Editorial: The Afterlife
Henry See
Signs of the Times
06 March 2006
The following caught my eye today as I was gathering articles for the Signs page:
McEwan on the afterlife
P.Z.Myers
Pharyngula
Seed sent me a copy of this book, What We Believe but Cannot Prove : Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, and I've been browsing. It's a collection of short essays (sometimes very short) on assumptions held by individual thinkers without solid evidence. It's thought-provoking, even where I think the writer is a dingbat (Ray Kurzweil) or blithering banalities (Kevin Kelly). I rather liked Brian Goodwin's essay on the fallacy of the nature-nurture problem, but so far, my favorite is one by the author Ian McEwan:
What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors to Edge will take this premise as a given-true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound.
It's short and obvious, and at first I was critical-hey, it's not that belief that should bear the burden of providing evidence-but he's quite right on that matter of a crucial division. There's also more to it than just a belief in life after death. Are we going to be ruled by reason and the weight of evidence, or are we going to choose to believe in that which makes us most comfortable and reinforces our prejudices?
There are many people on our planet that are convinced that there is more to existence than our brief passage in this life. For some, it is an afterlife for eternity at the right hand of God, or a burning in hell. For others, we reincarnate, coming back in different forms to have new experiences and to learn new lessons.
For others, this life is all there is. We live once, due to some chance of evolution that gave us the consciousness to be aware of our mortality.
It is hard to argue that one or the other belief is morally superior to the other. Those who say our life is the product of chance will argue that it makes it all the more special, something to be treasured, as the comments to the above post at the Pharyngula blog make clear. A belief that this is all there is is in no way an automatic license to licentiousness, crime, or a lack of moral character.
A belief in one or another form of afterlife does not a moral peson make, as the history of the crimes committed in the name of one or another god or religion also make clear.
Morality appears to be tied to the individual himself in some way that has little or nothing to do with beliefs in God, religion, an afterlife, or a rejection of them.
In the West, the crude forms of monotheism that reign have permitted the discussion between the two camps to degenerate to a very low level, as the above illustrates. McEwan paraphrases the belief in an afterlife as a certainty that "that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere". While this is a fair characterisation of the milk doctrine of Christianity, it is not at all a fair assessment of the idea of reincarnation, for a next life has no guarantee of being "better" or "more important". A believer in reincanaton would say that all there is is lessons, and that with karma, one could end up on the receiving end in the next life of the harm we have committed in this one: hardly a "better" life or an eternal paradise.
Moreover, if the teachings of esoteric Christianity as preserved in the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church are close to the real teachings of the man known as Jesus, then the man worshipped as the Son of God by Christians who fear they will burn in Hell for eternity for not obeying His word was himself a believer in reincarnation.
Many atheists say there is no scientific evidence for reincarnation.
Hypnotists who have used what is called past life regression would argue that there is. We discussed the question and looked at some of this evidence in our podcasts on reincarnation. While the evidence is suggestive, it cannot be considered proof. And here we enter into the realm of individual difference, of the inner life and experience of different people. Is there something in us, or in some of us, that convinces us of the probability of there being some form of life after death? Something that is missing in others? We would suggest there is, in the idea of the organic portal. (There is a rich discussion on the topic of organic portals on the Signs forum.)
On the other hand, there could be people who grasp onto the idea of an afterlife in much the way that is criticised in McEwan's essay above. They believe it because they have been programmed to believe it in church, with visions of fire and brimstone dancing in their heads. They believe it through fear, the fear of being eternally damned if they don't follow the rules. The belief in such an afterlife may well also be held by the organic portal, so belief or not in an afterlife cannot be used to distinguish between organic portals and potentially souled beings. What is more important, I would suggest, is that, no matter what decision one comes to, it be reached through one's own efforts and research, not by blindly following the ideas of an athority, be it religious or scientific.
Nor should we conflate the issue of the organic portal with the question of morality. If an understanding of the distinction between organic portals and potentially souled beings is important, and we think it is, the distinction between moral beings and those without a conscience is even more fundamental and important. Here we are, obviously, referring to the difference between the psychopath and the rest of humanity.
Fear is a powerful factor influencing the our lives. It seems to be hard-wired into us on a very deep level. It is so apparent that Freud decided it must so a fundamental part of our psyche and erected the notion of the super-ego around it. One source on the net defines the super-ego thusly:
SUPER-EGO: The super-ego is the faculty that seeks to police what it deems unacceptable desires; it represents all moral restrictions and is the "advocate of a striving towards perfection" ("New Introductory Lectures" 22.67). Originally, the super-ego had the task of repressing the Oedipus complex and, so, is closely caught up in the psychodramas of the id; it is, in fact, a reaction-formation against the primitive object-choices of the id, specifically those connected with the Oedipus complex. The young heterosexual male deals with the Oedipus complex by identifying with and internalizing the father and his prohibitions: "The super-ego retains the character of the father, while the more intense the Oedipus complex was and the more rapidly it succumbed to repression (under the influence of discipline, religious teaching, schooling and reading), the more exacting later on is the domination of the super-ego over the ego-in the form of conscience or perhaps of an unconscious sense of guilt" ("Ego and the Id" 706). Given its intimate connection with the Oedipus complex, the super-ego is associated with the dread of castration. As we grow into adulthood, various other individuals or organizations will take over the place of the father and his prohibitions (the church, the law, the police, the government). Because of its connection to the id, the superego has the ability to become excessively moral and thus lead to destructive effects. The super-ego is closely connected to the "ego ideal."
In short, the super-ego is the internal parent policing all of our thoughts and actions. It is fear-based, ordering what we can and cannot do according to rules that we have internalised. It may also be an accurate description of the mechanism of morality in some people. Comparing this idea with the stages of development of moral reasoning as defined by Lawrence Kohlberg, of Harvard University, in his The Philosophy of Moral Development, 1981, is instructive. He identified three stages:
1. Premoral (ages 7 to 10) Defer to rules and adult authority based upon expections of punishment and reward.
2. Conventional Level (beginning around 10) Behaviour guided by the opinions of others and the desire to conform. Obeying authority is a value in itself, without reference to punishment or reward or higher principle.
3. Post-conventional morality (During adolescence) Only 10% of the population (in the US in the 60's) attain this level. They formulate abstract moral principles and act according to conscience, not for approval from others or society. Reasoning is influenced by abstract and fluid concepts such as freedom, dignity, justice, and respect for life.
The ability to think fluidly using abstract concepts was missing, according to Kolhberg's study, in 90% of the American population in the 1960s. Given the influence of television and the media in the forty years since, one cannot imagine the situation has improved.
There seems to be a correlation between fear, Freud's description of the super-ego, and Kohlberg's first two stages of moral reasoning. The third level, post-conventional morality, is different as it involves abstract thinking, an ability that is missing in a large percentage of the population. The ability to think abstractly and use "fluid concepts" such as freedom, dignity, and justice is missing from the psychopath. When the pathocrats around Bush use these terms, they are not using them fluidly, they are using double-speak, that is, they use them with a different meaning, a hidden meaning that is understood by other pathocrats while retaining their nobler meanings for the normal population. "Freedom" for the Iraqis means the enslavement to US and Israel. "Justice" means that US soldiers who commit war crimes and the politicians that order these crimes cannot be held accountable to the world community, to be judged and condemned.
When a person with a conscience thinks fluidly using these concepts, it means one is able to apply them differently in different contexts, according to the essence of the situation. They understand that there are no hard and fast rules, no recipes, for understanding what is right action. Right action, or, to put it differently, good and evil, are determined by the specific nature of a situation. Of course, the psychopath would argue that he was doing the same thing. The difference, when studied over a period of time, would be that the psychopath would never make a choice that went against his own personal interests while the person of conscience would. At times, the right thing would mean putting another person's interests ahead of his or her own.
Myers ends his comment on McEwan with the statement, "Are we going to be ruled by reason and the weight of evidence, or are we going to choose to believe in that which makes us most comfortable and reinforces our prejudices?"
We concur. Trouble is, it is possible to seek comfort and the reinforcement of prejudices in science and reason as well as in religious belief. There is evidence that suggests the world is a much stranger place than science, in its strict, materialist manifestation, would allow, and there are many scientists who rule out such evidence because it conflicts with their world-view.
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Editorial: John Bolton Does AIPAC
Monday March 06th 2006, 9:20 am
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
It should be obvious, considering the photo to the left, who John Bolton, the Straussian neocon "representative" to the United Nations, works for-the American-Israel Political Action Committee. "U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is 'beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat,'" in other words the Pentagon is preparing to shock and awe Iran, maybe later this month, but probably down the road, sooner before later.
"Bolton reaffirmed that the United States does not see the security council moving quickly to impose sanctions on Iran, but he pointedly noted that 'many other governments have begun to include the word sanctions in their discourse on Iran,' implying they may take action outside the security council." As was the case with the Iraq invasion, the United Nations is considered irrelevant. "Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding or will it be irrelevant?" Bush asked the Security Council in September, 2002, a couple months before his neocon handlers invaded Iraq. Bolton is setting up a re-run.
Recall Condi's Boy Friday, neocon national security adviser Stephen Hadley, suspected of the vicious outing of Valerie Plame, telling AIPAC last November that the "spread of democracy [i.e., invading various Arab and Muslim countries] will make the Middle East a safer neighborhood for Israel. An American retreat from Iraq, on the other hand, would only strengthen the terrorists who seek the enslavement of Iraq and the eventual destruction of Israel." In other words, the two thousand plus (and actually closer to 10,000) Americans killed in Iraq were sacrificed to make a "safer neighborhood for Israel."
Philip Zelikow, executive director of Bush's nine eleven whitewash commission, said as much. "I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990-it's the threat against Israel," Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on September 10, 2002. "And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell," Zelikow added, admitting that the real reason for invasion and occupation must be hidden from the American people.
"Israel's long-term survival depends upon the spread of democracy in the Middle East," Bush declared last December (simply replace the word "democracy" with "submission" and you have a better idea of what Bush was saying). Commenting on Bush's remark, Bruce Blakeman, billed as a "GOP activist," told the Forward that Bush (meaning the Straussian neocons) "realized not only that Saddam Hussein was a danger to America, but that Saddam Hussein had designs on attacking Israel. There was a concern that an attack on Israel would turn into a regional war, with Syria and Iran joining in on Iraq's side," a comment that is at odds with reality and a load of hooey to boot.
As the late Livia Rokach, daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett, second prime minister of Israel, has noted, Israel has not only consistently provoked its Arab neighbors, but also has a long and sordid track record of sabotaging U.S. relations with Arab nations. Rokach, writes Naseer H. Aruri in a forward to Rokach's book (Israel's Sacred Terrorism), documents "deliberate Israeli acts of provocation, intended to generate Arab hostility and thus to create pretexts for armed action and territorial expansion."
"AIPAC has increasingly tilted to the Likud in Israel, and to the political Right in the United States," notes Juan Cole. "A handful of special interests in the United States virtually dictate congressional policy on some issues. With regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a few allies have succeeded in imposing complete censorship on both houses of Congress. No senator or representative dares make a speech on the floor of his or her institution critical of Israeli policy, even though the Israeli government often violates international law and UN Security Council resolutions (it would violate more such resolutions, except that the resolutions never got passed because only one NSC member, the U.S., routinely vetoes them on behalf of Tel Aviv.) As the Labor Party in Israel has been eclipsed by the Likud coalition, which includes many proto-fascist groups, this subservience has yoked Washington to foreign politicians who privately favor ethnic cleansing and/or aggressive warfare for the purpose of annexing the territory of neighbors."
Bush's neocon handlers no longer care to hide the fact U.S. foreign policy is designed to make a "safer neighborhood for Israel" and this project has so far cost the lives of around 250,000 Iraqis, a few thousand Americans, and billions of U.S dollars (in addition, Israel has received $84.8 billion in grants, loans, and commodities from the fleeced U.S. taxpayer since 1949, or around $23,000 per U.S. citizen, according to research conducted by Richard H. Curtiss).
It appears the Straussian neocons are advertising that the up-coming shock and awe attack on Iran is in the interest of Israel, as Bolton's speech before AIPAC reveals. Of course, since most Americans don't pay attention or can't be bothered with such political signals, considering such little more than irritating minutiae, they will ultimately end up bamboozled once again by the Straussian neocons, determined to squander all of America's precious resources on invasions and occupations in the name of Israel.
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Fisk Paints a Middle East in crisis
The World Today
ABC Radio (Oz)
ELEANOR HALL: One of the Middle East's most experienced observers is warning today that we should prepare for another major catastrophe in the region.
Robert Fisk says that in his three decades of reporting from the Middle East for British newspapers, he's never seen it more dangerous, and that he's certain another major crisis, possibly even another September 11, is coming.
The veteran war reporter also says he remains baffled by just who is trying to generate civil war in Iraq.
Robert Fisk is in Australia this week to promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilization, and he joined me in The World Today studio a short time ago.
Now, you've been a bit of an optimist about Iraq and civil war, but do you think what's going on now is already civil war?
ROBERT FISK: Well, it's perfect proof that somebody wants a civil war. Um, but the problem for me is that the narrative is that the Shi'ites are being attacked by the Sunnis and their mosques are being blown up and now the Shi'ites are attacking the Sunni mosques and the Shi'ites and the Sunnis are going to fight each other.
I think that's far too simple a version of events. There's never been a civil war in Iraq. Sunnis and Shi'ites, despite the fact that the Sunnis as a minority have always effectively ruled Iraq, have never had this sectarian instinct. It's not a sectarian society, it's a tribal society. People are intermarried.
You know, I was at the funeral of a Sunni and asked his brother, you know, he'd been murdered - probably by Shi'ites, I think - I asked his brother if there was going to be a civil war and he said look, I'm married to a Shi'ite. You want me to kill my wife? Why do you westerners always want civil war?
The first people to mention civil war were the occupation authorities. The Iraqis were not. Some…
ELEANOR HALL: But the Iraqis are now. I mean, Al-Jaafari's talking about civil war.
ROBERT FISK: They're not talking about civil war, they're talking about being frightened of who's doing the bombing. But, you see, we still don't know who's doing the bombings. How many names have we been given of the suicide bombers? Two out of, what, 320 suicide bombings now. Where do they come from, these people?
I mean, we keep hearing about kidnaps. In every case they were kidnapped by people, quote, "wearing police uniforms," unquote. There's a police station on the airport road, it was overrun and all the policemen executed by men wearing, quote, "army uniforms," unquote.
Now, we used to have this phenomenon in Algeria, when I was covering the Islamist government war there, and it took a while before we realised that they were policemen and they were soldiers.
In other words, they were being paid by the authorities. These were not people… there's not a huge wardrobe factory in Fallujah with, you know, 8,000 policemen's uniforms, waiting for the next suicide bomber. It's not like that. What we've got is death squads, and some of them are clearly working for government institutions within Baghdad.
ELEANOR HALL: So you're saying there are death squads, there's chaos, but it's not civil war?
ROBERT FISK: Well, it's certainly chaos, and it's certainly death squads. But I don't regard this as a civil war at the moment. As I said, somebody wants a civil war. I mean, if you really try hard and you kill enough people you may be able to produce this.
ELEANOR HALL: So somebody wants a civil war?
ROBERT FISK: Yes.
ELEANOR HALL: You must have some clues about who.
ROBERT FISK: I don't have… I have suspicions, I don't have clues. I spend a lot of time, when I'm in Baghdad, trying to find out who this is and what this is. Clearly, the Interior Ministry have been torturing people to death, and clearly the Interior Ministry have people who do operate death squads.
But you've got to remember something, that a very prominent figure in politics, and a close friend of the United States, was accused just before the first elections of executing, quote, "insurgents," unquote, in a police station, a police station I know very well. This was reported in Australia at the time.
I suspect the story is true. I think he was a murderer, and he was working for the Americans, and he was a former CIA operative, as we know. I'm not saying the CIA are doing the death squads and this is an American plot - no, I'm not.
But I think that there are all kinds of tendencies and fractures within the current authorities, who all live in the green zone in the former Republican palace of Saddam, surrounded by American barbed wire and American protection.
ELEANOR HALL: What's the rationale of this though? I mean, if these people are in government, why do they want a civil war?
ROBERT FISK: I think what they want to do is to produce a situation in which their side, or their party, will control Iraq.
You've got to realise the insurgents too, most of whom but not all are Sunni, we keep seeing the insurgents as people who want to get the Americans out. But that's a very short-sighted view of it. That's our view of it.
It's quite clear the insurgents want to get the Americans out, but they want to get the Americans out so they can say afterwards, we liberated our country, we want a place in power. That is what this is about. This is about securing political power after the withdrawal of the United States.
ELEANOR HALL: What about the political negotiations that are going on at the moment though? I mean, is there no faith placed in those?
ROBERT FISK: Look, I'm sorry to sound so pessimistic, but all the political negotiations are going on within a few square acres, guarded by American tanks, from which nobody emerges. These people who are negotiating, they don't go into the streets of Baghdad, they don't see the people, they don't see the bombs.
ELEANOR HALL: But the people voted for them.
ROBERT FISK: Yes, the Shi'ites voted for them mostly.
Look, people want to vote. People would like freedom. But they'd also freedom from us, and that we will not accept, because we want to go on controlling Iraq and making sure Iraq does what we want. We want to control the government of Iraq.
I mean, they have a democratic election, and what happens? Bush comes on the telephone and says come on, we want some unity, get moving.
ELEANOR HALL: You say the US will have to get out of Iraq, but it will need the help of Iran and Syria to do so…
ROBERT FISK: Of course, of course it will.
ELEANOR HALL: Now, how would that work?
ROBERT FISK: It'll need the help of Iran to make sure that all Shi'ite resistance to the United States ends during the withdrawal, and it'll need the help of the Syrians, who do have a lot of influence along the border with Iraq, to make sure that there is some kind of deal with the insurgents that the Americans can leave not under fire.
You see, I mean I've said this before, but the terrible equation, of course politically, from an American political point of view as well, in Iraq, is that the Americans must leave, and they will leave, and they can't leave.
And that's the equation that turns sand into blood. And that remains the case. It's very easy to invade other people's countries; it's very difficult to get out of them. It should be the other way around, but unfortunately it's not. That's how it happens.
And the Brits found that, you know, all over the Middle East. And every time, every time, every time the authorities of the occupying power say the same things - we will not talk to terrorists. The Americans say it too. And they don't read history books, because at the end of the day the Americans will have to talk to the insurgents in Iraq, and they will, they will.
ELEANOR HALL: Now, the victory for Hamas, in the Palestinian elections, how closely is the West's reaction to this being watched in the Arab world?
ROBERT FISK: With its usual cynicism, yes. It's the same old story - we demand democracy, we demand they have freedom to vote, and they vote for the wrong people, so we try to destroy the government that's been freely elected. We love democracy, providing the Muslim nations elect the people we want.
I mean, we keep hearing the Israelis will not deal with Hamas. The Israelis created Hamas. When the PLO were in Beirut, and the Israelis wanted to counteract the PLO, they urged Hamas to set up more mosques and social institutions in Gaza.
Even after Oslo a senior Israeli officer, and this was reported on the front page of The Jerusalem Post, held official talks with Hamas officials in Jerusalem. Israel won't deal with Hamas… this is just a facade of narrative, for us, the press.
There is a narrative being set down for us where there will not be negotiations, but there can be any time the Israelis want, and if they find it in their interest, they will.
ELEANOR HALL: And yet you're in no doubt that Hamas, or certain members of Hamas, are terrorists?
ROBERT FISK: Look, I don't use the word terrorist about anybody. This has become a semantically meaningless word. Look, there are people in the Hamas movement who support the murder of innocent people, yes, of course.
There are… I'm not trying to make equivalences here, but when you have an Israeli air force officer, as we did at one occasion in Gaza, who bombs a block of apartments, knowing that he will kill innocent children, as well as a man who is believed to be behind suicide bombings, what is that man? What goes on in his brain too?
ELEANOR HALL: Now, you make the point in your book about the targeted killing of Hamas leaders coming back …
ROBERT FISK: The murder. I don't say targeted killing.
ELEANOR HALL: Okay.
ROBERT FISK: The murder.
ELEANOR HALL: The killing of leaders of Hamas will come back to haunt the leaders of the West. What do you mean…
ROBERT FISK: Well, we already did have - a year and a half ago I think - the murder of an Israeli Government minister in Jerusalem.
Um, you see, once you start going for leaderships, you're opening a door that can come back at you. And the great danger is once you say, you know, we might kill Yasser Arafat, well he died of his own accord, but I mean that was constantly said, so then you open the door to someone saying well, let's kill the Israeli leadership, or let's kill the British leadership.
Once you say we're going to kill Osama Bin Laden, what does that allow him to do? He doesn't need permission of course. But what doors are you opening…
ELEANOR HALL: Aren't these doors already open?
ROBERT FISK: Oh, they've been opened now, yes.
ELEANOR HALL: But weren't they already open for people like…
ROBERT FISK: The moment we turned our back on international law and gave up on justice and wanted revenge, that was the end.
ELEANOR HALL: Now, you describe in your book, you were there for Rafiq Hariri's killing in Lebanon…
ROBERT FISK: I was 400 metres away, yes.
ELEANOR HALL: After that you write you're increasingly stunned by the growing tragedy of the Middle East. Now, I would've thought that's a big statement from someone who's been reporting from the Middle East for 30 years.
ROBERT FISK: Yes, but the Middle East has never been in such a terrible situation, it's never been so dangerous. I've never found myself going on assignments of such danger as I do now. Iraq's the worst assignment I've ever been on, ever.
I think that our hypocrisy towards the Middle East, and the ruthlessness of its own leaders, Arab leaders, has reached such a stage now that there's some kind of… I mean, some kind of explosion is going to come.
Over… I did a CBC interview in Toronto, which I've got a copy of, three years before 2001, and I said an explosion is coming. And obviously…
ELEANOR HALL: But do you think an explosion is still coming?
ROBERT FISK: Oh yes. I don't… it doesn't have to be a real physical one like 'bang'. It might be. But something is coming. I mean, I feel it very strongly.
When I go back, when I went back for the book, I realised I was feeling it because I live there, I live in a Muslim society, I live in the Middle East, and all the people around me are Muslims.
And, clearly, living there, breathing that environment, I knew something was going to happen. And I still think something's going to happen. I don't mean September 11, but something.
ELEANOR HALL: But like what?
ROBERT FISK: Well, I mean, the Americans being driven out of Iraq is one, isn't it?
ELEANOR HALL: But if the Americans leave Iraq the suggestion is that that will create more stability there. Is that not likely to…
ROBERT FISK: Well, I hope it would, yes. Um, yeah but, you see, if the Americans leave Iraq it's an enormous blow to US military and political and strategic prestige throughout the world, there's no doubt about it.
ELEANOR HALL: So you've been warned. That's the Middle East Correspondent for the British newspaper, The Independent, Robert Fisk, who's been reporting on the Middle East for 30 years and is in Australia this week to promote his latest book, The Great War for Civilization. He was speaking to me earlier this morning.
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War Pimp Alert! US envoy hints at strike to stop Iran
By Julian Borger Washington
The Guardian
6 Mar 06
The US ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, has told British MPs that military action could bring Iran's nuclear programme to a halt if all diplomatic efforts fail. The warning came ahead of a meeting today of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which will forward a report on Iran's nuclear activities to the UN security council.
The council will have to decide whether to impose sanctions, an issue that could split the international community as policy towards Iraq did before the invasion.
Yesterday the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, said: "Nobody has said that we have to rush immediately to sanctions of some kind."
However the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, visiting Washington last week, encountered sharply different views within the Bush administration. The most hawkish came from Mr Bolton. According to Eric Illsley, a Labour committee member, the envoy told the MPs: "They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down."
It is unusual for an administration official to go into detail about possible military action against Iran. To produce significant amounts of enriched uranium, Iran would have to set up a self-sustaining cycle of processes. Mr Bolton appeared to be suggesting that cycle could be hit at its most vulnerable point.
The CIA appears to be the most sceptical about a military solution and shares the state department's position, say British MPs, in suggesting gradually stepping up pressure on the Iranians.
The Pentagon position was described, by the committee chairman, Mike Gapes, as throwing a demand for a militarily enforced embargo into the security council "like a hand grenade - and see what happens".
Yesterday Mr Bolton reiterated his hardline stance. In a speech to the annual convention of the American-Israel public affairs committee, the leading pro-Israel US lobbyists, he said: "The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve ... we must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses."
The IAEA referred Iran to the security council on February 4, but a month's grace was left for diplomatic initiatives. By yesterday, those appeared exhausted. A meeting of European and Iranian negotiators broke down on Friday over Tehran's insistence that even if Russia was allowed to enrich Iran's uranium, Iran would enrich small amounts for research. Iran says that it needs enrichment for electricity.
According to Time magazine, the US plans to present the security council with evidence that Iran is designing a crude nuclear bomb, like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. The evidence will be in the form of blueprints that the US said were found on a laptop belonging to an Iranian nuclear engineer, and obtained by the CIA in 2004. However, any such presentation will bring back memories of a similar briefing in February 2003 in which Colin Powell, then US secretary of state, laid out evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which proved not to exist.
