgent' raids. Most of these missions and raids are almost certainly directed at Iraqis opposed to the government our troops are propping up.
At this point our soldiers are just muckraking along with the Shiite-dominated militias we have funded, equipped, and supported. This same band of armed government loyalists, Shiite Kurdish and Sunni combatants, is the force that many, in and out of government, both republicans and Democrats, say they rely on to take over 'security' of Iraq so our soldiers can withdrawal.
The reality is, the Iraqi militias are using our assistance as a wedge against their political opponents. That's not democracy forming, it's a junta, a recipe for perpetual resistance to the existing authority, and we're on tyranny's side.
Bush called the leaders of the major parties in Iraq to buck them up as he darted around the world to keep out of harm's way: Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite; the head of Iraq's largest Shiite political party, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim; President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd; and parliament speaker Hajim al-Hassani, a Sunni.
Bush ``encouraged them to continue to work together to thwart the efforts of the perpetrators of the violence to sow discord among Iraq's communities.''
However, the AP had another report that signaled the Iraqi leader's impatience with Washington's 'protection' racket . . . the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was hinting, as was Vice President Adil Abdul-Mahdi, that their religious armies could get the security job done if the government couldn't defend the holy shrines.
There are reports of police finding dozens of bodies, cuffed and shot execution-style since Wednesday. The bodies of 14 Iraqi police were found burned inside their vehicles near a Sunni mosque. The deaths included three journalists working for Al-Arabiya television.
There will never come a point where the U.S. military will be able to bring any reasonable political balance there and they shouldn't be expected to. They are designed to fight wars and defend our homeland against invasion or disaster, not iron out the intricacies of Iraqi politics and sectarian rivalry. Those are for Iraqi's to resolve themselves. The sectarian divisions can only be deepened and exaggerated by the heavy hand of our military occupation.
They want us to believe that the forces they are training (the ones that the politicians want to 'take control' of Iraq if we ever withdraw), will be some sort of beacon of democracy, but the reality is that there will always be a sect in Iraq who will be locked out of power and they will always be at the mercy of the ruling party's forces.
Our soldiers are now mercenaries of a supposedly independent government - Bush crowed the other day that Iraq's now a sovereign nation. "In less than three years," Bush claimed, the nation of Iraq has gone from living under the boot of a brutal tyrant to liberation, to sovereignty . . ."
"Our strategy in Iraq is, as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down." he said. Troop levels on the ground will be decided by commanders on the ground -- not by politicians in Washington, D.C." (Applause.)
Yet, these soldiers, and the Iraqis under their guns, are clearly at the point of Washington's politics. They were likely optimistic and hopeful that the elections signaled a turning point in the occupation. They probably expected, and may have seen for a time, that optimism and hope in the faces and attitudes of the folks around them.
Unfortunately, there will be more political and military meddling, fueling more violence directed at the symbols of the sponsors of the ruling authority, our soldiers. Until Bush can find his way into his next brawl with Iran or Syria, Iraq will remain the deliberate, jingoistic symbol of Bush's paranoid fear.
Bush's cohort, Blair, admitted that the assault on Baghdad was essentially a muscle-flexing exercise. They thought Iraq would be a cakewalk (the hunt for bin Laden was a bust) so they loaded up our national pride and covered all of us with Iraqi blood to go with the blood of innocent Afghans caught in our swaggering reprisal. Tens of thousands of innocents, in Iraq and Afghanistan have been killed by our cluster bombs, our search and destroy missions, and by the misguided hands of our nervous soldiers so that Blair and Bush could "draw a line in the sand" like bullies in front of a crowd.
So the numbers of bystanders slaughtered by our aggression quickly outpaced the numbers killed in the 9-11 attack, but that wasn't enough to satiate the fear of Blair and Bush. And they seem shocked (as bullies often are) at the lack of fear from those they sought to dominate with their violence. And their enemies multiplied. More shock. And their critics multiplied. More shock.
Yet, Bush pushed on, mesmerized by his own hypocritical rhetoric about freedom and democracy. It's more than clear to all in the Middle East that his rhetoric masks the bloody reality that the U.S., under Bush's leadership, has become the type of oppressor that all the suffering people around the world fear. According to our own military and intelligence operatives, our presence in Iraq is having the effect of creating more enemies and resistance to the U.S. than can be countered by any new recruits or any new Iraqi government intuitive sponsored or propped up by our heavy-handed military forces and their war of aggression against all who would resist our occupying army.
A military force, our military force is designed primarily to fight and win wars. Not that they don't do peacekeeping well. American compassion and generosity are reflected in many of the actions of our soldiers, most noticeably in their dedication to humanitarian pursuits like medical care, rebuilding schools, providing food and housing, and other instigations of the representatives of a prosperous nation.
But, there is great resentment among many in the Iraqi population that won't be assuaged by chocolates, bandages, or raising roofs. Bush has pulled the plug on those projects anyway. Our soldiers shouldn't be put at the point of such a murky policy of intentions in Iraq. Our military is the inevitable arm of an authority engaged in active armed conflict with Iraqis in opposition to their propped up regime. Americans don't know who our soldiers are being asked to kill and who they are dying for. That shouldn't be a secret anymore. Bush shouldn't be allowed to escape accountability by labeling everyone who gets slaughtered with our soldier's help and support, evil insurgents.
We know that Bush wants to use the troops for anything that keeps them in place for future meddling They're his protection racket for the oil that we're 'holding for the Iraqis. They're his personal prop for victory speeches. They're his hired muscle in hell's kitchen, waiting for a new contract.
But, they are also our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, waiting for some rationality to their mission . . . and a ticket home. Our leaders should spell out just what they expect our soldiers to do in Iraq that is in tune with our own values and democratic principles. To ask them to defend anything less is a tyranny of our nation's leadership in Washington and in Foggy Bottom
Ron Fullwood, bigtree_75@msn.com is an activist from Columbia, Md. and the author of the book 'Power of Mischief : Military Industry Executives are Making Bush Policy and the Country is Paying the Price'
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Wounded in Iraq: Survivors
By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune
WASHINGTON - They left under a wave of support - red, white and blue bunting and flags and cheers - and headed to a war half a world away in Iraq. It was their duty, their calling, their patriotic responsibility. They returned missing . . . one his arm, the other his ability to walk. Their lives shaken and futures uncertain, two soldiers from Utah are now at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. They have few regrets.
'We're soldiers; that's our job,' Utahn says
Cpl. Braxton McCoy's uniform had pockets on both sleeves. On the right, he carried a folded flag. On the left, he packed his checkbook. That's meaningful, he's sure, because the bullet from the AK-47 ripped through the checks, not through the Stars and Stripes.
Sitting in his electric wheelchair, the bones in his legs cracked and shattered from a suicide bomber, McCoy isn't outwardly emotional as he recounts the tale of when ball bearings ripped through his hand, his legs and his face.
He'll walk again, he vows. But the 20-year-old member of the Utah National Guard's 222nd who wears his cowboy hat like it's required, won't be riding bulls anymore or shoeing any horses for a while.
"I've always wanted to serve," McCoy says, as he struggles to attach footrests to his wheelchair with his one unbandaged hand. "Being in the Army wasn't enough; as a soldier you don't feel like you've done your duty unless you've gone to war.
"It's sad we had to go over, but we're soldiers; that's our job." McCoy's future paid a price when he did his job. Now his new daily routine isn't feeding horses or cattle or moving the sprinklers on the alfalfa as a ranch hand near Scipio. He's waking to the sounds of a hospital in Washington, D.C., and struggling to get out of bed and into his wheelchair for physical therapy.
There, while grasping a metal rail with his left hand, McCoy takes a step and winces; he repeats the move a few times, catches his breath and reverses the path backward.
His physical trainer jokes about learning how to ride bulls; McCoy wishes he could teach him.
Back in his room, a once-sterile white-on-white rectangle that now looks like a college dorm, his first move is to take off a New York Yankees cap. He's not a fan; it was a gift from two widows of the 2001 terrorist attacks and he wears
At a Washington hospital, Sgt. Daniel Gubler, 37, originally from La Verkin, shows where his arm was amputated. (Peter Lockley/Special to The Salt Lake Tribune)
it in remembrance. He dons his signature black, wide-brimmed cowboy hat.
It was hard to depart for war, he says, leaving his parents and younger siblings and worst of all, his 18-year-old fiancée, Emily, whom he married while on leave in October. McCoy would introduce her to a visitor, but he doesn't know where she is at the moment. He later learns she was under the blankets in the bed, dead asleep until almost noon.
Joining the Guard wasn't about the money to go to college or even a peer pressure thing to McCoy, he says as he leaves his hospital room to check out his new living quarters, a red-brick home shared by several other families. He's become quite adept at maneuvering his electric wheelchair.
Becoming a soldier wasn't a huge family priority, though it was somewhat of a legacy with a grandfather and uncles splitting service in the Navy, Air Force and Marines.
McCoy filled out the remaining branch, signing up for the Army National Guard.
"I really can't tell you where it came from," he says of his patriotic leaning. "Saying the Pledge of Allegiance always just meant more to me."
McCoy entered Iraq with his 222nd Field Artillery Unit last June. In January, the soldiers in his headquarters company were patrolling around Ramadi Ð the "Wild, Wild West."
There are no bulls to ride there.
"There's lots of donkeys, though," McCoy quips, but no Iraqi rodeos.
On Jan. 4, McCoy and his guys were dispatched to help protect a recruiting station for Iraqi police officers at a glass factory. At least a thousand people were already lined up when he arrived at 7:30 a.m. It was Day Four of a four-day operation. And it would be McCoy's last day on patrol.
Later in the morning, a military K-9 dog started growling at an Iraqi. Then the guy pushed the trigger of a bomb concealed under this clothing.
Two explosions ripped through the crowd, killing some 60 Iraqis and injuring about the same. Two U.S. soldiers were killed. McCoy, some 15 yards away, was thrown back, blood and guts strewn across his belly.
"As far as you could see there were dead people and body parts," McCoy says. "I thought I'd been blown up from the waist down. I was just like, 'Son of a bitch,' I thought I was done."
His
# Survivors: Wounded in Iraq
legs were still there, but his left femur was snapped in three places and felt like gelatin. Ball bearings from the bomb had shot through his right hand and peppered his face. Somehow, a bullet from an Iraqi guard's AK-47 hit him in the left shoulder. The guts covering him were not his own, it turns out, but from a dead body on top of him.
"I thought there was absolutely no way I was going to live," McCoy says now. "All I could think about was my wife."
His friend Johnny Humphries hovered over his body.
"I told him, 'Tell my wife that I love her,' " McCoy recalls, now tipping his hat down to cover his face.
"You're going to tell her yourself," Humphries responded.
"I thought, 'Bullshit. There's no way,' " McCoy says.
But he does get to tell her.
Thousands of miles away and a month withdrawn, McCoy pulls out a can of Copenhagen and talks about his friends Humphries, Zane Williams and Lyle Gardner.
"Them guys are heroes," McCoy says. "They saved my life."
McCoy says he doesn't want to get into the politics of the war but he does believe, "we're overstaying our welcome."
"We're trying to do good things, trying to help them," he says, "and those people hate us. You can only do so much."
And he thinks about his injuries and how it will affect his life.
"My life will never be the same. [But] that sacrifice to me is worth it. It's worth it to protect my guys."
The rest of his life won't be as easy as he once thought. Still, he adds, "I'm not going to let this stop me from living my dream."
He has friends who are soliciting lumber and home supply companies to donate materials to help build a home in Scipio.
He has a good friend, Sonny Murphy, of Herriman, a bull rider who's pretty good on the rodeo circuit.
"Hopefully," McCoy says, "he'll be a world champion for me."
'I still have a life; I still have options'
Thrown some 30 to 90 feet, Sgt. 1st Class Daniel Gubler knew the homemade bomb had taken his left arm. His vision was gone too, replaced with white flashes.
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But that didn't stop him from shouting orders to his soldiers.
"I started to scream at them to get security out," Gubler recalls, at the time fearing an ambush by insurgents. "It set me at ease to do something, not just sit there and be hurt."
Months later, Gubler, a native of La Verkin, is learning how to use his shoulder muscles to move a prosthetic arm; it's one that can include a cosmetic hand, a hook or even a paddle for swimming.
Things are different now.
"I'm doing well, but it's not always been like that," Gubler says, his open shirt sleeve dangling over the remaining stump on his left arm and a black patch over his right eye. "You think about what was and how it's going to be."
The worst, he says, is how frustrating it is to wait for the injuries to heal. Especially for the robust, get-it-done type of guy Gubler is. You get a sense from talking to him for a few minutes that he'd rather be at home or working or doing something, anything but sit in a chair and talk about the past.
"I still have a life; I still have options," Gubler says, taking the positive look that he says has helped him pass the days holed up at Walter Reed Medical Center. His wife, Robalyn, is there as well, but the couple's four kids are at their new home in Idaho Falls, Idaho.
Back home, Gubler was a general contractor for commercial buildings; it's a job that will be tough to do without his natural arm. The new plan is to go back to school to finish that engineering degree Gubler started at Dixie State College in St. George, where he met his wife. His children understand, he says. Except maybe for 3-year-old Kaleb. When the child first saw his dad missing an arm, Kaleb asked what happened.
"I lost it in Iraq," Dad told him.
"Well, let's go find it," the son responded.
Gubler had always wanted to be a pilot. But when he couldn't get in the full-time military because of a minor juvenile record, he entered the Utah National Guard instead, hoping to end up flying. He never did. Or will.
At dusk Nov. 16, Gubler and his soldiers were sent to patrol a section of a road going to Ramadi when they came upon a 5-gallon drum in the roadway. It was staged, the soldiers were sure, and they shot at it from a distance to see if
it was a bomb. Assured it wasn't, they approached and found just an empty can.
But a few yards away, there was a small section of a Humvee hood, an older piece of metal from a blown-up military vehicle, just sitting off the side of the road. Gubler went to check it out. On first glance, there was nothing under the metal.
But, "I just had a feeling there was something there," Gubler recalls.
There was.
Gubler was 2 1/2 feet from the buried explosive device; it had a kill range of 50 meters.
He never lost consciousness, even after the explosion blew him far away. He landed on his arm, or what was left of it. That's when he yelled to his troops to prepare for small-arms fire from insurgents; none came. Other soldiers came to his rescue. Zane Bybee of Cedar City applied a tourniquet.
"I was telling jokes with the guys," Gubler recalls, forgetting now what the jokes were, only that they were self-deprecating.
Months later, Gubler says maybe he should have done something different Nov. 16; maybe he should have approached the bomb differently or shot it first. But he has accepted his new life.
"I don't look back and wish it didn't happen," he says.
Gubler's religion - he's a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - is important to him, but he doesn't want to talk about it much.
"I have a lot of faith and that's what helped me in the tough times here," Gubler says, ending questions about religion right there.
Doctors say Gubler will be able to see clearly again out of both eyes; right now, he sees blurry out of his left eye and the right eye needs more time to heal. His new arm is made in Utah. It's called a myoelectric prosthetic for its use of natural muscle and electronics to operate.
Gubler must learn how to control his muscles in his remaining shoulder so they can send electronic impulses causing the elbow and device to move.
For now, Gubler is focused on what will be, not what has been.
Anything else? he is asked.
"Life's great," he answers. "Life's good. Life's a great thing."
"I think we'll be all right," Robalyn adds.
"We will," he says.
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Iraq's death squads: On the brink of civil war
Andrew Buncombe and Patrick Cockburn
26 February 2006
UK Independent
Most of the corpses in Baghdad's mortuary show signs of torture and execution. And the Interior Ministry is being blamed. By
Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.
John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.
Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.
"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile. "But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of the Interior."
Coupled with the suicide bombings and attacks on Shia holy places carried out by Sunnis, some of whom are followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qa'ida's leader in Iraq, the activities of the death squads are pushing Iraq ever closer to a sectarian civil war.
Mr Pace said the Ministry of the Interior was "acting as a rogue element within the government". It is controlled by the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri); the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings. Another is the Mehdi Army of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is part of the Shia coalition seeking to form a government after winning the mid-December election.
Many of the 110,000 policemen and police commandos under the ministry's control are suspected of being former members of the Badr Brigade. Not only counter-insurgency units such as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions and the Tigers, but the commandos and even the highway patrol police have been accused of acting as death squads.
The paramilitary commandos, dressed in garish camouflage uniforms and driving around in pick-up trucks, are dreaded in Sunni neighbourhoods. People whom they have openly arrested have frequently been found dead several days later, with their bodies bearing obvious marks of torture.
Mr Pace, a Maltese-Australian who has now retired from his UN post to his home in Sydney, says the constant violence and utter lack of security in Iraq are creating a vicious circle in which ordinary citizens are turning to extremist sectarian groups for protection. Fear of anybody in official uniform inevitably strengthens the militias and the insurgents. In Sunni areas people will look to their own defences, and not to the regular army and police.
But ordinary Sunnis are caught between the death squads and the desire of some of the insurgents on their own side to start a civil war - an aim they are now not far from achieving. The so-called Salafi, Sunni fundamentalists, want not only to eject the Americans but also to build a pure Islamic state. They see Iraqi Shias, even though they are 60 per cent of the population, as heretics allied to the US who should be slaughtered.
Last week's attack on the Golden Mosque is only the latest in a long series of outrages against the Shia community. They started in August 2003 when Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, then leader of Sciri, was killed, along with more than 100 of his followers by a suicide bomber in a vehicle outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. There have been repeated massacres of the Shia ever since - some targeting the security forces, such as the attacks on queues of young men trying to join the police or army, but others, such as the slaughter of Shia day labourers waiting for a day's employment, for no other reason than that they are Shia.
Despite extending a 24-hour curfew into a second day yesterday in Baghdad and other major cities, the authorities were unable to prevent further revenge killings and outrages against holy sites. The current cycle of violence, which began with the bombing of the Azkariya shrine in Samarra on Wednesday, has claimed at least 200 lives so far, including those of 47 factory workers pulled from buses and shot on the outskirts of Baghdad.
This was the sort of killing that touched off Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Already an exchange of populations is taking place in Baghdad as members of each community move to districts in which they are in the majority.
The ability of the US occupiers to influence the situation is not only limited, but some of their actions are seen as making things worse. The Americans have been trying to dislodge Mr Jabr as Interior Minister, accusing him of turning his ministry into a Shia bastion. But the Shia believe that the US and its allies, the Kurds, simply want to prevent the majority community from gaining full power over security despite winning two parliamentary elections in 2005.
One important development over the past few days is that it is clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.
In Mr Pace's view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police as they move from city to city carrying out raids. "The vast majority are innocent," he said, "but they very often don't get released for months. You don't eliminate terrorism by what they're doing now. Military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians ... The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists at the end of their detention."
In such circumstances, family members often contacted UN officials asking for help in getting a young man outside of the country and away from the influence of insurgents they had met in jail. They were among many Iraqi citizens fleeing the country as a result of the violence. "Those with money go to Jordan. The poor go to Syria," he said.
Mr Pace, who first made his comments to The Times of Malta newspaper, said the situation in Iraq had "definitely, definitely" got worse over the two years in which he headed the UN human rights team. The interim government and the international community were trying to restart the country's crippled economy, but, he said, they would not succeed "until people are secure".
THE KILLERS
BADR BRIGADE:
Armed wing of the most powerful Shia party. Many police and paramilitaries 'still wear Badr T-shirts under their uniform,' a US general said.
MEHDI ARMY:
Loyal to the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Apart from open clashes with Sunnis, its members in the police are accused of death squad killings.
DEFENDERS OF KHADAMIYA:
Followers of Hussein al-Sadr, Moqtada relative. Among forces set up to guard Shia shrines, but having more sinister links.
SPECIAL POLICE
COMMANDOS:
Feared by Sunnis, despite having had some Sunni commanders.
Hundreds of Iraqis are being tortured to death or summarily executed every month in Baghdad alone by death squads working from the Ministry of the Interior, the United Nations' outgoing human rights chief in Iraq has revealed.
John Pace, who left Baghdad two weeks ago, told The Independent on Sunday that up to three-quarters of the corpses stacked in the city's mortuary show evidence of gunshot wounds to the head or injuries caused by drill-bits or burning cigarettes. Much of the killing, he said, was carried out by Shia Muslim groups under the control of the Ministry of the Interior.
Much of the statistical information provided to Mr Pace and his team comes from the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute, which is located next to the city's mortuary. He said figures show that last July the morgue alone received 1,100 bodies, about 900 of which bore evidence of torture or summary execution. The pattern prevailed throughout the year until December, when the number dropped to 780 bodies, about 400 of which had gunshot or torture wounds.
"It's being done by anyone who wishes to wipe out anybody else for various reasons," said Mr Pace, who worked for the UN for more than 40 years in countries ranging from Liberia to Chile. "But the bulk are attributed to the agents of the Ministry of the Interior."
Coupled with the suicide bombings and attacks on Shia holy places carried out by Sunnis, some of whom are followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qa'ida's leader in Iraq, the activities of the death squads are pushing Iraq ever closer to a sectarian civil war.
Mr Pace said the Ministry of the Interior was "acting as a rogue element within the government". It is controlled by the main Shia party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (Sciri); the Interior Minister, Bayan Jabr, is a former leader of Sciri's Badr Brigade militia, which is one of the main groups accused of carrying out sectarian killings. Another is the Mehdi Army of the young cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who is part of the Shia coalition seeking to form a government after winning the mid-December election.
Many of the 110,000 policemen and police commandos under the ministry's control are suspected of being former members of the Badr Brigade. Not only counter-insurgency units such as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpions and the Tigers, but the commandos and even the highway patrol police have been accused of acting as death squads.
The paramilitary commandos, dressed in garish camouflage uniforms and driving around in pick-up trucks, are dreaded in Sunni neighbourhoods. People whom they have openly arrested have frequently been found dead several days later, with their bodies bearing obvious marks of torture.
Mr Pace, a Maltese-Australian who has now retired from his UN post to his home in Sydney, says the constant violence and utter lack of security in Iraq are creating a vicious circle in which ordinary citizens are turning to extremist sectarian groups for protection. Fear of anybody in official uniform inevitably strengthens the militias and the insurgents. In Sunni areas people will look to their own defences, and not to the regular army and police.
But ordinary Sunnis are caught between the death squads and the desire of some of the insurgents on their own side to start a civil war - an aim they are now not far from achieving. The so-called Salafi, Sunni fundamentalists, want not only to eject the Americans but also to build a pure Islamic state. They see Iraqi Shias, even though they are 60 per cent of the population, as heretics allied to the US who should be slaughtered.
Last week's attack on the Golden Mosque is only the latest in a long series of outrages against the Shia community. They started in August 2003 when Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim, then leader of Sciri, was killed, along with more than 100 of his followers by a suicide bomber in a vehicle outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. There have been repeated massacres of the Shia ever since - some targeting the security forces, such as the attacks on queues of young men trying to join the police or army, but others, such as the slaughter of Shia day labourers waiting for a day's employment, for no other reason than that they are Shia.
Despite extending a 24-hour curfew into a second day yesterday in Baghdad and other major cities, the authorities were unable to prevent further revenge killings and outrages against holy sites. The current cycle of violence, which began with the bombing of the Azkariya shrine in Samarra on Wednesday, has claimed at least 200 lives so far, including those of 47 factory workers pulled from buses and shot on the outskirts of Baghdad.