While the US and Britain keep a united front over Iraq in the UN security council, there are clear differences over Iran. Britain has ruled out a military option if diplomatic pressure fails. The US has not. There is no serious consideration of large-scale use of ground forces, but there are disagreements in the administration over whether air strikes and small-scale special forces operations could be effective in halting or slowing down Iran's alleged nuclear weapons programme.
Some believe Iran has secret facilities that are buried so deep underground as to be impenetrable. They argue that the US could never be certain whether or not it had destroyed Iran's "capability".
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006
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Amid AIPAC's Big Show, Straight Talk With a Noticeable Silence
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; Page A02
Words are seldom minced at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
During a luncheon speech yesterday at the convention center, Daniel Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, shouted a barnyard obscenity involving a bull when he dismissed the theory that Iran and Hamas might soften their anti-Israel views. The audience gave Gillerman a standing ovation.
The undiplomatic diplomat went on to describe a war on radical Islam: "While it may be true -- and probably is -- that not all Muslims are terrorists, it also happens to be true that nearly all terrorists are Muslim."
But ask people at this week's gathering about Steve Rosen, the father of modern AIPAC, who goes on trial next month for disseminating classified information, and you get the sort of look you'd expect if you inquired about an embarrassing medical condition.
"I'm not the person to ask about that," says Nathan Diament, a Washington representative for Orthodox Jews.
"Who?" responds Neil Cooper, a delegate from the Philadelphia area.
"Rosen? Which one is he?" answers a charity executive, with a smile.
"I need to read more about it," demurs Etan Cohen, a college student.
AIPAC staff members note that, with Iran and the Palestinians to worry about, the indictments of Rosen and former deputy Keith Weissman have not been mentioned in any of the group's public meetings so far. And they say the pro-Israel lobby, unharmed by the Rosen flap, is putting on its biggest and best show ever this week: 4,500 participants, including more than 1,000 students, paying visits to at least 450 House and Senate offices.
Indeed, the scandal doesn't seem to have slowed down the group. At last night's dinner, AIPAC set aside 27 minutes for the reading of its annual "Roll Call" of lawmakers, diplomats and administration officials attending the gathering. As of midday yesterday, RSVPs had come in from 57 embassies, from Burundi to Turkey; a score of Bush administration officials; a majority of the Senate; and a quarter of the House. Even the ambassadors of Pakistan and Oman supped at AIPAC's table.
Any talk of Rosen is confined to private donor meetings and hallway conversations -- where opinions are split on AIPAC's decision to turn its back on Rosen and Weissman.
"I don't like the way AIPAC handled it, hanging them out to dry," said one West Coast delegate, after delivering an on-the-record no comment. "They didn't do anything different from what everybody else does in this town every day."
Rosen and Weissman are the first nongovernment officials to be prosecuted under the all-but-forgotten Espionage Act of 1917. The law, amended in 1950, makes it a crime for an unauthorized person even to have classified information knowingly; if Rosen broke that law, so do hundreds of other lobbyists and journalists as part of their normal course of business.
The New Yorker magazine reported last year that AIPAC's lawyer, Nathan Lewin, recommended that the two officials be fired after he heard from prosecutors about an FBI-recorded telephone call between Rosen, Weissman and The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler, in which Rosen observed that "at least we have no Official Secrets Act." Lewin and the prosecutors may not have realized that the line -- referring to a British law about publishing classified information -- was a stock joke Rosen used in conversations with Kessler and other reporters.
AIPAC at first defended Rosen vigorously, then dismissed him in April over unspecified conduct "beneath the standards AIPAC sets for its employees." The group has advised members that it has not taken a position on whether Rosen acted legally.
That nuance was understandably lost on most of the attendees asked about the matter at yesterday's session. "AIPAC doesn't support passing of state secrets to Israel, and that's my view, too," said Daniel Rathauser, a high school senior from New Jersey.
Max Newman, from Michigan, had no complaints, either. "I respect the way the organization handled it," he said. "What they did was against the policy of AIPAC."
Exactly what they did should come out in next month's trial. In the meantime, AIPAC is clamping down on what information it lets out.
Luncheon speeches by former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former Virginia governor Mark Warner (D) were declared off the record. At another speech yesterday by Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, reporters were turned away at the door; an AIPAC spokeswoman went through the room making sure no journalists had infiltrated.
At the public sessions, the message was uniform: AIPAC is strong, and getting stronger. "Thank God for AIPAC," Gillerman told the participants. "This is for us the greatest guarantee and insurance policy for the survival of Israel," he added. "Please don't ever change."
As Rosen and Weissman have learned, it already has.
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War Pimp Bolton warns Iran of 'painful consequences'
Reuters
5 Mar 06
WASHINGTON - Iran faces "tangible and painful consequences" if it continues its nuclear activities and the United States will use "all tools at our disposal" to stop this threat, a senior U.S. official said Sunday, ahead of a crucial international meeting on Iran.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, speaking at a convention of Jewish-Americans, said it is too soon for the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions on Iran but other countries are talking about doing so and Washington is "beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat."
Monday's meeting of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency governing board is expected to take stock of Iran's continued defiance of U.S. and European demands to end sensitive weapons-related uranium enrichment activity and then hand the case over to the security council.
Security council concerns
Iran Sunday again threatened to begin large-scale nuclear enrichment if the case is taken up by the security council.
"The longer we wait to confront the threat Iran poses, the harder and more intractable it will become to solve," Bolton warned.
"The Iran regime must be made aware that if it continues down the path of international isolation, there will be tangible and painful consequences," he told 4,500 delegates to the annual convention of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the leading pro-Israel U.S. lobbying group.
He said Iran poses a "comprehensive threat" as a state sponsor of terrorism as well as a nuclear aspirant and so "we must be prepared to rely on comprehensive solutions and use all the tools at our disposal to stop the threat that the Iranian regime poses."
The United States has had sweeping sanctions on Iran since after the 1979 Iranian revolution but is looking at ways to further use its Proliferation Security Initiative to deny Iran materials it needs for its nuclear program, he said.
Bolton reaffirmed that the United States does not see the security council moving quickly to impose sanctions on Iran, but he pointedly noted that "many other governments have begun to include the word sanctions in their discourse on Iran," implying they may take action outside the security council.
Copyright 2006 Reuters Limited.
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The USS Ronald Reagan deployed in the Persian Gulf
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
February 21, 2006
ABU DHABI - The U.S. Navy has deployed its latest aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. Fifth Fleet said the USS Ronald Reagan has been deployed for maritime security operations in the Gulf region. The nuclear-powered surface vessel headed a carrier group that contains a guided missile cruiser, two destroyers and support ships.
The Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier was assigned to patrol the Fifth Fleet area of operations, which includes the Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean, Middle East Newsline reported. "Our past nine months of training have been in preparation to support our troops on the ground in Iraq and carry out maritime security operations," Carrier Strike Group Seven Commander Rear Adm. Michael Miller said.
Officials said the arrival of the Reagan Carrier Strike Group, which contains more than 6,000 sailors, was part of a routine rotation of U.S. ships in the Gulf. The strike group consists of the USS Reagan; USS Lake Champlain missile cruiser, USS McCampbell and USS Decatur destroyers; USS Rainer fast combat support ship; and Explosives Ordnance Disposal Unit 11 Det 15.
The USS Reagan, whose home port has been in San Diego, Calif., was commissioned in July 2003.
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Europe And America At Odds On Terrror Threat
by Gareth Harding
UPI Chief European Correspondent
Mar 06, 2006
Europeans and Americans are supposed to be fighting shoulder to shoulder in the so-called war on terror. But how can they beat their common enemy when they have such radically different interpretations of the scale of the threat posed by Jihadi terrorism and the nature of the response needed to defeat it?
This question was left lingering at the end of two recent conferences in Brussels on international terrorism -- one organized by the Royal Institute for International Relations in Belgium and the other by the Italian International Affairs Institute, in association with the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks the Bush administration has viewed the struggle against terrorist groups like the Taliban and al-Qaida as a war that can be won in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and the deserts of the Sunni triangle. Europeans, on the other hand, remain deeply uncomfortable with the term "war on terror," with many asking how it is possible to wage war on an abstract noun.
"The United States talks of a war against terror," said one senior European Union official at the GMF conference. "We don't subscribe to that view in the European Union." Speaking at the same event, which observed 'Chatham House' rules of anonymity, a NATO official said the 26-member military bloc also preferred to talk about the "fight against terror."
It is more than a semantic issue. The Bush administration -- and many ordinary Americans -- see their country "at war" with terrorism, and argues trenchantly that U.S. troops in Iraq are part of this effort. There is no such feeling in Europe, partly because European nations have lived with terrorist attacks on their soil for decades, if not centuries.
"The European Union sees terrorism through the prism of the past, the United States as a new threat," said one participant at the Italian institute's meeting, adding that the two transatlantic powers are divided over both the nature of the threat faced and the best means of tackling it.
A country that sees itself at war is more likely to take extreme measures to protect its population, even if this leads to an erosion of civil liberties such as the right to privacy, free speech and a fair trial. Gerhart Baum, a prominent German human rights lawyer and former interior minister, told the Belgian institute's conference last month that the United States had "crossed the border between criminal law and war law" in its fight against Jihadi terrorism, resulting in the sanctioning of torture and targeted assassinations.
"The fight against terrorism should be compatible with human rights, but clearly it is not (in this case)," said Baum.
Calls from traditionally pro-American EU leaders, such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, for the United States to close its internment camp at Guantanamo Bay highlight the gaping divide between Washington and European capitals when it comes to finding the right balance between using state power against terrorist groups and protecting civil liberties.
Another major difference between the two sides concerns the scale of the threat posed by al-Qaida and its offshoot organizations. The Bush administration believes Osama bin Laden is comparable to Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin and that al-Qaida poses as great a menace to Western free-market democracies today as the Nazis did in the 1930s.
Europeans are in no doubt about the lethal threat posed by Jihadi terrorism -- after all, they were the prime victims of it in Madrid, London and Istanbul -- but there is a growing body of opinion that argues the real danger is no longer posed by al-Qaida, but by the freelance franchises the terrorist grouping has spawned.
"I do not believe that we are confronted with a formidable global external foe," Rik Coolsaet, a security expert at the Belgian Institute for International Relations, told the Brussels conference on Jihadi terrorism. "We must stop behaving as if we were in a permanent state of war with a monolithic authoritarian threat, a successor enemy to Nazism or communism."
Dismissing Bin Laden as nothing more than a "leader of a sect," Coolsaet added: "Unduly stressing the global nature of the threat we boost his appeal to would-be suicide bombers who feel boosted by the worldwide success of a potent al-Qaida the west contributes to magnify."
The U.S. administration views terrorism as primarily an external threat emanating from failed states, jihadist groupings and Islamist regimes in the broader Middle East -- hence the decision to oust the Taliban in 2001 and, although a belated justification, to invade Iraq in 2003.
European governments, on the other hand, see the threat as largely internal -- stemming from extremist sects within their Muslim communities. It is a view drawn from bitter experience. Both the London and Madrid bombings were largely carried out by British and Spanish citizens and the killer of Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh was a well-integrated, Dutch-speaking citizen of the Netherlands.
"We have the impression that they are coming to attack us, but in fact it is the other way around," said Olivier Roy, a terrorism expert at the French CNRS institute. "Europe is actually exporting jihadis to the Middle East. More Germans and Japanese have joined the jihad in Palestine than second generation European Muslims."
The Bush administration believes you cannot and should not negotiate with terrorists. But this is precisely what European governments have been doing for decades. Ultimately, Britain came to a negotiated settlement with the Irish Republican Army, just as the Spanish government is trying to do with the Basque terrorist organization ETA. As yet, no one is proposing inviting bin Laden for talks in Camp David, but history is littered with examples of yesterday's terrorists becoming tomorrow's leaders.
One area where there does seem to be an increasing convergence in American and European opinions is over the root causes of terrorism.
Many well-meaning European analysts used to argue that terrorism is flourishing because of the international community's inability to bring closure to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and the lingering resentment felt towards the rich West by the "wretched of the earth."
This idea was comprehensively rubbished by European speakers at both recent conferences. "None of those responsible for Jihadi attacks suffered from colonial occupation, illiteracy or poverty," Javier Ruperez, the former Spanish diplomat who now heads the U.N. fight against terrorism, told the Belgian institute's Feb. 13 conference. Added Roy: "There was never a Palestinian flag flying in the Paris suburb riots in November, but this did not stop the media talking about an intifada." Speaking at the GMF/Italian institute's seminar last week, an EU diplomat said: "It would be a strategic mistake to believe that if we solve the Mideast problem, bin Laden will give up targeting the West."
European experts such as Roy and Coolsaet are slowly beginning to build up a more subtle profile of the Jihadi terrorist that has little to do with the popular stereotype of the crazed, Madrassa-educated religious fanatic in the pocket of bin Laden. "They are almost all Westerners," said Roy, adding: "They don't have a traditional religious education." Instead, most European Jihadis are well-educated Muslims who have experienced a personal psychological trauma -- such as drug or alcohol addiction -- before becoming born-again Islamists.
Jihadi terrorism will only be defeated if Europeans and Americans arrive at a joint understanding of the threat posed by violent Islamist groups and a joint plan of action to eradicate the menace. At present, most experts, analysts and policy practitioners would agree this is far from being the case.
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Russia and West Split on Iran Nuclear Issue
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: March 7, 2006
VIENNA, March 6 - A serious rift emerged Monday when Russia split with the United States and Europe over Iran's nuclear program after the Russians floated a last-minute proposal to allow Iran to make small quantities of nuclear fuel, according to European officials.
The reports of the proposal prompted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to call Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and according to an administration official who was briefed on the conversation, "she said the United States cannot support this."
Ms. Rice's call came after Dr. ElBaradei suggested to reporters that the standoff with Iran could be resolved in a week or so, apparently an allusion to the Russian proposal. Washington's strategy is to get past the meeting of the I.A.E.A. that opened Monday and, under a resolution passed by the agency's board in February, have the issue turned over to the United Nations Security Council immediately. But officials clearly fear that the Russian proposal is intended to slow that process.
American officials said they had been assured by the Russians that there was no formal proposal on the table. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, had dinner in Washington on Monday evening with Ms. Rice and the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, and he is scheduled to meet President Bush in the Oval Office on Tuesday.
Under the Russian proposal, Iran would temporarily suspend all uranium enrichment activities at its facility at Natanz but then be allowed to do what Russia describes as "limited research activities" in Iran's uranium enrichment program, said the European officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity under normal diplomatic rules.
Iran would have to agree to a moratorium on production of enriched uranium on an industrial scale for between seven to nine years, ratify additional measures that let the nuclear agency conduct intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities and create a joint venture with Russia on the production of enriched uranium on Russian soil, the officials said. The proposal, which has not been made public, spurred Dr. ElBaradei to give an upbeat assessment about a possible swift resolution of the impasse over Iran's program, an official familiar with his thinking said.
In a tonal shift, Dr. ElBaradei said Iran had made concessions on some issues. Calling Iran's activities at its uranium enrichment plant at Natanz "the sticking point," he added, "That issue is still being discussed this week, and I still hope that in the next week or so that agreement could still be reached."
In an interview on Monday evening, R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, said the administration would reject any proposal that did not require the Iranians to stop domestic nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities. "The United States will not support any halfway measures," he said. "That means full suspension of all nuclear activities, and a return to negotiations on that basis."
Ms. Rice told Dr. ElBaradei that Washington wanted to see Iran's case before the Security Council as soon as this week's agency board meeting was over; that the United States would seek a presidential statement, which does not carry the weight of a resolution, noting Iran's past failures to comply with its international commitments; and that Iran's case would then be sent back to the nuclear agency for further review, according to an official with knowledge of the conversation.
The Russian proposal is a reversal of its previous stance and seemed motivated by its determination to protect Iran from judgment by the Security Council.
Russia - and even China - had joined the United States and the Europeans in demanding that Iran resume a freeze of uranium enrichment activities at Natanz, reflecting mounting global suspicion that Iran's nuclear program is intended to produce weapons.
The Russian proposal surfaced late last week, when Sergei Kisliak, Russia's chief nuclear negotiator, presented it to officials of Britain, France and Germany.
He said Iran would have to resume full suspension of all enrichment-related activities, including what it calls its small-scale "research and development" while the agreement on the package was negotiated. Once there was an agreement, however, Iran would be allowed to conduct limited uranium enrichment research activities under a pilot program as agreed with the I.A.E.A.
As soon as Iran and the agency agreed on the small-scale enrichment, Iran's Parliament would ratify the "Additional Protocol" to Iran's nuclear agreement. That protocol gives the nuclear agency's inspectors the right to ask for exceptional access to Iran's nuclear facilities. When one of the Europeans asked Mr. Kisliak for his definition of a pilot program, he said there was no real definition, one official said.
A moratorium on industrial-scale enrichment and reprocessing activities would last two to three years while the nuclear agency carried out an investigation of Iran's past nuclear activities and five to six years more until trust with Iran could be rebuilt.
Mr. Kisliak conceded that a major risk of such a package was that Iran would inch closer to mastering the technology for a small cascade of centrifuges that turn uranium gas into enriched uranium that can be used to produce electricity or to make bombs. He added that it would shorten the period needed for Iran to "manufacture a weapon" by a number of months, one official familiar with the briefing said.
Iran has always contended its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, although Russia, like the United States and the Europeans, is convinced it intends to make nuclear weapons.
Mr. Kisliak speculated that Iran was unlikely to accept the proposal, in part because of the long-term constraints on its industrial-scale enrichment program. The proposal threatened to derail a carefully formulated, but fragile strategy to send Iran's case to the Security Council. Last month's resolution by the nuclear agency board demanded that no action be taken in the Council until after the current board meeting, a way to give Iran one last chance to comply with agency demands.
Even though there is no specific timetable to seek economic sanctions on Iran, both Russia and China are opposed to sanctions. There is no need for another resolution to be passed by the agency board this time for the Security Council to act. Certainly, Dr. ElBaradei is looking for a negotiated solution to the Iran impasse even if it means giving Iran a significant concession on making nuclear fuel.
In a conversation with the German and French foreign ministers, a senior British Foreign Office envoy and the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, in Vienna last Friday, Dr. ElBaradei expressed the view that Iran needed to continue some uranium enrichment work as a face-saving measure, a European official said. The Europeans, who met earlier with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, replied that it was not a question of saving face but of maintaining both the credibility of the nuclear agency and a firm position toward Iran.
The crucial issue for Iran is mastering the fuel cycle by enriching uranium. Indeed, in Tehran on Sunday, Mr. Larijani reiterated Iran's position that it would not freeze small-scale production of nuclear fuel even if its case came before the Security Council.
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Bush's bumpy road to Iran
by Mike Whitney
March 7, 2006
The Bush administration was hoping for a "green light" from the UN's nuclear watchdog agency, but things fell apart at the last minute. Iran mobilized an "eleventh hour" diplomacy-coup and promised not to pursue "industrial-scale" enrichment for two years.
The announcement took IAEA-chief Muhammad ElBaradei by surprise and left him looking for ways to revive negotiations rather than issuing a critical report to the UN Security Council.
"I am still very much hopeful that that in the next week or so an agreement can be reached," said ElBaradei.
This is bad news for White House strategists who've synchronized their war-plans with the anticipated resolutions by the Security Council. Now, there's a good chance that the 35-member board will slow things down and look for a diplomatic settlement.
This is bound to send the Bush claque into spasms of anxiety. Massive military operations can't be turned off and on at a moment's notice. As we know now, the logistical build-up for Iraq began a full year in advance. So if there is a plan to attack Iran in March (as many analysts believe) it will be hard to change the dates without compromising the entire operation. This means we can expect to see the administration spinning frantically to maintain the momentum for war.
Already State Dept officials are saying that Iran's concessions are insufficient:"The IAEA has made clear that there needs to be a suspension of these enrichment capabilities for a prolonged period of time necessary to restore confidence. Two years is not a prolonged period of time." (Reuters)
But if the Bush administration really wants peace, then why not wait and see if Iran keeps its word? That's easy enough isn't it?
But Washington's not looking for peace and the State Dept's remarks only confirm that the administration is marching inexorably towards war.
Reuter's is reporting that "Iran may agree to extend a moratorium (on industrial-enrichment) if it is permitted to run a small-scale enrichment research program."
This shows that Iran has no grandiose plans for building nuclear weapons but just needs a face-saving way of freeing itself from the current confrontation.
Will ElBaradei help to bail Iran out or throw them to the wolves?
UN Ambassador John Bolton has added to the drama by threatening to retaliate if Iran resumes nuclear activities which are allowed under the terms of the NPT. Addressing the powerful Jewish lobby, AIPAC, Bolton said that Iran would face "tangible and painful consequences" if it fails to comply with US demands to suspend all enrichment activities. He added ominously that the US would use "all tools at our disposal" to stop this threat.
Bolton said that America is "beefing up defensive measures to cope with the Iranian nuclear threat".
Threat? What threat?
The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) predicted that it would take Iran at least 10 years to develop nuclear weapons! Perhaps, Bolton is referring to the threat of US oil corporations not having access to Iran's prodigious petroleum reserves which are estimated at 10% of the world's remaining supplies.
So far, Bolton's claims have been brushed aside by the IAEA, which has repeatedly said that there is "no evidence" of an Iranian nuclear weapons program or any indication of the diversion of nuclear material.
Bolton's accusations are strictly designed to manipulate public opinion and mobilize the country for another war. They are as baseless as the allegations that dominated the headlines before the war in Iraq.
Did Bolton's vehemence scare ElBaradei and convince him to slow down the process?
We don't know, but the IAEA-chief seems to be following a "foot-dragging" strategy that's intended to dampen Washington's enthusiasm for war.
Bush's trip to India hasn't helped matters either. Bush breezily ignored the NPT (Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty)and promised to provide India's Prime Minister Singh with nuclear fuel and technology without consulting congress, the United Nations, or the IAEA. For Iran, this was just another example of the arbitrary and hypocritical way that nuclear issues are resolved.
Why should India be rewarded for operating outside the NPT when Iran is punished for playing by the rules?
What yardstick is the United States using to decide who gets fuel and technology and who doesn't?
Could it be that India promises open markets, "union-free" labor, and unlimited foreign investment, while Iran sits atop an ocean of oil that begs to be "liberated" by western energy giants?
Hmmmm?
Could be.
Mike lives in Washington State with his charming wife Joan and two spoiled and overfed dogs, Cocoa and Pat-Fergie.
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Washington splits over best policy to halt Iran's nuclear plan
By Tom Baldwin
London Times
7 Mar 06
Visiting MPs were astonished by a lack of consensus on the eve of the crucial nuclear meeting
THE US Administration is riven by divisions over how it should tackle Iran's defiance of the international community with its nuclear programme, according to British MPs returning from a fact-finding mission to Washington.
They expressed astonishment that widely differing policies - ranging from military action to diplomatic soft-pedalling - were still being debated even as the International Atomic Energy Agency board prepared for its vital meeting in Vienna today.
Iran yesterday raised the stakes by vowing that it would resume large-scale uranium enrichment if the meeting referred the Islamic republic to the UN Security Council.
Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, who will today hold talks in Washington with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, is advocating a cautious approach.
"Nobody has said that we have to rush immediately to sanctions of some kind," she said at the weekend.
"I think the Security Council will have to have a serious discussion about what the next steps will be."
Members of the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee returning from Washington were, however, confused and disorientated about the direction of US policy towards Iran. They had held talks with John Bolton, the US Ambassador to the UN, who is a hawk on the issue. He told the MPs that he wanted a "Chapter 7 resolution" under which the UN would authorise military action, such as air strikes, against Iran.
Mr Bolton was quoted as saying: "They must know everything is on the table and they must understand what that means. We can hit different points along the line. You only have to take out one part of their nuclear operation to take the whole thing down."
Mike Gapes, the committee chairman, said that this was one of "at least three views" they had heard on Iran from within the Administration.
Another option, which he ascribed to the Pentagon, where they had talks with Peter Rodman, the Assistant Defence Secretary, and Brigadier-General Carter Hamm, formerly the US commander in northern Iraq, was to throw the issue "into the Security Council like a hand grenade and see what happens".
However, Mr Gapes said that both the CIA and Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, believed that the US should "ride it out" rather than engage in "posturing", because of a lack of clarity as to what the Security Council would agree. Going to the UN could lead to a rerun of the attempts to get agreement on Iraq before the war.
Ali Larijani, Tehran's chief negotiator, raised the stakes, saying that Iran had a "God- given right" to a nuclear programme. He even said that oil production might be used as a weapon if the crisis deepened.
Iran has already resumed enrichment on a small scale at its Natanz research facility, testing 20 centrifuges, according to the IAEA. Thousands of centrifuges are required to produce enough enriched uranium for a weapons programme.
The Islamic republic, which has the fourth-largest reserves of oil in the world, insists that it needs the nuclear programme for the production of electricity. The West fears that the Tehran Government, which has recently threatened to wipe Israel off the map, is trying to build nuclear weapons.
In the US, hawks such as Mr Bolton have been largely marginalised by the growing foreign policy ascendancy of Dr Rice as well as by the continued carnage in Iraq, which has damaged America's military and political capacity to take action.