This was the sort of killing that touched off Lebanon's civil war in 1975. Already an exchange of populations is taking place in Baghdad as members of each community move to districts in which they are in the majority.
The ability of the US occupiers to influence the situation is not only limited, but some of their actions are seen as making things worse. The Americans have been trying to dislodge Mr Jabr as Interior Minister, accusing him of turning his ministry into a Shia bastion. But the Shia believe that the US and its allies, the Kurds, simply want to prevent the majority community from gaining full power over security despite winning two parliamentary elections in 2005.
One important development over the past few days is that it is clearly becoming very difficult to use American or British troops to keep the peace, undermining the argument that they are the only bulwark against civil war. The occupation forces lack the legitimacy to play the role of UN peacekeepers; it is almost impossible to have US soldiers defend a Sunni mosque against a Shia crowd, because if they open fire they will be seen as having joined one side in a sectarian struggle.
In Mr Pace's view, the violence in Iraq is being made worse by the seizing of young Iraqi men by US troops and Iraqi police as they move from city to city carrying out raids. "The vast majority are innocent," he said, "but they very often don't get released for months. You don't eliminate terrorism by what they're doing now. Military intervention causes serious human rights and humanitarian problems to large numbers of innocent civilians ... The result is that such individuals turn into terrorists at the end of their detention."
In such circumstances, family members often contacted UN officials asking for help in getting a young man outside of the country and away from the influence of insurgents they had met in jail. They were among many Iraqi citizens fleeing the country as a result of the violence. "Those with money go to Jordan. The poor go to Syria," he said.
Mr Pace, who first made his comments to The Times of Malta newspaper, said the situation in Iraq had "definitely, definitely" got worse over the two years in which he headed the UN human rights team. The interim government and the international community were trying to restart the country's crippled economy, but, he said, they would not succeed "until people are secure".
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U.S. Christian Leaders Apologise For Iraq War
Ximena Diego
NEW YORK, Feb 24 (IPS) - Christian leaders from the United States lamented the war in Iraq and apologised for their government's current foreign policy during the 9th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Porto Alegre, Brazil, which ended Thursday.
"We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights," the Very Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, the moderator of the U.S. Conference for the WCC, told fellow delegates from around the world.
Kishkovsky is the rector of Our Lady of Kazan Church in Sea Cliff, New York, and is an officer in the Orthodox Church of America.
Taking an unusual stand among U.S. Christian leaders, the United States Conference for the World Council of Churches (WCC) criticised Pres. George W. Bush's actions in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"We are citizens of a nation that has done much in these years to endanger the human family and to abuse the creation," says the statement endorsed by the most prominent Protestant Christian churches on the Council.
"Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the voices of church leaders throughout our nation and the world, entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of our own national interests. Nations have been demonised and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous."
The message, written like a prayer of repentance and backed by the 34 Christian churches that belong to the WCC, mourns those who have died or been injured in the Iraq war and says, "We confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to deter our leaders from this path of preemptive war."
Among the attendees was the Rev. Bernice Powell-Jackson, North American President of the World Council of Churches. A civil rights activist for more than 25 years, Jackson previously served as executive director of one of the Justice and Witness Ministries predecessor bodies, the Commission for Racial Justice.
The U.S. Conference of the WCC also criticised the government's position on global warming. "The rivers, oceans, lakes, rainforests, and wetlands that sustain us, even the air we breathe continue to be violated... Yet our own country refuses to acknowledge its complicity and rejects multilateral agreements aimed at reversing disastrous trends," reads the message.
Earlier this month, a group of more than 85 U.S. evangelical Christian leaders called on Congress to enact legislation that would reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, which most scientists believe contribute to global warming.
The U.S. Conference of the WCC message also said, "Starvation, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the treatable diseases that go untreated indict us, revealing the grim features of global economic injustice we have too often failed to acknowledge or confront."
"Hurricane Katrina," it continues, "revealed to the world those left behind in our own nation by the rupture of our social contract. As a nation we have refused to confront the racism that infects our policies around the world."
The statement comes days after the National Council of Churches (NCC), the United States chapter of the WCC, endorsed a U.N. report on the situation of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
Separately, in a letter addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, NCC General Secretary Robert W. Edgar called on the U.S. to bring the detainees to trial, release them, or to "close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility without further delay". It also asked Rice for access to the Guantanamo facility "to monitor the physical, spiritual and mental conditions of the detainees".
At the Brazilian conference, the Rev. John Thomas, president of United Church of Christ, was quoted as saying: "An emerging theme in conversation with our partners around the world is that the U.S. is being perceived as a dangerous nation."
He called the Assembly "a unique opportunity to make this statement to all our colleagues" in the ecumenical movement. The statement says, "We come to you seeking to be partners in the search for unity and justice."
Thomas acknowledged that not all church members would agree with the thrust of the statement, but said it was their responsibility as leaders to "speak a prophetic and pastoral word as we believe God is offering it to us".
The final WCC event featured a candlelit march for peace through downtown Porto Alegre with up to 2,000 people -- including two Nobel Prize-winners -- taking part.
Organised by local churches as part of the World Council of Churches' Decade to Overcome Violence, it was accompanied by Latin American music from Xico Esvael and Victor Heredia. Young people carried banners highlighting peace and justice issues. One, depicting the world held in God's hand, read "Let God change you first, then you will transform the world."
WCC president Powell-Jackson urged the crowd to commit themselves to overcoming violence. Prawate Khid-arn of the Christian Conference of Asia told them, "If we do not take the risk of peace, we will have to take the risk of war."
Israel Batista of the Latin American Council of Churches spoke of poverty, injustice and abuse of women and children and asked, "How are we to speak of peace?" Still, he said, "In spite of violence, we will persist in the struggle for peace."
After an address by Julia Qusibert, a Bolivian indigenous Christian, the marchers sang the Samba of the Struggle for Peace and the Taizé chant Ubi Caritas, among other songs. The march paused while Nobel prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel improvised a poem and addressed the crowd at the Esquina Democrática or Democratic Corner.
The evening was brought to a climax with an address by the second Nobel Prize-winner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. He began his impassioned speech by saying, "We have an extraordinary God. God is a mighty God, but this God needs you. When someone is hungry, bread doesn't come down from heaven. When God wants to feed the hungry, you and I must feed the hungry. And now God wants peace in the world."
The WCC is the largest Christian ecumenical organisation, comprised of 340 Christian denominations and churches in 120 countries, and said to represent 550 million Christians throughout the world. The U.S. Conference of the World Council of Churches alone represents 34 Christian churches, including Orthodox, Evangelical, Lutheran and Anglican churches, and four million members throughout the country.
The Roman Catholic Church is not a member of the WCC but has worked closely with the Council in the past. Since its origins in 1948, the WCC gathers in an Assembly every seven years with each member church sending a delegate.
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Tomdispatch Interview: Mark Danner on Bush's State of Exception
A Tomdispatch Interview with Mark Danner
Danner is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA, and the Bush administration (and his primer on the subject, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, is a must for any bookshelf). A professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, his cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume, The Massacre at El Mozote, in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where over 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S. trained troops during Ronald Reagan's first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, The Secret Way to War, is due out in April.
On a cloudless day, the sky a brilliant, late-afternoon blue, my car winds its way up the Berkeley hills. Plum and pear trees in glorious whites and pinks burst into sight at each turn in the road. Beds of yellow flowers, trees hung with lemons, and the odd palm are surrounded by the green of a northern California winter, though the temperature is pushing 70 degrees. An almost perfectly full moon, faded to a tattered white, sits overhead. Suddenly, I take a turn and start straight up, as if into the heavens, but in fact towards Grizzly Peak before turning yet again into a small street and pulling up in front of a wooden gate. You swing it open and proceed down a picturesque stone path through the world's tiniest grove of redwoods toward the yellow stucco cottage that was only recently the home of Nobel-Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz, but is now the home -- as yet almost furniture-less -- of journalist Mark Danner, who has said that, as a young writer in search of "a kind of moral clarity," he gravitated toward countries where "massacres and killings and torture happen, in the place, that is, where we find evil."
Danner greets me at the door which, thrown open, reveals a bay window with a dazzling vista of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay and through which the sun blazes goldenly. In a rumpled dark shirt and slacks, he ushers me out onto a small stone patio. "This is where the deer hang out," he says and points to a small area just beyond our chairs where the grass is slightly pressed down. "They lie there contemplating me as I pace on the other side of the bay window. I feel like their ping pong game."
Facing this peaceable kingdom, Danner has a slightly distracted, out-of-the-washer-but-not-the-drier look to him, except for his face, strangely unmarked, which would qualify as lighting up (even without the sun). He beams in such a welcoming way and there is in him something -- in this setting at least -- that makes it almost impossible to believe he has reported from some of the least hospitable, most dangerous spots on the planet over the last decades: Haiti in the 1980s, war-torn Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and Iraq, which he's visited three times in recent years, among other spots. He has covered the world for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and especially the New York Review of Books (whose editors have been kind enough to let a number of his pieces be posted at Tomdispatch.com).
Danner is now an expert on the torture practices of the U.S. military, the CIA, and the Bush administration (and his primer on the subject, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror, is a must for any bookshelf). A professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, his cup of tea seems to be dicey American foreign-policy situations. His book-writing career began with a now-classic volume, The Massacre at El Mozote, in which he traveled to El Salvador for the exhumation of an infamous site where over 750 Salvadorans were massacred by U.S. trained troops during Ronald Reagan's first year in office. A new book of his recent writings, The Secret Way to War, is due out in April.
We seat ourselves, a makeshift table with my tape recorders between us, and turning away from the slowly sinking sun, simply plunge in.
Tomdispatch: I wanted to start with an area of expertise for you, torture policy. For me, the Bush administration's decision to enter this arena so quickly after 9/11 was a reach for power. If you can torture, you can do anything.
Mark Danner: When you look at the record, the phrase I come back to, not only about interrogation but the many other steps that constitute the Bush state of exception, state of emergency, since 9/11 is "take the gloves off." We hear this again and again. The interesting thing about that phrase is the implication that before we had the gloves on, that the laws and principles that constitute our belief not only in democracy but in human rights left the country vulnerable. The U.S. adherence to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. record of treating prisoners humanely that goes back to George Washington, laws like the FISA law passed to restrict the government's power to surveil its citizens -- all of these constitute the gloves on American power and 9/11 signaled to those in power that the system with "the gloves on" was insufficient to protect Americans. That seems to be their belief.
As you know, very shortly after 9/11, the then-White House counsel [Alberto Gonzales] proposed to President Bush that provisions of the Geneva Conventions had been rendered obsolete, even quaint, by this quote "new paradigm." The Geneva Conventions, the Convention against Torture, and the federal statutes against torture -- these undertakings by the U.S. -- represented restrictions that would unduly hobble the country in fighting the war on terror and, by extension, threaten[ed] the existence of the United States. And I think that's where torture -- "extreme interrogation" is the euphemism -- goes to the heart of the reaction against the way this country has observed human rights in the past, a reaction in a way against law itself. What we have here is a conflict between legality and power.
Torture is a very direct route from human rights, which is to say, restricted power, to unleashed power. We see a movement here backwards from ideals that were at the root of this country's founding during the enlightenment: the restriction of government power and the conviction that human beings had certain inherent rights, one of which was the freedom from cruel and inhuman treatment. Under this way of looking at the matter, those enlightenment ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which were given to Americans, were extended through the Geneva Conventions, through the Convention against Torture, to all people -- and the administration, in pushing extreme interrogation, in going from a secret abuse of power to a public one…
TD: Wasn't it really less an abuse of power than a proclamation of power?
Danner: Exactly. In what I've started to call Bush's state of exception, we've now reached the second stage. Many of these steps, including extreme interrogation, eavesdropping, arresting aliens -- one could go down a list -- were taken in relative or complete secrecy. Gradually, they have come into the light, becoming matters of political disputation; and, insofar as the administration's political antagonists have failed to overturn them, they have also become matters of accepted practice, which is where I think we are now. As we sit here, we are approaching the two-year anniversary of the publication of the Abu Ghraib photographs. It would have been the very unusual observer, on seeing those photographs in April 2004, who would have predicted two years later that extreme interrogation would, in effect, have become accepted within the CIA. And though the Senate passed an amendment that forbade it, the President replied with a signing statement that essentially reserved his right to violate that amendment according to his supposed powers as commander-in-chief.
In effect, the President claims to believe that his wartime powers give him carte blanche to break the law in any sphere where he decides national security is involved. An added element is the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. The only countervailing power we've seen since 9/11 really lay in the June 2004 Supreme Court detention decisions. In one of them, Justice O'Connor declared that the President's power in wartime was not a blank check. Now, she's been replaced by an admitted believer in a "unitary executive." It was Alito when he was at the Justice Department who strongly pushed the strategy of presidential signing statements as a way to mitigate congressional assertions of power.
TD: Weren't you struck by the fact that, of all the things top Bush officials did, their urge toward torture, toward taking the gloves off, was first and fastest? It was an impulse at the top.
Danner: I think that's an interesting way to put it, an impulse at the top. The President and the Vice President have said that, after 9/11, they asked the national security and law enforcement bureaucracies to come to them with proposals. What should the U.S. do? Look, it's time to take the gloves off and every one of you has to show me the way to do it. General [Michael] Hayden said in an interview just the other night that, with the NSA eavesdropping program, he was responding to a request from the White House.
TD: Wasn't it Rumsfeld, when they were "interviewing" John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, in Afghanistan, who actually told the interrogators to take the gloves off?
Danner: According to a Newsweek report, Rumsfeld had someone essentially telephone the interrogators: Do what you have to do. Go as far as you have to go.
Creating Reality
TD: Torture hasn't exactly been absent from U.S. government policy in our lifetimes, but one difference, it seems to me, is the degree to which our leaders have been involved. I think Rumsfeld was getting reports on the Lindh interrogation by the hour.
Danner: When we look at the techniques used by the CIA, these things go back a ways. Alfred McCoy and others have written about this. These techniques of torture, developed in the 1950s and 1960s, are reappearing. There is one very important difference: the explicit official approval and the determination to defend these techniques in the case of public exposure and public controversy. And torture has survived its exposure -- a critical difference. The clear evidence of intent at the very top of the government is also striking. At a certain point, of course, you have to get into the realm of the psycho-political, which is a very mushy realm.
TD: Let's do it anyway.
Danner: The central question here is: Why did we have the kind of response we did after 9/11? The Bush administration, which professed itself so strong on national security, had let the United States suffer the most catastrophic attack on its territory in history. We have to remind ourselves of the effect of this. Remember, their major security programs were the Strategic Defense Initiative and confronting China. They thought that terrorism, which they didn't care about, was a matter for sissies. Like humanitarian intervention, the threat posed by non-state actors -- and many other concerns of the previous administration -- all this stuff was, as they saw it, a kid's view of national security, so they ignored it. And afterwards they knew very well that reports existed showing how they had ignored it, most notably the PDB [Presidential Daily Briefing] that was famously entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US." This was a very human thing. Having proclaimed how strong they were on national security, they were attacked. I think that accounted, to some degree, for the ferocity of the counterattack. You don't need to get too deep to see that. When you look at this idea of the gloves coming off, the implication is very much exculpatory. They're saying, in effect: Before the gloves were on, so we weren't able to detect and prevent this attack.
General Hayden has explicitly said, had this [NSA warrantless eavesdropping] program been in place, we would have prevented 9/11. There's no evidence of that, but when you talk about the psycho-political roots of this stuff, I think it's very revealing. It also dovetails with the concerns of several prominent officials, especially Rumsfeld and Cheney, that the government had been unduly hobbled during the late Vietnam War era. Cheney has said this explicitly. We're talking about the War Powers Resolution, which was passed in 1973. FISA is out of the same complex of political concerns, though it was passed under Carter.
TD: They chafed under FISA in the Reagan era.
Danner: Oh, indeed they did. Then there were the Church and Pike hearings of the mid-1970s, which, in their view, disabled the CIA. So part of this has to do with righting wrongs that they believe were committed in an earlier and very traumatic time in their lives. Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense just after the Vietnam War. Cheney was chief of staff in a White House that was under siege. So history is coming back to haunt this era in a personal and vivid way.
TD: You've often quoted a piece in which reporter Ron Suskind is told by an unidentified senior administration official that he's in the "reality-based community," after which that official says something striking: "We're an empire now and when we act we create our own reality." Care to comment?
Danner: I think that quote is immensely revealing. It underlines their policies in all kinds of areas, their belief that the overwhelming or preponderant power of the United States can simply change fact, can change truth. It is quite indicative of their policy of public information inside the United States. They don't care about people who read the New York Times, for instance. I use that as a shorthand. They don't care about people concerned with facts. They care about the broader arc of the story. We sit here constantly citing facts -- that they've broken this or that law, that what they originally said turns out not to be true. None of this particularly interests them.
What interests them is the larger reality believed by the 50.1% that they need to govern. Kenneth Duberstein said this recently -- he was chief of staff to Ronald Reagan -- that this administration is unique in that they govern with 50.1%. He was referring not to elections but to popularity while governing. His notion was that Reagan would want to get 60-65% backing him, while the Bush people want a bare majority, which means they have a much more extremist policy because they're appealing to the base. It makes them very hard-knuckle when approaching politics, simply wanting the base plus one.
On empire, what's unusual about this administration isn't only its focus on power, but on unilateralism. It's the flip side of isolationism. The notion that alliances, economic or political, and international law inevitably hinder the most powerful nation. You know, the image of the strings around Gulliver. They said in the National Security Strategy of the United States, the 2005 version, that rivals will continue to challenge us using the strategies of the weak including "international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism." They're associating terror and asymmetric warfare with international law as similar ways to blunt the overwhelming power of the United States. That represents an attitude toward international law and institutions that, I think, is a real and dramatic break from past practice in the United States. In our history, certainly recently, there's just no comparison to them -- no government anywhere near as radical.
TD: They're really extreme American nationalists, though you can't use that word in this country.
Danner: That's true, and they combine with this belief in great-power America an almost nativist distrust of international institutions. That's the difference between Truman America and this regime in its approach to foreign policy. They put international institutions in a similar class with terrorism –- that is, weapons of the weak
TD: Weapons of mass interference.
Danner: I should add that, in my view, the era of neocon leadership is clearly coming to an end. The impression that they were ever entirely in control is wrong in any event and the vanguard of the neocons has obviously been blunted by the great failure of Iraq -- because their assumption of preponderant American power turned out not to be true. Napoleon had this wonderful line that you can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it. Military power is good for blowing things up; it's good for destroying things. It's not good for building a new order. It takes a great deal more power, skill, and patience to construct an enduring order in Iraq. The United States doesn't have sufficient power; it doesn't have the skill; and we know it doesn't have the patience. One part of the Axis of Evil has been occupied -- you can think of it as the part of the Axis that has sacrificed itself to make way for the greater freedom (freedom from attack, freedom perhaps to build nuclear weapons) of North Korea and Iran. Although I think the U.S. has dealt with Iran rather cleverly in the last few months, they're playing a very weak hand. After all, the use of military force against Iran is now out of the question in large part because of the disaster next door in Iraq and the way Iran's hand has been strengthened by that disaster.
TD: Here's my hesitation: If these people are pushed to the wall, I could construct a scenario for you, I believe, in which Iran, crazy as it might seem, could be hit.
Danner: The difference we have on this just has to do with how willing we are to imagine the utter irrationality of the administration. When I look at Iran now, the upside of a military strike of a kind that they could do, with aerial bombardment, and the downside of such a step seems obviously to be so wildly out of proportion, I can't believe even they would take that step.
The Age of Frozen Scandal
TD: You've talked about our current American world as one of "frozen scandal," an interesting phrase. When you first used it, we were in the Downing Street Memo scandal and nothing was happening. Now, we're immersed in the NSA and other scandals and nothing is happening…
Danner: The icebergs are floating by. I've used the phrase to indicate that a process of scandal we've come to know, with an expected series of steps, has come to an end. Before, you had, as step one, revelation of wrongdoing by the press, usually with the help of leaks from within an administration. Step two would be an investigation which the courts, often allied with Congress, would conduct, usually in public, that would give you an official version of events. We saw this with Watergate, Iran-Contra, and others. And finally, step three would be expiation -- the courts, Congress, impose punishment which allows society to return to some kind of state of grace in which the notion is, look we've corrected the wrongdoing, we can now go on. With this administration, we've got revelation of torture, of illegal eavesdropping, of domestic spying, of all kinds of abuses when it comes to arrest of domestic aliens, of inflated and false weapons of mass destruction claims before the war; of cronyism and corruption in Iraq on a vast scale. You could go on. But no official investigation follows.
TD: You get revelation and repetition.
Danner: Yes, R and R. It's been three years since the invasion and occupation of Iraq and there's been no official investigation of how the administration made use of intelligence to suggest that the intelligence agencies were certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, the consequence of this is that we live with the knowledge of these scandals, published in newspapers, magazines, books, but we get no official acknowledgement of wrongdoing and no punishment. Perhaps in the end a handful of people will be punished…
TD: …minor figures…
Danner: …who were silly enough to get themselves caught -- for example, the military police whose images appear in the Abu Ghraib digital pictures. The actual policymakers responsible for the change in interrogation policy will suffer no punishment whatsoever. In fact, they're still in their jobs. None of the investigations has reached them. Even the people who actually carried on the interrogations themselves we know very little about.
TD: You've interviewed some interrogators, haven't you?
Danner: Indeed, and I've had from them accounts of some of the things that were done. The great problem in the Age of Frozen Scandal is that it's as if we're this spinning wheel, constantly confirming facts that we already knew, so the revelations become less and less effective in causing public outrage. The public begins to become inured to it, corrupted in its turn.
TD: I'm going to suggest something grimmer. In what's likely to be the dirtiest election any of us has experienced, if the Democrats actually took one house of Congress in November 2006 and begin to investigate, I think you'd enter the era of frozen investigation. The administration will claim commander-in-chief rights.
Danner: That's a good prediction. The Bush administration is already stonewalling extremely timid Republican-led committees when it comes to the response to Hurricane Katrina or NSA eavesdropping. If the Democrats do take control of a house of Congress and mount real investigations, on the one hand, they'll be very circumspect because they'll be concerned about jeopardizing their chances in the elections of 2008. On the other hand, you'll have the overwhelming claim of commander-in-chief power which could completely handcuff investigations.
TD: I came across this sentence today in a piece on the Plame case. "A spokesman for Cheney would not comment for this story, saying the investigation into the leak was ongoing. The spokesman refused to give her name."
Danner: (laughs) A secret spokesman.
TD: So you've got secrecy, lying, and a third thing you've brought up before, a bizarre kind of frankness. I was wondering if you could talk about that.
Danner: There's been an interesting ambivalence in the administration when it comes to all these actions they've taken in the name of national security -- between the impulse to deny and stonewall and the impulse to come forward and very boldly assert that they took such actions in the name of national security. You see it in eavesdropping, where Karl Rove has clearly indicated a preference for declaring, in a very clever response to the NSA revelation, "If al-Qaeda is talking to someone in the United States we want to know about it. Apparently some Democrats don't." Which is basically to say: If you're concerned about this, you're weakening the United States. All this human rights, Fourth Amendment stuff is so much hooey.