The US has, instead, pinned its hopes on the EU3 - Britain, France and Germany - securing a diplomatic solution. Last-ditch negotiations over a compromise proposal, under which uranium would be enriched for Iran by Russia, broke up without agreement on Friday.
The IAEA board today is widely expected to set Iran a new 30-day deadline by which it must halt the nuclear programme and comply with international inspectors - or face being referred to the Security Council for further action.
Both the US and the EU3 are thought to favour sanctions targeted on Iran's nuclear programme and the clerical elite behind the regime.
This could include a ban on its 100 top leaders travelling outside Iran, as well as freezing their bank accounts.
But Dr Rice's meeting today with her Russian counterpart could be crucial in determining how the international community will proceed.
Russia and China, both of which are permanent members of the UN Security Council, are reluctant to authorise even limited sanctions.
In Tehran, Mr Larijani said that Iran still wanted to negotiate but added: "We will definitely resume our enrichment if Iran is referred to the Security Council."
Time magazine reported that the US will show to the Security Council diagrams from a computer, stolen from an Iranian nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004, that are believed to depict an atomic bomb.
ROAD TO WAR... OR A DEAL
IRAN
November 2003
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear regulator, reports that Iran has concealed a programme to enrich uranium for 18 years. The US says that Iran should be reported to the UN Security Council, then sanctions should be imposed
September 2005
The IAEA agrees in principle that the issues fall within the council's authority
January 30, 2006
Five permanent members of the Security Council - the US, Russia, China, Britain and France - agree that the IAEA should report its decisions on steps required of Iran under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the council
February 2, 2006
The IAEA holds an emergency meeting on Iran
March 2006
A further IAEA report and a Security Council decision on whether to become actively involved are due
IRAQ
November 2002
UN Security Council resolution 1441 passed. UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix return to Iraq for the first time in four years
December 7, 2002
Iraq files 12,000-page weapons declaration
December 19
Secretary of State Colin Powell states that Iraq is in material breach of the Security Council resolution
January 16, 2003
UN inspectors find empty chemical warheads February 5, 2003 Powell appears before the UN, claiming that Iraq harbours an al-Qaeda terrorist network
February 24, 2003
Britain and the United States present a draft resolution to the Security Council declaring that Iraq is in material breach of its obligations under resolution 1441. A diplomatic rift ensues with the US and the UK coming under sustained criticism from France, Russia and Germany. The resolution was eventually withdrawn
March 2003
President Bush gives Saddam Hussein an ultimatum to leave power. UN pulls out inspectors from Iraq
March 21, 2003
Invasion of Iraq begins
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Israel: Hamas leaders not immune
Tuesday, 7 March 2006, 12:06 GMT
Palestinian PM-designate Ismail Haniya will not be immune from assassination if Hamas renews attacks on Israel, the Israeli defence minister has said.
Shaul Mofaz told Israeli Army Radio the policy of targeted killings had been successful and would continue.
Mr Haniya has been nominated to form the next Palestinian government after Hamas' shock poll victory in January.
Israel's own campaign for polls on 28 March has begun, with the Kadima party of acting PM Ehud Olmert tipped to win.
Tough line
Mr Mofaz's comments came a day after two Islamic Jihad militants and three other Palestinians were killed in an Israeli air strike on a car in Gaza City.
"We will continue the targeted killings at this pace," Mr Mofaz said.
"If Hamas, a terror organisation that doesn't recognise agreements with us and isn't willing to renounce violence, presents us with the challenge of having to confront a terror organisation, then no-one there will be immune.
"Not just Ismail Haniya. No-one will be immune."
Two years ago, Israel killed two top Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdelaziz al-Rantissi, in air strikes.
Hamas has launched many suicide attacks on Israeli territory in the five-year Palestinian uprising, but has largely observed an informal ceasefire for more than a year.
In contrast to Hamas, Islamic Jihad has continued to mount suicide bombings inside Israel and did not participate in the 25 January election.
Salah Bardawil, a Hamas spokesman, said Mr Mofaz's comments "reflect the bloody, inhumane and inflammatory character of the Zionist enemy".
"We are not seeking immunity or mercy from Israel. We are in a confrontation. The side that is most steadfast is the side that will survive," he said.
Hamas won 74 seats to the 45 of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah Party in January's election.
Mr Haniya is seen as a pragmatist, more open to dialogue with Israel than many other Hamas leaders although Hamas refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist.
The new parliament on Monday attempted to revoke recent legislation giving more powers to Mr Abbas, dimming hopes of forming a unity government. Fatah MPs walked out.
Settlements
The BBC's correspondent in Jerusalem, Matthew Price says it is no surprise that Mr Mofaz's comment was made at the start of the Israeli election campaign, in which all leading parties are running advertisements on radio and TV.
Mr Mofaz's party, Kadima, could lose votes if it appears to be soft on the Palestinians, our correspondent says.
Recent opinion polls put Kadima well ahead.
One in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper recently predicted Kadima would win 38 seats in the 120-strong assembly, with the Labour party of Amir Peretz winning 20 and Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu gaining 15.
Kadima leader Ehud Olmert, who has headed the party since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke in January, launched Kadima's election campaign by vowing to reduce spending on settlements in the West Bank if Kadima retained power.
"It is no secret. We are not going to invest in coming years the same kind of money that we have previously spent on construction and infrastructure development in areas beyond the Green Line," which separates Israel from the West Bank, he said.
"Instead, in the coming years we are going to accord priority status to three areas in Israel: the Negev, the Galilee and Jerusalem where we are going to invest sums which are unprecedented in the history of our country."
The international community considers all settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.
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Israel blasts car carrying Palestinian militants; 3 militants, bystander killed - Eight people, including a child, were wounded
Associated Press
Mar 06, 2006
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Israeli aircraft on Monday fired a missile into a car carrying Islamic Jihad militants, killing three and a teenage bystander, Palestinian doctors said.
Eight people, including a child, were wounded, doctors said.
A spokesman for the militant group, who gave his name as Abu Dajana, vowed to get even.
"God willing we are going to get revenge for the honourable blood shed today," Abu Dajana told reporters outside a morgue at the Shifa hospital in Gaza.
Three passengers killed in the car were Islamic Jihad members, Abu Dajana said. Palestinian doctors said a teenage bystander was also killed in the strike.
One lightly injured person, Amin Sarsour, said he was crossing the road when the missile struck.
"Suddenly a missile hit a car travelling in front of us and a huge explosion went off and the car went up in flames," said Sarsour, a resident of the area.
An angry mob gathered outside the morgue, shooting in the air and shouting "Death to Israel."
The car was travelling when the explosion went off, witnesses said.
The Israeli military confirmed it hit the car with a missile. It said one of those killed had been involved in rocket attacks against Israeli communities.
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Israel airstrike kills 5
Mon Mar 6, 2006
By Labib Nasir
Reuters
An Israeli air strike killed two Islamic Jihad militants and three other people in the Gaza Strip on Monday, including an eight-year-old boy, Palestinian medics and witnesses said.
The Israeli army confirmed the strike on a car carrying the two militants, which came on the eve of formal campaigning for Israel's elections on March 28 and after interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to use an "iron fist" against militants.
"The war on terror will be conducted in full strength as it is being conducted, in every corner, in every place in the Gaza Strip and everywhere else," Olmert said in an recorded interview aired on Monday on a talk show on Israel's Channel 2 television.
Islamic militant group Hamas, which is forming a government after winning Palestinian parliamentary elections in January, called the air strike a "massacre." President Mahmoud Abbas said it was a "dangerous escalation" against the Palestinian people.
The unified condemnation was in sharp contrast to the first working session of the new Palestinian parliament, where Hamas legislators challenged Abbas by revoking all decisions made by the previous legislature at its final session last month.
That included legislation giving Abbas wider powers to appoint judges.
Hamas trounced Abbas's once-dominant Fatah movement in parliamentary elections on January 25. A senior Abbas aide accused Hamas of attempting to oust the Palestinian president.
"We see this as a coup attempt to change the regime and they have to seriously reconsider their decisions," said the aide, Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.
In the final session of the previous parliament on February 13, majority Fatah members pushed through an amendment to an existing law, giving Abbas power to appoint judges to a constitutional court without seeking legislative approval.
The judges could have been asked to decide whether laws approved by the new parliament were constitutional. Hamas said the move effectively gave Abbas veto power over new laws.
Comment: Notice the title of this article which is supposed to be reporting the wanton murder by Israel of three innocent Palestinians including an 8 year old child. Notice that Israel did not murder 3 three civilians, one of whom was an 8 year old boy, but rather "killed 3 other people". This is the kind of subtle twisting of reality that allows such brutal state-sponsored murder to continue unchallenged.
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Hamas revokes Abbas's wider powers
By Reuters, Monday 6 March, 2006 15:24
Hamas legislators voted on Monday to revoke all decisions made by the previous Palestinian parliament at its final session last month, including laws that gave President Mahmoud Abbas wider powers to appoint some judges.
The move was seen as a challenge to Abbas, whose once-dominant Fatah faction suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of Hamas in parliamentary elections on Jan. 25.
A senior Abbas aide accused Hamas of attempting to oust the Palestinian president.
"We see this as a coup attempt to change the regime and they (Hamas) have to seriously reconsider their decisions," said Tayeb Abdel-Rahim.
In the final session of the previous parliament on Feb. 13, majority Fatah members pushed through an amendment to an existing law, giving Abbas power to appoint judges to a constitutional court without seeking legislative approval.
The judges could be asked to decide whether laws approved by the new parliament are constitutional. Hamas has said the move would effectively give Abbas veto power over new laws.
In the first parliamentary session since being sworn in, Hamas lawmakers -- who dominate the 132-seat parliament, nullified all decisions taken in the session.
"The law is very clear. It gives us the right to endorse or reject the resolutions or the decisions of that session," senior Hamas lawmaker Mahmoud Ramahi told Reuters before the annulment vote was taken.
Fatah members had earlier walked out of the first working session of the new parliament on Monday in protest after Hamas began steps to revoke the previous decisions.
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Senior aide to Mahmoud Abbas accuses Hamas of coup attempt
Haaretz
06 Mar 2006
A senior Palestinian official accused Hamas lawmakers on Monday of attempting to oust Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas by nullifying a parliamentary decision that gave the Palestinian president wider powers.
"We see this as a coup attempt to change the regime and they [Hamas] have to seriously reconsider their decisions," said Tayeb Abdel-Rahim, a senior aide to Abbas.
Meanwhile, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshal said Monday that the group's recent visit to Moscow marked the end of its international isolation.
Hamas legislators voted Monday to revoke all decisions made by the previous Palestinian parliament at its final session last month, including legislation that gave Abbas wider powers to appoint some judges.
The move was seen as a challenge to Abbas, whose once-dominant Fatah faction suffered a resounding defeat at the hands of Hamas in parliamentary elections on January 25.
"The law is very clear. It gives us the right to endorse or reject the resolutions or the decisions of that session," senior Hamas lawmaker Mahmoud Ramahi told Reuters before the annulment vote was taken.
The session was held simultaneously in the West Bank town of Ramallah and in Gaza City, with legislators hooked up by video conference.
In the final session of the previous parliament on February 13, majority Fatah members pushed through an amendment to an existing law, giving Abbas power to appoint judges to a consitutional court without seeking legislative approval.
The judges could be asked to decide whether laws approved by the new parliament are constitutional. Hamas has said the move would effectively give Abbas veto power over new laws.
Fatah members had earlier walked out of the first working session of the new parliament on Monday in protest after Hamas began steps to revoke the previous decisions.
During the voting, a dozen Fatah gunmen walked near the parliament building in Gaza City, firing in the air. However, the protesters eventually headed to a nearby meeting of Fatah leaders, demanding that their party not join a Hamas government. One masked gunman said any Fatah politician joining a Hamas government would be killed.
Meshal, whose three-day visit to the Russian capital ended Sunday, was quoted as telling the daily Vremya Novostei that "Moscow became the place where we opened the door to the entire global community."
"It broke the blockade which Israel and the United States have been trying to impose on us," Meshal said.
He also said that "Russia's position is completely unlike that of the West" and praised Russian officials for understanding Hamas' stance.
"We have never found understanding with the Americans," Meshal told Vremya Novostei. "They aren't ready to listen to opinions which contradict theirs. And at the Russian Foreign Ministry we felt that we were being understood."
Russian President Vladimir Putin called Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over the weekend to update him on the outcome of the visit.
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Defiling the Grave of an American Hero:
The Censoring of Rachel Corrie
by Jack Random
www.dissidentvoice.org
March 6, 2006
After all the outcry concerning the intolerance of the Islamic world in their impassioned response to the degrading cartoon depictions of the prophet Mohammed, where is the outrage in response to the silencing of Rachel Corrie by the New York Theater Workshop?
Is there a double standard in western values of free speech? You bet there is. The hypocrisy runs so deep that the vast majority of Americans does not know who Rachel Corrie is and, thanks to the self-imposed gag rule of cultural and media institutions, they never will.
In a year when Hollywood embraced such groundbreaking movies as Goodnight & Good Luck, Syriana, Trans America, Brokeback Mountain and Crash, a New York theater company cancelled a production of the play My Name is Rachel Corrie on the grounds that the public outcry would be unbearable.
The rationale is a lie on its face. As anyone in theater knows, controversy is manna from heaven. It was not public outcry that silenced the voice of a martyr; it was the censorship imposed by Israeli loyalists. It was the promise that generous public funding and contributions would suddenly come up short. It was intolerance for any view, any story, that does not portray Israel as the righteous party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Who was Rachel Corrie?
She was an all-American girl who was impassioned by the cause of the Palestinian people. In an act of civil disobedience, like the anonymous hero of Tiananmen Square, she stood before an Israeli bulldozer preparing to demolish a Palestinian neighborhood. She stood against injustice and oppression. She stood courageously for the values that all Americans cherish and she was crushed by the heavy and heartless hand of Israeli indifference.
She stood in the way of the "Road Map" to peace. She stood in the way of Ariel Sharon's new deal for the Palestinians: let them eat dirt and suffer as we assassinate their leaders with American-made precision bombs and reduce their homes to rubble.
Rachel Corrie had the audacity to care and, beyond caring, to act on her convictions. Without regard to any judgments you may impose on the validity of her cause or means, Rachel Corrie was the essence of courage and heroism. She was what every mother's child should endeavor to be. She chose the ground upon which she would make her stand and paid for it with her life.
Like Marla Ruzicka and so many others, most of whom will never have a public name, whose stories will never be told, Rachel Corrie will never speak for herself again. From the silence of her grave, she will never answer her detractors. She will never marry. She will never have children. She will never be elected to Congress. She will never know the joy and sorrow of a life fully lived.
The essential question of whether her life, her cause and her sacrifice were worthwhile and the greater question of whether or not she made a difference in this indifferent world can only be answered by the living.
If we do not possess the courage even to tell her story for fear of public outcry, then we are truly complicit in the actions of her murderers. We are enabling when all that we know and feel begs us for retribution.
Imagine what being crushed by a bulldozer would feel like. Linger on that gruesome deed and allow your tears to flow like a river of redemption. Even the vilest creature on earth would not deserve such a death.
Rachel Corrie was no such creature.
Let her voice be heard. Let her story be told.
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Condi's Promises of Gaza trade Fall Flat
Mon Mar 6, 2006
Reuters
Scant progress has been made implementing a deal brokered last year by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to boost the flow of goods into and out of Gaza after Israel's withdrawal, the World Bank said.
"Very little has been implemented and the system that exists today is virtually unchanged," the international lending agency said in the report, which was expected to be released on Monday.
Under the November 15 agreement announced by Rice and touted by Washington as a rare breakthrough in Middle East diplomacy, Israel agreed to allow 150 commercial trucks to pass daily through Gaza's Karni crossing with Israel by December 31, 2005.
That number would rise to 400 by the end of 2006.
But the World Bank said Karni crossing data suggested that there had been "no sustained improvement" in the movement of goods across Karni before or after Israel's pullout, completed last September.
In the six months preceding the withdrawal, an average of 43 trucks per day crossed out of Gaza, followed by 18 trucks a day in September and October 2005, the report said.
From November 2005 to mid-February, the daily average reached only 43 trucks a day, it added.
The United Nations cautioned last week that stocks of wheat, sugar and cooking oil were dwindling in Gaza and could begin to run out within days unless Israel reopened Karni.
Israel closed the crossing for 21 days between January 15 and February 5. It was closed again on February 21 after a mysterious explosion in the area and has remained closed because of "continued security alerts," the army said.
Israeli officials have defended their closure of Karni as a security precaution against possible Palestinian attacks and said they offered to reroute supplies to Gaza through another crossing, a proposal the Palestinians declined.
Israel has retained control of all access points for bringing goods in and out of the Gaza Strip, citing security concerns.
Palestinians depend on foreign aid totaling more than $1 billion a year. It is unclear how much of that money would be withheld by international donors once Palestinian election winner Hamas, whose charter calls for Israel's destruction, forms the next government.
Since a Palestinian revolt erupted in 2000, Hamas has masterminded at least 60 suicide bombings against Israelis. But it has largely abided by a truce declared last year.
Comment: Like their Israeli masters, members of the Bush administration care nothing for the suffering of the Palestinians and are moved to initiate hollow 'peace deals' in order to hide from the world their contempt for the Palestinians.
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Chirac Opposes Sanctions Against Hamas Government
By VOA News
06 March 2006
French President Jacques Chirac says he is opposed to any international sanctions against a Palestinian government formed by the militant group Hamas.
Speaking to reporters Monday on the final day of a visit to Saudi Arabia, Mr. Chirac said he was aware of calls for cutting off aid to a Hamas-led government because of the group's refusal to renounce violence against Israel. But he said imposing sanctions would mostly hurt the Palestinian people.
Hamas won a landslide election victory in January, prompting Israel, the United States and the European Union - which includes France - to threaten to stop funding unless the Islamic militant group recognize Israel and stop its militants from attacking the Jewish state.
France often presents itself as supporting Arab causes, while many Arabs regard the United States as biased toward Israel.
Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.
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Wolfensohn: Aid to PA Must Continue
FINE
6 March 2006
Jerusalem - James Wolfensohn, international envoy to the Middle East, said Monday that Western aid to Palestinians must continue but could bypass a Hamas-led government unless it renounces violence and recognizes Israel, AP reported.
Wolfensohn, who represents the so-called Quartet of Mideast peacemakers, the US, UN, European Union and Russia, said cutting off aid to the Palestinians would lead to a humanitarian disaster.
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Accusations of anti-semitic chic are poisonous intellectual thuggery
David Clark
Monday March 6, 2006
The Guardian
Attempts to brand the left as anti-Jewish because of its support of Palestinian rights only make it harder to tackle genuine racism
If the past few weeks have demonstrated anything, it is the frequency with which allegations of anti-semitism surface in modern political debate. Ken Livingstone, the Church of England and the Guardian (over articles comparing Israel and apartheid) are the most recent to find themselves in the firing line. This is the backdrop against which an unofficial parliamentary inquiry on anti-semitism under former Foreign Office minister Denis McShane concludes its hearings in Westminster today.
A sober reflection on the nature of the problem is badly needed to take the sting out of the issue and establish groundrules that everyone can respect. But there is a suspicion that others have a different objective. In announcing the inquiry, John Mann, the MP who chairs the Parliamentary Committee Against Anti-Semitism, said: "Anti-semitism is back in fashion and can be found on the streets of Islington, Aldershot and Bethnal Green." This is no random list: Bethnal Green is included because of its large Muslim population, Aldershot because it is where a Jewish cemetery was desecrated last year, and Islington because it is widely regarded as the spiritual home of Britain's leftwing intelligentsia. It is this last group that has become the target of particular vilification.
Variants of this theme have become common since the breakdown of the Middle East peace process, and especially since 9/11. The left is said to be in the grip of what the rightwing American columnist George Will has called an "anti-semitic chic". Instead of declaring its hatred of Jews openly, this new antisemitism is expressed indirectly through criticism of Israel or even opposition to Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. A particularly meretricious version suggests that opposition to American foreign policy, or even criticism of neoconservatives, is really a coded form of anti-semitism.
This accusation isn't confined to the rough and tumble of the post-9/11 transatlantic debate, either. The normally measured Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has cited "a leftwing anti-American cognitive elite with strong representation in the European media" as one of the main sources of anti-semitism. He doesn't spell it out, but we all know who he means. The argument is not just that there are individuals who harbour anti-semitic views, but that something in the political culture or ideology of the left predisposes it to anti-semitism. This is said to be the real reason why it criticises Israel.
There is no shortage of examples, from Karl Marx to George Orwell, of prominent leftwing figures making offensive remarks about Jews. Instances of anti-capitalism spilling into "rich Jew" bigotry are also well documented. More recently, Tam Dalyell blamed government support for Israel on "a cabal of Jewish advisers" - comments that were deservedly condemned.
But these personal expressions of prejudice stand out precisely because they conflict so sharply with the left's universalism and its opposition to ethnic discrimination. A more sweeping charge is that this universalism is itself a source of anti-semitism since, in its maximalist interpretation, it denies Israel's right to be a Jewish state. But the few still calling for a single "secular, democratic state" in the whole of historic Palestine are making a statement about the inadmissibility of defining statehood according to religious or ethnic criteria that they apply as a universal norm. Impractical and idealistic this may be, but it is not anti-semitic, and it is plainly dishonest to suggest it is.
In any case, this is a minority view on the left, and has been for a long time. Decolonisation forced the mainstream left to incorporate expressions of national and ethnic identity into its worldview. The reaction of the democratic left to Israel's creation was largely positive as a result. It helped that Israel was governed from the left, but the example of a persecuted people creating a successful, independent state inspired a profound admiration for Zionism.
So what changed? The answer is 1967 and Israel's subsequent emergence as a power determined to annex territory beyond its legally recognised borders. The unbearable truth is that the left that identifies with the Palestinians today is largely the same left that identified with Israel in the 50s and the 60s. Moreover, it does so for largely the same reason: instinctive sympathy for the underdog. For some, the idea that anyone could see the conflict in these terms is literally unthinkable, so they are forced to impute to Israel's critics the motive of Jew-hatred. At best, this betrays a lack of empathy - at worst, something less forgivable. From Golda Meir's denial that the Palestinians existed to Ehud Barak's dismissal of them as congenital liars, there is a long tradition of prejudice that regards the Palestinians as lesser beings deserving of lesser rights.
A more subtle argument accepts that Israel is open to criticism, but complains that it is singled out to an extent that reveals an underlying anti-Jewish prejudice. Or to put it another way: "Others get away with it, so why can't Israel." Despite its cynicism, this argument deserves an answer, and it is provided, as it happens, by Israel's staunchest supporters. Israel, we are rightly reminded, is a democracy. Is it not legitimate, therefore, to expect it to uphold the democratic values we share in common? Far from being held to a higher standard, as its supporters often protest, Israel seems to operate with a greater impunity, and to do so with western acquiescence. This is the real reason why the issue is felt so deeply on the left and why unofficial boycotts are emerging to fill the moral void left by our feeble leaders.
A final objection takes issue with the left's supposed "demonisation" of Israel. Although often overdone, one suspects that comparisons with apartheid provoke anger because they contain an uncomfortable element of truth. More clear-cut are analogies with Nazi Germany. These should be deplored on grounds of both historical truth and taste. But are they anti-semitic as opposed to just plain obnoxious? Those who resort to them know they are bogus, but they understand their shock value and hope to shame and anger Israel and its supporters into modifying their behaviour. Indeed, as a debating tactic, it is indistinguishable from the one deployed by those levelling charges of anti-semitism against the left. They do it not because they believe it, but because they know the left takes its anti-racism seriously and is susceptible to this kind of blackmail. There has been enough of this intellectual thuggery on both sides, and it's time someone called a stop to it.
This is one way in which the report of the parliamentary inquiry could contribute something positive. Real anti-semitism is a serious and growing problem, and there is a need for political consensus about how to tackle it. But debate is poisoned and consensus becomes difficult when allegations of anti-semitism are bandied about for reasons that have nothing to do with fighting racism. An inquiry that wants to confront anti-semitism should also confront those who cheapen the term through reckless misuse.
· David Clark is a former Labour government adviser
Dkclark@aol.com
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Iraq's Crisis of Scarred Psyches
By Jonathan Finer and Omar Fekeiki
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 6, 2006; A01
BAGHDAD -- More than 25 years after Saddam Hussein's rise to power ushered in a period of virtually uninterrupted trauma -- three wars, crippling economic sanctions and now a violent insurgency -- the psychological damage to many Iraqis is only now being assessed, psychiatrists and government officials here say.
Even as a grim, though incomplete, picture of the population's mental health has emerged in recent studies, so too has the realization that the country's health care system is ill-equipped to deal with what are likely millions of potential psychiatric patients with conditions born of the hardship of recent years.
One recent study was sparked by one of the country's darkest days in recent memory. Last Aug. 31, nearly 1,000 Shiite Muslim pilgrims died -- some trampled in a crush of humanity, others by drowning -- when a religious procession across a Baghdad bridge became a lethal stampede.