In essence, this is an assault on the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights is in the Constitution because the framers understood that a lot of these rights, especially when under pressure in wartime, are not particularly popular. So they were put in permanently, so as not to be subject to majority control or majority abnegation. It's politics of the most savagely bare-knuckle and dangerous kind when you use that gap between the country's precepts as embodied in the Constitution and the fact that many of these become unpopular in time of war to destroy your political opponents, which is what this administration does.
There are many in the administration who want to come out four-square for these things. You saw that impulse also with interrogation. They could have come out after Abu Ghraib -- there were hints of this -- and said, "Yes, there are a few bad apples, but yes, we use extreme interrogation, we do it to defend the country." And if they'd done this, they might have pumped up a majority who would, for example, have supported waterboarding.
When I talk about these matters, there's an ambivalence on my part as well because one becomes extremely upset that they're lying in public and doing these things in secret and denying them; but, on the other hand, I fear the kind of populist technique they could use if they declared these policies openly to rally support for themselves.
All this, of course, begs the question of a second attack. It's the assumption of many people that a second attack would punch through everything, that there'd be a much more explicit assumption of powers.
TD: And do you believe this?
Danner: It's quite possible, sure. If it had happened a year after 9/11, I think that's exactly what would have occurred. Now that time has passed, I'm not so sure. They're in a much more defensive political position. It depends on what kind of attack it was, whether it was an attack of a kind that they should have anticipated –- that is, one where it was at least conceivable that they should have prevented it.
It's Not the Information, It's the Politics
TD: It's always dangerous to predict the future, but can you imagine, in quite another direction, this administration imploding or unraveling?
Danner: Well, as in so many things, Yogi Berra had it right: I never make predictions, especially about the future. When it comes to raw political power, the ramrod backbone of the administration is clearly national security. 9/11 restored to the Republican Party what they had lost with the end of the Cold War -- this persistent advantage in national security. If there is one thing this administration has done brilliantly, ruthlessly, efficiently, it's making political use of its war on terror. It remains to be seen whether they can go to that well one more time in the 2006 election. There is an opportunity for the Democratic Party, exactly because Americans, after four years of it, are tired of this rhetoric and they've been enlightened by the Iraq war, the response to Hurricane Katrina, and the Medicare debacle among other things to the general incompetence of the administration and to its corruption.
Could the administration unravel? The notion many people on the left are putting forward about a move toward impeachment -- it's hard for me to imagine that. First of all, we're coming to a point in the political calendar where Democrats, as at the time of Iran-Contra, are not going to want impeachment to get in the way of retaking the White House in 2008. Democrats also saw what impeachment did to the Republican Party in 1998. For the first time in memory in an off-year election in a President's second term, the Republicans lost seats -- leading, as you'll remember, to the abrupt fall of Newt Gingrich. On the other hand, if the Democrats did take one house of Congress this November, I think there are a number of areas where an investigation could hurt this administration severely, and it's hard to predict what the Bush people's reaction would be if they found themselves the target of aggressive congressional committees actually investigating officials who faced being charged, convicted, and sent to jail. Even with Congress actually doing its job, we would confront the central political reality of our time: Terrorism has embedded itself in our political system, which is to say that fear has become the most lucrative political emotion and the administration would retain a considerable power to promote fear. It has the power to suggest that an attack on the national security bureaucracy is an attack on the safety of the people.
TD: I'd like to turn to Iraq now by backing up to an earlier moment in your career, a terrible massacre in El Salvador in the 1980s, whose aftermath you reported on, a massacre by Salvadoran troops trained and backed by the United States. Could you compare that early age of Reagan moment to today, given that so much of the cast of characters has turned out to be the same, including…
Danner: …Elliott Abrams…
TD: …and Cheney, Rumsfeld, Negroponte, and any number of others. I'd also like you to consider a more general question: How does the U.S. get up to its elbows in blood so regularly?
Danner: Oh boy… When I look back at the massacre at El Mozote, which happened at the beginning of the Reagan administration, what sticks out is the way it served to signal the renewed determination -- of the incoming Reagan officials and the newly defiant Salvadoran military -- to draw a line at Salvador and not let that so-called advance of communist interests within the hemisphere continue.
When I compare now and then, I think of the power of a determined government to deny the facts and, if it is ruthless, to make its denials stick. Because what reverberates now about El Mozote is that two reporters, Raymond Bonner and Alma Guillermoprieto, from the New York Times and the Washington Post, got to that massacre site within a few weeks and filed stories. These were published on the front pages of the two most powerful newspapers in the country…
TD: …far more so then than now.
Danner: Exactly. At a time of real dominance by the Times and Post, and the administration came forward, denied the massacres took place, and was able to make its views stick. And remember we knew that the death squads were being run out of the Salvadoran government; that the American embassy knew all about this; that it was the public policy of the American government that this shouldn't be happening and that aid would be cut off if it was. But every time a new outrage took place, the press obligingly reported the denial of the administration, the denial of the embassy in San Salvador that, in fact, they knew anything about the connection of the death squads and the government the United States was supporting.
That leads me to a conclusion I came to then: that in many stories it's not the information, it's the politics. It's not that we were lacking information. It's that, when that information came out, it was denied and those in power were able to impose their view of reality. Political power decided what reality was, despite clear information to the contrary. When I look at our time I see that phenomenon writ large. It's gone way beyond a massacre in a relatively obscure Central American country. It's gone to policies and statements that led the United States to invade a country that had not attacked us, to torture prisoners and deny we're doing it even when clear evidence says that we are, to domestic spying in which the government is clearly breaking the law and the President declares that he will continue to do so. In all these cases, it's not the information, it's the politics. This is a hard thing for journalists to admit because the model of journalistic behavior in our era is Watergate. It's very hard for journalists to come to grips with the reality that wrongdoing can indeed be exposed, and continue to be exposed again and again with no result, in a kind of tortuous eternal return.
The Yawning Gap
TD: Apply this to Iraq. You've been to Iraq three times. It must be startling to arrive in this described land and see the actual country.
Danner: One of the striking things about going to Iraq is the extraordinarily large chasm between what people know about the story here and what the story actually is. First of all, the lurid, security-imposed landscape of the country is very hard to convey to people here: the miles of concrete blast walls, the miles of barbed wire, the constant fear in driving around and trying to report, and the absolute, constant accompaniment of death. Most of the killings in Iraq are not reported here and yet American viewers think that they're seeing the war when what they're seeing is a television reporter doing a stand-up on the roof of a heavily guarded hotel, behind blast walls and barbed wire and countless armed guards, who may or may not have exited that hotel that day. Many reporters are doing extraordinary jobs under horrific conditions, but those conditions make adequate reporting, as we know it, nearly impossible.
The result is that the Iraq we see is a tiny, tiny sliver of a very complex, very violent reality, and the constant repetition of the bad news, of the continual deaths there, has been absorbed by the news system of the United States. By that I mean, whereas ten deaths might have made the front page of the paper or been not quote "a tell" but an actual filmed report on a network newscast, now it takes more death than that. The country and the news media are gradually absorbing how badly the war has gone so that the normal pace of death there which, had we predicted it before the war, would have been a horrible outcome -- an outcome that, had we known, no one would have supported the war in the first place -- this horrible outcome has become the baseline that we take for granted.
For the story to occupy the news space, a particularly catastrophic attack is necessary. Today in the New York Times, there was a striking report about the steady upsurge in the number of attacks since the beginning of the insurgency This has been inexorable, which shows that the insurgency is growing more formidable, despite all these reports about American and Iraqi successes in the war. That story appeared on p. A12 of the New York Times. It wasn't even news. Accompanying it was a piece about the failure of infrastructure in Iraq. Though the United States has put roughly $16 billion of American money into the Iraqi infrastructure, the number of hours of average electricity available to an inhabitant of Baghdad has gone from 24 hours to 4. All the figures on infrastructure point downward, so that if you're an Iraqi, you have seen your standard of living steadily decline under the Americans even as you now have a much greater chance of being kidnapped or killed or blown up in an explosion or having your children kidnapped. Very little of this gets through to Americans. In fact, the story has generally been migrating off the front pages and becoming a small version of Orwell's famed distant and never-ending war between East Asia and Oceania.
I think it's widely known at the top of the administration that Iraq is a failure. It's also been recognized by many that, in strategic terms, the Iraq war could turn out to be a catastrophe because it's essentially created a Shia Islamist government sympathetic to Iran and, among other things, made it impossible for the U.S. to adequately pressure Iran on the nuclear issue. The result of this occupation is going to be a reversal of 50 years of American policy in the Gulf, which has been a reliance on the Sunni autocracies in the area. That policy had an awful lot wrong with it; its support of those autocracies over many decades certainly helped lead to al-Qaeda and its epigones. The fact is, though, that the Bush administration has essentially overthrown that policy with nothing to put in its place.
TD: You've written, "I think I became a writer in part because I found that yawning distance between what I was told and what I could see to be inescapable." Now, that yawning gap is available to everybody. And we're in a strangely demobilized moment, it seems to me. I was wondering: If you're a reporter, what's the story now? Remind me?
Danner: Thank you, Tom, for putting a deeply depressing point in such a deeply depressing way. I congratulate you on that, and indeed that yawning gap is now available to everyone and it's debilitating, partly because one is perilously close to arriving at the conclusion that reality doesn't matter. When I look at the pieces on the inside pages of the papers about the stealing of funds in Iraq by American officials, when I realize that no one is likely to be punished for this, I think of the novels of [Milan] Kundera, of his vivid descriptions of what it was like to live in Eastern Europe in the 1950s and 60s -- in the Soviet system where everyone realized the corruption, the abuse of power, the mediocrity of the government, the yawning gap between what was said and what was really going on, but no one could do anything about it.
TD: Are we in a kind of Brezhnev moment?
Danner: I'm not sure I would go so far as that because a Brezhnev moment means we're talking about a system that has reached its geriatric debility. I'm by no means saying that the U.S. now is equivalent to Eastern Europe back then, but there is a similarity in this gap between what you know is true and officially recognized reality -- and in the fact that that gap cannot be breached. On the other hand, the fall in Bush's approval ratings, and especially the catastrophic decline in the all-important do-you-think-the-country-is-on-the-right-track question shows that this has had a broad effect among a lot of people. And I take some comfort from that.
The Democrats are doing very well in a generic poll about who you would want to run the country. This doesn't mean the mid-term elections will turn out that way, of course. It does mean people have not been so dulled by fear as not to see that the war has been a mistake and that the administration has done a very bad job when it comes to, say, Katrina or the Medicare program. At the end of the day, the problem is that there needs to be a political alternative that is in some way viable and believable -- and the political elite that opposes this administration has been unable to formulate a believable program in opposition to it.
At the heart of this is the problem of national security. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in poll after poll the American people say they trust Republicans more than Democrats to protect them. This is a cliché of polling. At this particular time, it's been made worse by a paradox. If, with great skill, the Democrats attack the Republican handling not just of the Iraq war but of the more general war on terror -- and the Bush administration has been brilliant in connecting those two -- if the Democrats succeed in doing this, they are, in effect, igniting the overwhelming political emotion of fear. And the Republicans have been very successful in using fear; fear, whatever its cause, seems to benefit the Republicans and the self-described strong leadership they offer. Their basic strategy in the 2004 election was to say: Elect this guy Kerry with his surfboard, and he's going to get you killed. Enough people were willing to believe that then. It's unclear whether that old snake oil will still have as many willing buyers. I tend to doubt it.
TD: As dusk settles in, let me end this way: You've reported on some countries in horrific situations over the years. You wrote somewhere that in State Department parlance they are called TFN, totally f--ked up nations. Your mother, when you come home, has a tendency to say, "Can't you go someplace nice for a change?" So here we are on this patio, the sun going down, the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. This looks nice. My question is: Is it nice, or are you now reporting from and teaching in a TFN?
Danner: [laughs heartily] Oh, you mean, this just a mask, a sunny, picturesque mask over what is, in reality, a totally f--ked up nation? Actually, to reach the point of being a TFN, I think we have a long way to go. We're at a very low point in the political evolution of this country. I've certainly not lived under an administration as radical in its techniques, its methods, and its beliefs as this one. I've seen nothing like it in my lifetime.
It's a difficult time for those of us who care about the truth and who don't believe, as I think this administration does, that the truth is actually determined by what those in power think. I take comfort from the fact that a lot of people don't believe that.
There are two borderline dangers here. One is to go off into a state of political debility in which you think that none of this matters. To hell with politics, let's try to live our lives. And that's a very natural response, to kind of bow out of political engagement, but I think that would be very wrong and very harmful. The other risk is to equal the administration in their exaggerations and their distortions, in their stunning lack of fidelity to what is happening. To exaggerate, to overstate, to alter the truth in the cause of a political goal -- this, I think, is very tempting… very tempting. When you see Fox News existing as it does, you want something of the same on the other side. But I don't think that's my job and I'm glad it's not the job of a lot of writers and journalists out there.
You asked a little while ago what reporters should do in a time like this. I think it's immensely important that people continue, with great determination, to report what is true, to investigate things like the NSA story, to make a record of all of this. Because, at the end of the day, that is what reporters do, and that is why their work is so valuable -- so, if you'll forgive this word, sacred. They try to tell what actually happened.
As I leave him at the now dark doorway and head up the stone steps to my car, he calls, "Watch out for the deer! They tend to be up there at this time of night!"
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MOST AMERICANS ACCEPT GROWING POLICE STATE
Sunday, February 26, 2006
UPI - Most U.S. adults feel law enforcement is using its expanded surveillance powers in a proper way, although many express concern over civil liberty erosion. The Harris telephone poll of 1,016 U.S. adults found 57 percent of adults feel U.S. law enforcement is using its expanded surveillance powers in a proper way, while 40 percent feel they are not being used in a proper way. The survey also found that 66 percent think that it is very or somewhat likely that there will be a major terrorist attack in the next 12 months -- up from the 55 percent who felt that way in June 2005. Sixty-six percent U.S. adults feel that the government's anti-terrorist programs have taken only a little or none of their own personal privacy away. However, 14 percent feel the programs have taken away quite a lot or a great deal of their own personal privacy. Eighty-four percent of adults favor stronger document and physical security checks for travelers, 82 percent favor expanded undercover activity to penetrate groups under suspicion and 67 favor expanded camera surveillance on streets and in public places.
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Why Is Halliburton Building Internment Camps?
By Sheila Musaji
02/26/05
On January 24th it was announced [1] that a subsidiary of Halliburton KBR was awarded a $385 million contract by the Department of Homeland Security to build detention centers in the U.S. These centers might be used for immigration, or for disaster relief, or vaguely "... to support the rapid development of new programs."
As early as September of 2002, John Ashcroft discussed internment of even American citizens who were deemed "enemy combatants" [2a] and Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission said that he "could foresee a scenario in which the public would demand internment camps for Arab Americans if Arab terrorists strike again in this country." If there's a future terrorist attack in America ''and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights." [2 b]
"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo." [3]
Now we are beginning to see this mentioned by a number of sources [4] to [10] but it is still not front page news, although it is not only Muslims and Arabs who are concerned about what sort of emergency might require detention centers, [11] and what are these mysterious "new programs"? [12] and [13].
I believe that all Americans should be very concerned. It might be "someone else" they come for first, but if this is the direction our nation is going, who knows where it will end.
NOTES:
[1] KBR Awarded Project http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060124/20060124005819.html?.v=1
[2] Ashcroft's Detention Camps http://www.prisonplanet.com/090402camps.html , Civil Rights Panelist Foresees Internment Push
http://www.prisonplanet.com/rights_panelist_forsees_internment_push.html
[3] Preparing for Martial Law http://www.ocnus.net/artman/publish/article_22660.shtml
[4] - Homeland Security to Build Detention Camps in the U.S.
http://www.gnn.tv/headlines/7254/Homeland_Security_To_Build_Detention_Camps_In_The_United_States [5] http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12077.htm
[6] Customs Camps Cause for Concern http://www.presstelegram.com/search/ci_3470080
[7] Will Bush's War on Terror Bring Back Internment Camps http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=de9dd9fbbbbd59388d802c3f4e0e1288
[8] Detention Centers By Any Other Name http://vivirlatino.com/2006/02/07/detention-centers-by-any-other-name.php
[9] Homeland Security Contracts for Vast New Detention Centers http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=%20SC20060206&articleId=1897
[10] Detention Camp Jitters http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/06/02/far06003.html
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_84
[11] What Sort of Emergency Requires Detention Centers http://www.blackcommentator.com/171/171_freedom_rider_halliburton_detention_centers.html [12] Bush's Mysterious New Programs http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html
[13] 10 Year U.S. Strategic Plan for Detention Centers Revives Proposals from Oliver North http://news.pacificnews.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=9c2d6a5e75201d7e3936ddc65cdd56a9
Sheila Musaji is the Editor of The American Muslim at http://www.theamericanmuslim.org
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Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data
By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 25, 2006
PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 23 - A small group of National Security Agency officials slipped into Silicon Valley on one of the agency's periodic technology shopping expeditions this month.
On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.
The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.
Supercomputer companies looking for commercial markets have used the practice for decades. Now intelligence agencies, hardly newcomers to data mining, are using new technologies to take the practice to another level.
But by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not.
"The theory is that the automated tool that is conducting the search is not violating the law," said Mark D. Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. But "anytime a tool or a human is looking at the content of your communication, it invades your privacy."
When asked for comment about the meetings in Silicon Valley, Jane Hudgins, a National Security Agency spokeswoman, said, "We have no information to provide."
Data mining is already being used in a diverse array of commercial applications - whether by credit card companies detecting and stopping fraud as it happens, or by insurance companies that predict health risks. As a result, millions of Americans have become enmeshed in a vast and growing data web that is constantly being examined by a legion of Internet-era software snoops.
Technology industry executives and government officials said that the intelligence agency systems take such techniques further, applying software analysis tools now routinely used by law enforcement agencies to identify criminal activities and political terrorist organizations that would otherwise be missed by human eavesdroppers.
One such tool is Analyst's Notebook, a crime investigation "spreadsheet" and visualization tool developed by i2 Inc., a software firm based in McLean, Va.
The software, which ranges in price from as little as $3,000 for a sheriff's department to millions of dollars for a large government agency like the Federal Bureau of Investigation, allows investigators to organize and view telephone and financial transaction records. It was used in 2001 by Joyce Knowlton, an investigator at the Stillwater State Correctional Facility in Minnesota, to detect a prison drug-smuggling ring that ultimately implicated 30 offenders who were linked to Supreme White Power, a gang active in the prison.
Ms. Knowlton began her investigation by importing telephone call records into her software and was immediately led to a pattern of calls between prisoners and a recent parolee. She overlaid the calling data with records of prisoners' financial accounts, and based on patterns that emerged, she began monitoring phone calls of particular inmates. That led her to coded messages being exchanged in the calls that revealed that seemingly innocuous wood blocks were being used to smuggle drugs into the prison.
"Once we added the money and saw how it was flowing from addresses that were connected to phone numbers, it created a very clear picture of the smuggling ring," she said.
Privacy, of course, is hardly an expectation for prisoners. And credit card customers and insurance policyholders give up a certain amount of privacy to the issuers and carriers. It is the power of such software tools applied to broad, covert governmental uses that has led to the deepening controversy over data mining.
In the wake of 9/11, the potential for mining immense databases of digital information gave rise to a program called Total Information Awareness, developed by Adm. John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser, while he was a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Although Congress abruptly canceled the program in October 2003, the legislation provided a specific exemption for "processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence."
At the time, Admiral Poindexter, who declined to be interviewed for this article because he said he had knowledge of current classified intelligence activities, argued that his program had achieved a tenfold increase in the speed of the searching databases for foreign threats.
While agreeing that data mining has a tremendous power for fighting a new kind of warfare, John Arquilla, a professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said that intelligence agencies had missed an opportunity by misapplying the technologies.
"In many respects, we're fighting the last intelligence war," Mr. Arquilla said. "We have not pursued data mining in the way we should."
Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.
"Checking every phone call ever made is an example of old think," he said.
He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.
An AT&T spokeswoman said the company would not comment on the claim, or generally on matters of national security or customer privacy.
But the mining of the databases in other law enforcement investigations is well established, with documented results. One application of the database technology, called Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform, or Scamp, offers access to about nine weeks of calling information. It currently handles about 70,000 queries a month from fraud and law enforcement investigators, according to AT&T documents.
A former AT&T official who had detailed knowledge of the call-record database said the Daytona system takes great care to make certain that anyone using the database - whether AT&T employee or law enforcement official with a subpoena - sees only information he or she is authorized to see, and that an audit trail keeps track of all users. Such information is frequently used to build models of suspects' social networks.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive corporate matters, said every telephone call generated a record: number called, time of call, duration of call, billing category and other details. While the database does not contain such billing data as names, addresses and credit card numbers, those records are in a linked database that can be tapped by authorized users.
New calls are entered into the database immediately after they end, the official said, adding, "I would characterize it as near real time."
According to a current AT&T employee, whose identity is being withheld to avoid jeopardizing his job, the mining of the AT&T databases had a notable success in helping investigators find the perpetrators of what was known as the Moldovan porn scam.
In 1997 a shadowy group in Moldova, a former Soviet republic, was tricking Internet users by enticing them to a pornography Web site that would download a piece of software that disconnected the computer user from his local telephone line and redialed a costly 900 number in Moldova.
While another long-distance carrier simply cut off the entire nation of Moldova from its network, AT&T and the Moldovan authorities were able to mine the database to track the culprits.
Much of the recent work on data mining has been aimed at even more sophisticated applications. The National Security Agency has invested billions in computerized tools for monitoring phone calls around the world - not only logging them, but also determining content - and more recently in trying to design digital vacuum cleaners to sweep up information from the Internet.
Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address - another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency's interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.
An earlier N.S.A. patent, in 1999, focused on a software solution for generating a list of topics from computer-generated text. Such a capacity hints at the ability to extract the content of telephone conversations automatically. That might permit the agency to mine millions of phone conversations and then select a handful for human inspection.
As the N.S.A. visit to the Silicon Valley venture capitalists this month indicates, the actual development of such technologies often comes from private companies.
In 2003, Virage, a Silicon Valley company, began supplying a voice transcription product that recognized and logged the text of television programming for government and commercial customers. Under perfect conditions, the system could be 95 percent accurate in capturing spoken text. Such technology has potential applications in monitoring phone conversations as well.
And several Silicon Valley executives say one side effect of the 2003 decision to cancel the Total Information Awareness project was that it killed funds for a research project at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox, exploring technologies that could protect privacy while permitting data mining.
The aim was to allow an intelligence analyst to conduct extensive data mining without getting access to identifying information about individuals. If the results suggested that, for instance, someone might be a terrorist, the intelligence agency could seek a court warrant authorizing it to penetrate the privacy technology and identify the person involved.
With Xerox funds, the Palo Alto researchers are continuing to explore the technology.
Comment: Whenever you read an "expert" telling you that the US surveillence technology and attitudes are out-dated, or that they "are fighting the last intellignce war", you can bet it is disinfo. The fact that you read Signs of the Times is being noted. If you contribute to our forums, or other alternative news forums, you're being noted.