Months after the dead were buried and the wounded had begun to heal, a team of psychiatrists at the Health Ministry established a psychological outreach facility in Sadr City, a teeming Shiite slum in the capital, to assess and treat the damage inflicted on victims, witnesses and their families. What they found surpassed even their worst fears. More than 90 percent of the people surveyed suffered from psychological disorders, including depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
"The people we've identified as troubled are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the mental health situation in this country," said Ali Abdul Razak, 55, who runs the clinic in a dank corner of Sadr City's Imam Ali Hospital. "I don't consider this post-traumatic, I consider it 'continuous traumatic,' because the trauma they have is ongoing."
Resources for treatment are scarce. Only about 75 psychiatrists remain in a country that has endured a brutal eight-year war with Iran and two wars with the United States, along with crippling economic sanctions in the 1990s and the bloody insurgency today. Many fled along with other professionals to escape kidnappings and threats from insurgents. As a result, there is one psychiatrist for about every 300,000 Iraqis, compared with about one for every 10,000 Americans. There are currently no child psychiatrists in this country of about 25 million, Razak said.
This year the Health Ministry declared mental health a top priority and opened two psychological outreach centers in Baghdad (the second is in the city's main teaching hospital in the predominantly Sunni Muslim neighborhood of Yarmouk). In addition to studying those affected by the bridge collapse, the ministry has begun collecting data on the population as whole.
In a survey of just over 1,000 randomly selected people across five Baghdad neighborhoods, completed this month by psychiatrists at Baghdad's Mustansariyah University, about 890 reported having experienced a violent incident firsthand, including all 27 children under 12 in the sample.
Most alarming, according to the physicians who analyzed the data, was that exposure to trauma has grown dramatically more common since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The people in the study recalled 3,504 violent incidents between 1979, when Hussein came to power, and 2003. Since the invasion, they have recorded 6,463.
In the survey, the psychiatrists adapted an Iraqi version of the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire, a research tool once used to evaluate the mental health of Southeast Asian refugees displaced by war.
Among the 42 yes-or-no queries, Iraqi subjects were asked to indicate whether they had been "oppressed because of ethnicity, religion or sect," "witnessed the desecration or destruction of religious shrines," "witnessed mass execution of civilians," been "used as a human shield," "witnessed rotting corpses," or been "forced to pay for a bullet used to kill a family member."
Those at the greatest risk, psychiatrists say, are people who came of age during Hussein's reign and have rarely known a life without trauma.
"For more than 40 years, everything in our country said to be a hero you must be violent. Violence was how we survived, by identifying with aggressors," said Muhammad Lafta, the deputy national adviser for mental health and a psychiatrist at al-Rashid Hospital, one of two dedicated psychiatric hospitals in the country. Under Hussein, he said, elementary school students were made to assemble at least once a week to watch their principals fire AK-47 assault rifles into the air.
The damage to Hussein Ali Saoud's mind is reflected in the molten-looking, purplish scars that rend the skin of both his forearms. An Iraqi soldier during the 2003 invasion, he said he watched two of his platoon mates die from gunshot wounds as U.S. troops invaded Baghdad. Since then, he has sought relief by taking drugs and slicing jagged lines in his flesh with a razor.
"I get nervous and start to feel like someone is suffocating me," said Saoud, 30, joined by his younger brother in a recent visit to the outreach center at the Yarmouk hospital, where doctors diagnosed PTSD. "When I see myself bleeding it helps me relax, even though I know it is wrong."
International advisers and experts say Iraq's mental health system has a long way to go, despite about $25 million in aid, including a $6 million grant from the Japanese government.
"It's pretty small beer, compared to the scope of the problem. You're probably talking about epidemic levels of PTSD," said Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist and associate professor at Stanford Medical School who is helping train Iraqi doctors in modern practices. "The health system was pretty good, including mental health care. But in the last 25 years or so, they've virtually been kept in the dark. They weren't allowed to go to conferences or even read the medical journals."
Humphreys and other American and European psychiatrists have led conferences for their Iraqi counterparts in the region, although not in Iraq because security is tenuous, a fact he said complicates the psychiatrists' work.
"The thing with psychiatric work, though, is that to make progress you first have to have a functioning society," Humphreys said. "You need to have peace."
Another barrier to progress is a strong stigma attached to psychiatric care in Iraq. "It's unacceptable to say you need mental help, so you have people making appointments with surgeons and then telling them they are depressed," Lafta said.
Muhammed Ata, 44, said he sought treatment at the Yarmouk center only because his sister made him. A policeman, he was patrolling the western Baghdad neighborhood of Khadra three months ago when a pair of improvised bombs exploded, killing two of his fellow officers.
"I looked for my friends, 'Where is Ayad? Where is Fuad?' No Ayad and no Fuad. I just saw a neck here and a hand there," Ata said. "We were like one family, my friends who died and me."
His sister, Nisreen Ata, who attended a recent appointment with him, said he has been too afraid to return to work. "He gazes at police cars and hums," she said.
Most patients are not victims of violence but witnesses to horrific events, Iraqi psychiatrists say.
Khadija Murad's older brother died fighting in the Iran-Iraq war, months before the end of the brutal conflict that consumed nearly a million lives during the 1980s. Her house burned to the ground five years ago, taking with it all her savings at a time when Iraq was under economic sanctions.
Since last January, when a car bomb exploded near an Iraqi army patrol passing by her house, Murad, 40, has been unable to banish from her mind the images of smoke and screaming and charred flesh. Overwhelmed by nightmares and thoughts of suicide, she said, she made her way to the center at Yarmouk Hospital.
"Every other day I feel fine, but then it always comes back," said Murad, clutching her year-old son Hussein, as she described bouts of depression and anxiety that have twice caused her to leave her husband and four children to move in with her parents. "I stop eating. I cry. I just want to go to sleep and not wake up."
Asked how long it would take for the country's collective psyche to recover from the turmoil of recent years, Lafta, the psychiatrist at al-Rashid Hospital, predicted "a generation or more, from the time the fighting here stops."
"The damage was done over a long period," he said, "and it will take decades to heal."
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Iraqi forces probe general's "strange" killing
By Alastair Macdonald
Reuters
March 7, 2006
BAGHDAD - The Iraqi army is investigating how a gunman managed to kill a senior Iraqi general in an attack that has fueled concern about the new, U.S.-trained Iraq military's cohesion in the face of brewing sectarian conflict.
"It is a very strange incident and raises many questions," an official in the Defense Ministry press service said on Tuesday after the commander of all Iraqi troops in Baghdad died from a bullet to the head while in a patrol convoy on Monday.
Another Iraqi general told Reuters it was an assassination that needed inside information and proved the army, recruited by U.S. officers over the past two years, had been infiltrated by factional militia groups ready to turn on fellow soldiers.
"The outsiders have hands on the inside," the general said.
The former U.S. commander in Baghdad said the killing of Major General Mubdar Hatim al-Dulaimi, a Sunni Muslim who commanded the 10,000-strong 6th Division in Baghdad, could be part of a move to establish Shi'ite control of the capital.
The division, among the best equipped and strongest of Iraq's new forces, has been on the frontline of preventing a civil war after sectarian bloodshed erupted two weeks ago over the bombing of a Shi'ite shrine in the Sunni city of Samarra.
U.S. forces have handed operational control of about 70 percent of the city of Baghdad to Iraqi forces as part of a plan under which the 133,000 Americans now in Iraq will gradually withdraw as Iraqi forces are trained to take over.
Sectarian violence could jeopardize that strategy.
Dulaimi, a Saddam Hussein-era general who had a reputation for personal bravery, was in a convoy of 14 armored vehicles in an area of western Baghdad where Sunni insurgents are active, the Defense Ministry official said. He had driven out from his headquarters in late afternoon to investigate a gun battle.
"PRECISE INFORMATION"
The general was wearing body armor, the ministry official said. He opened the door of his four-wheel drive vehicle and a single bullet struck his head as he was putting on his helmet.
"The gunmen had very precise information," he said.
A security source at Baghdad's Yarmuk hospital said the bullet entered the right side of the general's head.
The ministry official, the Iraqi general and an Interior Ministry source all said one bullet was fired, apparently by a sniper in a high building. However, a second Defense Ministry official said many shots were fired and other troops wounded.
The hospital source said no wounded soldiers were admitted.
The Iraqi general said the killing could be the work of many groups, from Sunni insurgents to pro-government Shi'ite militias out to control the new armed forces in any civil war.
Senior U.S. officers have complained about efforts by the Shi'ite-led government to impose commanders in the city in the face of U.S. objections about their competence. Dulaimi is the most senior officer killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion.
Major General William Webster, until January U.S. commander in Baghdad, told the Washington Post: "Losing a strong commander for even a little while in Baghdad could cause a further power shift toward what looks like the Shia control of the city."
The U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said in a statement: "This tragic incident will neither impede the 6th Iraqi Army Division from continuing its mission of securing Baghdad nor derail the formation of the government of Iraq."
The U.S. occupying authority disbanded Saddam's 300,000- strong armed forces after the 2003 invasion, a move blamed by some for chaos and turning Sunni ex-soldiers into insurgents.
Since recruiting began for a new army, vetting has excluded many of Saddam's Sunni-dominated senior officer corps.
President George W. Bush says U.S. troops will pull out of Iraq as local security forces, now numbering some 230,000, take over. But despite U.S. efforts to ensure a sectarian and ethnic mix, many Sunnis see the security forces as hostile to them.
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Noam Chomsky Interview
BBC
20 May 04
If George Bush were to be judged by the standards of the Nuremberg Tribunals, he'd be hanged. So too, mind you, would every single American President since the end of the second world war, including Jimmy Carter.
The suggestion comes from perhaps the most feted liberal intellectual in the world - the American linguist Noam Chomsky. His latest attack on the way his country behaves in the world is called Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance.
Jeremy Paxman met him at the British Museum, where they talked in the Assyrian Galleries. He asked him whether he was suggesting there was nothing new in the so-called Bush Doctrine.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, it depends. It is recognised to be revolutionary. Henry Kissinger for example described it as a revolutionary new doctrine which tears to shreds the Westphalian System, the 17th century system of International Order and of course the UN Charter. But nevertheless, and has been very widely criticised within the foreign policy elite. But on narrow ground the doctrine is not really new, it's extreme.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
What was the United States supposed to do after 9/11? It had been the victim of a grotesque, intentional attack, what was it supposed to do but try...?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Why pick 9/11? Why not pick 1993. Actually the fact that the terrorist act succeeded in September 11th did not alter the risk analysis. In 1993, similar groups, US trained Jihadi's came very close to blowing up the World Trade Center, with better planning, they probably would have killed tens of thousands of people. Since then it was known that this is very likely. In fact right through the 90's there was technical literature predicting it, and we know what to do. What you do is police work. Police work is the way to stop terrorist acts and it succeeded.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
But you are suggesting the United States in that sense is the author of Its own Nemesis.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, first of all this is not my opinion. It's the opinion of just about every specialist on terrorism. Take a look, say at Jason Burke's recent book on Al-Qaeda which is just the best book there is. What he points out is, he runs through the record of how each act of violence has increased recruitment financing mobilisation, what he says is, I'm quoting him, that each act of violence is a small victory for Bin Laden.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
But why do you imagine George Bush behaves like this?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Because I don't think they care that much about terror, in fact we know that. Take say the invasion of Iraq, it was predicted by just about every specialist by intelligence agencies that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of Al-Qaeda style terror which is exactly what happened. The point is that...
JEREMY PAXMAN:
Then why would he do it?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Because invading Iraq has value in Itself, I mean establishing...
JEREMY PAXMAN:
Well what value?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
What value? Establishing the first secure military base in a dependant client state at the heart of the energy producing region of the world.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
Don't you even think that the people of Iraq are better off having got rid of a dictator?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
That, they got rid of two brutal regimes, one that we are supposed to talk about, the other one we are not suppose to talk about. The two brutal regimes were Saddam Hussein's and the US-British sanctions, which were devastating society, had killed hundreds of thousands of people, were forcing people to be reliant on Saddam Hussein. Now the sanctions could obviously have been turned to weapons rather than destroying society without an invasion. If that had happened it is not at all impossible that the people of Iraq would have sent Saddam Hussein the same way to the same fate as other monsters supported by the US and Britain. Ceausescu, Suharto, Duvalier, Marcos, there's a long list of them. In fact the people, the westerners who know Iraq best were predicting this all along.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
You seem to be suggesting or implying, perhaps I'm being unfair to you, but you seem to be implying there is some equivalence between democratically elected heads of state like George Bush or Prime Ministers like Tony Blair and regimes in places like Iraq.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
The term moral equivalence is an interesting one, it was invented I think by Jeane Kirkpatrick as a method of trying to prevent criticism of foreign policy and state decisions. It has a meaning less notion, there is no moral equivalence what so ever.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
Is it a good thing if it is preferable for an individual to live in a liberal democracy, is there benefit to be gained by spreading the values of that democracy however you can?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
That reminds me of the question that Ghandi was once asked about western civilisation, what did he think of it. He said yeah, it would be a good idea. In fact it would be a good idea to spread the values of liberal democracy, but that I would be a good idea to spread the values of liberal democracy. But that's not what the US and Britain are trying to do, it's not what they've done in the past, I mean take a look at the regions under their domination. They don't spread liberal democracy. What they spread is dependence and subordination. Furthermore its well- known there is a large part of the reason for the reason the great opposition to the US policy within the Middle East. In fact this was known in the 1950's.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
But there is a whole slur of countries in eastern Europe right now that would say we are better off now than we were when we were living under the Soviet Empire. As a consequence of how the west behaved.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, and there is a lot of countries in US domains, like Central America, the Caribbean who wish that they could be free of American domination. We don't pay much attention to what happens there but they do. In the 1980s when the current incumbents were in their Reganite phase. Hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in Central America. The US carried out a massive terrorist attack against Nicaragua, mainly as a war on the church. They assassinated an Archbishop and murdered six leading Jesuit intellectuals. This is in El Salvador. It was a monstrous period. What did they impose? Was it liberal democracies? No.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
You've mentioned on two or three occasions this relationship between the United States and Britain. Do you understand why Tony Blair behaved as he did over Afghanistan and Iraq?
NOAM CHOMSKY:
Well, if you look at the British diplomatic history, back in the 1940s, Britain had to make a decision. Britain had been the major world power, the United States though by far the richest country in the world was not a major actor in the global scene, except regionally. By the Second World War it was obvious the US was going to be the dominant power, everyone knew that. Britain had to make a choice. Was it going to be part of what would ultimately be a Europe that might move towards independence, or would it be what the Foreign Office called a junior partner to the United States? Well it essentially made that choice to be a junior partner to the United States. US, the leaders have no illusions about this. So during the Cuban missile crisis for example, you look at the declassified record, they treated Britain with total contempt. Harold McMillan wasn't even informed of what was going on and Britain's existence was at stake. It was dangerous. One high official, probably Dean Atchers and he's not identified, described Britain as in his words "Our lieutenant, the fashionable word is partner". Well the British would like to hear the fashionable word, but the masters use the actual word. Those are choices Britain has to make. I mean why Blair decided, I couldn't say.
JEREMY PAXMAN:
Noam Chomsky, thank you.
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Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals assassinated by death squads
By Sandy English
6 March 2006
Hundreds of Iraqi academics and professionals have been assassinated since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to a petition to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Summary Executions from the European peace group BRussells [sic] Tribunal on Iraq.
The petition has been signed by Nobel Prize winners Harold Pinter, J. M. Coetzee, José Saramago, and Dario Fo, as well as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Cornel West, and Tony Benn. A Green party member of the European Parliament from Britain, Caroline Lucas, has called for support for the investigation.
The exact figure of deaths is unknown; estimates range from about 300 to more than 1,000. According to Iraqi novelist Haifa Zangana, writing in the Guardian last month, Baghdad universities alone have lost 80 members of their staffs. These figures do not include those who have survived assassination attempts.
Intellectuals from all regions of Iraq have been killed. They include specialists in physical education, journalism, Arabic literature, and the sciences. Physicians have also been targeted at a high rate.
The victims have been Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, and Turkomans, and they have held a variety of political views. They have been shot down at work, at home, and in their cars or have simply disappeared.
Zarngana writes that Abdul Razaq al-Na'as, a Baghdad University professor, was murdered on January 28 when two cars blocked his entrance and gunmen fired on him. He was a vocal opponent of the occupation on al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya television.
Dr. Abdullateef al-Mayah, a well-known academic, was killed in 2004, 12 hours after he criticized the Iraqi Governing Council on al-Jazeera television.
In the Independent over a year ago, Robert Fisk had already noted the growing trend. "The dean of the college of law in Mosul, murdered last month, was the most gruesome killing. 'She was in bed with her husband when they came for her,' a Baghdad colleague told me yesterday. 'They coolly shot both of them in their bed. Then they cut off both their heads with knives.'"
The BRussells Tribunal website (www.brusselstribunal.org) contains a number of letters from Iraq about the situation. One describes the murder of Professor Nawfal Ahmed from the Institute for Fine Arts in Baghdad on December 26, 2005:
"Unknown armed men had assassinated a university professor of the institute of fine arts, on Monday morning in Toopchy district in Baghdad. A source from the ministry of defense said that; armed men fired a stream of bullets towards professor Nawfal Ahmed, on eight morning, while he was getting out of his house, heading to his working office."
Another letter from Tara Al-Hashimi, the daughter of the late Dr. Wissam Al-Hashimi, a geologist and internationally known expert in carbonates, says:
"[M]y father (Dr. AL- Hashimi) has died. He was kidnapped early in the morning on the 24th Aug 2005 while going to work, his recent papers were stolen. A ransom was given but unfortunately he was shoot twice in the head and died. May his soul rest in peace. As his ID was taken from him it took us about 2 weeks to find his body in one of Baghdad's hospitals."
The murders have forced Iraqi professionals to leave the country in large numbers. Death threats, often letters accompanied by a single bullet, are common.
In January, the Washington Post reported the case of a leading Iraqi cardiologist, Dr. Omar Kubasi, now an exile in Amman, Jordan:
"Kubasi left Baghdad after he and nine other doctors received letters, written in a childish hand, telling them they would be killed if they did not stop working in their native Iraq. He and his colleagues had been objects of threats before, but the last carried a foreboding urgency."
No one has been prosecuted or even arrested in any of the murders. No group has claimed responsibility. A variety of organizations are widely suspected by Iraqis, including the Israeli Mossad (which assassinated Iraqi scientists working on the country's nuclear program in the 1970s and 1980s), the American military (which has harassed and beaten Iraqi academics) and, in the north, the Kurdish Peshmerga.
There are clearly a variety of groups operating, but the evidence points to a leading role of death squads organized by the supporters of the pro-American government, especially in the Interior Ministry, in conjunction with Shiite fundamentalist militias such as the Badr Brigade.
The same groups, believed to be responsible for the recent anti-Sunni pogroms, are popularly called the "black crows" because of their black uniforms.
"They're also called the men in black. Nobody dares identify them although everybody knows who they are. They are groups selected by some political parties that have infiltrated the Interior Ministry and directly report to it," remarked Mutahana Hareth Al-Dari, a spokesman of the Iraqi Association of Muslim Scholars, in this week's issue of the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly Online.
The immediate reason is not hard to find: most of these intellectuals opposed the American occupation of their country.
As Haifa Zangana notes: "Most were vocally opposed to the occupation.... Like many Iraqis, I believe these killings are politically motivated and connected to the occupying forces' failure to gain any significant social support in the country. For the occupation's aims to be fulfilled, independent minds have to be eradicated."
This is a part of a program of cultural destruction, and it emanates from Washington.
The appearance of death squads in Iraq stepped up after the installation of John Negroponte as ambassador to Iraq in June 2004. Negroponte was the ambassador to Honduras at the height of the American-sponsored counter-insurgencies in Central America in the 1980s. He is an experienced operative in creating and managing extra-judicial killings, the so-called Salvador option.
Similarly, veterans of US "dirty wars" in Latin America-James Steele, who oversaw counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador during the height of the killing there 20 years ago, and Steve Casteels, who worked with US anti-guerilla and anti-drug operations in Colombia, Peru and elsewhere-were brought in to oversee the Iraqi Interior Ministry's operations.
The goal, however, is not simply to silence critics of the puppet regime. The assassination policy is an attempt to create a tractable population.
It includes weakening Iraqis even on the physical level. The murders and emigration of physicians have been particularly devastating in a country once known for the high quality of its health care system that now confronts electricity shortages at hospitals and skyrocketing incidences of infectious disease and traumatic injury.
But the killing of art historians, geologists, and writers must be explained as an attempt to destroy the intellectual health of Iraq.
The loss of academics "is causing a drop in the quality of higher education," according to the UN's IRINnews.org. " 'The best professors are leaving the country and we are losing the best professionals, the real losers are the next generation of students-the future of Iraq.' Abbas Muhammad, a student of Pharmacology at Baghdad University said."
The country's intelligentsia was already depleted in the period from 1990 to 2003, when an estimated 30 percent had left the country for economic reasons.
The goal now, encouraged or allowed by Bush administration, and implemented by its stooges in Iraq, is to destroy the historical consciousness of the Iraqi people, as a means of further subjugating them to US imperialism and its Iraqi supporters.
According to the UN's International Leadership Institute, "84% of Iraq's higher learning institutions have been burnt, looted or destroyed." The thefts from the Iraqi Museum of April 2003, the untrammeled looting of hundreds of archaeological sites and the burning of libraries place Iraqi's access to culture, history, and science in grave danger. The assassinations and the flight of Iraqi professionals are the most criminal part of this process.
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Iraqi leadership crisis grows
By Scott Peterson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BAGHDAD – Pushing the legal deadline to the limit, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani Monday declared that Iraq's new parliament will convene for the first time on March 12.
But an event that was expected to bring a glimmer of hope - and the formation of a US-backed unity government - is instead being overshadowed by a perfect political storm. While Iraq's leaders are battling over the post of prime minister, sectarian bloodshed has left more than 500 dead over the past two weeks. Party militias are exerting more control over the streets, and Iraqis are fed up with a weak government and collapsing services.
The political crisis revolves around the decision by the main Shiite bloc to extend the rule of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He edged out his rival by just one vote with the support of anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
Last week, an alliance of Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and others called for Mr. Jaafari to step down and a new candidate to come forward. The call for a new premier followed shortly after the deadly bombing of an important Shiite shrine in Samarra sparked a rash of the sectarian violence between Shiites and Sunni Arabs, sliding Iraq further into civil conflict.
"The most likely scenario is the worst," says Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Queen Mary, University of London. "[Jaafari] staggers through, with Kurds and Sunnis and others undermining him. So you get a vastly weaker prime minister, backed by radicals."
The crisis has laid bare a deepening divide within Iraq's majority Shiite community. The other contender was Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi, backed by the faction of Sadr rival Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who has portrayed himself as a technocrat and centrist who can get the job done.
Forming a stable government is seen by US officials as a key step to enabling the start of any military withdrawal. A more distant goal, but one required before any US exit, is to ensure that Iraqi police and security forces are 2capable of halting sectarian violence and coping with the insurgency.
Jaafari has been widely blamed in Iraq for permitting the violence to erupt out of control - yielding a week of sectarian killings and attacks on mosques that mostly targeted Sunni Arabs - after the gold roof of the Askariya Shrine in Samarra was destroyed on Feb. 22.
Days of curfew finally brought relative calm. But insurgent violence continued Monday, with eight car bombs - five of them in Baghdad alone - that took at least 28 lives, according to news agencies. One morning blast struck a packed market in Baquba, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, killing six, including two children. Two of the car bombs, one driven by a suicide bomber, struck at Mahmudiyah, 25 miles south of the capital.
Sunni Arabs blame the lethal result on Jaafari's inability to control Shiite militias and Shiite-dominated security forces, as well as a strategic inability to come to grips with the insurgency. Kurds further took issue with Jaafari's trip to Ankara, Turkey, without cabinet approval, which has strained relations with Iraqi Kurds.
Jaafari's entourage included no Iraqi Kurds, who hold top government positions in Baghdad, but some minority Iraqi Turkomen who are often at odds with ethnic Kurds, but have close ties to Turkey.
"The Jaafari government has a long history of failure," says Mustafa Alani, head of the Security and Terrorism program at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai. "Everything has deteriorated: security, basic services, corruption. There is no major achievement."
"Weak government contributes [to the violence], state infrastructure is disintegrating gradually, and militias are taking over," says Mr. Alani. "Those people [militiamen] are becoming more loyal to their parties than the state. I don't see how this can be changed."
The convening of parliament begins a 60-day period in which a new head of state must be elected, and a new prime minister and cabinet agreed upon. Lobbying has been fierce for weeks. On Sunday, President Talabani increased pressure against Jaafari, by sending an adviser to push the case with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's preeminent Shiite cleric, in Najaf.
"We reject Jaafari because we believe that Iraq needs a government of national unity and new faces," said envoy Barham Saleh, who is also planning minister, after the meetings.
Sunni Arab leaders have found unlikely champions in US diplomats, trying to ensure their place at the table of a unity government.
They have also been most recent targets of apparent revenge attacks. Gunmen on Sunday killed the nephew and cousin of Sheikh Harith al-Dari, leader of the main Sunni Arab religious group, the Muslim Clerics Association.
Last Thursday, Adnan al-Dulaimi, leader of the Iraqi Accordance Front, part of the Sunni parliamentary bloc trying to oust Jaafari, survived an assassination attempt on his convoy that killed one guard and wounded five others.
In a separate incident the same day, a convoy of bodyguards for Defense Minister Saadoun al-Dulaimi, also a Sunni Arab, was attacked, killing one guard and wounding others.
"You can argue that Iraq has been without a government since the fall of the [Hussein] regime, and after three years we are in a very messy situation," says Hassan Bazaaz, an aide to Adnan al-Dulaimi. "We are on the brink of a civil war; in fact, we are in a civil war. The reason is because there is no government."
The December national election was meant to usher in Iraq's first postinvasion permanent government. But the hopes of Iraqis expressed on election day - almost as vociferous and hopeful as they had been when they first went to the polls in January 2005 - have faded with the passing of time, and amid political deadlock.
The result is growing, popular exasperation.
"What difference does [a new government] make?" asks an Iraqi political analyst who asked not to be named. "The real crisis is the daily killing of Iraqis, which no one writes about. This is because of the US occupation. Whether Jaafari gets back in is of no concern to Iraqis. Who is going to stop [the violence]?"
Any hope of effective rule will require real change, regardless of who holds the PM post.
"A new government along the old line will be weak, and divided on the sectarian side; they are only concerned about how much they can steal," says the Iraqi analyst. "The ministries of Interior and Defense tell you everything is fine and under control. If you listen to the minister of electricity, you would think people live in a state of full electric power. The minister of oil says Iraqis are living with everything."
That sentiment echoes Khalaf al-Olayan, another Sunni leader in parliament, who wrote on the Iraqi Accordance Front website that Iraq has gone from "bad to worse" with Jaafari.
"Jaafari's government failed to solve the chaos that followed the Samarra explosions and did not take any measures to solve the security crisis that could have pushed the country into civil war," wrote Mr. Olayan.
Another Jaafari government would mean "much more of the same - a many headed hydra, without the power to nail down the [pro-Shiite and abuse] problems in the Ministry of Interior," says Mr. Dodge at Queen Mary.
Sadr supports Jaafari "not because of who he is, but who he is not," says Dodge. "They would nominate anyone, to get around Abdul Mahdi getting it."
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Expert on Iraq: 'We're In a Civil War' - U.S. Officials Deny Violence Has Risen to That Level, but ABC News Analysts See a 'Serious Lack of Realism'
By JAKE TAPPER
ABC News
March 5, 2006
BAGHDAD - As Pentagon generals offered optimistic assessments that the sectarian violence in Iraq had dissipated this weekend, other military experts told ABC News that Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq already are engaged in a civil war, and that the Iraqi government and U.S. military had better accept that fact and adapt accordingly.
"We're in a civil war now; it's just that not everybody's joined in," said retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash, a former military commander in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The failure to understand that the civil war is already taking place, just not necessarily at the maximum level, means that our counter measures are inadequate and therefore dangerous to our long-term interest.
"It's our failure to understand reality that has caused us to be late throughout this experience of the last three years in Iraq," added Nash, who is an ABC News consultant.
Anthony Cordesman, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told ABC News, "If you talk to U.S. intelligence officers and military people privately, they'd say we've been involved in low level civil war with very slowly increasing intensity since the transfer of power in June 2004."
Since the elections last year, Cordesman says, more radical Islamist insurgents have made "a more dedicated strike at the fault lines between Shiites and Sunnis." And they have succeeded.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday, however, U.S. Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, disputed that.
"I think that the Iraqi people - Kurds, Shia, Sunni - walked up to the abyss, took the look in, didn't like what they saw, have pulled together, have pulled back from violence, and are working together to keep things calm and to find the right mix for their own government," Pace said.
Sectarian Violence Rages On
The sectarian violence over the weekend was lower in intensity than in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of the Askariya Mosque - one of the holiest Shiite sites - in Samarra on Feb. 22. But still, the sectarian violence continued.
On Saturday night, gunmen mowed down four people - killing two of them - at the Shiite Ahl al-Beit mosque in Kirkuk, North of Baghdad. On Sunday, at least two others were killed in a gun battle at the Sunni al-Noor mosque in the al-Jihad neighborhood of West Baghdad.
Shakir Mahmoud, a cleric at al-Noor mosque, claimed the attackers came from the Interior Ministry itself, which is controlled by Shiites and has been accused of allowing, if not permitting, Shiite militias.
"The group consisted of 10 cars, care used only by the Interior Ministry," Shakir said. "The uniforms are only worn by the Interior Ministry. They attacked the mosque."
The Interior Ministry denied the charge.
Al Qaeda at Work?
On Saturday in Doha, Qatar, the head of the U.S. Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, claimed al-Qaeda was responsible for the bombing of the Askariya Mosque, saying that the blast indicated the group was changing its goal and trying to start a civil war in Iraq. He allowed that it had worked, to an extent.
"They got more of a reaction from that than they had hoped for," Abizaid told the Associated Press. "I expect we'll see another attack in the near future on another symbol. They'll find some other place that's undefended, they'll strike it and they'll hope for more sectarian violence."
Abizaid also noted that the attack had achieved its intended affect to disrupt the formation of an Iraqi government, saying, "The shrine bombing exposed a lot of sectarian fissures that have been apparent for a while, but it was the first time I've seen it move in a direction that was unhelpful to the political process."
But while Abizaid offered a fairly glowing assessment of the performance of the Iraqi military and police, others noted that the body count hovered in the hundreds, if not surpassing a thousand, and that in some cases the largely Shiite forces had created problems as well.
'Serious Lack of Realism'
Nash told ABC News, "The vast majority of the personnel in the army come from the Shiite and the Kurd population. And what we need to understand is that a political settlement - not brokered, but insisted upon by the U.S. - that gives equitable treatment to all factions is what we need."
Cordesman, who is also an ABC News consultant, noted that when military leaders speak publicly, "They have to spin the issue - particularly for American and European audiences - and there's often a rather serious lack of realism."
Whether or not this is civil war, the fighting is not yet a broad national conflict, since an overwhelming majority of the attacks are in just four out of Iraq's 18 provinces. The question is whether it will spread.
Zoe Magee and Mazin Faiq in Baghdad, and Sam Brooks in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
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Sen. Tom Harkin calls for pullout, says Iraq is now 'quagmire'
THOMAS BEAUMONT
REGISTER STAFF WRITER
March 4, 2006
Sen. Tom Harkin said in Iowa Friday that Iraq has deteriorated into "civil war," declaring it no longer manageable by U.S. forces.
Harkin's comments make the Iowa Democrat among the first members of Congress to declare publicly that Iraq had slipped into war between Muslim factions. They come as polls show President Bush's approval at managing the situation at an all-time low.
"I'm firmly convinced now, after all this time, that it really is a civil war," Harkin said.
The senator, an opponent of the war, said the only solution to the surge of sectarian violence is to begin withdrawing U.S. forces.
"You keep hoping for the best," Harkin said. "And then after a while you say, wait a minute, this isn't working. This isn't working."
About 500 Iraqis have been killed in the violence unleashed by the Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in central Iraq and reprisal attacks against Sunni mosques. The dramatic wave of violence has complicated negotiations for a new government after December parliamentary elections.
A national CBS News poll last week showed 30 percent of Americans approved of President Bush's handling of the situation with Iraq, with 65 percent disapproving, Bush's worst marks since the war began three years ago.
Harkin said the more than 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq could be repositioned in allied Arab nations, but withdrawal needs to begin immediately "in order to extricate ourselves from that quagmire over there."
White House spokesman Blair Jones said President Bush would make decisions about troop levels based on the advice of military advisers in Iraq, but that full withdrawal now would be irresponsible. "We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed," Jones said. "To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness."
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Tracing the Trail of Torture
by Tom Engelhardt and Dahr Jamail
LewRockwell.com
March 6, 2006
Torture is usually defined as "infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion," or as "excruciating physical or mental pain, agony." No civilized society can accept laws which justify the use of torture. So it's not surprising that Ali Abbas was astonished to discover Americans willing to inflict such humiliating and inhumane treatment on him while he was in their custody in Abu Ghraib. "They cannot be human beings and do these things," was the way he put it. He concluded: "This, what happened to me, could happen to anybody in Iraq."
Unfortunately, what happened to him can now conceivably happen to anyone, anywhere in the world, according to George Bush.
One of the last things Abbas said as our interview ended was: "Saddam Hussein was a cruel enemy to us. Once I made it to Abu Ghraib though, I wished I had been killed by him rather than being alive with the Americans. Even now, after this journey of torture and suffering, what else can I think?"
The other day on Jerry Agar's radio show, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld responded to accusations about American atrocities at our prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He accused the detainees there of manipulating public opinion by lying about their treatment. He said, in part:
"They're taught to lie, they're taught to allege that they have been tortured, and that's part of the [terrorist] training that they received. We know that torture is not occurring there. We know that for a fact… The reality is that the terrorists have media committees. They are getting very clever at manipulating the media in the United States and in the capitals of the world. They know for a fact they can't win a single battle on the battlefields in the Middle East. They know the only place they can win a battle is in the capitol in Washington, D.C. by having the United States lose its will, so they consciously manipulate the media here to achieve their ends, and they're very good at it."
Statements like this have been commonplaces from an administration whose President repeatedly insists it doesn't do "torture," while its assembled lawyers do their best to redefine torture out of existence. Here's how, for instance, our Vice President has described the lives of detainees at Guantanamo Bay: "They're living in the tropics… They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want. There isn't any other nation in the world that would treat people who were determined to kill Americans the way we're treating these people."
As a matter of fact, the record of detainee abuse, humiliation, and torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere is by now overwhelming – and it's been laid out by a remarkably wide-ranging set of sources. In June 2005, for example, Time Magazine released excerpts from official interrogation logs on just one Guantanamo prisoner, Mohammad al-Qahtani, reputedly the 20th September 11th hijacker who never made it into the U.S. This stunning record of mistreatment over time so threatened the detainee's health that it should certainly have qualified as torture under this administration's definition ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death") in its famed "torture memo" of 2002.
Or let's remember two years' worth of blistering memos and e-mails by disgusted FBI agents stationed at Guantanamo Bay (obtained and released by the American Civil Liberties Union) who laid out styles of detainee mistreatment that should have staggered someone's imagination:
"'On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water,' the FBI agent wrote on Aug. 2, 2004. 'Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18 to 24 hours or more.' In one case, the agent continued, 'the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night.'"
Just in the last week, the administration that doesn't do torture found itself in court fighting hard for a torture exemption from the McCain anti-torture amendment, thanks to extreme force-feeding methods being used on a prisoner on a Guantanamo hunger strike. According to Josh White and Carol D. Leonnig of the Washington Post, "Bush administration lawyers, fighting a claim of torture by a Guantanamo Bay detainee, yesterday argued that the new law that bans cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of detainees in U.S. custody does not apply to people held at the military prison. In federal court yesterday and in legal filings, Justice Department lawyers contended that a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, cannot use legislation drafted by Sen. John McCain... to challenge treatment that the detainee's lawyers described as 'systematic torture.'"
In the meantime, U.S. military officers, "breaking with domestic and international legal precedent," refused to rule out the admission of evidence obtained by torture at the military trials the Pentagon is now running at Guantanamo.
The week before, Jane Mayer wrote a thoroughly depressing New Yorker piece, "Annals of the Pentagon," about former U.S. Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora, a conservative military man who just happened to believe in the law. Hers was a gripping tale of Mora's losing battle to stop Donald Rumsfeld and his followers from circumventing the Geneva Conventions and instituting a "gloves-off" policy of torture and abuse at Guantanamo. Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times produced a front-page story that same week (Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantanamo), pointing out something well covered by the British Guardian almost a year ago: We now have a second Guantanamo on our hands, a prison at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan that may indeed make Guantanamo look like the "tropics." There, 500 or so detainees, beyond all law or oversight, have been kept under barbaric conditions, in some cases for two to three years.
The week before that, the latest Abu Ghraib photos were released, even grimmer than the previous batch – a huge story around the world – to largely "been there, done that" coverage in the United States. Each day, it seems, more and worse pours out, largely to no obvious effect here. It is in this context that Dahr Jamail, who began hearing of American torture practices while covering the war in Iraq in 2003 as an independent journalist, looks back on the last several years and considers the nature of our torture regime. Tom
Tracing the Trail of Torture
Embedding Torture as Policy from Guantanamo to Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
They told him, "We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell."
Ali Abbas, a former detainee from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was filling me in on the horrors he endured at the hands of American soldiers, contractors, and CIA operatives while inside the infamous prison.
It was May of 2004 when I documented his testimony in my hotel in Baghdad. "We will take you to Guantanamo," he said one female soldier told him after he was detained by U.S. forces on September 13, 2003. "Our aim is to put you in hell so you'll tell the truth. These are our orders – to turn your life into hell." And they did. He was tortured in Abu Ghraib less than half a year after the occupation of Iraq began.
While the publication of the first Abu Ghraib photos in April 2004 opened the floodgates for former Iraqi detainees to speak out about their treatment at the hands of occupation forces, this wasn't the first I'd heard of torture in Iraq. A case I'd documented even before then was that of 57 year-old Sadiq Zoman. He was held for one month by U.S. forces before being dropped off in a coma at the general hospital in Tikrit. The medical report that came with his comatose body, written by U.S. Army medic Lt. Col. Michael Hodges, listed the reasons for Zoman's state as heat stroke and heart attack. That medical report, however, failed to mention anything about the physical trauma evident on Zoman's body – the electrical point burns on the soles of his feet and on his genitals, the fact that the back of his head had been bashed in with a blunt instrument, or the lash marks up and down his body.
Such tales – and they were rife in Baghdad before the news of Abu Ghraib reached the world – were just the tip of the iceberg; and stories of torture similar to those I heard from Iraqi detainees during my very first trip to Iraq, back in November 2003, are still being told, because such treatment is ongoing.
Institutionalizing Torture: Abu Ghraib
While President Bush has regularly claimed – as with reporters in Panama last November – that "we do not torture," Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Brigadier General whose 800th Military Police Brigade was in charge of 17 prison facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib back in 2003, begs to differ. She knows that we do torture and she believes that the President himself is most likely implicated in the decision to embed torture in basic war-on-terror policy.
While testifying this January 21 in New York City at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration, Karpinski told us: "General [Ricardo] Sanchez [commander of coalition ground forces in Iraq] himself signed the eight-page memorandum authorizing literally a laundry list of harsher techniques in interrogations to include specific use of dogs and muzzled dogs with his specific permission."
All this, as she reminded us, came after Major General Geoffrey Miller, who had been "specifically selected by the Secretary of Defense to go to Guantanamo Bay and run the interrogations operation," was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration to "work with the military intelligence personnel to teach them new and improved interrogation techniques."
Karpinski met Miller on his tour of American prison facilities in Iraq in the fall of 2003. Miller, as she related in her testimony, told her, "It is my opinion that you are treating the prisoners too well. At Guantanamo Bay, the prisoners know that we are in charge and they know that from the very beginning. You have to treat the prisoners like dogs. And if they think or feel any differently you have effectively lost control of the interrogation."
Miller went on to tell Karpinski in reference to Abu Ghraib, "We're going to Gitmo-ize the operation."
When she later asked for an explanation, Karpinski was told that the military police guarding the prisons were following the orders in a memorandum approving "harsher interrogation techniques," and, according to Karpinski, "signed by the Secretary of Defense, Don Rumsfeld."
That one-page memorandum "authorized sleep deprivation, stress positions, meal disruption – serving their meals late, not serving a meal. Leaving the lights on all night while playing loud music, issuing insults or criticism of their religion, their culture, their beliefs." In the left-hand margin, alongside the list of interrogation techniques to be applied, Rumsfeld had personally written, "Make sure this happens!!" Karpinski emphasized the fact that Rumsfeld had used two exclamation points.
When asked how far up the chain of command responsibility for the torture orders for Abu Ghraib went, Karpinski said, "The Secretary of Defense would not have authorized without the approval of the Vice President."
Karpinski does not believe that the many investigations into Abu Ghraib have gotten to the truth about who is responsible for the torture and abuse because "they have all been directed and kept under the control of the Department of Defense. Secretary Rumsfeld was directing the course of each one of those separate investigations. There was no impartiality whatsoever."
Does she believe the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib has stopped?
"I have no reason to believe that it has. I believe that cameras are no longer allowed anywhere near a cellblock. But why should I believe it's stopped? We still have the captain from the 82nd airborne division [who] returned and had a diary, a log of when he was instructed, what he was instructed, where he was instructed, and who instructed him. To go out and treat the prisoners harshly, to set them up for effective interrogation, and that was recently as May of 2005."
Karpinski was referring to Captain Ian Fishback, one of three American soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division at Forward Operating Base Mercury near Fallujah who personally witnessed the torture of Iraqi prisoners and came forward to give testimony to human rights organizations about the crimes committed.
Karpinski, who was made the scapegoat for the atrocities which occurred at Abu Ghraib, went public as a whistle-blower, and retired with a demotion in rank after serving a quarter of a century in the Army. General Sanchez, on the other hand, was transferred to Germany where he is continuing his tenure as commander of the V Corps. However, he was reportedly relieved of his role and not promoted to a fourth star due to the fact that the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke during his watch.
But Abu Ghraib was – and remains – only a symptom of a much deeper problem.
The Guantanamo Treatment
"Since the start of the war on terror, the intelligence community, led by the CIA, has revived the use of torture, making it Washington's weapon of choice," writes Alfred McCoy in his new book, A Question of Torture.
When the infamous Abu Ghraib photo of the prisoner on a box draped in black, head covered with a sack, arms outstretched with electrical wires attached to his fingers, was made public, it had a deeper resonance for McCoy than simply documenting a war crime of the present moment.
"In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of CIA torture," McCoy told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview. "It's very simple. He's hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental techniques" that, as his book makes vividly clear, the CIA pioneered in breakthrough research on torture, funded to the tune of billions of dollars in the 1950s. In his book, he adds: "The photographs from Iraq illustrate standard interrogation practice inside the global gulag of secret CIA prisons that have operated, on executive authority, since the start of the war on terror."
Rather than placing blame merely on the handful of guards in Abu Ghraib who were reprimanded (and in a few cases jailed) for their crimes against humanity, McCoy believes that they – and the interrogators there – were simply "following orders" and, like Karpinski, considers that "responsibility for their actions lies higher, much higher, up the chain of command."
When I interviewed Ali Abbas in Iraq, his descriptions from Abu Ghraib bore a remarkable similarity to those given by detainees released from the American prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and from the little noticed American mini-gulag in Afghanistan.
"They shit on us, used dogs against us, used electricity and starved us," he told me. "They cut my hair into strips like an Indian. They shaved my mustache, put a plate in my hand, and made me go beg from the prisoners, as if I was a beggar."
Lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York in a statement on the detention experiences of three men they represent who were held in both Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay reveal, for example, similarly over-the-top treatment. And such treatment long preceded anything recorded at Abu Ghraib. Starvation rations were common and, in Sherbegan Prison in Afghanistan in December, 2001, one of the detainees, Shafiq Rasul, described the situation as follows: "We all had body and hair lice. We got dysentery and the toilets were disgusting. It was just a hole in the ground with shit everywhere. The whole prison stank of shit and unwashed bodies."
He would not be allowed to wash for at least six weeks. He would be transferred to a U.S. base in Kandahar and endure a "forced cavity search" while he was hooded, then go on to suffer countless beatings. When he was later transferred to Guantanamo Bay, he would witness the "Guantanamo haircut" where men would either have their heads shaved completely or have a cross shaved into their head in order to insult their faith. Denial of medical care and long stays in solitary confinement, along with sleep deprivation tactics, were the norm.
Other forms of treatment included:
* Gratuitous violence: Prisoners would be punched, kicked, and slammed to the ground.
* Exposure to the elements: Prisoners were locked in cage-like structures located in hangers with no heating.
* Denial of nourishment.
* Denial of religious rights including purposeful desecration of the Quran.
* The use of dogs to threaten prisoners.
And keep in mind, this was the norm. The extreme we know from the recorded deaths of at least 98 prisoners in American hands in these years.
Outsourcing Torture
Extraordinary renditions – the kidnapping of terror suspects and their transport to countries willing to torture them for the Bush administration – have been the rage (for the CIA) in Europe in recent years and have enraged European publics. But far less is often known about what happens to those kidnappees on the other end of the process. Craig Murray, however, knows more than most of us. He was the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, a time when that country's strong man, Islam Karimov, was described by Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld as an "important ally" of George Bush in his war on terror. Murray was dismissed by the British government in October 2004 when he made public his findings on extraordinary renditions to Uzbekistan and the torture by Uzbek security personnel of those rendered into their hands by the CIA.
Murray describes Karimov as having longstanding ties with Bush. These seem to have begun in 1997 when Bush was still governor of Texas. He then met with Uzbek Ambassador Sadyk Safaev, a meeting (for which there is documented evidence) organized by Ken Lay, CEO of Enron, in order to enlist the governor in brokering a two billion-dollar gas deal between the corporation and that oil-rich country. Karimov, says Murray, "was a guest in the White House in 2002. It's very easy to find photos of George Bush shaking Karimov's hand." Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was, he added, "particularly chummy with Karimov" back then and, at the time, the administration was making use of the Karshi-Khanabad air base, also known as K2, in that country.
Murray is not alone in considering Karimov one of the most vicious dictators on the planet, a man personally responsible for the death of thousands. The ambassador helped uncover evidence of one detainee who "had had his fingernails extracted, he had been severely beaten, particularly about the face, and he died of immersion in boiling liquid. And it was immersion, rather than splashing, because there is a clear tide mark around the upper torso and arms, which gives you some idea of the level of brutality of this regime."
While not certain that detainees who had been rendered were boiled alive, about extraordinary rendition Murray said, "There is no doubt that George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have been lying through their teeth about extraordinary rendition for some time." As he put it, "The United States, as a matter of policy, is willing to accept intelligence got by torture by foreign agencies. I can give direct firsthand evidence of that and back it up with documents."
When asked why he decided to go public with his information, Murray replied, "I think it's just what any decent person would do. I mean, when you come across people being boiled and their fingernails pulled out or having their children raped in front of them, you just can't go along with it and sleep at night."
The U.S. vacated the K2 base as the result of political fallout from the massacre of over 600 demonstrators by Karimov's security forces in May 2005. Karimov has since moved back under Russian protection.
Nevertheless, Murray is convinced that the U.S. continues to rendition people to other grim and willing regimes around the globe to be tortured.
In addition to the degradation and inhumanity involved in torture, which afflicts those meting it out as well as those on the receiving end, both intelligence officials and law enforcement personnel believe that information obtained by torture is almost invariably useless. In addition, torture policies, seldom kept secret for long, invariably produce outrage and opposition on a large scale.
Here, for instance, is a typical response a rebel in Fallujah offered a colleague of mine in Iraq in January 2005:
"We are fighting in Fallujah first because we are defending our religion. Because they desecrate our Holy Quran. They put the Quran in the sewage. They rape our women. They rape them in Abu Ghraib. The raiding, the burning, the detentions, the evictions, the killing it is continuous, everyday and night. These are the reasons we resist the Americans."
"George Bush is the law"
Testimony from Afghan prisons and Guantanamo, the photos and video from Abu Ghraib, evidence of extraordinary renditions to the far corners of the planet – all of this doesn't even encompass the full reach of Bush administration torture policies or the degree to which they have been set in motion at the highest levels of the American government. But what simply can't be clearer is this: horrific methods of torture have been used regularly against detainees in U.S. custody in countries around the globe, while an American President, Vice President and Secretary of Defense, among others, openly advocated policies that, until recently, would have been considered torture in any democratic country. In the meantime, the Bush Administration has twisted the law just enough to allow authorities to potentially pick up more or less anyone they desire at any time they want to be held wherever the government decides for as long as its officials desire with no access to lawyer or trial – and now, for the first time, the possibility has arisen, at least in the military trials in Guantanamo, that testimony obtained by torture will be admissible.
All of this can also be seen as part of a desperate attempt by a failing superpower to ratchet up the use of force in the service of subjugation, as has happened time and time again in the past.
In A Question of Torture, McCoy quotes one CIA analyst, whose expertise was in the now long-departed Soviet Empire, this way: "When feelings of insecurity develop within those holding power, they become increasingly suspicious and put great pressures upon the secret police to obtain arrests and confessions. At such times police officials are inclined to condone anything which produces a speedy 'confession,' and brutality may become widespread."
Testifying at the same commission of inquiry as Karpinski, Michael Ratner, once head of the National Lawyers' Guild, now president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and an expert on international human rights law, caught the essence of our present situation:
"Let there be no doubt this administration is engaged in massive violations of the law. Torture is an international crime. What [George Bush] has done is basically lay the plan for what has to be called a coup-d'état in America. [His Presidential Signing Statement attached to the McCain anti-torture amendment] makes three points… First, speaking as the President, my authority as commander in chief allows me to do whatever I think is necessary in the war on terror including use torture. Second, the Commander in Chief cannot be checked by Congress. Third, the Commander in Chief cannot be checked by the courts. In other words… George Bush is the law."
Torture is usually defined as "infliction of severe physical pain as a means of punishment or coercion," or as "excruciating physical or mental pain, agony." No civilized society can accept laws which justify the use of torture. So it's not surprising that Ali Abbas was astonished to discover Americans willing to inflict such humiliating and inhumane treatment on him while he was in their custody in Abu Ghraib. "They cannot be human beings and do these things," was the way he put it. He concluded: "This, what happened to me, could happen to anybody in Iraq."