The list is being checked. Big brother knows if you've been naughty or nice. Count on it.
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U.S. Defends Detentions at Airports
By Nina Bernstein
08/10/05
Foreign citizens who change planes at airports in the United States can legally be seized, detained without charges, deprived of access to a lawyer or the courts, and even denied basic necessities like food, lawyers for the government said in Brooklyn federal court yesterday.
The assertion came in oral arguments over a federal lawsuit by Maher Arar, a naturalized Canadian citizen who charges that United States officials plucked him from Kennedy International Airport when he was on the way home on Sept. 26, 2002, held him in solitary confinement in a Brooklyn detention center and then shipped him to his native Syria to be interrogated under torture because officials suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda.
Syrian and Canadian officials have cleared Mr. Arar, 35, of any terrorist connections, but United States officials maintain that "clear and unequivocal" but classified evidence shows that he is a Qaeda member. They are seeking dismissal of his lawsuit, in part through the rare assertion of a "state secrets" privilege.
The case is the first civil suit to challenge the practice known as "extraordinary rendition," in which terror suspects have been transferred for questioning to countries known for torture.
After considering legal briefs, Judge David G. Trager of United States District Court prepared several written questions for lawyers on both sides to address further, including one that focused pointedly on Mr. Arar's accusations of illegal treatment in New York. He says he was deprived of sleep and food and was coercively interrogated for days at the airport and at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn when he was not allowed to call a lawyer, his family or the Canadian consul.
"Would not such treatment of a detainee - in any context, criminal, civil, immigration or otherwise - violate both the Constitution and clearly established case law?" Judge Trager asked.
The reply by Mary Mason, a senior trial lawyer for the government, was that it would not. Legally, she said, anyone who presents a foreign passport at an American airport, even to make a connecting flight to another country, is seeking admission to the United States. If the government decides that the passenger is an "inadmissible alien," he remains legally outside the United States - and outside the reach of the Constitution - even if he is being held in a Brooklyn jail.
Even if they are wrongly or illegally designated inadmissible, the government's papers say, such aliens have at most a right against "gross physical abuse."
Under immigration law, Ms. Mason asserted, Mr. Arar was afforded "ample" due process when he was given five days to challenge an order finding him inadmissible.
"The burden of proof is on the alien to demonstrate his admissibility," Ms. Mason said, "and he did not do that."
"Do you do this to all people on a connecting flight?" Judge Trager asked, raising his eyebrows.
"Yes, all have to show admissibility," Ms. Mason replied. In some ways, she asserted, Mr. Arar had more rights than a United States citizen, because he could have challenged his deportation to Syria, which he had left as a teenager, under the Convention Against Torture. He also had 30 days to challenge his removal, she said.
But David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who argued on behalf of Mr. Arar and the Center for Constitutional Rights, contended that the government had denied Mr. Arar a meaningful chance to be heard, first by refusing to let him call a lawyer, and later by lying to the lawyer about his whereabouts.
Mr. Arar, who had been told he would be deported to Canada, was not handed a final order sending him to Syria until he was in handcuffs on the private jet that took him away, Mr. Cole said, while his lawyer was told he had been sent to a jail in New Jersey.
"We can't take a citizen, pick him up at J.F.K. and send him to Syria to be tortured," he said. "We can't hold against Mr. Arar the failure to file a motion for review when he's locked up in a gravelike cell in Syria."
Dennis Barghaan, who represents former Attorney General John Ashcroft, one of the federal officials being sued for damages in the case, argued that Congress and recent judicial decisions tell federal courts "keep your nose out" of foreign affairs and national security questions, like those in this case.
At several points the judge seemed to echo such concerns. He said he had refused to read a letter from the plaintiffs detailing testimony before a Canadian board of inquiry into Mr. Arar's case because he did not know how to deal with questions that might require the government to confirm or deny classified information.
"How am I going to handle that?" he asked, rubbing his forehead and furrowing his brow before adjourning the hearing.
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Hunger strikes in Guantanamo-sanitized?
Progressive U
This is a little bit scary. How many causes have furthered themselves through hunger strikes? Womens suffrage has, North Ireland has, and now Guantanamo suspects have. It is a terrible thing to choose a slow suicide over imprisonment, but what we do to them under the sanitized name "force feeding" is ridiculous!
This is a good article about the procedure of force feeding, and the docter-patient relationship as it affects these prisoners, and a lot of other interesting things.
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.
Is it humane to be forcing these prisoners to remain in our custody without charges, and to expect them NOT to be upset about it? Hunger strike is one of the LAST things we can do to attract attention to our plight.
What situation does this sort of desperation put our docters in?
- The doctor treating hunger strikers is faced with the following conflicting values:
- There is a moral obligation on every human being to respect the sanctity of life. This is especially evident in the case of a doctor, who exercises his skills to save life and also acts in the best interests of his patients (Beneficence).
- It is the duty of the doctor to respect the autonomy which the patient has over his person. A doctor requires informed consent from his patients before applying any of his skills to assist them, unless emergency circumstances have arisen in which case the doctor has to act in what is perceived to be the patient's best interests.
- This conflict is apparent where a hunger striker who has issued clear instructions not to be resuscitated lapses into a coma and is about to die. Moral obligation urges the doctor to resuscitate the patient even though it is against the patient's wishes. On the other hand, duty urges the doctor to respect the autonomy of the patient.
- Ruling in favour of intervention may undermine the autonomy which the patient has over himself.
- Ruling in favour of non-intervention may result in a doctor having to face the tragedy of an avoidable death.
- A doctor/patient relationship is said to be in existence whenever a doctor is duty bound, by virtue of his obligation to the patient, to apply his skills to any person, be it in the form of advice or treatment.
This relationship can exist in spite of the fact that the patient might not consent to certain forms of treatment or intervention.
How's this for an experience?
"They press their knuckles into your jaws and press in hard. The way they finally did force feed me was getting forceps and running them up and down my gums," he said.
"I opened my mouth, but I was able to resist after that," said the Sinn Féin man in the interview.
"Then they tried – there's a part of your nose, like a membrane and it's very tender – and they started on that. It's hard to describe the pain. It's like someone pushing a knitting needle into the side of your eye. As soon as I opened my mouth they put in this wooden bit with a hole in the middle for the tube. They rammed it between my teeth and then tied it with cord around my head.
"Then they got paraffin and forced it down the tube. The danger is that every time it happens you think you're going to die. The only things that move are your eyes.
"They get a funnel and put the stuff down."
Affidavits from the prisoners in Guantanamo describe how the torture victims vomited up "substantial amounts of blood" while being fed through their nose.
These people DESERVE attention, they deserve due process, and the opportunity to get OUT of the situation our government has put them in. I hope this hunger strike shames the administration enough to give them decent trials and revue. I doubt it will, but one can always hope.
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The CIA's 'Black Sites'
by Nat Hentoff
February 24th, 2006
The CIA's top counterterrorism official [Robert Grenier] was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation, and using forms of torture such as "waterboarding," [making a prisoner believe he is about to be drowned] intelligence sources have claimed. The Sunday Times, London, February 12
For more than three years, I've been reporting on what has been increasingly, but fragmentarily, revealed about secret CIA prisons around the world. On September 17, 2001, the president, in a classified order, gave the CIA these "special powers" (as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales agreed during his confirmation hearings).
These "black sites"-as they are called in CIA, White House, and Justice Department files- escaped attempted congressional oversight until December 2005. But in the National Defense Authorization Act, the Senate finally called for regular reports on where those prisons are, what plans there are for the ultimate release of their prisoners, and "a description of the interrogation procedures used." Ted Kennedy and John Kerry introduced the resolution.
A similar December requirement was passed by the House (226 to 187) in a nonbinding resolution to urge the House and Senate negotiators to shine a shaft of sunlight on these "dark sites" in the final National Defense Authorization Act for 2006. But secretly, both the Senate and House resolutions were killed by the conference committee.
This February, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, Human Rights First, and Amnesty International urged the House International Relations Committee to support three new resolutions of inquiry into American use of torture, citing the fact that "there is still a strong perception in many parts of the world that the United States continues to facilitate or willfully ignore torture by rendering individuals to countries where they are likely to be tortured, and by holding detainees in secret locations closed to the International Committee of the Red Cross." (Emphasis added.)
But on February 10, in a party line vote, the House International Relations Committee defeated all three resolutions.
There has been hardly any notice in the press or anywhere else about these congressional setbacks as part of the Bush administration's continued success in suppressing news of what actually goes on in those "black sites" in the name of the United States and its citizens.
As I have noted in previous columns, there has been a debate for more than two years inside the CIA about the legality of these secret prisons and how to eventually dispose of the prisoners. They cannot be tried in American courts because they have been wholly denied due process under our constitution and so are wrongfully held.
Two years ago, FBI veteran Jack Cloonan, who had been the senior agent on the FBI's bin Laden squad in New York and later was in charge of investigating Al Qaeda master planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (now in some CIA "black site"), asked on ABC's Nightline:
"What are we going to do with these people [in the CIA secret cells]? . . . Are they going to disappear? Are they stateless? . . . What are we going to explain to people when they start asking questions about where they are? Are they dead? Are they alive? What oversight does Congress have?"
Passport Art & Culture
The present answer to Jack Cloonan's last question is this: There is no congressional oversight. Congress has been blocked-by its Republican leadership, the president, Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA chief Porter Goss-from having any oversight at all. The constitutional separation of powers has also fallen into a black hole.
There is, however, a quick look into one of those secret prisons in a December 19, 2005, Human Rights Watch report, "U.S. Operated Secret 'Dark Prison' in Kabul."
Eight "detainees" now being held at Guantánamo, another extralegal U.S. prison, have told their attorneys what it was like when they were individually held, at various times between 2002 and 2004, in a secret U.S. facility for more than six weeks before being transferred to Guantánamo. That secret prison was apparently closed after the transfer. This is their story, as told in the HRW report:
"The detainees, who called the facility the 'dark prison' or 'prison of darkness,' said they were. . . shackled to rings bolted into the walls of their cells, deprived of food and drinking water. . . for days at a time . . . and kept in total darkness with load rap, heavy-metal music, or other sounds blaring for weeks at a time. . . . Some detainees said they were shackled in a manner that made it impossible for them to lie down or sleep."
One of the prisoners added that he was put in "an underground place," and "during the interrogations, he says, an interrogator threatened him with rape."
Ethiopia-born Benyam Mohammed, who grew up in Britain, told his attorney, in English, "[At one point] I was chained to the rails [of my cell] for a fortnight. . . . The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. . . . Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."
Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al. regularly intone, in chorus, that the U.S. does not torture and always acts within the law. But if the fearful facts in the darkness in those CIA prisons are ever documented by an independent prosecutor in a future administration, it will finally be proved that, as Human Rights Watch emphasizes, the CIA is responsible-along with the president who gave it "special powers"-for "serious violations of U.S. criminal law, such as the War Crimes Act and the Anti-Torture Statute. . . . The mistreatment of detainees also violates the [International] Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which the United States has ratified, and the laws of war."
There is a rising focus around the country on this year's midterm elections. During the campaigning, will there be any mention of the screams in the CIA's underground prisons of darkness? And if there is, how many Americans will care enough to be repelled by their own silent, passive complicity in the growing moral darkness of this nation's leadership?
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YOUNGER HOUSEHOLDERS LOST GROUND UNDER BUSH
Sunday, February 26, 2006
Undernews
MARK TRUMBULL, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - A new survey shows that median incomes fell for householders under 45, even as they rose for older ones, between 2001 and 2004. Income fell 8 percent, adjusted for inflation, for those under 35 and 9 percent for those aged 35 to 44. . .
- Over the past decade, the volume of federal student loans tripled, reaching $85 billion in new loans last year, according to a new book by Anya Kamenetz, "Generation Debt." Nearly a quarter of college students are using credit cards to pay some of their tuition costs, she writes.
- The median income for men under age 44 was significantly lower in 1997 than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation, according to a long-term analysis by the Census Bureau in the late 1990s. For those over 45, incomes barely held their own during that period.
- The entry of women into the workforce in those decades has helped push median family incomes up over time. But even when men and women are included together, younger workers (age 25-34) are earning well below what they did in 1970. And at all ages, evidence suggests that families are putting in more hours of work to make their household incomes rise.
- Even with extra time at work, median family income has barely budged since 1995 for householders below 45, up about 5 percent after inflation through 2004.
- Those aged 45 to 54 did better, with family incomes rising 23 percent during that period, according to the numbers released last week from the Federal Reserve Board.
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Surprise! Bankruptcy filers really are broke
By Michelle Singletary | February 26, 2006
In what will undoubtedly be the first of many ''I told you so" reports, the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys has found that, overwhelmingly, people who file for bankruptcy protection aren't deadbeats who went on shopping sprees with the intention of shirking their debts.
That's quite contrary to what was being charged by supporters of a federal bankruptcy law that went into effect last October.
For years, those proponents argued that billions of dollars were being lost because people were simply being allowed to walk away from their debts.
''As retailers, we have seen first-hand the dramatic effect bankruptcy has had on both consumers' finances and on our ability to serve the public," wrote Steve Pfister, senior vice president for government relations of the National Retail Federation, in a letter to House members as the bankruptcy bill was being debated.
''These filings ultimately cost the tens of millions of households we serve hundreds of dollars each in unseen costs every year. Unfortunately, many of those losses are the result of misuse of the law by irresponsible, higher-income filers," he added.
On the day President Bush signed the bankruptcy bill, he said: ''In recent years, too many people have abused the bankruptcy laws. They've walked away from debts even when they had the ability to repay them."
The law now requires people to get credit counseling before they can file for bankruptcy protection.
The premise behind this provision is that by forcing people to get counseling, it will show that many bankruptcy filers in fact have enough money left over after taking care of their essential expenses to repay creditors.
I spent several years reporting on bankruptcy, and I saw no evidence (academic or anecdotal) to support claims that scores of people were gaming the system.
Now, in the first analysis of the tens of thousands of people who have undergone credit counseling since the law passed, the bankruptcy attorneys association found that nearly all (97 percent) of the debtors truly couldn't pay their debts.
The association examined data provided by six large and small credit counseling firms from a cross-section of the country.
All of the firms have been authorized by the US Justice Department's executive office for US trustees to provide the required prebankruptcy counseling.
In total, the firms that were surveyed counseled 61,355 consumers.
Four out of five filers felt forced to seek bankruptcy protection because of a job loss, catastrophic medical expenses, or the death of a spouse, according to the report, ''Bankruptcy Reform's Impact: Where Are All the Deadbeats?"
Fewer than 1 out of 20 consumers (3.3 percent) were candidates for paying off what they owe under a debt management plan (DMP), the report indicated.
With a plan, a debtor makes one monthly payment to a credit-counseling agency.
The agency then distributes the funds according to a payment schedule they've worked out with the person's creditors.
Creditors may agree to lower interest rates or waive certain fees if you are repaying through a DMP, although this is happening less as more people sign up for such plans.
Typically it takes about 36 to 60 months to repay debts through a DMP.
The highest estimate of consumers' being able to make repayments under a credit counseling DMP was 5 percent, with the low being in the 1 to 2 percent range, according to the report.
''The masses of expected deadbeats who were supposed to be identified under the new law and forced into debt management plans have not materialized," the association's report concludes.
Only about one in five (21 percent) of those seen by a credit-counseling firm were identified as racking up debt due to ''circumstances within their control."
In many of those cases, people said they didn't fully appreciate how credit card fees and finance charges could put them deeper and deeper into debt.
OK, if you must, call the latter folks deadbeats. It's hardly a revelation that if you buy something on credit and you don't pay the bill off the next month, you're going to be charged interest.
With the low minimum payments required, it's easy to amass a lot of debt over time. We all know this.
But I do sympathize with people who experience a major disruption to their income or become financially ruined by uncovered healthcare costs (a growing and disturbing trend in America).
It is for these people we have bankruptcy protection.
There is at least something good to come out of the new law. If you're looking for a reputable credit counseling agency -- even if you aren't filing for bankruptcy -- I'd suggest you choose one that is now certified by the trustee program. At least then you'll have less of a chance of dealing with a deadbeat agency.
To find an agency on the list, go to www.usdoj.gov. In the search field type ''approved credit counseling agencies."
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Shooting in Detroit Church Kills Woman
AP
February 26, 2006
DETROIT - A man opened fire inside a church Sunday, killing an 18-year-old woman and wounding her child before shooting another man outside, according to police and broadcast reports.
Second Deputy Police Chief James Tate confirmed that three people were shot at Zion Hope Missionary Baptist Church but declined to provide details.
The child did not have life-threatening injuries, WWJ-AM reported. The station said the third victim was in critical condition. Police were searching for the shooter.
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American Government: Heading Toward Disintegration and Collapse
By Charles Mercieca, Ph.D.
In several of his writings and interviews, former U. S. President Jimmy Carter stated that he is very much concerned at the direction the United States is moving. He said emphatically that this is not the United States he always knew. Many are increasingly beginning to convince themselves that the present United States government could be viewed as the worst in the history of the American nation. Democracy has ceased to exist for all practical purposes and we have a situation today where the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.
Government Deterioration
Several scholars and organizations are becoming increasingly worried as they see their government deteriorating from day to day. They feel upset as they watch the American government openly spying on the public, especially on those with peaceful reputation. Besides, they are taken by surprise to see the great curtailing of free speech and the increasing of censorship of the news media covering the radio, press and television. Peaceful dissenters are being punished and at times put in jail, even if they were religious women and clergymen.
Moreover, to turn insult into injury, the press at times is secretly paid to write articles that would justify governmental actions even if they constitute blatant violations of human rights, as it has been found even with the foreign press reporters. The waging of an ongoing war in both Iraq and Afghanistan has now drained the financial assets of the U.S. government to the very detriment of the American people. As a result, millions of Americans suffer from lack of health care benefits, while their health deteriorates even to the point of death.
The destruction of the infrastructure of Iraq along with the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent civilian Iraqis, amounting to women, children, the elderly and the sick, along with pregnant women as well, has been minimized. The lies told to the American people on how the Iraqis have been "liberated" from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, need to be challenged. A national referendum in Iraq needs to be conducted and all Iraqis from age of 15 to 95 must be allowed to participate under proper international supervision.
This referendum should consist of one question: Do you feel you were better off under Saddam Hussein when you still had your own homes, enjoyed the presence of your parents, spouses and children as well as friends? ……... Or, do you feel you are better off now under American domination with your homes destroyed, your parents, spouses and/or children killed or maimed, as well as with several of your friends killed or maimed for life? The whole world would be interested to hear directly what the Iraqis themselves have to say without any interference or manipulation from the outside.
Belligerent and Dangerous Policies
Very often the same questions are raised over and over again: When is the United States going to learn that in a war every one is a loser and no one a winner? Was not the Vietnam War experience enough? Is American diplomacy going to be always one based on guns, bullets, military involvements and wars instead of healthy dialogues and respect for others? It is very obvious that the United States would not hesitate to wage a war against Iran unless it brings this Asian nation under American political control. Why should the USA demand Iran not to have one nuclear weapon when this American nation has already more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and it is still manufacturing more?
In accordance with the philosophy of this American government, the United States can launch a pre-emptive strike against any nation on earth even without warning. Would it not then be natural for every country to equip itself with the most devastating weapons possible as way of counteraction against the United States? Moreover, since the United States manufactures and sells more weapons than all the nations of the world combined, it means that this American nation pollutes our air and water very badly with toxic wastes that is causing two millions of people incur cancer every year in the USA alone. Why is it that when the whole world wanted to take drastic action to curb air and water pollution from our planet, the USA was virtually the only dissenter?
It is very obvious that this capitalistic nation is concerned merely with the financial interests of big corporations and nothing else matters, not even the very health and life of the American people. Its top priority is to cater to special interests. This explains why the present U.S. government especially continues to cut significantly the budget on health care and education as to spend more and more money on corporate interests, generally headed by the weapons industry, the construction companies and the oil enterprises. In fact, every year the budget for the military and the waging of wars keeps on going higher and higher, while the budget on the vital needs of the people keeps on going lower and lower.
All of this explains why the American people in general and of the whole world at large tend to feel overwhelmed and powerless. But there is always hope. We learn from history that when good and evil struggle against each other, initially evil tends to take the upper hand until all of a sudden it disintegrates and collapses. Regardless of the vicious governments nations might have had, people always ended up getting what they viewed as positive and constructive. Like U.S. President Eisenhower said in his farewell address to the U.S. Congress, "all people of all countries want peace, only their government wants war."
Looking for a Hopeful Future
We should look with hope into a positive and constructive future where people could live together peacefully, where education and health care will be available for every human being, and where the protection of the environment will become a top governmental priority. People everywhere need to unite in generating positive and constructive energy until peace, as well as harmony, respect and justice will become a tangible reality for everyone. We need to become more involved in public affairs. We must do our best to replace every single politician by a statesman. Some historians described a politician as one who takes interest in one group to the exclusion of others, while they described a statesman as one who takes interest in all people without exception.
The current belligerent American government will one day be replaced. The question is when. It may still take quite a time until the change is effected and by then only God knows how many people, both American and non American alike, would have suffered unnecessarily. The present turmoil in so many global areas is bound to continue as long as the USA and other major powers continue to use violence to solve some of the crucial problems the world faces. We know that violence begets violence and more violence begets more violence. The military, by its very nature, is structured merely for destructive purposes, even though once in a while it might have been used to help in some natural disasters for a very brief period.
At this stage of history, which has become characterized by so much violence, suffering and death, the United States needs a president that has the mind, the courage, the determination, the wisdom, the understanding, the compassion, and the common sense of both U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower and U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the sooner the better. The nation and the whole world, as a matter of fact, need a new direction where the vital needs of the people will occupy top priority in every governmental endeavor.
Charles Mercieca, Ph.D., President International Association of Educators for World Peace. Dedicated to United Nations Goals of Peace Education, Environmental Protection, Human Rights & Disarmament. Professor Emeritus, Alabama A&M University.
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From Superpower to Tinhorn Dictatorship
by Paul Craig Roberts
February 27, 2006
America is headed for a soft dictatorship by the end of Bush's second term. Whether any American has civil rights will be decided by the discretionary power of federal officials. The public in general will tolerate the soft dictatorship as its discretionary powers will mainly be felt by those few who challenge it.
The congressional elections this coming November is the last chance for for Americans to reaffirm the separation of powers that is the basis of their civil liberties. Unless the voters correct their mistake of putting both the executive and legislative branches in the hands of the same party and deliver the House or the Senate to the Democrats, there is nothing on the domestic scene to stand in the way of more power, and less accountability, being accumulated in the executive.
The Democrats have been a totally ineffective opposition and might not inspire any voter response other than apathy. Rather than vote for a cowardly party that is afraid to defend the Constitution, voters might simply not vote at all.
In this unfortunate event, the only check on the Bush regime is its own hubris.
Bush's ill-fated invasion of Iraq has set in motion forces beyond his control. On February 23 the Asia Times reported that America's Pakistani puppet, Musharraf, is "losing his grip." Some Pakistani provinces are already beyond Musharraf's control, and the remainder are rioting against "Busharraf" as Musharraf is now known. The infantile American press misrepresents the riots as responses to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, but in fact the target of the riots is the American puppet.