Unfortunately, what happened to him can now conceivably happen to anyone, anywhere in the world, according to George Bush.
One of the last things Abbas said as our interview ended was: "Saddam Hussein was a cruel enemy to us. Once I made it to Abu Ghraib though, I wished I had been killed by him rather than being alive with the Americans. Even now, after this journey of torture and suffering, what else can I think?"
Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture. Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of U.S. war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City this January. He writes regularly for Inter Press Service, Truthout.org, Asia Times, TomDispatch, and maintains his own website.
Copyright © 2006 Dahr Jamail
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Under-reporting of British casualties in Iraq: Analysis published in the Lancet
LCFM
6 Mar 06
The highly renowned medical research journal, The Lancet, has published an analysis of government under-reporting of British casualties in the Iraq war. The research, conducted by a Professor Sheila Bird of the MRC Biostatistics Unit at Cambridge, illustrates that casualty figures are almost certain to be much higher than stated by John Reid, the Minister of Defence, and argues that the failure to properly count UK military casualties in Iraq must end.
In the absence of credible official figures, she first looks at estimations of casualties constructed using the deaths:total casualty ratio technique used by ourselves in our published estimates. However, rather than using previous published research data she chooses to go with data from the Iraq Casualty Count site and breaks down the casualty figures according to the different phases of the conflict.
She then points out some valid concerns with using the ratio estimation method and asks:
Against such statistical imperatives for improved accountability, who or what thwarts the UK's competent compilation and dissemination of statistics by which to monitor death rates and casualty rates for UK military personnel deployed to Iraq?
As she tries to collate the necessary data herself part of the answer starts to appear. Amazingly, the Defence Analytical Services Agency (DASA) could not even provide her with monthly or quarterly numbers (to the nearest 100) of military personnel deployed to Iraq, because, they claim, the figures are not held electronically. However, these data were in fact later revealed in Hansards as a written answer on Feb 13, 2006 to Jeremy Corbyn, a Member of Parliament who had asked the Secretary of State for Defence what the total strength of UK forces in Iraq had been.
Despite her efforts, no information on total casualties, as distinct from fatalities, was gained, and the rest of her Lancet letter is devoted to looking at differences in mortality rates at different phases of the conflict.
The apparent failure of the MOD to monitor casualty rates is truly breathtaking. While such apparent gross negligence appears unlikely to be the result of actual incompetence, the political convenience of shrouding casualty figures in a constructed fog of war is obvious.
Our attempts to gain information on casualties via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) appears now to be of even greater importance following the publication of these research findings. Whilst our approach has also been temporarily thwarted, this is not an issue that is going to go away. In principle, the tools exist within our democratic system to find this out - we intend to keep digging.
For background see:-
11th Sep, 2005: MOD figures reveal one thousand British casualties in Iraq to date
Feb 20, 2006: British casualties in Iraq: MOD stalls the release of figures under the freedom of information act
Feb 24th 2006: MOD letter reveals John Reid issued misleading figures on British casualties in Iraq
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Most Americans see Iraq civil war as likely: poll
Mon Mar 6, 2006
Reuters
Eight in 10 Americans believe that recent sectarian violence in Iraq has made civil war likely, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released on Monday.
The parliamentary elections in December had produced a sharp gain in public optimism that the United States was making progress in Iraq, but the slide toward civil war has erased those gains just as quickly, ABC said.
More than seven in 10 Republicans and eight in 10 Democrats and political independents believe civil war is coming, showing that the public's assessment of the situation cuts across party lines, the Washington Post said.
About one third of Americans polled thought such a conflict was "very likely" to occur, the newspaper said.
The surge in violence has killed more than 500 people since the destruction of a major Shi'ite shrine in Samarra on February 22.
Fifty-five percent of poll respondents said the United States was not making significant progress restoring civil order in Iraq -- up 19 points from a poll shortly after the December elections.
Nearly half, or 49 percent, said they thought there has been progress in establishing a democratic government in Iraq. But that was down from 65 percent in December.
Nearly three months after Iraqis elected a parliament, Iraq's political leaders are still fighting over the post of prime minister, delaying the formation of a grand coalition government, which Washington promoted in the hope of fostering stability and allowing U.S. troops to begin withdrawing.
According to the poll, a record 65 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration lacks a clear plan for what to do in Iraq.
Despite the bleak views of the situation in Iraq, fewer than 20 percent of respondents support an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops, while a narrow majority, 52 percent, supported decreasing troop strength.
Fifty-nine percent of those polled said they disapprove of the way President George W. Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, compared to 40 percent approval -- nearly unchanged from the same poll's numbers in late January.
Bush's overall job approval rating was steady at 41 percent, unchanged, but two points above his career low in a poll last fall.
The telephone poll of 1,000 people was conducted March 2-5 and has a three point error margin.
Comment: We really enjoyed this one. The American public now has an 'opinion' that is being presented as in some way soverign or independent of the daily spoon-feeding that they receive from the mainstream media. Someone please tell us how "the american public" can know anything about the reality of what is happening in Iraq other than that which the media and their government tells them?
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Bolivia's Morales Accuses US of Blackmail
By Helen Popper
LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales accused the United States of "blackmail, threats and intimidation" on Monday for withdrawing anti-terrorism funding from the poor South American country, the official news service ABI reported.
Morales, a coca farmer who once described his socialist movement as a "nightmare for the U.S.," said the U.S. military told Bolivian military chiefs last week the country was no longer seen as a suitable partner in the war on terrorism.
"Because we don't accept vetoes or the change of a commander, blackmail comes from the U.S. armed forces," Morales was quoted as saying, referring to perceived U.S. interference in the Bolivian military.
In a speech to mark the 21st anniversary of the rebellious left-wing city of El Alto, Morales said the U.S. decision to "declassify" Bolivia as an anti-terrorism partner would lead to the withdrawal of U.S. military equipment deployed for the countries' joint anti-terrorism force, as well as the discontinuation of grants and training courses.
In total, the U.S.-sponsored programs were worth more than $300,000, Morales said.
"It's peanuts. These resources are only there to control Bolivia, to have intelligence agents. We don't want intelligence agents serving the U.S. government," he was quoted as saying.
No one from the U.S. Embassy in La Paz was immediately available to comment.
Washington has been wary of Morales' leftist rhetoric and worries he may make good on an election promise to decriminalize all coca growing, instead of maintaining quotas for cultivation for traditional uses like tea and chewing for altitude sickness and hunger.
It is not the first time Morales has attacked Washington since he was sworn into office in January. Late last month he criticized a U.S. decision to revoke the visa of a close aide and fellow coca farmer.
Several weeks earlier, he attacked Washington's move to cut 96 percent of military aid to Bolivia because it had failed to sign an accord granting U.S. troops immunity from prosecution at the International Criminal Court.
However, Morales has vowed to pursue friendly relations with the Bush administration and has promised to fight the narcotics trade in the world's third-largest cocaine producer.
Despite deep differences with Morales over coca and his political ideology, U.S. diplomats have been positive about their early contacts with the new government.
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Uzbek rights activist sentenced to eight years in prison
AFP
Tue Mar 7, 3:40 AM ET
TASHKENT - A prominent Uzbek human rights activist has been sentenced to eight years in prison for "anti-government activity" and receiving money from Western governments to disrupt public order, rights groups and her lawyer said.
Mutabar Tojiboyeva, head of the Ardent Hearts group in the eastern city of Fergana, was convicted on Monday after a trial in a small town in Tashkent province, some 70 kilometers (43 miles) south of the capital.
A vocal critic of the Uzbek government, Tojiboyeva has been on trial since January 30 and was found guilty of 13 charges, including threatening public order, fraud, theft and blackmailing local businessmen.
The trial was slammed by human rights groups, which have pointed to a crackdown on dissent in the tighly-controlled Central Asian state with the sentencing this month of two opposition leaders -- Sanjar Umarov and Nodira Hidoyatova -- to 10 years in prison each for fraud.
"We view Tojiboyeva's conviction as part of a pattern of persecution against independent voices and critics within civil society since the Andijan massacre," said Holly Cartner, Europe and Central Asia director at HRW said in a written statement on Tuesday.
Rights campaigners say state security forces shot dead hundreds of unarmed civilians who joined anti-government protests after gunmen took over the eastern city of Andijan on May 13 last year.
The government has denied such claims, saying that 187 people died, all due to the actions of Islamic insurgents.
"The ferocity of this pattern is unprecedented, even when judged against Uzbekistan's 14-year history of repression since independence from the Soviet Union," she said.
Tojiboyeva was arrested on October 7, the day before she was to leave for an international rights conference in the Irish capital Dublin.
Prosecutors said she received more than 5,000 dollars (4,130 euros) from the US Agency for International Development and 200 dollars from the French embassy.
"The money was used to breach public order and for slander and fraud," an indictment order seen by rights groups read.
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Annan seeks authority to outsource some UN services - report
AFP
Tue Mar 7, 1:23 AM ET
UNITED NATIONS - UN chief Kofi Annan is to propose that some non-core UN administrative services be relocated or outsourced in a management report to be unveiled Tuesday.
"While the character of the UN and the sensitivity of some of its tasks means that a core group of functions should always be carried out by a dedicated core of international civil servants at headquarters, there are non-core functions for which other options should be seriously examined," according to an executive summary of the report.
The document, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, said the UN General Assembly, which controls the budget, should allow the secretariat to "consider all options for alternative service delivery, including identifying the potential for relocation and outsourcing."
The report gave no details of which services would be outsourced and where but UN staff have indicated that translation and payroll activities would be affected.
Annan, whose second five-year term expires at the end of this year, was due to answer questions from the UN staff at a town hall meeting Tuesday.
The report noted that previous reform efforts had been largely piecemeal and had lacked a "comprehensive strategic vision for the organization as a whole and its future needs and requirements."
Annan said his proposed measures, requested by world leaders at their summit here last September in the wake of the
Iraq oil-for-food corruption scandal and evidence of UN procurement fraud, would "enable future secretaries-general to carry out their managerial responsibilities more effectively."
Noting that the UN secretariat's top management structure was not well equipped to handle large and complex operations, he also proposed that the role of deputy secretary general be redefined so as to grant him "formal authority and accountability for managing the organization's operational activities."
Last week, the UN announced that Annan's chief of staff, Mark Malloch Brown of Britain, would take over as deputy secretary general from April 1, succeeding Canadian Louise Frechette who is stepping down.
The report also said that the 25 departments and other entities currently reporting directly to the secretary general should be regrouped into organizational clusters, each led by a senior undersecretary-general.
It also sought to address what it calls the world body's "cumbersome and insufficiently strategic budgeting process" where management performance is not adequately assessed.
The summary therefore proposed that the budget and planning process be explicitly linked to results and managerial performance and that the cycle for reviewing and adopting the budget be shortened.
"The Secretary-General should have expanded authority to redeploy posts as necessary, and to use savings from vacant posts," it noted, adding that "peacekeeping accounts should be consolidated and Trust Fund management streamlined."
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Third blast hits Ethiopian capital
Reuters
March 7, 2006
ADDIS ABABA - A third blast struck the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa on Tuesday, exploding outside the gate of a hotel and tourism training center, a Reuters witness said.
No one was injured in the blast, which damaged a small guard shack at the gate. It followed two other explosions earlier in the city. One outside a restaurant injured four people, while another in a market caused no injuries.
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Tokyo approves plan to fingerprint, photograph foreign visitors
AFP
Tuesday March 7, 3:57 PM
Japan's government has approved a controversial plan to fingerprint and photograph most foreign visitors in a bid to tighten security and prevent extremist attacks.
Under the bill, foreigners aged 16 or older -- excluding permanent residents such as ethnic Koreans born in Japan -- would be subject to the measures.
Airlines would be required to provide advance lists of passengers and crew members before the flights arrive in Japan.
The government, which approved the bill at a cabinet meeting, aims to see the bill voted into law during the current parliament session ending in June.
Justice Minister Seiken Sugiura acknowledged there was concern over human rights but said the need to improve national security was more important.
"The point is, which is more important -- this (rights) issue or domestic measures to reduce illegal entry and anti-terror measures," the minister told reporters.
"It would be best if we did not have to do this," he added.
The United States, Japan's main ally, introduced similar security measures after the September 11, 2001 attacks, to a mixed reaction by foreign visitors.
The number of foreign visitors to Japan hit a record high 7.45 million in 2005, increasing 10.3 percent from the previous year, according to the justice ministry.
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China Boosts Defense Spending Another 15 Percent
by Martin Walker
UPI
Mar 06, 2006
The strategic significance for Asia of the nuclear cooperation deal signed with India last week in New Delhi by U.S. President George W. Bush was underlined Saturday by the announcement that China's military budget for the coming year will rise by almost 15 percent.
This is the 18th consecutive year of double-digit growth in China's defense budget, which officials from the Pentagon and from India's RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) intelligence service agree is now the second largest in the world after the U.S. defense budget of $450 billion.
The paradox is that China's military spending is rising sharply just as the overall numbers of military personnel are falling, as China shifts from a strategic doctrine that relied on mass armies and human wave attacks to a far more sophisticated and capital intensive military with modern and high-technology equipment.
The American and Indian commitment to a new strategic partnership, symbolized by the Bush visit to India, owes a great deal to the common concern over the rise of China and the strategic implications of China's headlong economic growth. The Goldman Sachs financial group last week issued a report suggesting that the Chinese economy will be larger than the American by 2050, and Indian security officials are concerned by the prospect of Chinese dominance over Asia.
The news of the new rise in China's military budget was released in Beijing by parliamentary spokesman Jiang Enzhu, who said the country will increase its military spending by 14.7 percent this year to 283.8 billion yuan or $35.3 billion. He noted that the United States spent a greater proportion of its wealth on defense and that China had "no intention of vigorously developing armaments," claiming that much of the new spending would be devoted to higher petrol and fuel costs and to salaries and concluded that China was a "peace-loving nation."
But much of the new defense expenditure of recent years has gone to buy advanced new weaponry, including S0-27 and su-30 warplanes, Kilo-class submarines and Sovremenny-class warships, all from Russia. China also sought to buy the Phalcon AWACS airborne early warning system from Israel, but was barred when the Bush administration pressured Israel to stop the deal. China has also sought, so far without success, to press the European Union to lift its own arms embargo against China, first imposed after the Tiananmen Square massacre 17 years ago.
American defense analysts claim that the official Chinese budget massively understates the real level of spending, which they believe to be as much as $100 billion a year, three times higher than Beijing admits. They say that the military research and development budget, the military construction and pension and medical bills and some of the procurement costs are all hidden away elsewhere in the civilian budget. They also claim that profits from private companies owned or managed by the Peoples Liberation Army also swell the real military budget.
The new Chinese budget comes after the publication last month of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, which described the new priorities of the U.S. military as preparing to conduct a "long war" against terrorists worldwide, to improve homeland security capabilities, and to prepare for possible confrontation with China as an emerging superpower rival.
"China is likely to continue making large investments in high-end, asymmetric military capabilities," the Pentagon report said. "These capabilities, the vast distances of the Asian theater, China's continental depth, and the challenge of en route and in-theater U.S. basing place a premium on forces capable of sustained operations at great distances into denied areas."
American military concerns are matched in India, which has watched nervously the construction with Chinese funds and engineers of new ports and naval bases in Pakistan and Myanmar, as China builds a string of bases to protect the sea routs of the oil tankers from the Persian Gulf on which China's energy imports depend. But for India, this new Chinese presence on both its flanks in the Indian Ocean, along with China's central role in arming Pakistan, means that Beijing is a major security concern. India's last Defense Minister, George Fernandes, said publicly that India's new nuclear arsenal was aimed at deterring China.
India security officials told United Press International in interviews in Delhi last week that they have taken careful note of the American report, "The National Security Implications of the Economic Relationship Between the United States and China," published by the Congressional China Security Review Commission (CSRC), which argues that:
"China's leaders consistently characterize the United States as a 'hegemon', connoting a powerful protagonist and overbearing bully that is China's major competitor, but they also believe that the United States is a declining power with important military vulnerabilities that can be exploited."
The report said that "China sees the United States as a hegemonic power that is a major obstacle and competitor for influence in the world; believes the United States is a superpower in decline, losing economic political, and military influence around the world; and China aspires to be a major international power and the dominant power in Asia."
Indian officials broadly agree, which is the background to the new strategic partnership between India as the world's largest democracy, and the United States as its most powerful democracy, each of them nervous at the rise of a China where political power is still a monopoly of the Communist Party.
Indian and U.S. officials are paying particular concern to China's suspected capabilities in unconventional warfare, particularly in cyber-warfare and information warfare, attacking the computer networks on which advanced military forces increasingly depend. The U.S. concerns were first made public by U.S. Air Force General Ralph Eberhart, Commander of U.S. Space Command, who noted in 2001 that, "We see this (cyber-warfare) in terms of capabilities we know they have, we see this written in their doctrine, we see this espoused by their leadership."
Joint alarm about China has led to an unprecedented degree of cooperation between Indian and U.S. forces, with intensive joint exercises between their militaries, which include giving U.S. pilots dog-fighting experience against China's Su-30 warplanes, also operated by India. U.S. and Indian intelligence officials have operated a number of cooperation and data-sharing agreements, most notably in Afghanistan and Central Asia, where both countries share a common concern for Islamic and jihadist radicalism, as well as for China's growth and ambitions.
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Frances Thales Plans Takeover Of Australias Largest Defence Manufacturer
by Staff Writers
AFP
Mar 04, 2006
French defence giant Thales announced plans Saturday for a complete takeover of Australia's largest military manufacturer ADI, in a move that could raise concerns in Washington. Thales and Australian construction giant Transfield currently each own a half share in ADI, which was privatised by the Australian government in 1999 for almost 350 million dollars (260 million US).
"Thales Australia has announced its plans to increase its stake in Australian defence contractor ADI Limited to 100 percent," the company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the French parent, said in a statement posted on the ADI website.
Thales said the transaction was conditional on approval from Australia's Foreign Investment Review Board.
No figures were given for the ADI takeover bid, but the number is certain to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Australian newspaper said the United States would be concerned about a French-controlled company handling some of its sensitive military technology.
The US and Australian military cooperate closely and share technology, with "interoperability" between the two forces one of Canberra's stated goals when acquiring defence hardware.
The newspaper said a similar takeover proposal was scuttled five years ago because of security concerns.
Thales is 30 percent owned by the French government, which has questioned elements of Washington's "war on terror", while Australia is a strong US ally that has participated in the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan.
ADI has annual sales of 700 million dollars and employs 2,500 people.
It has a wide range of contracts with the Australian military providing munitions, minehunter ships, missile frigate upgrades, armoured personnel carriers and software for a fleet of Eurocopter Tiger attack helicopters.
Thales operates in more than 30 countries, has 60,000 staff and annual revenues of 10.3 billion euros (12.4 billion US).
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Fighting in Pakistan Leaves 100 Dead
By BASHIRULLAH KHAN
Associated Press
March 6, 2006
MIR ALI, Pakistan (AP) - Authorities imposed a curfew in this tribal region's main town Monday as thousands of people fled a third day of clashes between Pakistani security forces and al-Qaida and Taliban supporters. An official said at least 100 militants may have been killed.
Clerics tried to mediate a cease-fire to the fighting, most of which has been in Miran Shah. Security forces conducted mop-up operations Monday after artillery and helicopter gunships targeted militant strongholds in the town.
More than 100 militants might have died, based on intelligence reports and questioning of injured and arrested fighters, army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. Security forces had yet to regain control of all compounds in Miran Shah, so he could not give an exact toll. Journalists were barred from the town.
The fighting in Pakistan's lawless tribal regions along the Afghan border is the bloodiest in more than two years and marks an escalation in President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's campaign to crack down on al-Qaida and Taliban militants and their local sympathizers.
It also underscored Islamabad's failure to establish governmental control in the rugged region - a possible hiding place of Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri - where fiercely independent Pashtun tribesmen have resisted outside authority and influence for centuries.
The trigger of the unrest was a Pakistani army strike against a suspected al-Qaida camp in the border village of Saidgi last week that authorities said killed 45 people, including foreign militants. It was launched two days before a visit by President Bush, fueling speculation Pakistan was flexing its military muscle in the border regions to signal its commitment to the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Pro-Taliban tribesmen claimed locals were killed in the assault and, according to officials, ambushed the vehicles of security forces Saturday and opened fire on the main Frontiers Corps base in Miran Shah. The army responded with artillery and fire from helicopter gunships.
Dil Nawaz, 45, a resident of Miran Shah, said he had been stranded with his weeping family in their home for a day as guns boomed around them and bullets ricocheted off the walls. He finally fled on foot with his wife and five children during a lull in the fighting Sunday.
``We saw destruction in the main bazaar. We saw damaged homes. We just kept walking and hours later reached Mir Ali,'' he said.
About 10,000 people have fled the violence. Vehicles were not allowed in or out of Miran Shah, so people had to walk 10 miles to a security checkpoint. Many have ended up in Mir Ali, 15 miles west of Miran Shah, where the situation has stabilized after at least 21 people died in violence Saturday.
A full curfew was declared in Miran Shah except for three afternoon hours for residents to buy provisions, said Sikandar Qayyum, a security official for Pakistan's tribal areas. It would last as long as ``the security situation requires.''
Fighting rumbled on Monday. A militant rocket attack on a residential area for government officials in Miran Shah killed one official's 17-year-old daughter, Qayyum said.
Qayyum confirmed that army helicopter gunships fired on militant positions around Miran Shah on Monday, while militants attacked security checkpoints around Mir Ali and the nearby town of Razmak but caused no casualties.
Musharraf on Monday defended the army's operations, saying hundreds of foreign militants were hiding in North and neighboring South Waziristan.
``They include Uzbeks, Chechens, Middle Easterners, and even some Chinese,'' he told reporters. ``Foreigners are also present in Miran Shah.''
But opposition lawmaker Imran Khan condemned the government for ``the massacre of our citizens in the tribal areas by the use of indiscriminate force.''
Khan was released Sunday from two days of house arrest in Islamabad for trying to organize an anti-U.S. protest during Bush's visit.
Associated Press reporters Riaz Khan in Peshawar and Sailab Mahsud in Dera Ismail Khan contributed to this report.
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Pakistan battles the forces within
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Asia Times
KARACHI - Protests against the administration of President General Pervez Musharraf and against the US took off in Pakistan about a month ago in the guise of rallies denouncing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
These protests have now reached the stronghold of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan: the self-proclaimed "Islamic State of North Waziristan", a volatile tribal area on the border with Afghanistan.
For the past few days this region has been the scene of fierce battles between the Pakistani armed forces and the Taliban and their supporters. This, analysts believe, is the starting point of taking the nascent Tehrik -i-Nizam- i-Mustafa movement to other areas in Pakistan, that is, to enforce the Prophet Mohammed's way of life, or sharia law, on society. Underground Islamic radical groups will surface in support of this struggle that could ultimately lead to the ousting of the Musharraf government.
People in North Waziristan who spoke to Asia Times Online claimed that the present battles between the armed forces and the tribals are unlike those of the past, which in essence were skirmishes. They said that now there was a virtual mass mutiny against both Pakistan and its pro-US government in Islamabad.
Asia Times Online broke the story about the establishment of an Islamic state in North Waziristan (see The Taliban's bloody foothold in Pakistan, February 8) after the Taliban took control of the area. Initially, Pakistani authorities avoided clashes and restricted themselves to the district headquarters, Miranshah. There was an unwritten accord between the Taliban and Pakistani forces that they would not encroach on each other's areas.
However, an air raid last Friday, a day before the arrival of US President George W Bush in Pakistan, changed everything. Pakistani authorities claimed they had attacked a group of militants who were infiltrating North Waziristan after attacking a US base in Afghanistan. Local tribes maintain that the air raid killed a number of innocent men, women and children who had nothing to do with the suspect group.
In reprisal, tribals seized control of the district headquarters of Miranshah. Many Pakistani armed-forces personnel were killed, while dozens were forced to surrender and were arrested by the local Taliban.
Pakistan's ground forces could not take on the tribals, so more gunship helicopters were sent in, resulting in the deaths of more than 100 tribesmen on Saturday, according to local estimates. And on Sunday, dozens more were killed. Despite the air cover, Pakistani ground troops are not prepared to risk advancing too far beyond their bases.
Taliban sources tell Asia Times Online that had Pakistan not begun the air raids, sharia courts would have been operational from this month. The Taliban have already established centers all over the tribal area to run local affairs, including their own system of policing.
The fight spreads
The Taliban intend to extend from their base in North Waziristan to Afghanistan to fuel the resistance there against the US and its allies. Similarly, the movement will spread to "mainland" Pakistan in an effort to topple the pro-American government in Islamabad. Pakistan is a key component of the United States' "war on terror".
This anti-government movement will need a leader. The jihadi hardcore is looking for one who will be untainted and not hand-in-glove with the military establishment. So far, a general consensus is emerging that international cricketer turned politician Imran Khan, head of the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaaf (Pakistan Justice Movement), might be the man for the job.