By invading Afghanistan and Iraq and by threatening Syria and Iran, Bush has taught Muslims everywhere that they owe their humiliation to the Western controlled secular governments that suppress their aspirations. They are realizing that their power resides in Islam and that this power is suppressed by secular governments. Busharraf is probably dead meat, and when he goes so does the US military adventure in Afghanistan.
When Bush attacks Iran, the US army will be caught between the Iraqi Shia and the Iranian Shia and will be decimated in fourth generation conflict, so aptly described by William S. Lind. If a few thousand Sunni insurgents can tie down 10 US divisions, imagine the fate of US forces trapped in a Shia crescent.
The collapsing power of the US hegemon is everywhere evident. It is evident in the inability to successfully occupy Iraq or even Baghdad. It is evident in the growing military cooperation between North and South Korea, and it is evident it the revolt in the Indian government against Prime Minister Singh's nuclear agreement with the US. Indians say this agreement subjects India to US hegemony and represents America's attempt to block India's pioneering research on thorium as a nuclear fuel. Opposition parties have told Singh that if he signs the agreement, they will bring down his government.
The entire world now recognizes that America has lost its economic power and is dependent on the rest of the world to finance its budget and trade deficits. The US no longer holds the cards. American real incomes are falling, except for the rich. Jobs for university graduates are scarce, and advanced technology products must be imported from China. The US is a rapidly declining power and may soon end up as nothing but a tinhorn dictatorship.
Comment: Some might argue that it already is a tinhorn dictatorship. Given the control of the vote, do we really think there is any chance of a Democratic win in November? Didn't the exit polls in November 2004 give Kerry the vote?
But even...what if the Democrats got control of Congress? What difference would that really make, other than to reassure wishful thinkers that "something was done"?
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UPDATE: Tests Show Powder Found in Dorm NOT Ricin
AP
Mon Feb 27, 3:57 AM ET
AUSTIN, Texas - The FBI determined a powdery substance found in a roll of quarters at a University of Texas dormitory was not ricin after initial state tests had indicated it was the potentially deadly poison, a spokesman said Sunday.
The FBI tests did not identify the substance, but they came back negative for the poison that is extracted from castor beans, said San Antonio FBI spokesman Rene Salinas.
"There were no proteins in there to indicate it was in fact ricin," Salinas said. He said was unlikely further testing would be done.
Texas health officials did "just a quick test and they don't check for the proteins in ricin," Salinas said.
The mystery powder spilled onto Kelly Heinbaugh's hands as she unwrapped a roll of quarters in her dorm room on Thursday. She said she'd used five other rolls of quarters her mother had gotten from the same bank and none had powder in them.
The a 19-year-old freshman and her roommate were both evaluated for possible exposure to ricin and cleared at a hospital.
Roughly 400 residents of the Moore-Hill dormitory were evacuated Friday night while hazardous materials crews sanitized the area where the substance was found.
Salinas said it was unclear whether the FBI would continue its investigation into how the substance ended up with the coins.
If it was put there as a joke, Salinas said "it was an extremely bad joke."
Comment: So, Texas health officials did a "quick test" that didn't even check for ricin, and yet the story was plastered all over the mainstream media! Now the FBI says it's unlikely further testing will be conducted. Obviously, they got the mileage they needed out of the story. Are you terrified yet?
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IRS Finds Sharp Increase in Illegal Political Activity
By Stephanie Strom
The New York Times
Saturday 25 February 2006
The IRS said yesterday that it saw a sharp increase in prohibited political activity by charities and churches in the last election cycle, a trend that it aims to reverse as the country heads into the midterm elections.
The tax agency found problems at three-quarters of the 82 organizations it examined after having received complaints about their political activities, according to a report the Internal Revenue Service released. The infractions included distributing materials that encouraged people to vote for particular candidates and giving cash to campaigns.
The agency said it was seeking to revoke the exemptions of three organizations but did not name them, pending an appeals process. Charities are generally prohibited from campaigning for candidates, although they can take stands on issues.
The internal revenue commissioner, Mark W. Everson, devoted much of a speech to a civic group yesterday in Cleveland to the subject.
"We've seen a staggering increase in money flowing into campaigns, and the question is whether all this money is encroaching upon and polluting the charitable sector," Mr. Everson said in a telephone interview before his address. "We saw a disturbing amount of political intervention in charities in the last election cycle."
While pointing out the extent of the problem, the agency published more guidance for nonprofit organizations, including examples of what is permissible and what is not. Mr. Everson warned that the agency would be more aggressive in addressing prohibited political activity as election campaigns moved into full swing.
"You have the ever-increasing influence of money in politics and the fact that charities are subject to much less regulation than campaigns for parties," he said. "Those two things come together to create an opportunity that is at variance with what the statute limiting political activity by charities allows."
Advocates for nonprofit groups praised the report, saying it was unusually clear and straightforward.
"They're getting information out early this year, before we get into the heat of an election year," said Liz Towne, director of advocacy programs for the Alliance for Justice, which has urged the tax agency to provide better guidance. "By releasing data on their findings, they're moving toward more transparency."
Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which has filed dozens of complaints about churches' political activities, said, "It's no longer possible for critics to say the IRS is blind or toothless, because this announcement is a pretty major indication that they are serious about educating charities and about imposing appropriate penalties."
The complaints by the group include one on July 15, 2004, against Jerry Falwell Ministries, saying falwell.com had endorsed President Bush and urged readers to donate $5,000 to the Campaign for Working Families. Such activities are illegal, Mr. Lynn said, and the Web site was quickly changed.
Almost half the tax-exempt groups under examination are churches. Churches played a pivotal role in the 2004 elections, and the Republican Party, in particular, harnessed their influence to register, educate and deliver voters. Both parties are cultivating churches for future elections. Democratic senators have been courting the Rev. Rick Warren, who draws more than 20,000 people a week to his Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., and the North Carolina Republican Party made waves when its leader sent an e-mail request for church directories.
Of the 47 complaints against churches under investigation, 37 were found to have merit. The agency found that three had no merit, and seven examinations were pending. Over all, 82 of 110 examinations have been completed.
All Saints Church, a liberal Episcopal church in Pasadena, Calif., is among those awaiting a decision. The agency began an investigation after a former pastor gave a sermon in which he imagined a debate among Jesus, President Bush and Senator John Kerry and in which he criticized the Iraq conflict.
A lawyer for All Saints, Marcus Owens, said he did not know the status of the investigation.
"The IRS agent assigned to All Saints doesn't even return my calls," Mr. Owens said. "The IRS sent an inquiry and then an examination letter. It has never done anything further."
Mr. Owens also represents the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose chairman, Julian Bond, gave a speech in July 2004 sharply critical of Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. The NAACP declined to cooperate in the following investigation, and Mr. Owens said it had not heard from the IRS since early last year.
Mr. Owens, who formerly led the unit in the agency responsible for overseeing tax-exempt groups, said he had concerns about the report.
"I wonder whether or not all the 50 or 60 organizations they identified as having engaged in illegal political intervention really did have significant issues," he said. "That having been said, give me an hour and my computer and I can sit down and give the IRS 200 good audit leads on questionable political activity."
Last month, a group of religious leaders representing Christian and Jewish denominations filed a complaint against two large politically active churches in Ohio, Fairfield Christian Church and World Harvest Church, and their leaders, the Revs. Russell Johnson and Rod Parsley.
The churches, which deny wrongdoing, said the IRS had not contacted them since then.
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Pit Boss: Blair's Dark Kingdom
Friday, 24 February 2006
Chris Floyd
Britain's New Statesman magazine has put together a powerful package of stories detailing how the government of George W. Bush's beloved disciple, Tony Blair, is "persecuting innocent people, tearing up our freedoms and undermining the judiciary." The basis of the stories is a new, blistering report from Amnesty International on the degraded state of civil liberties in the UK today.
The first NS story, Shamed, by Martin Bright, gives an overview of the Amnesty report. Two other stories are not available on the NS website, but your good Uncle Burlesque has kindly provided you with the texts.
The first of these, When Even Actors Aren't Safe, details the remarkable story of Rizwan Ahmed, who played a leading role in the award-winning new film, Road to Guantanamo. Ahmed played one of the Tipton Three, young Britons who were railroaded into Bush's concentration camp and held there for years, despite a plethora of evidence for their innocence. (I first wrote about them in March 2004: The Pentagon Archipelago: Trapped in a Net of State Terrorism). Ahmed was returning home to Britain after the film's celebrated showing at the Berlin Film Festival when he was nabbed at a UK airport and given the treatment. He was lucky not to have ended up in Guantanmo himself.
The other story, Squandering a Precious Heritage, is from Philippe Sands, one of Britain's leading human-rights lawyers (who, ironically, serves in the same law chambers as one Cherie Booth, better known to the world as Mrs. Tony Blair). Sands has also written an important new book, Lawless World, detailing the reckless destruction of the system of international law built up after World War II.
In many respects, Blair's Britain is actually more publicly draconian than Bush's America. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that Blair still feels bound to codify his degenerate practices -- to actually put them into law -- while Bush has decided that a president can blithely ignore any and all laws: so what's the point of changing them? (Heck, let those anti-torture, anti-aggression, Geneva Convention-type things stay on the books; they look real good on paper, and you don't have to obey them nohow.) But there is a fertile and sinister cross-pollination between these two oh-so-Christian "leaders" as they drag their nations down into a dark pit of lawlessness, repression, militarism and stinking fear.
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Is the problem weather, or is it war?
By Robert Fisk
02/26/06
The Independent
Something more serious is happening to our planet which we are not being told about
Back in the Sixties, a great movie was released called The Day the Earth Caught Fire. Leo McKern, I recall, played a Daily Express reporter along with the then real-life editor of the paper, Arthur Christiansen. What the Express discovered was that the British government was erecting showers in Hyde Park to keep people cool when in fact it was still winter. Investigative reporting eventually revealed - and this, remember, was fiction - that the US and Soviet powers had, without knowing of the other's activities, tested nuclear weapons at exactly the same moment at opposite sides of the earth.
I'm not sure that our present-day colleagues on the Express would discover any of this but that's not the point. In the movie, our planet had been blasted off course - and was now heading towards the sun. The governments, of course, tried to cover this up.
Now I remembered this creaky old film early this week when I woke up at my home in Beirut shivering with cold. This is mid-February in Lebanon and early spring should have warmed the air. But it hadn't. Up in the Christian mountain town of Jezzine, it was snowing fiercely. I walked to my balcony over the Mediterranean and a sharp, freezing wind was coming off the sea. Well poor old Bob, you might say. Better install central heating. (Most Lebanese exist like me with a series of dangerous and cheaply made gas heaters.)
But right now, flying around the world to launch my new book - travelling more than the average air crew - I'm finding a lot of odd parallels. In Melbourne last autumn, for example, the Australian spring turned out to be much colder than expected. Yet in Toronto at Christmas, all the snow melted. I padded round the streets of the city and had to take my pullover off because of the sun. It was the warmest winter in the records of a country whose tundra wastes are known for their frozen desolation.
I should add that those Canadians who welcomed this dangerous thaw seem at odds with reality; it's a bit like being cold and then expressing pleasure that your house is burning down on the grounds that you now feel warmer.
Then there are the air crews I was talking about. Out here in the Middle East, for instance, pilots have told me that head winds can now be so fierce at high altitude that they are being forced to request lower altitudes from air traffic control. As a flyer who knows how to be afraid on a bumpy flight - I am - I can tell you that I haven't encountered as much turbulence as I have in the past 24 months.
Now a deviation - but an important one. A British scientist, Chris Busby, has been digging through statistics from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment which measures uranium in high-volume air samples. His suspicion was that depleted uranium particles from the two Gulf wars - DU is used in the anti-armour warheads of the ordnance of American and British tanks and planes - may have spread across Europe. I'm not a conspiracy theorist but here's something very odd.
When Busby applied for the information from Aldermaston in 2004, they told him to get lost. When he demanded the information under the 2005 Freedom of Information Act, Aldermaston coughed up the figures. But wait.
The only statistic missing from the data they gave him was for the early months of 2003. Remember what was happening then? A little dust-up in Iraq, a massive American-British invasion of Saddam's dictatorship in which tons of DU shells were used by American troops. Eventually Busby, who worked out all the high-altitude wind movements over Europe, received the data from the Defence Procurement Agency in Bristol - which showed an increase in uranium in high-volume air sampling over Britain during this period.
Well, we aren't dead yet - though readers in Reading will not be happy to learn that the filter system samplings around Aldermaston showed that even they got an increase. Shock and awe indeed.
Back to our main story. I'm tired of hearing about "global warming" - it's become such a cliche that it's a turn-off, a no-read, a yawn-cliche. As perhaps our governments wish it to be. Melting ice caps and disappearing icebergs have become de rigueur for all reporting. After Unesco put the Ilulissat ice fjord on the World Heritage List, it was discovered to have receded three miles. And there's a lovely irony in the fact that the Canadians are now having a row with the United States about shipping lanes in the far north - because the Americans would like to use a melted North West Passage which comes partly under Canadian sovereignty. But I have a hunch that something more serious is happening to our planet which we are not being told about.
So let me remind you how The Day the Earth Caught Fire ended. Russian and American scientists were planning a new and joint explosion to set the world back on course. The last shot in the movie was set in the basement printing rooms (the real ones) of the Daily Express. The printers were standing by their machines with two headlines plated up to run, depending on the results of the detonation.
One said "World Doomed", the other "World Saved", As that great populist columnist John Gordon of the Sunday Express used to write: makes you sit up a bit, doesn't it?
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MI5 rebels expose Tube bomb cover-up
David Leppard
Times Online
26/02/2006
MI5 is facing an internal revolt by officers alarmed about intelligence failures and the lack of resources to fight Islamic terrorism.
To illustrate their concern, agents have leaked more topsecret documents to The Sunday Times because they want a public inquiry into the "missed intelligence" leading up to the July attacks in London.
They believe ministers have withheld information from the public about what the security services knew about the suspects before the bombing of July 7 and the abortive attacks of July 21.
The documents include an admission by John Scarlett, head of SIS, the secret intelligence service (also known as MI6), that one of the July 21 suspects was tracked on a trip to Pakistan just months before the attempted bombings.
Until now it was not known that any of the July 21 suspects, who are awaiting trial, were familiar to the intelligence services. It has been disclosed that MI5 had placed two of the July 7 bombers under surveillance before their attack, but judged them not to be a threat.
The new documents show that MI5, which is responsible for national security, allowed the July 21 suspect to travel to Pakistan after he was detained and interviewed at a British airport. Once in Pakistan he was monitored by SIS, which gathers intelligence overseas.
MI5 then conducted what the leaked memo says was "a low-level short-term investigation" into the suspect, who cannot be named for legal reasons.
It stopped monitoring him because it said "the Pakistani authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance".
Scarlett revealed details of the operation to the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) last November. The committee, comprising MPs and peers picked by Tony Blair, is conducting a secret inquiry into the "lessons learnt" from the July attacks. It is due to be completed in April.
The Scarlett memo - marked top secret - was leaked by the dissident officers who want a public inquiry similar to that undertaken in America after the 9/11 attacks.
They believe it would highlight the need for MI5 and SIS to be given more resources to deal with Al-Qaeda. They are critical of Blair, who has ruled out an inquiry saying it would distract the security services from fighting terrorism.
The leaked memo refers to Scarlett as C - the traditional codename for the head of SIS. It states: "On the events of July itself, and the question of whether intelligence was missed, C noted that SIS had previously been involved in an earlier investigation of one of the July 21 (suspects) in Pakistan.
"This had been at the Security Service (MI5)'s behest and should be discussed with MI5."
Another document, MI5's November 2005 memo The July Bombings and the Agencies' Response, has also been shown to The Sunday Times.
It names the suspect who was the subject of the 2004 investigation and shifts responsibility for the decision to stop monitoring him to the Pakistani intelligence authorities.
"(The suspect) had been the subject of a low-level short-term investigation concerning a visit he made to Pakistan after he was interviewed on departure from the UK," it states.
"However, the Pakistani authorities assessed that he was doing nothing of significance in a terrorist context."
The assessment echoes a decision by MI5 to halt surveillance on two of the July 7 bombers 16 months before the attacks. Both were filmed and taped by MI5 agents as they met two men allegedly plotting to carry out a terrorist attack in England.
After making what an official called "a quick assessment", MI5 concluded Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were not immediate threats. As the MI5 memo puts it: "Intelligence at the time suggested Khan's purpose was financial crime rather than terrorist activity."
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said: "These leaks show that the need for an independent inquiry is incontrovertible."
There is a growing consensus in Whitehall that the intelligence services will be seen to have made critical errors in failing to assess adequately the threat from at least three of the July suspects.
Scarlett conceded to the ISC that his agency had reacted too slowly. "Summing up the position before July 2005, C noted SIS were conscious of the size of the target, but equally conscious of what we did not know; we were thinly spread in North and East Africa; we were looking at new ways of increasing our reach; and we had sought funding to grow as fast as we thought feasible.
"Turning to the lessons learnt, C noted that SIS had understood the nature of the threat and that there was a great deal that we did not know. SIS had developed strategies to meet this threat.
"The attacks had shown that our strategies were correct, but needed to be implemented more extensively and more quickly," the memo noted.
Scarlett said that even before the attacks, SIS had planned to expand overseas. "C concluded by explaining how post-July SIS were speeding up implementation of the pre-July strategy." He said the agency did not want more money for staff.
The dissident officers believe the buck-passing revealed in the memos demonstrates that there should be closer co-operation between the agencies.
They support calls for a unified department of homeland security, along the lines suggested by Gordon Brown, the chancellor, this month.
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Diana driver was secret informer
David Leppard
The Sunday Times
February 26, 2006
THE chauffeur of the car in which Diana, Princess of Wales died was working for the French secret service, the British team reinvestigating her death has been told.
The inquiry - headed by Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner - into the Paris car crash that killed Diana is now trying to obtain the chauffeur's files from French intelligence but is being delayed by the reluctance of the authorities to hand them over.
Stevens's team has asked the country's domestic intelligence service, the DST, to surrender all its "agent handling" files on Henri Paul, the chauffeur, to establish whether he was doing any work for his French intelligence bosses on the night of the crash.
Paul crashed the car, killing himself, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed in a tunnel in central Paris in 1997. It has previously been claimed - and strenuously denied - that he worked for SIS, the secret intelligence service, also known as MI6.
Well-placed sources say requests by the Stevens team for information about Paul's activities on the day of the crash, and demands for complete records of tests taken on his blood after he died, have become bogged down by the "incredible bureaucracy" of the French justice system.
The delays mean the £4m inquiry, ordered by the royal coroner in 2004, is certain to stretch into the latter part of this year and may not be completed before 2007.
French police concluded the crash was an accident, caused by Paul driving the Mercedes in which Diana was travelling at high speed away from paparazzi while under the influence of drink and drugs.
The role of Paul, who was deputy head of security at the Paris Ritz hotel, and what he was doing in the hours up to the crash are central to the inquiry. Mohamed al-Fayed, the Harrods tycoon and Dodi's father who also owns the Paris Ritz, has claimed Diana and his son were murdered by British intelligence.
Scotland Yard sources disclosed last week that the French government had finally confirmed Paul's employment by the DST during discussions last year.
A Yard source said: "We now know he was working for the French secret service and the French have got to give us access to the records of what he was doing. It's an issue. We want to know where he was and what he was doing that evening."
After Paul's death French police discovered he controlled secret accounts containing more than £100,000 in 14 banks across France.
The Stevens inquiry has been complicated by the apparent refusal of the French authorities to allow Yard detectives to see several key witnesses to the accident.
Stevens has said he is determined to "leave no stone unturned" in his investigation. He needs to establish beyond all doubt whether or not Paul was drunk and under the influence of powerful antidepressant drugs when he crashed the Mercedes.
Concerned that there may have been a forensic mix-up, Stevens is trying to persuade the French public prosecutor's office to disclose all records of how Paul's blood was analysed. The Yard team has also had to wait for a new report by Dr Gilbert Pepin, the French toxicologist who analysed Paul's blood after the crash.
After a wrangle over the size of his fee for acting as an expert witness, Pepin has only recently supplied Stevens with a full account of his analysis of the blood taken from Paul's body as it lay in the central Paris mortuary.
Stevens is also waiting to interview the female laboratory technician who took the blood from Paul's body.
Fayed has claimed that MI6 agents visited the morgue on the night of the crash to plant evidence suggesting Paul was drunk, by substituting his blood for the alcohol-contaminated blood of a suicide victim. Sources say there were 25 bodies in the morgue that night.
After two years of investigation, Stevens still takes the view that Diana's death was an accident. However, he is conscious of the fact that many people still believe she was murdered.
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Monsters, Inc.
by Samuel Bostaph
February 27, 2006
Lewrockwell.com
In 2001, an animated film from Pixar Animation Studios was released and became extremely popular with both adults and children. Monsters, Inc. is set in the city of Monstropolis, where all monsters live. A corporation that gives the title to the movie employs "scarers," monsters who venture out of the city every night to enter the human world through the closets of children. Their job is to scare children into screaming because the screams can be collected and used to generate the electricity that powers Monstropolis. The children themselves, and all their things, are believed to be toxic to monsters and must be kept out of the city.
One night a furry, blue monster named Sulley is followed by a child through her closet door into Monstropolis and panic ensues. In the midst of it, Sulley discovers that she isn't toxic at all. His frantic attempts to conceal the girl he nicknames "Boo" and to return her to the human world only make her laugh. When she laughs, power surges brighten the city lights.
Sulley's boss, Mr. Waternoose, knows that children are not toxic and schemes to increase the energy available to the city. He will have children kidnapped and brought back to Monstropolis, where scream machines will suck out all their screams.
Monsters, Inc. is a useful analogue for understanding the main purpose that President George W. Bush's "war on terror" serves. Since September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq have served as useful monsters in generating screams from the American public. The resulting enhancements in federal government power have enabled the Bush administration to use the military forces of the United States to invade and occupy both Afghanistan and Iraq and to install puppet governments in both countries. It is inconceivable that police in any city in the United States or members of any federal civilian or military agency would be routinely permitted to kill anyone harboring or even being in the vicinity of a domestic fugitive. The enhancement of federal power that the "war on terror" has provided has enabled the adoption of Rules of Engagement by U.S. military forces that permit exactly that treatment of civilian targets in Iraq. The result has been the killing without distinction of an estimated 100,000 Iraqi men, women, and children.
The enhancement of federal power provided by the "war on terror" has also led to the incarceration of military captives for indefinite periods, the violation of Geneva Convention strictures on the treatment of prisoners of war, the deliberate torture of prisoners, the kidnapping of foreign nationals, and the "rendition" of kidnap victims to other countries where they can be tortured out of the view of the U.S. media. Even the recent revelation of the unlawful spying on U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency has resulted in more public expressions of support than condemnation.
George W. Bush is our Mr. Waternoose (although the cartoon character looks more like Dick Cheney). Unfortunately, he and the "scarer" monsters in his administration have succeeded in strapping the American public to a scream machine and are extracting more screams to provide more power to the executive branch. Their latest ploy is the demonizing of Iran, the creation of yet another monster for further power enhancement.