Khan took a lead role in the protests against Bush's visit to Pakistan, although he received some support from the six-party opposition religious grouping the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA). In fact, Khan was placed under house arrest before his main rally, and in his absence his workers gathered in Rawalpindi, where they were dispersed by police and many people were arrested.
In his distinguished cricket-playing days, the charismatic Khan was featured on the cover of international magazines, and he had a huge following in his own country because of his exploits on the field. Pakistani Islamists, a constituency in the army and the powerful Jamaat-i-Islami Pakistan party saw Khan as a leader who could be cultivated as a figure to charm the masses for Islamic revolution in Pakistan.
This was soon after Pakistan won the Cricket World Cup in Australia in 1993, when Khan's popularity knew no bounds. At this time, he retired from the sport and became involved in establishing a cancer hospital.
However, Khan's marriage to Jemima Goldsmith, a daughter of British industrialist James Goldsmith, messed up the designs of the Islamists, and the whole scheme was put on the back burner.
Educated at Oxford, England, and coming from a family that is considered among the elite of Lahore, Khan nevertheless turned out to be a genuine ally of the Islamic radicals as he sided with their cause and the Taliban. The majority of his party comprises progressive thinkers, women's-rights activists and a faction of Marxists, some of whom left the fold because of Khan's tendencies toward Islamic radicalism.
Yet Khan remained a vocal voice against US designs in the region, and even launched a campaign in support of some army officers who were arrested for alleged al-Qaeda connections, and he openly supported the Taliban movement.
Khan is now divorced, so in the eyes of many he is once again in a position to become a leader.
Before his rally in Rawalpindi, he was scheduled for a meeting with this correspondent in Islamabad. But because of his house arrest, he called by telephone to express his anger.
"There may be many dimensions to Bush's visit to Pakistan, but the basic thing is the reinforcement of US influence in Pakistan, which is situated at an ideal strategic location. Musharraf is the vehicle to reinforce American designs in the region," Khan said.
He called the ongoing operation in North Waziristan a prelude of radicalization in Pakistan. "The post-September 11 [2001] events perpetuate the present situation [unrest] and the current North Waziristan situation will further radicalize Pakistani society," Khan said.
He claimed that Musharraf was living in a house of cards and that a single powerful push could force him to step down. "Had Pakistan not been hit by an earthquake [last year], the opposition parties would already have begun their movement to oust Musharraf, but you will see that he will not be able to resist any longer against the present movement."
A million-person march was staged in Karachi on Sunday, and now there is a few days' lull due to Senate elections. In the meantime, the specter of North Waziristan will loom large in the consciousness of the establishment: the fear of a religious hard core, waiting for a leader, joining with the Islamic State of North Waziristan.
According to a report by Pakistani intelligence agencies, as many as half a million Pakistanis stayed in Afghanistan during the Taliban period from 1996 to 2001. Many of them took military training, while others only sought ideological inspiration.
After the September 11 attacks in the US, Pakistan took drastic steps to contain pro-Taliban organizations in Pakistan. Still, tens of thousands of jihadis and their supporters are believed to still be active. At present, the main problem of the religious hard core is to get all of them united in a battle against the establishment and mobilized on the streets.
To achieve this, a revolutionary leader is required who will be popular in the armed forces, with the religious hard core and among the masses.
Stubborn, defiant and extremely popular among the Taliban, Imran Khan might be such a leader.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd.
Comment: And what will happen if the Musharraf government falls to the Taliban? Well, obviously: Taliban with Nukes. Now that's not a very pleasant thought.
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India Deal Makes US a Nuclear Proliferator
By Ranjit Devraj
4 Mar 06
Campaigners for a nuclear-free South Asia are aghast at the potential nightmare that lies ahead following the nuclear technology and fuel deal announced here this week by visiting United States President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
''This deal may have further complicated an already difficult situation in South Asia which has two rival self-declared nuclear weapon states,'' said N.D. Jayaprakash, lead campaigner for the Movement in India for Nuclear Disarmament (MIND), which counts among its ranks well-known scientists and intellectuals.
''What is sad is that nowhere in all this did the idea that nuclear weapons are not safe in anybody's hands come up, and now, far from the disarmament debate, the clamour by other countries that they too be allowed to possess nuclear weapons has grown louder,'' he added.
Pakistan, where Bush was rounding off his four-day South Asian tour on Saturday, was first off the block demanding a civilian nuclear technology deal similar to the one Washington signed with its regional rival on the grounds that it was short on fossil fuel.
But, at a televised press conference in Islamabad, Bush ruled out any such deal with Pakistan. ''We discussed the civilian nuclear programme and I explained to him (Musharraf) that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories,'' Bush said.
''What is happening is that, with this deal, the U.S. has itself become the biggest proliferator of nuclear technology,'' Prof. Anuradha Chinoy, disarmament specialist at the Jawaharalal Nehru University (JNU), told IPS in an interview. ''The only difference is that what the U.S. is practicing is selective proliferation.''
Chinoy said the deal went against the ideal of universal disarmament and would only make aspirant countries, denied entry into the select nuclear club, even more dangerous and desperate, as could be seen from the examples of Iran, Pakistan and North Korea.. Iran has already accused the U.S. and India of double standards. As its case moves towards a likely reference to the U.N. Security Council, Iran will certainly raise the 'double standards' pitch.
Worst of all, said Chinoy, the ''U.S. and India are now partners in violating international law by not involving the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the 45-country Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) before agreeing to transfer nuclear fuel and technology''.
Both the IAEA and the NSG are United Nations bodies.
Indian newspapers, however, have been hailing the deal as a triumph for its negotiators' skills. They succeeded in keeping the country's demonstrated capacity to make nuclear weapons away from international inspections while gaining access to advanced reactors and technology for its civilian programme.
On top of that India has all along refused to be signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the grounds that it was discriminatory. It carried out nuclear tests in 1974, attracting international sanctions, but defiantly went on to declare itself a nuclear weapons state in 1998 through a second round of tests.
Following Thursday's deal, Singh told a press conference that under the Indo-U.S. pact the NSG and the IAEA would be made to formulate India-specific safeguards. Under existing rules, by contrast, the NSG cannot supply 'dual-use' nuclear technology to India since it does not accept full-scope IAEA safeguards on nuclear facilities.
So far, though, the agreement has received praise from IAEA director general Mohamed El Baradei, who has described it as ''timely for ongoing efforts to consolidate the non-proliferation regime, combat nuclear terrorism and strengthen nuclear safety''.
India has been allowed to classify eight of its existing 22 reactors as military and keep them away from IAEA inspectors and also decide whether any future reactor it builds ought to be classified as civilian or military.
Most importantly, India has been able to keep its entire fast-breeder reactor programme in the military list. Fast breeders use fission caused by fast neutrons and burn highly concentrated or enriched fuel and, theoretically, they generate more fissile material than they consume. And the deal has no caps on fissile material, including weapons-grade plutonium.
Even before Bush landed in India on Wednesday, Singh made pledged in parliament that the fast breeder programme, a pet project of India's secretive Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), would not be compromised in any way.
''It is possible that DAE officials want to have the option of producing nuclear fuel for weapons in these unsafeguarded reactors," said M.V. Ramana, well-known a physicist at Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Environment and Development, located in southern Indian city of Bangalore.
Another possible reason for the fierce resistance put up by DAE, through interviews fed to the media by its chief Anil Kakodkar, is that the fast breeder sites also house facilities for the nuclear reactor that India is developing for its submarines. ''Indian authorities probably don't want IAEA inspectors lurking around there,'' Ramana told IPS. (END/2006)
Copyright © 2006 IPS-Inter Press Service. All rights reserved.
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Moussaoui's lies led to 9/11 deaths: prosecutor
Reuters
07/03/20006
ALEXANDRIA, Virginia - Federal prosecutors argued on Monday that even though September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was in jail during the attacks he should be executed because his lies led to the deaths of 3,000 people.
Comment: Taking the figure of 3,000 killed in the 9/11 attacks; if Massaoui is executed, the new total for people murdered by the U.S. government as a direct result of the 9/11 attacks will be 3,001. Of course, if we include indirect murders, we are somewhere in the 300,000's. For the full story on what really happened on September 11th 2001, see laura Knight-Jadczyk's book: 9/11:The Ultimate Truth
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Bill to Make Anonymous Internet Posts Illegal - Cure for Libel, Slander and Defamation
ASSEMBLY, No. 1327
STATE OF NEW JERSEY
212th LEGISLATURE
PRE-FILED FOR INTRODUCTION IN THE 2006 SESSION
Sponsored by:
Assemblyman PETER J. BIONDI
District 16 (Morris and Somerset)
SYNOPSIS
Makes certain operators of interactive computer services and Internet service providers liable to persons injured by false or defamatory messages posted on public forum websites.
CURRENT VERSION OF TEXT
As introduced.
An Act concerning the posting of certain Internet messages and supplementing chapter 38A of Title 2A of the New Jersey Statutes.
Be It Enacted by the Senate and General Assembly of the State of New Jersey:
1. As used in this act:
"Information content provider" means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.
"Interactive computer service" means any information system, service, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides service to the Internet.
"Internet" means the international computer network of both federal and non-federal interoperable packet switched data networks.
"Internet service provider" or "provider" means any person, business or organization qualified to do business in this State that provides individuals, corporations, or other entities with the ability to connect to the Internet through equipment that is located in this State.
"Operator" means any person, business or organization qualified to do business in this State that operates an interactive computer service.
2. The operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish, maintain and enforce a policy to require any information content provider who posts written messages on a public forum website either to be identified by a legal name and address, or to register a legal name and address with the operator of the interactive computer service or the Internet service provider through which the information content provider gains access to the interactive computer service or Internet, as appropriate.
3. An operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider shall establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.
4. Any person who is damaged by false or defamatory written messages that originate from an information content provider who posts such messages on a public forum website may file suit in Superior Court against an operator or provider that fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required pursuant to section 2 of P.L. , c. (C.) (pending before the Legislature as this bill), and may recover compensatory and punitive damages and the cost of the suit, including a reasonable attorney's fee, cost of investigation and litigation from such operator or provider.
5. This act shall take effect on the 90th day following enactment.
STATEMENT
This bill would require an operator of any interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish, maintain and enforce a policy requiring an information content provider who posts messages on a public forum website either to be identified by legal name and address or to register a legal name and address with the operator or provider prior to posting messages on a public forum website.
The bill requires an operator of an interactive computer service or an Internet service provider to establish and maintain reasonable procedures to enable any person to request and obtain disclosure of the legal name and address of an information content provider who posts false or defamatory information about the person on a public forum website.
In addition, the bill makes any operator or Internet service provider liable for compensatory and punitive damages as well as costs of a law suit filed by a person damaged by the posting of such messages if the operator or Internet service provider fails to establish, maintain and enforce the policy required by section 2 of the bill.
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Bush, Chavez, and Hitler
by Jacob G. Hornberger
U.S. officials become angry and indignant when someone compares the Bush administration's policies to those of the Hitler regime. Even government officials at the local level get upset over the comparison, as reflected by the public schoolteacher who is under investigation for comparing Bush's policies to those of Hitler in his classroom.
Ironically, however, the anger and indignation felt by U.S. officials when someone compares Bush's policies to those of Hitler does not stop U.S. officials from comparing foreign leaders to Hitler.
The most recent example was when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld compared Venezuela's democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez, to Hitler, saying, "He's a person who was elected legally – just as Hitler was elected legally – and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Morales and others."
When Rumsfeld compares Chavez to Hitler, he's obviously not suggesting that Chavez is setting up deaths camps to commit another Holocaust. He's simply saying that Chavez, like Hitler, is "consolidating power" and working closely with foreign rulers who, like Chavez, refuse to submit to the dictates of the U.S. Empire.
Consider Fidel Castro. The beef that U.S. officials have with Castro is not that he has imposed a communist/socialist order in Cuba. After all, U.S. officials fully support the types of socialist programs that Castro has put into place, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public schooling, income taxation, gun control, drug laws, occupational licensure, and equalization of income. U.S. officials even have no problems repatriating Cuban refugees back into Castro's communism. Their primary beef with Castro is that he simply has always refused to become a member of the U.S. Empire and thereby do the bidding of U.S. officials, like his predecessor Fulgencio Batista did. If Castro had done that, U.S. officials would no more complain about what he did inside Cuba than they complain about what their unelected military dictator in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, does inside his country. Musharraf, of course, became a full-fledged, fully paid member of the U.S. Empire after 9/11, eagerly accepting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid and presumably abandoning his deeply held, pre-9/11 commitment to the Taliban.
It's the same thing with Bolivia's newly elected president Evo Morales, to whom Rumsfeld was referring when he compared Chavez to Hitler. The immediate beef that U.S. officials have with Morales is that he's going "independent" by threatening to end the war on drugs in Bolivia, a war that has torn not only Bolivia apart but also Colombia, Mexico, and many other Latin American nations. The problem, however, is that U.S. federal officials need this war – their budgets depend on it and their jobs depend on it. In fact, for some government officials, both at the state and federal level, their bribes depend on it. Thus, despite the fact that the drug war has totally failed to accomplish its objective – the elimination of drugs and drug abuse in the United States – as a recent official U.S. government report reflects, U.S. officials demand that foreign regimes continue waging it. That's one reason they're upset with Morales – he's not buying into the drug-war nonsense. And so they're expressing their displeasure with Morales by suggesting that he is now associating with "Hitler."
Ironically, even as Rumsfeld calls Chavez "Hitler" for consolidating power, no one can deny that ever since 9/11, Bush has done everything he can to "consolidate power," as evidenced by the USA PATRIOT Act, the unconstitutional assumption of power to declare war, the illegal attack and war of aggression on a country that had never attacked the United States, the illegal spying on Americans by recording their telephone conversations without a judicially issued warrant, the jailing and punishment of Americans without due process of law, illegal kidnapping and "rendition" of prisoners to foreign regimes for the purposes of torture, and of course the illegal torture, sex abuse, rape, and murder of detainees by U.S. forces. Unfortunately, when U.S. officials such as Rumsfeld compare Chavez to Hitler for "consolidating power," their own arrogance and hubris prevent them from seeing that President Bush has been doing the exact same thing ever since 9/11 – and arguably to a much greater extent than Chavez – "consolidating power." While they have no hesitancy in placing the label of "Hitler" on foreign leaders for doing so, U.S. officials scratch their heads in befuddlement when foreigners place the label of "hypocrites" upon them.
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The Value of George Orwell
By Charley Reese
03/06/06 "ICH" -- -- George Orwell remains a valuable writer, though he died in 1950. He was a man who was an active participant in his times, and since the new century appears to be going down the same road as the last one, we can still learn from him.
His essay "Politics and the English Language" ought to be read by every journalist and by everyone who reads journalists or listens to the babble on television.
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," he wrote. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
"In our age, there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia," Orwell wrote. Earlier in the essay he had said, "In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."
Our time and his time remain the same. We invade a sovereign nation based on lies, destroy its infrastructure, depose its government and kill 30,000 of its people, and we call that "spreading democracy" or "defending freedom."
The phrase "war on terror" is a phony metaphor. We are not at war. Ninety-nine and 99/100ths percent of the American people are living the same way they've always lived. We have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq fighting an insurrection that our invasions of those countries caused. They are at war – a war of their own country's making – but the rest of us are not. Waving a flag or putting a bumper sticker on one's car cannot be called a war effort.
The "war" is being relegated to the inside pages, and it's a safe bet that no matter what happens in Baghdad, the Academy Awards will receive more coverage and notice than the war. In our nutty society, the choice of a comedian to emcee a Hollywood trade show is considered big, national news.
What distinguishes us from other animals is language, and when we use language not to communicate truth as best we can determine it, but to deceive, mislead, obfuscate and obscure the facts, then we are committing the ultimate sin against humanity. We are playing a dangerous game with our own sanity.
Our own journalists sanitize even their skimpy coverage of the war. The American people must not be allowed to see the real face of war, lest they withdraw their support. The real face of war, of course, is broken bodies, blood, splattered brains and innards, horrible burns and other mutilations. There are no pleasant aspects of war. So, Americans are allowed to see soldiers giving candy to children, and occasionally an explosion on the horizon or the wreckage after the bodies have been removed.
In the meantime, the president and his folks blather on in carefully chosen euphemisms and newspeak just as if they were characters in an Orwell novel. At least the American people are at last beginning to catch on, and Bush's approval rating is 34 percent and his vice president's rating is 18 percent. That speaks well of the American people. They do trust their politicians, though that trust is often abused, but eventually they begin to check actions against words, facts against claims. Once they realized they've been bamboozled, then all the fancy words and euphemisms in the world won't restore their trust.
Bush has been in trouble in Iraq and Europe and Asia, and now he appears to be in trouble at home. He has three more years, so it would be a great help if this year one or both of the houses of Congress shifted to Democratic control. That would restore the checks and balances so necessary to preserve liberty, not that Democrats are any prize. That doesn't matter. The genius of our Founding Fathers is that they realized that as long as government fights itself, the liberty of the people is safe.
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"Politics and the English Language"
By George Orwell
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language -- so the argument runs -- must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because out thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad -- I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen -- but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that i can refer back to them when necessary:
1. I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
2. Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder .
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossa)
3. On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural, irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
4. All the "best people" from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the agitated petty-bourgeoise to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
5. If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like that of Bottom in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream -- as gentle as any sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as "standard English." When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse. I list below, with notes and examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of prose construction is habitually dodged:
Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying. Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning withouth those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe the line is sometimes written as tow the line. Another example is the hammer and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying would avoid perverting the original phrase.
Operators or verbal false limbs. These save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc. The keynote is the elimination of simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil, mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination of instead of by examining). The range of verbs is further cut down by means of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation. Simple conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future, deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and so on and so forth.
Pretentious diction. Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgements. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion. Foreign words and expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina, mutatis mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an air of culture and elegance. Except for the useful abbreviations i.e., e.g., and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.* The jargon peculiar to
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*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which English flower names were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, Snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
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Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
Meaningless words. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.† Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in
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† Example: Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness . . .Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bittersweet of resignation." (Poetry Quarterly)
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the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality," while another writes, "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness," the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one. Exhibit (3) above, for instance, contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations -- race, battle, bread -- dissolve into the vague phrases "success or failure in competitive activities." This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing -- no one capable of using phrases like "objective considerations of contemporary phenomena" -- would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase ("time and chance") that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry -- when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech -- it is natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash -- as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot -- it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of this essay. Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words. One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in addition there is the slip -- alien for akin -- making further nonsense, and several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness. Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it means; (3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the whole of the article in which it occurs. In (4), the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink. In (5), words and meaning have almost parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general emotional meaning -- they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity with another -- but they are not interested in the detail of what they are saying. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: 1. Could I put it more shortly? 2. Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you -- even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent -- and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a "party line." Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
"While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one's elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he "felt impelled" to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: "[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe." You see, he "feels impelled" to write -- feels, presumably, that he has something new to say -- and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this may be true, but it is not true in detail. Silly words and expressions have often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few journalists. There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un- formation out of existence*, to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average sentence, to drive out foreign phrases
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*One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.
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and strayed scientific words, and, in general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable. But all these are minor points. The defense of the English language implies more than this, and perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a "standard English" which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear, or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a "good prose style." On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning. What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When yo think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to mak on another person. This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs.
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Cindy Sheehan Arrested After U.N. March
By PAUL BURKHARDT
Associated Press
March 6, 2006
NEW YORK - Cindy Sheehan, who drew international attention when she camped outside President Bush's ranch to protest the
Iraq war, was arrested Monday along with three other women during a demonstration demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
The march to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations by about a dozen U.S. and Iraqi anti-war activists followed a news conference at U.N. headquarters, where Iraqi women described daily killings and ambulance bombings as part of the escalating violence that keeps women in their homes.
Women Say No to War, which helped organize the news conference and march, said Sheehan and three other women were arrested while trying to deliver a petition to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations with more than 60,000 signatures urging the "withdrawal of all troops and all foreign fighters from Iraq." Police said they were arrested for criminal trespassing and resisting arrest.
Ann Wright, a former U.S. Army colonel and U.S. diplomat, said in a statement issued by the group that the U.S. Mission refused to send someone to meet with the women "whose lives and families have been shattered by this destructive and immoral war." The protesters refused to leave without delivering the petition, she said.
Richard Grenell, the spokesman for the U.S. Mission, said in response to Sheehan's arrest: "We invited her in to discuss her concerns with a U.S. Mission employee. She chose not to come in but to lay down in front of the building and block the entrance. It was clearly designed to be a media stunt, not aimed at rational discussion," Grenell said.
At the news conference, Sheehan said when her 24-year-old son - a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq - died in April 2004, "the morgues were filled with innocent men, women and children."
Entessa Mohammed, a pharmicist who works at a hospital in Baghdad, became tearful when recalling the deaths and injuries she said she has witnessed daily.
She estimated that 1,600 Iraqis are killed in Baghdad every month, with a greater number injured. "Thanks for the liberation from Saddam" Hussein, Mohammed said, addressing the Bush administration, "now please go out."
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A Tame End to Patriot Act Debate
By Jonathan Weisman and Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Tuesday, March 7, 2006; Page A15
For a legislative fight that has stretched on for months, pitting the House against the Senate and the White House against members of the president's party, the battle to renew the USA Patriot Act will likely end very quietly this week.
Between three post office renamings and a measure to clamp down on the counterfeiting of manufactured goods, the House will give its final assent today on the Patriot Act's reauthorization. Republican leaders are so confident in its passage that they have scheduled the vote on the fast-track "suspension calendar," where approval takes the vote of two-thirds of the House. Just after they pass the Patriot Act, House members will vote to support the goals and ideals of National Engineers Week.
Passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, the law made it easier for federal agents to secretly tap phones, obtain library and bank records, and search homes of terrorism suspects. Complaints by civil libertarians, librarians and others prompted lawmakers last year to insist on adding safeguards to the act before renewing it.
Some of the revisions affect National Security Letters, which are subpoenas for financial and electronic records that do not require a judge's approval. Libraries functioning "in their traditional capacity" will no longer be subject to such letters. Also modified is "Section 215 subpoenas," which are granted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court. Recipients now will have the explicit right to challenge the subpoenas' nondisclosure or "gag order" requirements.
Some civil liberties groups, however, say the law is written in a way that will make it very difficult for a targeted individual to prevail in such an appeal.
Less Call for Sweeping Lobbying Reform?
As the Patriot Act battle ends with a whimper, the fight over the rules governing lobbying will begin. But just as the Patriot Act fight started with promises of major changes and ended largely with the status quo, the push for sweeping lobbying reform may be losing steam.
The Senate is scheduled to take up ethics and lobbying legislation this week. But first, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) hopes to merge two bills on the subject passed last week by the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, and the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
Senate aides do not expect much trouble accomplishing the combination. The rules bill deals basically with lawmakers' actions, and the governmental affairs bill involves mostly demands on lobbyists. Together they would represent the Senate's response to the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandals.
The bills lean heavily toward expanding disclosure requirements on both lawmakers and lobbyists. In addition, one pending proposal would make it harder for lawmakers to pass narrowly targeted spending measures called earmarks. The bill would also double to two years the time that former lawmakers must wait before they can lobby their ex-colleagues on Capitol Hill.
Senators have said they expect debate on a variety of measures on the floor including a plan, once rejected in committee, to establish an independent office of public integrity. Some senators also plan to offer an amendment that would force lawmakers to pay charter fares for their private airplane trips rather than the first-class rates allowed under current law.
Food Bill No Longer Small Potatoes
The biggest rhetorical battle in Congress may be a food fight. Tomorrow or Thursday, the House is scheduled to vote on the National Uniformity for Food Act, a measure to establish a federal system of food warnings that would replace the patchwork regulations of the states.
The measure has bipartisan support and was expected to pass with little controversy. But in recent days, the protests of state government officials and environmental groups have changed the equation. State attorneys general say the legislation will federalize a regulatory issue that has been handled at the state level and could replace some tough state standards with weaker federal rules.
The Natural Resources Defense Council hand-delivered bottles of Pepto-Bismol to House members and their staff with a special label warning that "H.R. 4167 side effects may include vomiting, diarrhea, birth defects, cancer and worse." A bipartisan group of attorneys general will protest the measure today at a news conference near the Capitol.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the bill's author, said yesterday that his measure is the victim of a disinformation campaign.
"The uniformity in food warnings under the bill will enhance food safety and public health," he said. "Contrary to the assertions of the attorneys general, H.R. 4167 is sound public policy that provides protection for all citizens of all states."
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Tillman's death in '04 to be focus of criminal probe
By JOSH WHITE
Republished from Houston Chronicle
Sun, 05 Mar 2006 19:44:02 -0800
WASHINGTON – The Army is opening a criminal investigation into the friendly-fire death of ex-NFL player Pat Tillman to probe whether negligent homicide charges should be brought against members of his Ranger unit who killed him in Afghanistan nearly two years ago, according to defense officials.
Pentagon officials notified Tillman's family Friday that a Defense Department inspector general's review of the case had determined there is enough evidence to warrant a fresh look, after initial investigations that were characterized by secrecy, mishandling of evidence and delays reporting crucial facts.