American foreign policy would better serve the domestic needs of peace and security if it were used to cultivate friends rather than enemies and create trading partners rather than areas to pillage. One of the first positive steps in this direction would be to withdraw all military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and to close every U.S. base in every foreign country. U.S. troops should be on U.S. soil unless they are fighting a declared war that someone else started.
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When Uncle Sam comes marching in
By Herbert Docena
Asia Times
26/02/2006
SULU, Philippines - About 5,500 US soldiers are coming to the Philippines this month, the latest and reportedly the largest batch in the continuing and uninterrupted deployment of US troops to the country since the "global war on terror" was launched after September 11, 2001.
About 250 of them will join an undetermined number of US troops already in Sulu, an island in the southern Philippines where the Abu Sayyaf group supposedly fled after being driven out of neighboring Basilan island, where US troops were also previously deployed. If official pronouncements are to be believed, US troops are coming only to train Filipino soldiers, give away medicine, build schools and even give veterinary services.
According to people who claim to have actually seen them in action, however, US troops who have been coming to the country are doing more than that. The target: not a terrorist group but legitimate liberation movements in the country.
The never-ending games
In 1991, the Philippine Senate voted to close down what were once the largest US military installations in Asia, signaling an end to permanent US military presence in the country. While there were regular US deployments to the country even after the closure of the bases, these were limited to small, short, and close-ended training exercises with Filipino soldiers as part of the Philippines' military alliance with the United States. From 1991 to 2000, not one US aircraft or warship came.
Since September 11, however, the United States has maintained what former US ambassador to Manila Francis Ricciardone has described as a "semi-continuous" presence in the country. The prefix "semi" may be unnecessary, since not a day has passed when not one US soldier is in the country; on any given day, between one and more than 5,000 US troops are deployed somewhere in the archipelago. Not only has the duration of the "war games" been extended to as long as nine months, for the first time, they began being held in actual conflict areas with live enemies whom US troops are allowed to shoot in case they get fired at.
For the past four years, there have been about 17-24 training exercises annually; this year, that number jumps to 37. Apart from the exercises, US troops are also engaged in different and overlapping humanitarian and civil- works programs under different names scattered all over the country. Aside from stationing troops, the US also began enjoying access to various ports, airports, depots and other military infrastructure throughout the territory, under the Mutual Logistics and Servicing Agreement signed in November 2001.
At one level, US and Philippine officials justified the deployments as part of the "global war on terror". With the presence of the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines and its alleged links with terrorist groups Jemaah Islamiah and al-Qaeda, various US officials have repeatedly branded the Philippines as "the next Afghanistan" or a "doormat for terrorism in the region" - a charge Philippine officials both echo and deny, depending on the circumstances.
At the local level, however, officials have tended to play down the counter-terrorist aims of the deployments and instead emphasize their accompanying civil or humanitarian projects.
The Philippine constitution prohibits the presence of foreign military troops in the country without a treaty. While the Supreme Court has qualified this and allowed the entry of foreign troops for military exercises, it bans their involvement in actual combat. The Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement, which are often invoked to justify the US military presence, also do not allow participation in actual fighting. So legally to justify and counter formidable domestic opposition to the US deployments, Philippine officials have consistently maintained that the troops keep coming for a variety of reasons - but never to engage in war.
The unconquered colony
Involving about 1,300 US troops, including 160 special-operations forces, the first and most controversial of the new type of post-September 11 "exercises" was held in Basilan, an island in the southern Philippines, where the Abu Sayyaf was holding foreign, including American, hostages. It was the largest US deployment to Mindanao since the US war of pacification against the Moros (predominantly Muslim Malay tribespeople of the southern Philippines) from 1901-13.
Tagged a "terrorist" group by the United States, dismissed as a bandit group by some and suspected by others to be a creation of the military, the Abu Sayyaf could not be understood accurately if not in the context of the long-running struggle by the Bangsamoro against the central Philippine government. The Bangsamoro, who are mostly Muslim people from the southernmost parts of what is now considered the Philippine nation-state, claim a national and historical identity distinct from that of the mostly Christian northern and central areas. Once ruled under independent sultanates prior to the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the 16th century, the Bangsamoro were never fully ruled over by the Spanish throughout their three centuries of colonization. It is often said that the Spanish sold what they never really possessed to the Americans at the end of the 19th century.
What followed was a long - and still ongoing - attempt to subordinate the area and its people under the Philippine nation-state. Perhaps the most decisive of these efforts was a massive resettlement policy in which mostly Christian and mostly landless people from the north were encouraged to migrate to the south. Filipino landlords and elites, multinational corporations and settlers claimed ownership of the lands that historically belonged to the Moros or the non-Muslim and non-Christian indigenous groups in the area.
In 1913, Muslims constituted 98% of the region's population and "owned" all the lands prior to colonization. But so successful was the long-running resettlement program that by the time war broke out during the Moro uprising in the 1970s, Muslims accounted for a minority of the population but a majority of the landless. They accounted for only 40% of the population and owned less than 17% of the land, with more than 80% of them landless. Today, the Muslim-majority areas are the poorest provinces in the country.
In the late 1960s, the Philippine military - widely believed to be supported by loggers and politicians - organized and financed paramilitary groups that massacred entire Muslim communities to drive them from their lands. This finally sparked massive, organized resistance on the part of the Bangsamoros (Bangsamoro is the name of the area claimed by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF). In 1972, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF, from which the MILF split in 1978) formally emerged, with widespread legitimacy and popularity among Muslims. War followed, but even after more than 100,000 were dead, neither the government nor the MNLF had won decisively.
A protracted period of negotiations ensued. The MNLF eventually gave up its goal of establishing an independent state by accepting a degree of autonomy under the Philippine government. Hawks in the military and other forces that had an interest in keeping control of the Bangsamoro consistently attempted to deprive the Moros of what they had settled for. The peace talks dragged, and faltered. But in 1996, the MNLF and the government forged what they called - or hoped would be - a final peace agreement in which the MNLF would once and for all lay down its arms and the government would give real power to the Bangsamoro under Philippine sovereignty.
The invincible enemy
It is in this context that what later came to be known as the Abu Sayyaf first emerged. It started out in the early 1990s as a loose grouping of mostly former MNLF leaders and their followers who split from the MNLF after it negotiated for autonomy with the central government. Disenchanted with the MNLF leadership under Nur Misuari, the group attracted mostly young recruits. With the MNLF lying low, with Misuari abroad, but with certain interests continuing to sabotage the negotiations and the military continuing to commit human-rights violations against Moros, the group filled the vacuum vacated by the MNLF and was seen by many as taking over the struggle on behalf of the Moros at the period when it emerged.
Initially, the group launched operations to push for political demands, including the banning in the Sulu seas of large fishing trawlers from the north that were displacing Moro fishermen in the south. While the group eventually decided to conduct kidnap operations, it was supposedly divided on whether only to make political demands or also to ask for ransom in exchange for releasing hostages. After its founder and ideologue's death in 1998 and after reportedly being infiltrated by agents planted by the military and by politicians, what was once a highly political group became increasingly known for its high-profile kidnapping and bombing operations. After abducting mostly foreign Catholic priests, tourists, journalists and local residents, the group raided a diving resort in neighboring Malaysia in 2000, taking hostage mostly European tourists and local workers. In May 2001, the group kidnapped another batch of hostages, including three Americans.
US Special Forces then joined the hunt for the Abu Sayyaf in February 2002. Prior to the US entry, Philippine officials discounted, if not altogether ruling them out, the reported links between the group and the so-called al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden. As late as November 2001, presidential spokesman Rigoberto Tiglao said of alleged links between the Abu Sayyaf and al-Qaeda, "Of course there are historical ties, but our investigations have yielded no signs that these international terrorists are at work here." The national security adviser then confirmed that there was no proof al-Qaeda was financing the Abu Sayyaf. Since then, however, the group's alleged association has simply been assumed as a given; almost all media reports now prefix the Abu Sayyaf as "al-Qaeda-linked" or mention its alleged association with the regional grouping Jemaah Islamiah.
While such connections to external groups could not be altogether ruled out, the ideological affinity of the Abu Sayyaf with them and the extent of their operational cooperation are widely disputed and meet with great skepticism in the country. By 2003, even officials from different countries interviewed by the New York Times admitted that their information on al-Qaeda presence in the Philippines was "sketchy". The Washington Post also reported that Abu Sayyaf's alleged ties to al-Qaeda "appeared dated and tenuous". While US officials continued to trumpet Jemaah Islamiah's growing links to Philippine-based groups, a White House assessment concluded that the Philippines had "more or less contained the terror group in Mindanao".
With numerous and credible accusations that the Philippine military has been conniving with the Abu Sayyaf, the group's supposed lines to the generals resonate more than its alleged links with bin Laden. For many, the Abu Sayyaf is understood less as a branch of a global "Islamic terrorist network" and more as the fringe of a local secessionist movement - its survival more dependent on the solution of the Bangsamoro issue and less on the intensification of military operations.
'By far the most dangerous group in the country today'
The Abu Sayyaf hostage-taking ended in June 2002 and since then, there have been contradictory assessments by US and Philippine officials as to the threat posed by the group. At times, the Philippine government has tended to portray it as a spent force even as other officials and analysts talk of the group as if it were stronger than ever.
The supposed number of Abu Sayyaf members, and the accompanying pronouncements, tell the tale: in December 2001, the chief military commander in the south said there were only 80 members. A Department of Defense report in late 2002, after the deployment of Americans, put the number at 250, down from 800 in 2001. A few months after, just as the government had announced the deployment of US troops to Sulu, the military chief of staff said a review of military documents showed that the membership is actually bigger, closer to 500.
Near the end of the US deployment to Basilan, US Army Brigadier-General Donald Wurster remarked that the Abu Sayyaf "are non-functional as an organization". And Philippine presidential spokesman Ignacio Bunye said, "It is widely acknowledged that the training, advice and assistance we received in Basilan [from the US] were critical factors that led to the defeat of the Abu Sayyaf there." A senior US diplomat was quoted by the New York Times as saying that the Abu Sayyaf is "practically null and void".
In May 2004, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo triumphantly said the Abu Sayyaf "can no longer resuscitate itself under other guises or names". As of June 2004, a government report states that the group counts only 508 members, down from 1,300 in 2001. Last August, just as some military officials were blaming Abu Sayyaf members for a spate of bombings in the south, newly installed army chief Major-General Hermogenes Esperon said, "We are on full offensive and the Abu Sayyaf are not likely to be able to launch any offensive that could inflict harm to our people."
Almost all the Abu Sayyaf leaders have now been killed. Those who remain are those leaders and factions that are more political than criminal and which reportedly objected to the kidnapping operations. According to people in Sulu, the primary reason the Abu Sayyaf is still able to draw people to its fold is that the military continues to commit atrocities against Moros and victims feel the only way to get justice is by joining armed groups. Stop the military atrocities, they say, and the group will fade away. Despite the limited popular support, the Abu Sayyaf's ranks are depleted; it is isolated, with few sources of funds, and has very little capacity to inflict damage.
And yet, if one listens to the government and the media, the Abu Sayyaf is still everywhere and nowhere; everyone and no one. Everywhere because almost all "terrorist" incidents are still routinely blamed on the group. And yet nowhere because - despite more than 50,000 troops based in the south running after them for more than 10 years and despite the US military's help - the Abu Sayyaf continues to elude pursuit and to be cited as the justification for military offensives in the region, for efforts to institute more repressive laws throughout the country and, bizarrely, even for justifying a raid on a house where evidence of alleged electoral fraud against Arroyo and Vice President Noli de Castro was stored. Everyone because almost all of those killed or arrested by the military as part of the anti-terror campaign are labeled Abu Sayyaf members. And yet seemingly no one, because - for all those arrested or killed - the Abu Sayyaf lives on and continues to be projected as, in the words of National Security Adviser Norberto Gonzales, "by far the most dangerous group in the country today".
The right to name thine enemy
Last February, the Abu Sayyaf, according to the military, struck again. Four people were killed in Maimbung town in Sulu, including a pregnant woman and a child, in what the military called an encounter with the group. People who know the casualties and other people in the province maintained otherwise. Frustrated by government's failure or refusal to look into the incident and other previous human-rights violations allegedly committed by the military, the MNLF attacked military camps, sparking clashes that lasted for a week and that killed more than 70 people. As early as then, a US military official confirmed the presence of US troops on the island during the fighting but denied that they were involved in combat.
In April, more groups of US soldiers started arriving in some of the very towns in Sulu that the Philippine military claims to be the base of the Abu Sayyaf and that would later be the site of military offensives. The Americans were supposedly on a mission to conduct an "assessment" of Sulu's infrastructure ostensibly for the civil projects they were going to implement. Among the things they checked out was whether US military ships and planes could use the island's infrastructure. US officials declined to specify exactly how many US soldiers were involved. By November, six months after they arrived, the Americans were still conducting their "assessment".
On November 11, Philippine marines attacked what they initially again claimed were members of the Abu Sayyaf in Indanan town in Sulu. Almost all media reports of the fighting followed the military's story line. Those who were being attacked - and who were fighting back - claim they are not members of the Abu Sayyaf but of the MNLF. The Philippine military then revised its story by reporting that it was also clashing with members of the so-called "Misuari Renegade Group" (MRG) or "Misuari Breakaway Group" (MBG) because this group was allegedly coddling members of the Abu Sayyaf. The MNLF, however, flatly rejects these labels imposed on it by the military. It questions why the military should reserve for itself the right to rename it and why the media should unquestioningly follow the military's labels.
Various accounts of what transpired in that offensive challenge the military's version of events. According to Brigadier-General Alexander Aleo, chief of the military's Sulu-based task force assigned to root out remaining Abu Sayyaf members, fighting erupted when patrolling soldiers were attacked by Abu Sayyaf members. Witnesses and residents in the area, however, claim the fighting was initiated by the military when it forcibly entered a known MNLF camp, despite warnings from the area's village official that it was indeed an MNLF camp and that the MNLF was not just going to sit back and watch them.
Supposing the military was really chasing Abu Sayyaf members, there are questions as to why the armed forces insisted on passing through the MNLF camp even if there was a shorter and more direct route to the area where the military claims the Abu Sayyaf members were located. Even Esperon was quoted in newspapers, four days after the fighting, openly contradicting his subordinates in the field by saying there was no confirmation that the MNLF were protecting the Abu Sayyaf.
Invoking the 1996 peace agreement, which they claim allows them to maintain their camps, the MNLF leadership said they were forced to defend themselves when the marines intruded into their territory. The MNLF's military chief of staff, Jul Amri Misuari, believes the attack was a deliberate attempt by hawks in the military to sabotage back-channel talks between them and the government. General Nehemias Pajarito, the commander who supervised the offensives in November, disputes this, maintaining that the MNLF is not allowed to run camps and that the marines were not crossing any bounds when they decided to enter their area. He also said that while his forces were aware that they were entering what he calls the "MRG/MBG" camps, they went ahead anyway despite the risk of provoking the "MRG/MBG" if only to seek the Abu Sayyaf.
'Dirty tricks' department
Certain sections in the Philippine military have long held that the Abu Sayyaf is the "dirty tricks department" of the MNLF, a charge that the MNLF has consistently denied. What the MNLF stands to gain from joining ranks with the Abu Sayyaf is not clear. Associating with the Abu Sayyaf would only have given the MNLF's opponents in the government - those factions who continue to insist on wiping the MNLF out once and for all - justification to undermine the 1996 peace agreement and continue military offensives against the organization, something the MNLF presumably doesn't want, as shown by its insistence that the peace agreement be respected.
Moreover, the MNLF could presumably have calculated that in this "global war on terror", associating with the Abu Sayyaf would only train the guns of the world's only superpowers at them - a prospect the MNLF might not necessarily relish, especially in its current condition.
The Philippine military, on the other hand, seems to have much to gain from blurring the lines. Given the prevailing opinion against the Abu Sayyaf, to claim that one is running after that group - or those who are coddling it - is a sure way to garner public support, elude scrutiny and label those who question the military's actions as, in the words of Arroyo, "Abu Sayyaf-lovers". Under the "war on terror", to claim to fight against the Abu Sayyaf, even as one is really targeting other groups, is a way to argue for a bigger budget from the national government and more military largesse from the United States.
In fact, a group of Filipino soldiers who staged a mutiny in July 2003 had accused the military top brass of setting off bombs in Mindanao to pin the blame on "terrorists" and thereby demand more military aid from the United States. Among all other countries in the region, the Philippine armed forces has received the most dramatic increase in foreign military funding from the US since 2001.
In January 2003, the military launched an offensive in Pikit, Cotabato, initially claiming it was chasing the Pentagon gang, a kidnap-for-ransom group, only to admit later that it was really going after the MILF. After the fighting, military officials couldn't identify the alleged Pentagon gang members from among the casualties. An intelligence officer was quoted as saying the threat posed by the Pentagon gang was exaggerated and that the military's oft-repeated allegations of supposed links between the gang and the MILF were inconclusive.
Training in action
In pursuing the so-called Abu Sayyaf members, the military assembled about 1,500 soldiers. Military planes dropped 500-to-1,000-pound (227-454-kilogram) bombs. Troops bombarded the area with howitzers and mortars for three days. In the end, Pajarito admitted that of the 200 Abu Sayyaf members the military claimed to be pursuing, his forces were not able to retrieve any of the bodies of those they had killed in their offensives.
Through all that, various civilian witnesses claim US forces were in the middle of the action. They say they spotted US soldiers in full battle gear together with their Filipino counterparts aboard trucks and Humvees at the battlefield. One witness reported seeing at least four US soldiers aboard a military truck proceed to the combat zone. Another report states that US troops were seen aboard rubber boats along the shores very close to the scene of the fighting. Others claim to have sighted US soldiers helping their Filipino counterparts mount heavy artillery, operate military equipment and remove land mines. Throughout the fighting, a US military spy plane was seen constantly hovering above the area where fighting raged. One spy plane crashed and was later recovered by farmers in the area.
There were even reports that at least four US soldiers were killed in the operations, including one identified as "Sergeant Grant". Witnesses allegedly saw their remains in body bags being transported by helicopter back to the military bases. This cannot be verified independently, however, unless the US military releases the complete and uncensored list of its casualties in its operations. In October 2002, one US Special Forces soldier was actually killed in a bombing in Zamboanga city, supposedly by the Abu Sayyaf, but this incident only made it to the foreign news - and only as an aside - a few months later.
Witnesses who attest to seeing US forces during the operations have executed sworn affidavits and have testified at a closed session of a Philippine congressional committee that went to Sulu to hear the allegations. But their allegations seem not to have caught the national attention. Other witnesses decline to speak on record because, on an island where massacres and killings almost always end up unresolved, they are afraid the military would seek revenge if they refute its claims.
Is the US engaged in 'actual combat' in Mindanao?
US officials dismissed the allegations as "absolutely not true". While they admit US soldiers were indeed on the island during the fighting, US Army Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Zimmer, public affairs officer of the Joint Special Operation Task Force Philippines, said, "We are not in any way involved in military operations conducted by the Philippine armed forces." According to Zimmer, the Americans' mission has not changed: "We are there to advise, assist and to train the armed forces" and "also share information with counterparts".
Philippine military officials, however, corroborated some of the witnesses' claims. One colonel who refused to be identified was quoted by Reuters as saying US troops have been asked to clear land mines. Pajarito confirmed witness reports the soldiers were where they were seen. According to him, at the time of the fighting, he was asked by the mayor of the municipality of Indanan to fix minor damage to a water pipe but, since his troops didn't have the resources nor the expertise to do so, he asked the US soldiers for help instead. The US troops hitched with them on the way to the battlefield, he said, so that Filipino troops would not have to provide a separate security convoy for them.
Such an explanation has only served to raise more questions regarding the US troops' actual role in the November clashes, in particular, and their mission to Sulu in general. Why do fully armed US soldiers - and not civilians - have to conduct "humanitarian" missions? Why was the minor water-pipe damage such a pressing concern in a time of war and why was no less than the top general leading the war worrying about it? Why did US soldiers - and not Filipino soldiers or civilians - have to fix the water pipes? Weren't the US troops aware that fighting was going on? Did they know the Filipino soldiers they tagged along with were attacking fighters of a national-liberation movement, or were they led to believe they were running after a "terrorist" group? Or were they aware that the fighting was against the MNLF but they went along anyway? And what interest, if any, does the United States have in joining the fight against the MNLF?
Humanitarian spy planes, medical assault ships
This is not the first time reports of involvement by US forces in fighting surfaced. In a little-known incident, the Los Angeles Times reported that US troops fired back and killed guerrillas when they were in Basilan in June 2002. In June 2005, US forces also allegedly joined the Philippine military in operations against Abu Sayyaf members in Maguindanao province in mainland Mindanao - even when no training exercises or civil projects were announced.
A Bantay Ceasefire mission, a coalition of groups monitoring the Philippines armed forces and the MILF, reported recovering empty MRE (meals ready to eat) packages that were issued to US soldiers in the area. As in Sulu, a P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft for pinpointing enemy positions was sighted and was even caught on video. An Associated Press report suggested the operations were "backed at times by US surveillance aircraft". A Philippine military official denied this, saying the US is not permitted to conduct reconnaissance flights in the country, but claimed the surveillance aircraft may have been used for a "humanitarian" mission, not for spying. Another spy plane that had crashed and gone missing would also be recovered a few months later in Central Luzon.
At times last year, unannounced appearances of US military ships and planes appeared to have caught Philippine government and military officials by surprise, giving rise to questions as to the extent by which the US military informs Manila of its actions within the country's territory. In October, for example, an 11,000-ton US military ship was spotted off Basilan near Zamboanga city. Foreign Ministry and military officials gave the ship different names and conflicting explanations as to its mission. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson initially claimed the US didn't inform the government of the presence of the ship, only to retract that later. US officials eventually stated the vessels had come for medical, dental and civil-works projects.
The foreign media have a description for all these mysterious sightings of soldiers, spy planes and ships. According to the Associated Press, the Philippines is fighting the "war on terror" with "covert US non-combat assistance" in Sulu. Another key US ally in the region, Australia, is also helping out by sending personnel who are involved in what Australian media refer to as a "covert operation" in the country.
'Emerging targets for preemptive war'
The possibility US troops are not just playing games, building schools or handing out pills in Mindanao is not such a wild allegation. In an editorial questioning the vagueness of the stated objectives of US troop deployments abroad, the New York Times had earlier warned, "The Pentagon has a long and ignoble history of announcing that it is dispatching American forces abroad as 'advisers' when they are really meant to be combatants."
That these "advisers" are doing more than looking after pets is not a conspiracy theory: certain factions in Washington are known to have been agitating for more action since 2002. Some of the highest-ranking US military officers, such as former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Richard Myers and Pacific Command commander Admiral Thomas Fargo, were reported to have been advocating a "longer and more intense mission" in the country after the initial deployment to Basilan.
Outside the US military, there have been calls for US forces to assume a more direct role in the fighting. In an opinion column for the International Herald Tribune, Brett M Drecker wrote: "If Washington and Manila are serious about eliminating Abu Sayyaf, the US Special Forces should be given the assignment. The terrorist group consists of about 100 poorly trained amateurs. They would be no match for American soldiers already in the Philippines, but they are still eluding Filipino troops."
In an editorial published after the July 2003 mutiny by Filipino soldiers, the influential conservative Wall Street Journal echoed the suggestion, saying, "If the US wants to defeat terrorists in places like Mindanao and Basilan, it should insist on a more hands-on role in the partnership with the Philippine military."
The Philippines has since been included on the list of "emerging targets for preemptive war" of a new US military unit authorized to conduct clandestine operations abroad, according to a memorandum prepared by the same Myers who had been pushing for deeper involvement in the country. Seymour Hersh, a prominent investigative journalist, has written about a US presidential order that allow the Pentagon "to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat". Though the list of countries was not revealed, the description fits that of the Philippines: "A number of the countries are friendly to the US and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism."
'We can always cover it up'
When US troops were first supposed to come to Sulu in February 2003, they had already announced that they were going to fight. A US defense official said then, "This is not an exercise, this will be a no-holds-barred effort." Reportedly worried about the possibility of suffering casualties and not being able to explain them to the public if they presented the operations as mere games, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided to call a spade a spade. He said: "Whatever it is we do, we describe in language that is consistent with how we do things. And we do not tend to train people in combat."
That triggered a public outcry in Manila, prompting denials from Philippine officials. This was despite the fact that a Justice Department undersecretary had already previously declared that the government would allow Americans to participate in combat. After Pentagon pronouncements, then Philippine defense secretary Angelo Reyes stuck to the official justification, saying, "It's a question of definitions and semantics," implying Manila and Washington were both referring to the same thing but just had different names for it.
But however the operations are labeled, the fact is that US forces in the Philippines are sent to actual conflict areas with the right to shoot back at real enemies. Whether merely providing military aid to the Philippine military to fight enemies, giving them training and advice, sharing information or actually joining them in the battlefield constitutes "participation in combat" is, as Reyes put it, a question of semantics.
Though it was eventually called off, the US government never took back its characterization of the planned deployment as an actual combat operation. According to a report by the Los Angeles Times, US officials maintained their Filipino counterparts asked them to lie to the public in case Americans were killed or wounded in action. "We could always cover it up," one Filipino official was quoted as telling them.
'Like rats in a trap'
With the recent military offensives and with successive unexplained and unresolved killings gripping the island in the past few weeks, Sulu is again teetering on the precipice of full-scale war. With spy planes and helicopters hovering above and naval ships berthing and dislodging military equipment, residents of Sulu say it feels like the 1970s all over again - but this time, with American GIs around. One thing is for sure: if true, the involvement of US troops in attacks against the MNLF will not push the island away from the edge.
Even before the November offensives, the 1996 peace agreement between the government and the MNLF already was in tatters. It began disintegrating even before 2001 when open clashes resumed between the MNLF and the government and Misuari was subsequently arrested by the government.
According to the government, only factions loyal to Misuari - the so-called MRG/MBG - attacked the military after the administration refused to support Misuari's candidacy for governorship of the Muslim-majority autonomous region. According to MNLF fighters, however, they were finally provoked into taking action then by successive military attacks on MNLF forces despite the ceasefire, continuing military atrocities against Moro and continuing government and military attempts to render meaningless the concept of autonomy.
While Misuari, who remains in prison, has ordered the MNLF to maintain "peace and order" for the duration of the US troops' indefinite stay, MNLF commanders said they will remain on the defensive and will not just sit back when they are again attacked. Further military offensives in the name of fighting "terrorism" will only escalate the fighting and, as has been the case for the past 30 years, they will likely result in more human-rights violations and killing of innocent civilians. It will do nothing to address the roots of the conflict.
According to one official, the MNLF is not only reconsolidating but also, because of the failure of the 30 years of peace talks, becoming more radicalized. Having learned its lessons from the past and having cast off its dependence on outside support, the MNLF, the official says, is now even stronger and more determined to carry on with what the Bangsamoro have been doing for the past 500 years: resisting and fighting. Even the military concedes that the movement continues to enjoy wide popular support.
And as American GIs roam Sulu, many residents can't help but remember what they did the last time American soldiers were around. In March 1906, about 500 US troops supported by Filipino members of the constabulary climbed up Bud Dahu, an extinct volcanic mountain in Sulu, and surrounded at least 900 Moros who had fled to the bowl of its crater to escape from and resist the rule of the US colonizers in the towns below.
From the rim of the crater, US troops bombarded the Moros below for four days - "like rats in a trap", wrote American novelist Mark Twain. Following their commander Gen Leonard Wood's order to "kill or capture those savages", US troops spared no one, not even women and children - "not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother".
A hundred years ago, the Americans also said they had only come to help.
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Tens of thousands march in Spain to protest ETA talks
AFP
February 25, 2006
MADRID - Tens of thousands of people marched in downtown Madrid to protest the government's anti-terrorism policies and its willingness to negotiate with the armed Basque separatist group ETA.
Crying "Zapatero, resign!", referring to Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, marchers mobilised by the Association of the Victims of Terrorism (AVT) waved placards scrawled with "Not in my name!" and "Memory, dignity and justice".
Others in the demonstration, which also had the support of the right-wing opposition Popular Party (PP) and the Catholic Church, bore large photos of some of the 800 people killed by ETA during its 40-year campaign to establish a Basque state in northeast Spain and southwest France.
The PP-led Madrid government said 1.4 million people turned out for the two-hour demonstration, more than 10 times the police estimate of 110,000.
The AVT and right-wing parties accuse Zapatero's socialist government of negotiating secretly with ETA.
The government denies this and says ETA must lay down its arms as a precondition for any talks.
"Each time we've wanted to talk to ETA, they have reinforced themselves," one of the marchers, Silvia Mera, a historian, told AFP.
"I mainly came to support the victims of terrorism, but also to protest against all of Zapatero's policies," said Jose Aguado, a psychoanalyst.
"If ETA gives up its weapons, we could talk to them and go easy on those who have not shed blood," he added.
Former PP prime minister Jose Maria Aznar and his erstwhile interior minister Angel Acebas were among those at the march.
AVT rented 200 coaches to bring people to the capital from all over Spain with the aim of matching the success of a rally it staged last July, which drew hundreds of thousands of people to the capital.
Public opinion in Spain about ETA has become even more polarised as Zapatero began talking in recent months about entering into a peace process and hinting "the beginning of the end" of the group was in sight.
But ETA put Zapatero on the back foot one week ago when it called on Basques to take "new steps" towards peace but failed to declare an expected truce.
On Saturday it released another statement saying that "respect (of the right) of all citizens of the Basque Country to decide" their future was key to resolving the conflict.
ETA's 40-page statement also spoke positively of a limited ceasefire it has observed in Catalonia since 2004, saying it had sparked debate and changed opinions.
While ETA has not killed anybody since May 2003, it has set off three bombs over the last 12 days, targeting Basque companies.
Like most people in Spain, the organisers of Saturday's march are against any political concessions, such as offering the recognition of self-determination, or pardons for prisoners, in return for an ETA ceasefire.
Such opinions are however not unanimous. Some ETA victims, most of them Basque socialist legislators, on Wednesday gave their support to Zapatero's efforts "in the hope that future generations might live in peace and freedom."
A pacifist Basque group called That's Enough said it would not demonstrate against any government.
The widow of Fernando Baesa, a Basque socialist assassinated by ETA six years ago, released a statement Saturday saying such demonstrations were divisive and only strengthened those bent on violence.
Former prime minister Felipe Gonzalez, a socialist in power between 1982 and 1996 who, like Aznar, tried to negotiate with ETA, called for unity on Friday, saying the "opposition had a duty to back the government, even when it is wrong."
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France Fights Panic From Bird Flu Outbreak
By ELAINE GANLEY
Associated Press Writer
Feb 26, 12:45 AM EST
PARIS -- French President Jacques Chirac urged consumers not to panic Saturday, hours after the government announced the European Union's first outbreak of deadly bird flu in commercial poultry.
Chirac said chickens and eggs remained safe to eat as he munched a piece of the famously succulent chicken from the Ain region, where the lethal virus was confirmed in turkeys.
Panic among consumers is "totally unjustified," Chirac said during a visit to open the annual Paris Agriculture Fair. "The virus in question ... is automatically destroyed by cooking. So there is absolutely no danger."
Yet fear already was setting in, raising worries for a multibillion-dollar industry that makes France the premier poultry producer among the EU's 25 nations.
Japan's decision Friday to suspend imports of French poultry and poultry products, including foie gras, signaled the potential impact even before the confirmation that the deadly H5N1 virus had decimated a farm of more than 11,000 turkeys at Versailleux in southeastern France.
Hong Kong also has temporarily suspended imports of French poultry, Brenda Chan, a spokeswoman of Hong Kong's Food and Environmental Hygiene Department, said Sunday.
In France itself, there has been a drop of up to 30 percent in poultry purchases in recent weeks. Chirac noted the "economic and social consequences" of panic and said the French must not fall into such a trap.
The lethal strain has spread from Asia to at least 10 European countries and Africa, and scientists fear it could mutate into a form that is easily transmitted between humans, sparking a pandemic. The disease has killed at least 92 people, mostly in Southeast Asia, according to the World Health Organization.
China on Sunday warned the public of a possible "massive" bird flu, and said two more people had contracted H5N1. The official Xinhua News Agency also quoted Agriculture Minister Du Qinglin as saying there was another new bird flu outbreak in eastern China.
Indonesia recorded its 20th human death from bird flu Saturday and India said two poultry farms in western Gujarat state had been contaminated by the virus in that nation's second known outbreak.
No human cases of bird flu have been reported in the EU.
French authorities sealed off the infected turkey farm Thursday. The farm's veterinarian said nearly all the 11,000 birds there were sick and hundreds had died. Surviving birds were slaughtered.
The farmer's family was quarantined and vehicles passing through a protection zone around the farm were required to ride through a 100-foot-long trough of disinfectant.
News that bird flu had spread to farm stocks was particularly bitter for France, which has been working for months to prevent and prepare for an outbreak.
France has some 200,000 farms that raise 900 million birds each year. In 2004, the latest year for which figures are available, the French poultry sector generated more than $3.6 billion in revenues - more than 20 percent of the EU's total poultry production.
The head of France's powerful farm union, Jean-Michel Lemetayer, asked Chirac to demand financial aid from the EU.
Agriculture Minister Dominique Bussereau said Friday that authorities were perplexed about how the virus appeared in commercial poultry despite precautionary measures.
The farm is located in a protection zone set up after two wild ducks died and were confirmed infected with H5N1. There was speculation the outbreak may have been caused by duck droppings on straw placed in the turkey pens, France's Poultry Industry Association said.
Claude Lassus, the veterinarian for the Versailleux farm, told France-Info radio Friday that he believed the straw theory was the only explanation for the infection.
Authorities in the eastern German state of Brandenburg said Saturday that two wild birds had tested positive for the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the first cases in that part of Germany.
The state's Agriculture Ministry said the two dead birds - a swan and a duck - were found around the town of Schwedt, northeast of Berlin and close to the border with Poland.
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Vietnam: Rise of the new fast food nation
By Jeremy Laurance
27 February 2006
UK Independent
As Vietnam enjoys unprecedented economic growth, its people have discovered a taste for high-calorie, high-fat, Westernised food - and are beginning to suffer the consequences.
Outside the Rex hotel in the centre of Saigon - the name by which most residents still refer to Ho Chi Minh City - the evening rush hour is a scene of motorised pandemonium. Tens of thousands of scooters sweep along the six- lane highways, blithely ignoring the rules of the road, like herds of migrating wildebeest across the Serengeti plains.
As darkness falls, clusters of tiny plastic tables and stools spread across the pavements - improvised street-side restaurants to feed the armies of office workers. The acrid smell of pigs' trotters seared over charcoal braziers beside pans of meat bubbling on spirit burners fills the humid night air.
The transformation of this war-ravaged rural economy into a booming industrial power is happening at astonishing speed. Ten years ago, the bicycle was the dominant mode of transport. Now it is the motor scooter. Back then crisps, cola and ice-cream were novelties and fast-food restaurants featured only in Western magazines. Now they are part of the everyday scene. Vietnam, like its neighbour China to the north, is experiencing double-digit economic growth. Cranes festoon the skyline, factories complain of a shortage of labour - 20,000 extra workers are needed in the south of the country - and people are being drawn in growing numbers from the country to the towns.
But progress has a price. Across the Far East, growing urbanisation, rapid industrialisation and increasing obesity associated with decreased physical activity is fuelling an epidemic that has killed as many as Aids but has received a fraction of the attention.
The disease is diabetes, and its incidence is accelerating around the world. From 170 million affected in 2000, doctors predict the total will rise to 370 million by 2025, leading to an epidemic of amputations and blindness, the two commonest effects of the condition. Developing nations will be hardest hit; they bear 90 per cent of the burden but have only 10 per cent of the resources to deal with it.
Professor Pierre Lefebvre, president of the World Diabetes Foundation (WDF), told an international conference in Hanoi last week that there was a worldwide explosion in the disease.
"If we do not change this we face a catastrophe. It is called the tsunami disease. We know it is coming and it will come if we do not do something to prevent it." On the streets of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, fast-food chains such as Kentucky Fried Chicken are starting to appear, alongside the snack bars, cake shops and mobile food carts catering for the worker on the move.
Traditional dishes that have sustained people over generations are disappearing, to be replaced by Western-style cooking that uses more fat, salt, sugar, oil and meat. Ordinary restaurants now offer a special version of the standard Pho Ga - chicken noodle soup - aimed at more affluent office workers that contains 22 per cent more calories than the basic dish.
The casualties of the trend can be seen in hospitals around the country. Squatting on an iron bedstead covered with a thin straw mat, Le Quang Can, aged 58, is unaware of the threat the disease poses to his life.
He arrived at the endocrinology clinic in Thanh Hoa province in northern Vietnam, 90 miles south of Hanoi, at 7 am for a routine test. He has unexpectedly been kept in for observation because his blood sugar level is sky high, and he could slip into a coma at any moment.
A retired soldier with six children, Mr Can waits for the insulin with which he has been injected to bring his blood glucose level down. He wears a woolly hat and blue pyjamas against the cold - it is winter in north Vietnam and a chill wind is blowing down from China. He and his wife work in the rice fields and the doctor will later warn him that unless he controls his diet he could end up a blind amputee, dependent on his family. Outside, scores of patients wait patiently on the steps under the corrugated iron roof for the results of tests carried out in the morning. The clinic, funded by the WDF, sees 130 diabetes patients a day in this provincial town, one of the poorest in Vietnam, and the scale of the need it has uncovered has persuaded the government to set up similar clinics across the country.
Diabetes is a chronic disease which first disables its victims and then slowly kills them. An estimated global total of 2.9 million deaths, equivalent to the number killed by Aids, were attributable to the disease in 2000, according to a study in Diabetes Care published in May 2005.
The most striking thing about the patients at the Thanh Hoa clinic is how few of them are fat. In the West, obesity is the chief driver of the epidemic - the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has just released a new report showing that soaring levels of obesity among children in the UK are sparking a crisis of diabetes in under-16s. But Mr Can is lean and spry as are most of the other patients. Doctors do not know why Asians are more prone to the disease. One theory is that because of their slighter build, compared with Westerners, they have less muscle bulk and more fat, so do not need to gain much weight to put themselves at risk. Malnourishment in infancy or in the womb, which is known to increase the risk of diabetes, may also play a part. Seven out of 10 of the worst affected nations by the disease are in Asia. India already has a total of 31 million cases, the highest in the world, closely followed by China with 20 million. The Far East is expected to see the fastest growth by 2025, with a near doubling in the current total of 81 million cases to 156 million.
Becoming blind or losing a limb is a huge problem anywhere but in the developing world it is a disaster. In India, 45,000 amputations are carried out a year because of diabetes, all of them unnecessary with the correct care, according to Anil Kapur, vice-president of the WDF.
"We are faced with a diabetes pandemic," Dr Kapur said. But the world only recognised infectious diseases as a threat. Of the $2.9bn (£2bn) given in overseas aid for health in 2002, just 0.1 per cent was allocated to chronic diseases including diabetes, he said.
The road to Thanh Hoa from Hanoi passes small village stores selling crisps, ice-cream and soft drinks, which are often cheaper than water. It is thronged with scooters but is free of the children - who once walked beside it to school - they now travel by bus. The disappearance of traditional diets and lifestyles and their replacement with junk foods and motor transport are believed to be behind the growth in the disease.
"As the economy grows, lifestyle and eating patterns change," Dr Kapur said.
The public health message was to eat less and exercise more but this was hard to get across to people raised in the shadow of hunger, he added. Mothers are being urged to feed up their infants but then to curb the appetites of their adolescent children. Social custom, Dr Kapur explained, dictated that when food was available it should not be restricted. "Often in our society being overweight is seen as a sign of prosperity and good health. If you are well off you must have a paunch," said Dr Kapur. Only half of people with diabetes are diagnosed, the remainder living in ignorance of their condition often until it is too late and they suffer irreversible side effects. Yet even those who find their way into care are poorly managed.
Three studies of diabetes care in Asia, covering 45,000 patients, found one- third had kidney damage, while a similar proportion had damage to the nerves in their feet and a smaller number were developing eye damage. Only one patient in five was properly controlled.
"Care is inadequate, complications are common. There is an increased economic burden on society, on the family and on the individual. Those who believe treating diabetes is expensive should change their opinion. Not treating it is very expensive," Dr Kapur said.
The food companies exacerbate the problem with sales techniques such as mini-sizing, according to Gauden Galea, regional adviser for the World Health Organisation. Mini-sizing - selling soft drinks and fast foods in miniature portions - is a growing practice in the region. While the food companies argue they are offering customers a low cost option, Dr Galea claims it is a cynical way of boosting their business.
"They are sowing a taste for fast food by inveigling their way into people's eating habits. As people become more affluent they move from mini size to super size." But Dr Galea says the global trend towards increasing weight, which is fuelling the pandemic of diabetes, can be halted. Successful public health projects were carried out in Da Qing, China, a decade ago based on intensive education on diet and exercise, which led to a 47 per cent reduction in the incidence of diabetes over six years. Similar projects in the United States, Finland and India achieved comparable results.
"These projects demonstrate very conclusively that you can delay or prevent diabetes with only minor reductions in weight," Dr Galea said. The challenge, he added, was to ensure that the care given to Mr Can could be delivered across the Far East.
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Renewed Afghan Drug Trade
Wayne Madsen Report
February 24, 2006
WMR can now report further on the mysterious aircraft sighted on remote runways in Afghanistan and engaged, according to U.S. intelligence sources, in flying around Afghan tribal leaders and warlords and questionable "cargo." Afghan and U.S. intelligence sources report that opium production is at an all time high in Afghanistan and that President Hamid Karzai, the U.S. viceroy for Afghanistan, who has nor real political power outside of Kabul, is handsomely profiting from the heroin trade.
The plane in question is a Beech 200, Model 65-A90-1, Serial number LM-64. Although the tail number (ends in 8A) is new, its former tail number was N70766 and the owner was Pactec (still seen on the plane's tail in the photo below), a California-based non-governmental organization that claims to help humanitarian groups install satellite terminals and other high-tech communications systems in remote locations like Afghanistan and Pakistan. The history of the plane shows that it was exported from the United States to Mali and then re-exported to Afghanistan. At the present time, however, the Beech 200 shown below as well as another similar plane, are operated by Air Serv International. The planes are based in Kabul but the one pictured below reportedly belongs to Pactec.
Air Serv is a Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF) corporation that was formed in 1985 at the height of U.S. covert involvement in Central America. PacTec's directorship interlocks with MAF. Air Serv is billed as "not religious by charter" and can "operate in areas where MAF may be restricted." MAF was particularly active in Honduras and Guatemala where it coordinated its activities closely with the Interdenominational Foreign Mission Association and Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, which included other organizations linked to CIA activities, including World Vision and Trans World Radio.
And it what may be a related story, WMR has obtained the flight itinerary for another CIA prisoner rendition aircraft, a Gulfstream IV, call sign N85VM (later re-registered as N227SV), the same plane that illegally took kidnapped Imam Abu Omar to Egypt from Milan via Germany. The Gulfstream was leased to the CIA by Phillip H. Morse, a minority partner of the Boston Red Sox, through his charter agent, Richmor Aviation of Hudson, NY. The owner of the aircraft was listed as Assembly Pointe Aviation, Inc., for which Morse is sole owner. The plane was purchased by Assembly Pointe from El Paso Gas and Electric. The plane's base of operations was Schenectady, NY. Morse's residences are in Jupiter, FL; Boston; and Lake George, NY. Morse is an acquaintance of George H. W. Bush.
Some of the stops made by the Gulfstream parallel those of CIA-chartered Gulfstream V (N379P, N8068V, N44982), nicknamed the Guantanamo Bay Express, and fit the profile of a drug-running aircraft, especially the stops made in various Caribbean islands well known as drug trans-shipment points -- Turks and Caicos, Jamaica, Bahamas, St. Lucia, Anguilla, etc. -- coupled with frequent stops in Afghanistan and other Middle East countries known as major drug sources. See full itinerary here.
In 1985, at the height of the CIA's and Ollie North's drug running operations, the chief minister, the minister of commerce and development, and a member of the Legislative Council of the Turks and Caicos were arrested in Miami in a narcotics "sting" operation run by the DEA.
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Somerset County boom a mystery
By DARLA L. PICKETT
Staff Writer
Blethen Maine Newspapers
SKOWHEGAN -- The earth shook and buildings rumbled Thursday morning, according to at least a dozen residents who reported tremors in Anson, Madison, Skowhegan and Norridgewock.
Shortly before 10 a.m., the Somerset County Communications Center was inundated with calls from people who said they had experienced earthquake-type movement.
Despite numerous reports within the 15-mile radius, local and state authorities could find no documented account that any type of earthquake or tremor had occurred.
State geologist Bob Marvinney of the Maine Geological Service said that if an earthquake had occurred, it was not recorded by any of the instruments in Maine or New England.
Marvinney said he had contacted the New England Seismic Network, and authorities there said nothing was apparent: "I'm surprised we didn't pick up anything. There are other kinds of explanations like quarrywork and roadwork," he said.
An official at the National Weather Service said he also had heard no reports.
However, Emergency Management Director Robert Higgins Sr. said he is going to ask them to look again.
"I'd like them to relook at what they may have; this is the second occurrence in less than a week of such magnitude," he said.
Higgins said residents of Solon and South Solon last Friday reported what sounded like a loud explosion, during which houses and mobile homes in the area shook: "That would indicate a tremor, he said."
Residents who reported the shaking this Thursday said the tremors were strong.
Norridgewock's town manager, John Doucette, said the shaking and noise was so significant, it sounded like a Dumpster had fallen off a truck or a truck had hit the building: "We went outside to see if there was an accident."
More than a mile away, Jeffrey McGown, district manager of Waste Management on U.S. Route 2 in Norridgewock, said he was sitting in his office when the noise and shaking occurred.
"It felt like somebody with a delivery type of vehicle had backed into our building," McGown said. "I was on a conference call and I got up to see what had struck. We went out on the site and looked around, we thought maybe the town airport (nearby) had an experience. It was so localized, we thought a delivery truck had hit the front porch."
In Anson, about six miles away, the shaking was so strong, even off-duty dispatcher William Crawford called the Communications Center.
"I heard a loud boom that shook the house," Crawford said. "At first I thought it was the furnace. I asked my son 'Did you feel that?' It shook the couch. I thought maybe something fell upstairs, or maybe the chimney collapsed or something. I went outside to look around. You can see the town garage from the house; I thought maybe it was the back of the bucket banging. Nobody was at the town garage."
Late Thursday, Higgins said he checked with Guilford Industries to see if they were working the quarry in the Embden-Solon area: "They said they hadn't done any blasting since last fall. And it was no sonic boom-- not that loud and shaking that many buildings. It's just unexplainable, I guess."
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Storm drops dark brown snow in Colorado
AP
2/24/2006 5:19 PM
FRISCO, Colo. - Snow that some residents described as dark as chocolate brown was reported across parts of Colorado Thursday, a result of a wind storm in northern Arizona that kicked up dust that fell with the snow overnight, officials said.
"It's pretty much statewide," said Ethan Greene, director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. "We've had reports from the San Juans, Winter Park ... all over."
Greene said it's not unusual to see plumes of reddish dust from the desert Southwest drop on the Rocky Mountains in the spring.
Exceptionally dry conditions in northern Arizona contributed to the dust, Greene said.
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A not-so-brief history of time
By Christopher Shea
February 26, 2006
Boston.com
Historian Dan Smail wants his colleagues to push the clock back - way back.
DAN SMAIL, a medievalist who arrived last month at Harvard's history department, is a time revolutionary. Historians, Smail says, are in thrall to a chronology of the human race that is, by now, embarrassingly out of date. He wants to move the start date of introductory history courses back, oh, 100,000 years or so.
If you have taken the first part of a two-semester, college-level history survey class, you know how it usually starts: a few desultory comments about ''prehistory" and then a pronouncement that civilization as we know it had its first stirrings in the Fertile Crescent, around 4,000 to 6,000 BC. But as Smail points out in an article in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, when you consider recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries in archeology, anthropology, and biology -- the finding that all humankind traces to Africa, for example, or that humans were on the march out of that continent by roughly 100,000 BC, not to mention good guesses for when language, hunting, and farming arose -- the fixation on a start date of 4,000 to 6,000 BC begins to seem awfully arbitrary.
And yet, as Smail goes on to argue in his essay, suggestively titled ''In the Grip of Sacred History," this chronological tick has a very interesting back-story. ''Every history curriculum in secondary schools and colleges that tacitly accepts a Near Eastern origin around 6,000 years ago," Smail writes, ''contains the unintended echo of the Judeo-Christian mythology of the special creation of man in the Garden of Eden."
Through the 18th century and well into the 19th, Western historians, almost all of them Christian, thought that humankind (and Earth) dated to roughly 4,000 to 7,000 BC. (One especially influential estimate pinpointed 4,004 BC.) And many thought that the Garden of Eden could be traced to the Fertile Crescent. Smail's theory is that, in the 19th century, as the biblical timeline lost credibility and the staggering age of the Earth began to be glimpsed, historians reflexively clung to as much of the traditional timeline as they could. A true reckoning with the long timelines envisioned by Darwin never occurred.
Smail is among a small but growing number of historians who think their field needs to push the clock back. Another key figure is David Christian, who teaches at San Diego State University. His 2004 book, ''Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History," starts with the Big Bang and, in a book of 15 chapters, doesn't get to humans until Chapter 6.
For his part, Smail says his interest in the full sweep of the human story -- he calls it ''deep history" -- came partly from his bedtime reading: books like ''Africa: A Biography of a Continent," by the British writer John Reader (not an academic), and the inescapable ''Guns, Germs, and Steel," by the physiologist and geographer Jared Diamond. ''This is fun -- why isn't it history?" Smail thought. John McPhee's meditations on ''deep time" in his trilogy on geology was another background inspiration, as was a course taught by Smail's late father, John R.W. Smail, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, called ''A Natural History of Man" -- a favorite of students.
At Fordham, from which Harvard plucked him, Dan Smail offered a course on natural history in addition to courses on the Middle Ages, but his current schedule won't allow him to teach a deep-history course at Harvard until fall 2008. His next book, for the University of California Press, will be a manifesto in favor of the deep-history perspective, possibly followed by his own attempt to write a history integrating the story of human evolution with ''ancient" and modern world history.
Of course, whether to kick off History 101 in 100,000 BC (or earlier) is one question; whether evolutionary perspectives are useful to modern historians is a separate one. ''I'm not sure I see the payoff in how we understand the commercial revolution of the 12th century or the industrialization of the 18th to 19th centuries," objects Patrick J. Geary, a UCLA historian who has heard Smail present his work.
And the suggestion that the traditional Western Civ chronology is crypto-Christian is especially contentious. There are certainly nonbiblical reasons to stress the period circa 4,000 BC, as Barbara H. Rosenwein, chairwoman of the history department at Loyola University Chicago and coauthor of a popular textbook called ''The Making of the West," points out. The word civilization comes from the Latin word for city, and what can confidently be called cities first appear in the Fertile Crescent around then. That cities (and, slightly later, writing) came into being roughly when Christians used to think that the world was born might just be a nice coincidence.
Yet Smail points out that historians no longer think history is solely the stuff of cities, empires, or written documents, so arguments for 4,000 BC that rely on those things have a curiously old-fashioned cast.
At this point, reliance on the ''short chronology," as Smail calls it, may just be habit. Since it obscures so much -- for one thing, humanity's common origins in Africa -- it may be past time to give it up.
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Phantom bomber mystery deepens with new sighting
Craven Herald
02/2006
TWO years after it vanished off the local radar, the phantom bomber of Barnoldswick has returned.
In January 2004, a retired policewoman and her husband reported seeing what looked like a Lancaster bomber flying impossibly low over the Rolls-Royce site at Bankfield.
Eerily, the craft made no noise and the two witnesses were so shocked by what they saw that they almost crashed their car.
Soon after, a Skipton aerial phenomena expert was inundated with phone calls from people all over Craven who reported similar sightings.
Most described what they saw as a low-flying Second World War bomber, grey in colour and with no markings. Several said they had seen it on the same day.
And this week, another man called the Craven Herald to say he had seen exactly the same thing flying towards the site of a small airstrip in Barnoldswick - which is rumoured to have been used for an emergency landing during World War II.
The resident of Sackville Street, Skipton, who asked for his name to be withheld, said: "I didn't think anything about it at the time - it wasn't until I remembered the reports in the papers from two years ago that it clicked.
"I was standing on the canal bank near Gargrave on Saturday and I saw what looked exactly like a Lancaster at around 400 feet. It didn't seem to be making a sound and it was heading north towards Gargrave and the Greenberfield strip where they sometimes fly microlights from."
At the time of the original sightings, it was suggested that RAF training flights involving large propeller-powered aircraft such as Hercules transporters could be to blame.
However, the 70-year-old man said: "I saw them during the war so I know what they look like - this wasn't a modern plane."
It was also suggested the reports could actually be flights of historical aircraft or commemorative events organised by Rolls-Royce, but there is just one airworthy Lancaster left in Europe - based at RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire.
A Rolls-Royce source confirmed the company does own and fly a Spitfire, but it is much smaller than a Lancaster and its last flight in the Barnoldswick area was on October 1 2004. However, she added that RAF training and memorial flights in the area were quite common and could well fly over or "salute" the Bankfield site because of its aviation connections.
Aviation enthusiast Donald Cooper said the reports followed a familiar pattern and could tie in with theories of "time slips" - supposed replays or images of events which have taken place in the past - and could be connected with energy fields around industrial plants.
After an appeal in the Craven Herald in 2004, one man came forward to say he remembered a Lancaster making an emergency landing near Greenberfield Lane in Barnoldswick, adding that the Army and police quickly sealed the area off to prevent curious locals getting a better look.
Another caller believed a landing strip had been reinforced with cork to make it a suitable site for heavy wartime aircraft to use in an emergency.
Mr Cooper said: "Lancaster bombers make a hell of a racket, but all of these people say they are silent. Was there a Lancaster that landed there during the war or did one try and didn't make it?
"I've shown all the witnesses I've spoken to pictures of modern RAF Hercules aeroplanes and they say it wasn't what they saw.
"They are quite different aircraft - the Hercules' wings are much higher in the fuselage and it only has a single tail-fin, whereas Lancasters have two. Besides, the RAF can't go below a certain altitude due to aviation regulations - especially not over a town of 10,000 people."
He added: "I'm keeping an open mind, but I have to believe the witnesses who all seem to be balanced, professional people and not people coming out of the pub after one too many."
Mr Cooper also has a cutting from a 1956 edition of the Craven Herald which shows a plane landing in Barnoldswick to deliver engineering components to Rolls-Royce. Anyone who can cast any further light on the mystery can contact him on 01756 791957.
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Ark's Quantum Quirks
SOTT
February 27, 2006
Nanotechnology in Action
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Naked-eye planets set cosmic stage for solar eclipse on the
29th
ALAN PICKUP
Scotsman
AN INTERESTING month for sky-watchers begins with all the naked-eye planets on view at one time or another during the night and culminates with a solar eclipse. Orion is still resplendent in our southern sky at nightfall, but he marches smartly westwards, taking with him the other bright winter constellations.
The Sun climbs 12° or 24 Sun-breadths higher in our noon sky during March, crossing the celestial equator at 18:26 GMT on the 20th, the instant of the vernal equinox. Sunrise/sunset times for Edinburgh change from 07:05/17:47 GMT on the 1st to 05:47/18:49 GMT (06:47/19:49 BST) on the 31st, after we switch to Summer Time by setting our clocks forward on the 26th. Nautical twilight lasts for about 82 minutes at dawn and dusk.
The Moon is at first quarter on the 6th, full on the 14th, at last quarter on the 22nd and new on the 29th. In fact, when the Moon is full and new this month there are eclipses that are both visible from Scotland. The first event occurs around midnight on the 14th/15th when the full Moon skims through the northern fringe of the Earth's shadow. The resulting penumbral eclipse lasts from 21:22 until 02:13 GMT, but little dimming of the Moon may result, except around its southern parts for a few minutes around mid-eclipse at 23:47.
Of much greater interest is the solar eclipse on the 29th, which is total along a line that stretches from the coast of Brazil, across western and northern Africa and Turkey, to end in northern Mongolia. The longest spell of totality, when the Sun's brilliant disk is fully hidden by the Moon, is 4 minutes 7 seconds as seen from the Libyan desert, about 20 seconds longer than for the many observers who have chosen Turkey as their vantage point. Observers in Europe enjoy a partial eclipse which, for London, lasts from 10:45 to 12:22 BST and sees the Moon's black outline extend across 28 per cent of the Sun's diameter at 11:33.
In Scotland we see a shallower event that starts a little later, ends earlier and takes a smaller bite out of bottom part of the Sun. For Edinburgh the eclipse begins at 10:55, sees 20 per cent of the Sun's diameter covered at 11:35, and ends at 12:16. Add three minutes to these times to get the circumstances for Aberdeen, while the corresponding details for some other locations around the country are: Glasgow 10:55, 11:34 (18 per cent), 12:14; Inverness 10:59, 11:36 (17 per cent), 12:15; Kirkwall 11:02, 11:39 (17 per cent), 12:17; Stornoway 11:01, 11:35 (15 per cent), 12:11.
To avoid serious eye damage, never observe the Sun directly through binoculars or a telescope. Instead, use so-called eclipse glasses, provided they are undamaged, or project the Sun's image onto a card through a pinhole, one side of a pair of binoculars or a small telescope. Projection through binoculars or a telescope is also good for seeing sunspots, but few of these are around at present while the Sun is nearing the minimum of its 11-year cycle of activity.
By our map times, Orion is sinking towards the west as the leading constellation in our spring sky, Leo, lies in the south. The lion's head and mane is represented by the Sickle and his heart by Regulus, a name that means "little king" in Latin and refers to the star's royal status since antiquity. Regulus lies 77 light years (ly) away and burns white-hot with the power of 130 Suns.
Telescopes show Algieba in the Sickle to be an excellent double star. At 125 ly, it consists of a pair of yellow-orange stars that turn about their shared centre of gravity every 600 years or so. A 12 Sun-power star at 36 ly, Denebola, the lion's tail, resembles Vega and the southern star Fomalhaut in being surrounded by a disk-like cloud of dust, possibly a planetary system in the making.
Between Leo and Gemini lies Cancer the Crab whose dim stars are overwhelmed by the golden light of Saturn at present. The planet reached opposition in late January and fades slightly this month from magnitude -0.1 to 0.1. However, it is still well placed as it climbs through the south-eastern sky during the evening to pass due south one hour before our map times. Binoculars reveal the Praesepe or Beehive star cluster alongside Saturn, while telescopes show the planet's disk and rings, which are 20 and 45 arcseconds wide respectively when the Moon lies nearby on the night of the 10th. Two nights later, the Moon passes even closer to Regulus.
Mars lies 5° to the left of the Pleiades In Taurus high in the south-south-west at nightfall this evening, shining brightly at magnitude 0.7. Find it low in the west at our star map times as it moves to set in the north-west more than three hours later. Of similar brightness and colour, and 9° below-left of Mars, is Aldebaran, the eye of Taurus. Mars fades to magnitude 1.2 as it recedes and tracks eastwards to pass north of Aldebaran on the 9th and end the period between the Bull's long horns. Telescopes now show little detail on the planet because its disk is shrinking below 7 arcseconds in diameter. The Moon lies between Mars and the Pleiades next Sunday night while NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is due to reach the planet on the 10th.
As it nears the end of its best evening spell this year, there is just time to glimpse Mercury very low in the west after sunset. Forty minutes after sunset on Wednesday, binoculars may show it shining at magnitude 0.8 and standing 8° high and 9° below-right of the thin sliver of the virgin Moon. Expect to lose it during the coming week as it moves towards inferior conjunction on the Sun's near side on the 12th.
Both Venus and Jupiter are conspicuous morning objects. Jupiter, in fact, rises at Edinburgh's east-south-eastern horizon at 00:22 GMT on the 1st and by 22:14 GMT (23:14 BST) on the 31st, and is unmistakable 15° high and a little to the west of south before dawn. It improves from magnitude -2.4 to -2.6 this month and shows a sizeable 42 arcseconds disk through a telescope when it stands 6° above-left of the Moon before sunrise on the 19th. Venus is a dazzling -4.6 morning star low in the south-east for two hours before sunrise at present, fading a little to magnitude -4.3 by the 31st when it rises only 70 minutes before the Sun.
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British court battle over 'The Da Vinci Code'
AFP
Feb 26 10:07 AM US/Eastern
The author of the blockbuster novel "The Da Vinci Code" faces an English High Court challenge Monday from two men who claim he stole their ideas.
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh are suing their own publishers, Random House, claiming Dan Brown's book draws heavily on their 1982 bestseller "Holy Blood, Holy Grail".
Brown's 2003 book has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and earned the American 45 million pounds (66 million euros, 78.5 million dollars) in one year, instantly making the writer one of the world's richest.
Baigent's and Leigh's book tackles theories that Jesus and Mary Magdalene married, had a child, and the blood line continues to the present day -- with the Catholic Church aware of the discovery and trying to suppress it.
A third author, Henry Lincoln, is not part of the lawsuit.
Brown's book, which combines thriller, detective and conspiracy theory genres, explores similar themes about the Vatican covering up the true story of Jesus.
The novel has been translated into 44 languages and drawn criticism from the Roman Catholic Church and historians.
If Baigent and Leigh are successful and obtain injunctions preventing the use of their material it could threaten the British release of the film adaptation of "The Da Vinci Code".
The big screen version, costing 100 million dollars and starring American two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks, British veteran actor Sir Ian McKellen and French favourites Audrey Tatou and Jean Reno, is scheduled to open in Britain on May 19.
The case is expected to last up to two weeks, barring a settlement. It is also likely to clarify the extent to which an author can use other people's research under existing copyright laws.
Brown acknowledges the theories of "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" in his novel. The villain is called Sir Leigh Teabing, which bears a remarkable resemblance to Baigent and Leigh's surnames.
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Science comes to the masses
By Mindy Sink
The New York Times
February 25, 2006
DENVER -- A scientist walks into a bar. More than 100 people are there, eager to hear all that she has to say and ask a lot of questions. No joke.
That's what happens at the Wynkoop Brewing Company here every month when Cafe Scientifique is held.
Science is not cold and remote in this setting. It's live, interactive, free and informal, with a drink or two. And other Cafe Scientifique meetings are popping up throughout the country and around the globe on campuses, in coffee shops, bars and even a church. The purpose is to make science accessible and even fun to anyone with the time to stop by.
"A lot of people come to see real, live scientists--some of whom are extremely famous and prominent--and see how their brains work," said Dr. John Cohen, a professor of immunology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the founder of the Denver Cafe Scientifique. "People don't often get a chance to do that. Some come to ask questions, others are content to listen."
The Denver Cafe Scientifique was established in 2003 and is the largest in the country to date, drawing about 150 people. The topics vary from sleep to interstellar communication to Higgs bosons to nanotechnology, and they attract people of all ages and occupations.
"Who would have thought you'd have standing room only at a geek event?" Cohen asked. He said he first read about science cafes in 1999 when they were catching on in England. "It just sounded like so much fun," he said. "I saw it as a reminder of the peripatetic philosophers who wandered the Agora in Athens." He imagined them, he continued, "stopping every so often to refresh themselves with a mug of wine from the local sellers."
It was an article by Duncan Dallas in the scientific journal Nature that inspired Cohen and others. Dallas, now a retired television producer, started Cafe Scientifique in 1998 with a note posted in a bar in Leeds, England, that said: "Where, for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, anyone can come to discuss the scientific ideas and developments which are changing our lives."
He said he was inspired by French philosophy clubs; coincidentally, science cafes were starting up in France in the late 1990s. In an e-mail message, Dallas said that taking science out of the classrooms changes the expectations of the audience and the speaker--from lecturing to discussing.
"I believe that science is the most important force in our culture," Dallas wrote, "and is increasingly impinging on our public and personal lives, through subjects like genetics, neurology, pharmacology and evolutionary psychology. So public engagement with science is bound to increase in many forms over the next decade."
Cafe Scientifiques in Britain received public financing to get started, and dozens are now held around the country. In the United States some such cafes have no budgets and are independent--like the one in Denver--while others receive school and corporate help.
Two science cafes in New York--one in Syracuse and the other in New York City--break from the tradition of free science to all and charge $5 to $10.
Sigma Xi, a scientific research society, was host to the first national gathering of Cafe Scientifique leaders this month in North Carolina to network and organize the movement.
Juliana Gallin, a 38-year-old graphic designer in San Francisco, started "Ask a Scientist" at the Bazaar Cafe two and a half years ago. "I was trying to think of something interesting to do outside of my day job that would be more personally fulfilling than the typical volunteer opportunities I was encountering," Gallin said, noting that it was only later that she learned of the Cafe Scientifique movement.
In Seattle, Gretchen Meller, a research scientist, and a few of her friends had their first event last September in a local bookstore. "If the general population is to vote on these issues eventually," she said, "they need the opportunity to ask questions."
Indeed the topics are sometimes taken from headlines. Cafe Scientifique Pittsburgh will be host to the author Pamela Winnick, who will discuss her book "A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion." The Pittsburgh science cafe was started by two science writers in 2004 and is held at the Penn Brewery every month. Tim Palucka, a 46-year-old freelance science writer, shows off the humorous side of Cafe Scientifique when he jokes that their motto should have been "Talk to a drunk scientist" instead of "Eat. Drink. Talk Science."
The topics are not always so funny. Tony Cox spoke here recently on "Risk Analysis and Public Health." Sipping on their microbrews, people listened and then rushed up to Cox to ask questions during a break before the official questions and answers began.
"It's almost like continuing education," said Lyda Ludeman, a 64-year-old retired IBM systems controller. "And the great part is, they don't test you." Ludeman comes to Cafe Scientifique every month with a group of regulars, some wearing denim shirts with Cafe Scientifique logos sewn on the chest.
John Farmer, a 49-year-old advertising executive who attended with his girlfriend last month, said he liked to come to Cafe Scientifique occasionally to learn about different topics. "A lot of people are intimidated by science," he said. "It's great to drink a beer and to brush elbows with these geeks who have very disciplined minds. Everybody can use a little more science in their lives."
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Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 26, 2006
SEATTLE -- Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, has died, a close friend said Sunday. She was 58.
Butler fell and struck her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, said Leslie Howle, a longtime friend and employee at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.
The writer, who suffered from high blood pressure and heart trouble and could only take a few steps without stopping for breath, was found outside her home in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park and died Friday, Howle said.
Butler's work wasn't preoccupied with robots and ray guns, Howle said, but used the genre's artistic freedom to explore race, poverty, politics, religion and human nature.
"She stands alone for what she did," Howle said. "She was such a beacon and a light in that way."
Jane Jewell, executive director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, said Butler was one of the first black women to explore the genre and the most prominent. But Butler would have been a major writer of science fiction regardless of race or gender, she said.
"She is a world-class science fiction writer in her own right," Jewell said. "She was one of the first and one of the best to discuss gender and race in science fiction."
Butler began writing at age 10, and told Howle she embraced science fiction after seeing a schlocky B-movie called "Devil Girl from Mars" and thought, "I can write a better story than that." In 1970, she took a bus from her hometown of Pasadena, Calif., to attend a fantasy writers workshop in East Lansing, Mich.
Her first novel, "Kindred," in 1979, featured a black woman who travels back in time to the South to save a white man. She went on to write about a dozen books, plus numerous essays and short stories. Her most recent work, "Fledgling," an examination of the "Dracula" legend, was published last fall.
She received many awards, and in 1995 Butler was the first science fiction writer granted a "genius" award from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which paid $295,000 over five years.
Butler described herself as a happy hermit, and never married.
"Mostly she just loved sitting down and writing," Seattle-based science fiction writer Greg Bear said. "For being a black female growing up in Los Angeles in the '60s, she was attracted to science fiction for the same reasons I was: It liberated her. She had a far-ranging imagination, and she was a treasure in our community."
Comment: In a Democracy Now! interview, we find the following:
Science Fiction Writer Octavia Butler on Race, Global Warming and Religion
Friday, November 11th, 2005
[...]
AMY GOODMAN: Octavia Butler, could you read a little from Parable of the Talents.
OCTAVIA BUTLER: I'm going to read a verse or two. And keep in mind these were written early in the 1990s. But I think they apply forever, actually. This first one, I have a character in the books who is, well, someone who is taking the country fascist and who manages to get elected President and, who oddly enough, comes from Texas. And here is one of the things that my character is inspired to write about, this sort of situation. She says:"Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery."
And there's one other that I thought I should read, because I see it happening so much. I got the idea for it when I heard someone answer a political question with a political slogan. And he didn't seem to realize that he was quoting somebody. He seemed to have thought that he had a creative thought there. And I wrote this verse:"Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see even an obvious lie again and again and again, maybe to say it almost by reflex, and then to defend it because we have said it, and at last to embrace it because we've defended it."
AMY GOODMAN: On that note we'll have to leave it there, but we'll continue it online at Democracynow.org. Octavia Butler.
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