The inspector general's review was launched in August after bitter and public complaints by the Tillman family that the Pentagon had failed to hold anyone accountable for the April 22, 2004, shooting or to fully explain its circumstances. His mother, Mary Tillman, has expressed deep frustration about what she calls a succession of "lies" she has been told about her son's death.
The Army originally reported that Tillman was killed in a firefight with enemy forces in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan near the Pakistani border, and officials heralded his heroism with a tale of how he was charging a hill against the enemy when he was shot. Weeks later, after a nationally televised memorial service, the Army revealed that he had been gunned down by members of his own unit who rounded a corner in a Humvee and mistook him and a coalition Afghan fighter for the enemy.
Mary Tillman said Saturday that she thinks evidence of a crime has existed all along and that the family's repeated calls for a criminal investigation were ignored until now. "The military has had every opportunity to do the right thing, and they haven't. They knew all along that something was seriously wrong, and they just wanted to cover it up."
Patrick Tillman Sr. expressed skepticism the new investigation will yield answers. "I think it's another step," he said. "But if you send investigators to reinvestigate an investigation that was falsified in the first place, what do you think you're going to get?"
The loss of Tillman - a popular Arizona Cardinals football player before joining the military after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - rattled the Army in part because of the controversy over the nature of his death and the interactions with his family. Army officials have been working to improve the information flow to families of soldiers who die in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This will be the first criminal investigation into the shooting.
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'Specific' Info on NSA Eavesdropping?
By Brad Knickerbocker
Republished from CS Monitor
Mon, 06 Mar 2006 16:26:15 -0800
A new lawsuit may have what other cases don't: official records about those under surveillance.
Ashland, Oregon – Of all the lawsuits seeking to halt the National Security Agency's program to eavesdrop on certain Americans' electronic communications, a new one filed last week in Oregon may provide the federal courts with the most detailed glimpse yet into the clandestine counterterrorism effort.
The biggest challenge for such cases – which have also been filed in New York, Michigan, and California – is that plaintiffs don't have access to records of highly classified government surveillance activities and therefore can't be sure they were personally subjected to covert phone- tapping or e-mail reading by the US government.
The Oregon suit may manage to leap over that imposing legal hurdle. Lawyers and their clients apparently have seen phone logs and other top-secret records inadvertently provided, and then hastily recovered, by government officials.
"In the [court] motion there is material under seal, which we will rely on in our case," says lawyer Tom Nelson in Portland, who represents an Oregon group tied to a now-defunct Islamic charity in Saudi Arabia and two Washington lawyers who allege they were wiretapped without warrant under the National Security Agency (NSA) program.
"We can't get into what's there," says Mr. Nelson. "But we have very specific information on what happened, when it happened, and what was intercepted. We obviously think it will be helpful in court in proving our contention."
Similar cases have been brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Their aim is to stop a controversial domestic-surveillance program that raises questions – in Congress and among the public – about how far national security efforts can impinge on individual privacy.
The EFF, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, has filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, accusing the telecommunications giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by helping the NSA engage in what staff attorney Kevin Bankston calls "the biggest fishing expedition ever devised." AT&T officials say they do not discuss national security issues or pending litigation. FBI and US Attorney's Office officials have declined comment as well.
Civil rights lawyers at the CCR in New York represent many Muslim foreign nationals detained after the 9/11 attacks, including some held at the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. CCR lawyers frequently communicate with clients and witnesses in Asia and the Middle East. They contend that NSA eavesdropping and e-mail "data-mining" violate constitutional provisions protecting free speech and prohibiting illegal search and seizure. The NSA's activities – which have been conducted by presidential order without the normally required court approval – also impinge on attorney-client protections, the CCR suit alleges. "It's absolutely clear on the face of the law that this program is illegal," says CCR attorney Shayana Kadidal.
Among the plaintiffs in the ACLU case, filed in Detroit, are journalists, scholars, and nonprofit groups such as Greenpeace and the Council on American Islamic Relations. The ACLU suit "challenges the constitutionality of a secret government program to intercept vast quantities of the international telephone and Internet communications of innocent Americans without court approval…."
More court challenges to the NSA program are expected to be filed on behalf of criminal defendants prosecuted under antiterrorism laws. Though they may have acknowledged their guilt in plotting to attack American targets such as the Brooklyn Bridge, they are now expected to challenge their convictions on the grounds that prosecution evidence (phone records and taped conversations) was illegally obtained, attorneys familiar with the cases say.
The Oregon case dates back to 1997 when a chapter of the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity, was established in the town of Ashland by Iranian immigrant Perouz Sedaghaty, a longtime arborist and peace activist known here as Pete Seda. Last year, the US government charged the group with laundering $150,000 in donations to help Islamic fighters in Chechnya, a charge Mr. Seda's many friends here (including a local rabbi) find incredible.
Americans have mixed views of the NSA's domestic snooping. Seventy-six percent agree that the government "should use wiretaps to listen to telephone calls and read e-mails between suspected terrorists in other countries and some people in the United States," according to a new poll by Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. And 54 percent believe that such surveillance by the Bush administration has prevented acts of terrorism, while 33 percent do not.
But a majority (55 to 42 percent) says snooping on US citizens communicating with individuals abroad should require a court order first. That's the nub of the debate in Congress. Reflecting such mixed opinions, the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee last week widened its investigation of the NSA program.
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Impeaching George W. Bush - From discussion to action - Michael Ratner and his fellow lawyers have drafted a call to impeach President Bush.
By Onnesha Roychoudhur
Until recently, talk of ousting President George W. Bush has proved little more than a distant rumbling. For too long, impeachment has been deemed implausible. It's not going to happen with a Republican Congress, so the argument goes. Not with the president finishing his second term, not while we're at war.
But the distant rumbling is growing louder by the day, creating a resonant echo that is rapidly taking root in public discourse. "Impeach Him," reads the cover of this month's Harper's magazine. And in a public forum in New York City last week, journalists, lawyers, and political figures came together to discuss the case against our president.
Since September 11th, 2001, there has been no shortage of news regarding this administration's involvement in torture, lies, secrecy and obstruction of the law. Yet, there has been little discussion in the mainstream media of holding those in power accountable for the actions so diligently catalogued by the press. It is a conspicuous vacuum that helps to explain why calls for impeachment are rapidly gaining currency.
In fact, the case for the impeachment of President Bush is arguably the strongest in American history. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) makes this amply clear in its recent book, a concise indictment of President Bush that lays out four clear legal arguments that point to impeachment as a necessary remedy for the gross violation of our Constitution. The Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush covers illegal wiretapping, torture, rendition, detention and the Iraq war. An appendix compares the impeachment proceedings of Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Clinton to the comparatively more powerful case against Bush.
Lawyers at the CCR, indeed lawyers throughout the world, have been embroiled in litigation with the administration for years. But the administration has consistently demonstrated disdain for the law, with the president effectively thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court, Congress, and the American people. It is this reality that led Michael Ratner and his fellow lawyers at the CCR to provide a clear argument for impeachment to the American people and Congress.
The piecemeal battles that journalists, lawyers and activists fight every day are a testament to the respect many Americans still have for the rule of law. But arguments against the president's violation of the Constitution have not resulted in any reform or change in behavior. Public shaming and the threat of legal action often work to keep politicians in line. But President Bush is vocally disinterested in the public's approval of his agenda. Furthermore, he views the law, as evidenced by torture and detainee litigation, as mutable suggestion. For such a president, legal recourse is largely ineffectual -- unless Americans and Congress reclaim the power of the law to remove the offending parties.
As Ratner told AlterNet, "While our battles against illegal wiretaps and Guantanamo are critical for trying to get back legality, until we get rid of what I consider a criminal administration, we will not be able to go back to even a semblance of civil liberties and human rights."
The Articles of Impeachment make clear that this is no longer just about President Bush. Rather, it is about preventing the executive branch from obtaining carte blanche to disregard the two other branches of government. This is a paradigm shift that has already gained substantial footing through this administration's steady erosion of legal precedent.
There is no shortage of diligent documentation of this president's violation of laws and misleading of the public -- from the 1,284-page Torture Papers to congressman John Conyers' 273-page compilation [PDF] of the lies leading to the Iraq war. But behind this incredible ongoing compendium of evidence against President Bush lurks the realization that publicly pointing to criminal behavior is not synonymous with bringing it to an end.
It is the ultimate case of missing the forest for the trees. Behind this massive body of evidence, behind each new report of this president's transgressions of the law, is the threat of the one and only story that Americans will read for the rest of this presidency, and presidencies to come: The abuse of power, and the destruction of our Constitution.
As Ratner notes, "We need to be as radical as reality, and reality right now is very, very radical." Indeed, after reading through the Articles of Impeachment, readers will find that the only thing radical about impeaching this president is simply that it has not yet happened.
AlterNet spoke with Michael Ratner to discuss the specifics behind the legal arguments for impeachment, and the need for popular protest to restore the rule of law and force Congress to hold this administration accountable.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri: Can you briefly describe the articles of impeachment?
Michael Ratner: We've drafted four articles: Article I concerns the warrantless wiretapping of Americans in the U.S. This constitutes a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which prohibits and makes criminal any wiretapping without a warrant. The president has said that he's doing this, and it's a criminal charge that can get you five years in jail for each count. Additionally, it violates the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits unlawful searches and seizures -- this includes electronic surveillance. On a deeper level, these wiretaps deny the efficacy and validity of a congressional act.
Article Two of the impeachment of Richard Nixon is very similar. Nixon went outside of Congressional law and engaged in warrantless wiretapping against domestic dissidents and others who opposed the war in Vietnam. So, this article has a historical relation, obviously solid.
Article II is the falsifications that were used to justify the Iraq war. That's the article that congressman John Conyers has really focused on -- he's written an extensive report that documents this. You reference any particular day and the administration was making statements that Iraq has a relationship to 9/11, al Qaida and Osama bin Laden; that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In the one and a half years leading up to the war, the time during which they were making these statements, they knew that they were false.
Lying to Congress and the American people got us into a war that has two serious impeachable issues within it: First, it's an aggressive war contrary to the U.N. charter and contrary to law that doesn't allow war unless it's in self-defense. Secondly, it undermines the authority of Congress and the American people to decide when war is necessary. Through the lies, he got a number of Congress people to believe that war was necessary, thereby undercutting their constitutional obligation to decide on war.
Elizabeth Holtzman, who was part of the Judiciary Committee that voted to impeach Nixon, has written a long piece about how this constitutes fraud under criminal law. Of course, you don't need a criminal act to impeach someone, you simply need an act that undermines and subverts the basic constitutional structure of our government, as well as a failure to execute the proper laws.
Article III deals with what the president has done in regard to the issues of torture, arbitrary long-term detentions, disappearances and special trial. Our law is very clear on these things. You can't torture people, you can't commit war crimes, you can't send people to countries where they're tortured and you can't set up special courts for trial. The Geneva Conventions are a part of our law, as is the international covenant of civil and political rights. The president, in authorizing that entire range of activities, has not met with his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute laws.
Congress tried to put some brakes on the president through the McCain amendment, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. But the president, in a signing statement, essentially said he reserved the right to ignore what Congress says. What he did is not just a violation of the law; he is destroying the checks and balances of our Constitution.
Article IV is a general article that puts all of the prior three articles together. If you look at these things together, you see that they are essentially destroying our republic and our democracy. They are destroying the constitutional structure of our government. Therefore, he should be impeached.
OR: Was it your intent for the book to be utilized by members of Congress to begin impeachment proceedings?
MR: Yes, that's definitely one of our intents. We would also like to see some courage given to our members of Congress. John Conyers has begun the process with 26 people now signed onto the inquiry bill, but that's very small compared to the number that should be there. Similarly with the NSA spying, 18 have signed on to a serious inquiry, but we're talking about the same kinds of conduct that were part of Nixon's impeachment proceedings -- illegal use of electronic surveillance. Even Democrats like Al Gore are calling this a government of tyranny because of the utter and complete subverting of the Constitution.
Another intent is to popularize the issue that what the president has done has got to be looked. These aren't just individual issues, but a destruction of democracy on its deepest level. We want to popularize that idea and get it out there, particularly right now. If you look at the polls on warrantless wiretapping and the Iraq War, over 50 percent of Americans think that Bush could be impeached for these activities. But the media aren't picking this up. No one's talking about impeachment from the New York Times, or the Washington Post or anywhere else.
OR: Why do you think that is?
MR: They claim it's because it's not realistic. But that's not at all the case. When they started with the Clinton impeachment, less than 30 percent of the people were willing to impeach him for his actions. Yet, the media carried it widely. It may be that there's a buy-in by some part of this media leader society -- thinking that this could shake up our government too much. Some people think it's too dangerous to do so, but we would argue that it's much too dangerous not to.
OR: What do you say to Americans who think it isn't worth bothering with impeachment with the president currently in his final term?
MR: This administration has gone so far beyond what the requirements of the Constitution and the law. The question is whether this country can ever come back and resemble a democracy again. Unless you hold accountable the people who actually carried out an illegal war with Iraq, warrantless wiretapping and torture, there's nothing to stop the next administration -- whether it's Republican or Democrat -- from continuing with the same. We have to show that what happened in this country in the past four years is an utter subversion of our Constitution and completely unlawful under domestic and international law. Otherwise, I fear that this country may be changed forever in a very negative direction.
OR: What's at stake here?
MR: What's at stake is a presidency that is becoming an imperial presidency -- in which he's no longer responsible to the judiciary or the Congress. This is a president that thinks that, on his own, he can wiretap people, torture people, pick them up anywhere in the world. This has to be beaten back, and it has to be done soon. It is becoming embedded in our society in a way that is very hard to get rid of.
For instance, we just had a loss in the case of Maher Arar. Part of the judge's thinking in his decision was that, while it may not be okay to torture in a criminal case, it may be okay if it's to prevent terrorism. When that kind of thinking is afoot, something has to be done. Otherwise, it will become embedded in our legal and political thinking in the next generations. There has to be accountability for this.
OR:There's a lot of people, especially on the left, who think of George W. Bush as very self-serving president. This characterization may be preventing people from seeing that he is actually thinking well beyond his presidency -- with the intent to expand executive power for future administrations. Is this a fair characterization?
MR: Yes, this is about a particularly bad president -- a president who doesn't care about constitutional rights. But what's really going on here is what Cheney actually came out and stated a month ago when he talked about warrantless wiretapping. He said that they wanted to overcome what happened to the presidency during the '60s and the '70s.
There's an absolute intent here to make the presidency much more powerful, what they call a unitary presidency where they're not just a co-equal branch, but they are the branch -- no court or Congress can check them. This is not just about the president any longer, it's about these assertions of inherent power in the executive to override constitutional, international, congressional limitations, and judicial limitations. That's a big problem because that's essentially a dictatorship.
OR: With all this gratuitous conduct that has been amassed in the media, the question arises, why haven't there been many legal successes stopping this behavior?
MR: At the CCR, in almost every single action discussed in the articles, we have various lawsuits going. The problem is that they take a long time. Also, the courts are not always in our favor. And, even when we win, the administration is able to undercut them. You don't just win by lawsuits; you win by popular protest, people in the streets. That's the way you have to win. The Center really believes that our lawsuits are important and people have to be represented. We have to stop torture to the extent that we can. But there has to be popular protest in this country, or our lawsuits are not going to change anything.
Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial fellow at AlterNet.
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Wall Street Journal: Impeachment Proves Risky Political Issue
By JEANNE CUMMINGS
March 6, 2006
Some Democratic Activists Push Removing Bush From Office, But Mainstream Steers Clear
If Democratic candidate Tony Trupiano wins a Michigan House seat this fall, he pledges that one of his first acts will be to introduce articles of impeachment against President Bush.
That has earned Mr. Trupiano the endorsement of ImpeachPAC, a group of Democratic activists seeking to remove Mr. Bush from office. ImpeachPAC's Web site lists 14 candidates offering similar commitments, which are reminiscent of the Republican drive to oust former President Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
But Mr. Trupiano's pledge hasn't much impressed Democratic Party leaders, who are keeping their distance from impeachment talk. They remember how the effort boomeranged on Republicans in the 1998 midterm elections, when Mr. Clinton's adversaries expected to gain House seats but lost ground instead.
"If you are looking for a message to take back the House and the Senate or the White House, there are better ways to go about it," says Democratic communications ace Joe Lockhart, a media aide to Mr. Clinton during the Republican impeachment effort.
That puts mainstream Democrats, on this issue at least, echoing the Republican National Committee. "Voters elect candidates because they understand the issues rather than engage in leftwing fantasies," says RNC spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. It also guarantees tension between some of the party's most fervent members and its electoral strategists, who are directing efforts to recapture Capitol Hill.
Impeachment advocates are undaunted. "Just because you can't win a political battle doesn't mean certain battles shouldn't be fought," says Bob Fertik, a founder of the ImpeachPAC effort. "If we don't hold a president accountable for lying to start a war, we might as well throw out the Constitution of the United States."
Mr. Fertik, 48 years old, founded a group called Democrats.com in 2000 and began organizing protests from his home computer in New York before the first U.S. bombers hit Baghdad. When the so-called Downing Street Memo emerged in Britain last year, he discerned evidence that the Bush administration had manipulated prewar intelligence.
An organization he helped found, AfterDowningStreet.org, soon assembled an electronic coalition containing 300,000 email addresses. The group hired independent pollster John Zogby to test support for impeachment in June and found that 42% of likely voters supported that step if it were proved that the president lied about prewar intelligence.
By November, the proportion reached 51% -- prompting an impeachment drumbeat from Mr. Fertik and like-minded activists. He cofounded ImpeachPAC, a political action committee dedicated to recruiting and backing candidates who support an impeachment inquiry.
The $60,000 that ImpeachPAC has raised so far isn't much, but has kept the Internet-based organization afloat. David Swanson, the 36-year-old director, works from his home in Virginia.
The movement can point to some small successes. Radio celebrity Garrison Keillor posted an article for the online magazine Salon calling for Mr. Bush's impeachment. Three California cities -- San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Arcata -- have passed resolutions backing impeachment, and municipalities in North Carolina and Vermont are considering such steps.
But the Democratic National Committee, chaired by 2004 campaign firebrand Howard Dean has declined to chime in. A House resolution offered by Rep. John Conyers of Michigan seeking an initial impeachment inquiry has attracted support from just 26 of 201 House Democrats. Even Mr. Conyers, the ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, allows, "This isn't something we have to do right away."
Democratic strategists remember the fallout Republicans suffered among swing voters in 1998 amid their bid to oust Mr. Clinton. The National Republican Congressional Committee sank $10 million into a last-minute advertising blitz focused on Mr. Clinton's character, only to lose five seats and see House Speaker Newt Gingrich pressured to resign.
A Bush impeachment drive could only move forward if Democrats regained control of the House from the president's party. But even then it would be an uphill fight.
"At most, they could show a mistake in judgment, it seems to me," says the Rev. Robert F. Drinan of the Georgetown University Law Center, a former Democratic House member who backed seeking the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974 over Watergate. Michael Gerhardt, an impeachment expert at the University of North Carolina law school, says there could be a "credible basis for an inquiry," but additional facts would have to be established before anyone could "demonstrate an impeachable offense occurred."
Mr. Trupiano, a 45-year-old radio talk-show host, doesn't need convincing. Members of both parties must "exercise oversight," he says, "and once and for all, let's settle some of these discrepancies" about prewar intelligence.
He is seeking the Detroit-area House seat held by Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, a two-term Republican incumbent who hasn't decided if he will seek re-election. He predicts his impeachment stance will become an issue, since Republicans "are going to try to define me as something of a radical."
"From our side of the fence, people are very supportive of the president," says Mr. McCotter's spokesman Bob Jackson. He adds that Mr. McCotter, who won re-election in 2004 with 57% of the vote, hasn't heard complaints about inadequate congressional oversight of the Bush administration.
Mr. Trupiano acknowledges that the economy is the No. 1 concern of the suburban electorate he is courting. And on the stump, he usually avoids using the word "impeachment," opting instead to call for holding the administration "accountable" for its handling of prewar intelligence and its warrantless wiretaps of some Americans' telephone calls as part of the war against terrorism.
"I'm not afraid of the word," says Mr. Trupiano. "But some people are uncomfortable with it."
Write to Jeanne Cummings at jeanne.cummings@wsj.com
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The torture dodge: Congress must put an end to abuses at Gitmo
A Register-Guard Editorial
6 Mar 06
It's becoming clear why President Bush agreed to Sen. John McCain's legislation barring the use of torture when interrogating detainees.
The president believes he can ignore the law whenever he chooses. He made that clear in a "signing statement" in which he reserved the right to interpret the torture ban in the context of his broader constitutional powers as commander in chief.
In the case of the 500 detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Bush was also banking on a separate provision in the same defense authorization bill that contained the torture ban. Sponsored by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., it severely restricts the Gitmo detainees' access to U.S. courts.
Last Thursday, administration lawyers cited the Graham provision in fighting a detainee's lawsuit claiming military officials violated the torture ban when they used brutal tactics to force-feed him and end his hunger strike.
The administration's response could be paraphrased in two words: "So what?" Even if the tactics qualified as torture under the law, Guantanamo detainees have no right to challenge them in U.S. courts, Justice Department lawyers said.
Regrettably, this does not appear to be a controversial reading of the law. Human rights officials and even attorneys for detainees concede the administration is probably right. Tom Malinois, of Human Rights Watch, puts it this way: "The law says you can't torture detainees at Guantanamo, but it also says you can't enforce that law in the courts."
Congress is to blame for this disgraceful situation. Craven, ineffective lawmakers knew exactly what they were doing when they agreed to remove general access to U.S. courts for prisoners at Guantanamo. To put it in military terms, Congress has been absent without leave since Sept. 11, 2001, from its constitutional duty to oversee the administration's prosecution of the war against terror.
There is no longer any reasonable doubt that detainees have been tortured in the black hole that is Gitmo. A recent U.N. investigation found that conditions at the prison routinely violate international law and detainees have been subjected to acts tantamount to torture, including punitive force feedings and a grim array of "special interrogation" techniques.
While many of the detainees are terrorists or Taliban supporters, others were wrongly swept up in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan when warlords were offered cash bounties for suspects. The U.S. government has conceded that 15 detainees are Chinese ethnic Uighurs who do not qualify as enemy combatants, yet it refuses to release them, even after five years of imprisonment.
Congress has played the role of an enabler by setting no boundaries for an administration in desperate need of them. Now, it must atone for its five-year sin of omission by enacting laws that are unambiguous and consistent with international standards of humane treatment of prisoners. It should require the administration to either put detainees on trial in a court or release them. And it should order the closure of Guantanamo, which has become a global symbol of everything the Bush administration has done wrong in its war on terror.
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No Habeas at Guantanamo? The Executive and the Dubious Tale of the DTA
Ian Wallach
The Jurist
JURIST Special Guest Columnist Ian Wallach, habeas counsel for several Guantanamo Bay detainees, says that the US Executive Branch may have engaged in questionable acts and disseminated inaccurate information to encourage Senate passage of provisions in the Detainee Treatment Act preventing federal judges from seeing problematic evidence on why detainees are being held...
Habeas actions are getting a lot of media attention lately. The unfortunate American military conduct in Abu Ghraib has begun to raise questions about the treatment of prisoners at the US Navy detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where incidents of torture and abuse have been reported and largely ignored over the past four years. The habeas question looms large on the heels of two recently-published case studies (by the National Journal and the Seton Hall University School of Law) that suggest that the majority of people held in Guantánamo are innocent, and the report by the United Nations seeking the closure of the facility. Americans seem split on whether federal judges should be involved at all. Some people want judges to be able to investigate whether the military is holding people for valid reasons, while others think that -- in a time of war -- how the military conducts itself is a matter for the President only, and judges' interference might impair the President's ability to protect America.
On the litigation front the dispute is largely the same, with pro bono habeas counsel on one side, and the Department of Justice, counsel to the Executive Branch, on the other. But in Congress, the dispute embodied itself in the passage and potential application of the Detainee Treatment Act (the "DTA") -- a part of the defense spending bill signed into law on December 30, 2005. Detainees' counsel (such as me) thought the DTA was only going to stop future cases. The Executive Branch now maintains that the DTA knocks out pending cases too. The matter is before both the United States Supreme Court and the DC Circuit Court (argument is currently scheduled to take place before the Circuit Court on March 22nd).
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More blacks deciding not to serve
Associated Press
7 Mar 06
FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. -- War. College. A better job. The answers are as numerous as the number of young black people who are deciding against a military career.
Defense Department statistics show that the number of black active-duty enlisted personnel has declined 14 percent since 2000.
The decrease is particularly acute among the troops most active in the Middle East: The number of black enlisted soldiers has dropped by 19 percent and the number of black enlisted Marines has fallen by 26 percent in the same period.
Even in this area near Fort Bragg, where serving in uniform is a family tradition, the drop in Army enlistment by blacks from 2000 to 2005 matches the national average.
Kashonda Leycock is the daughter of a soldier, and the 17-year-old has been a member of the Junior ROTC at Westover High School for more than two years.
She joined to prove to her parents and herself she could do it -- not because she wants to join the military. She doesn't. Her primary objection is the war in Iraq.
"Why are we fighting?" Leycock asked. "Nobody has really said why the war is still going on. I don't think it should be going on because it's not solving anything. ... None of my people want to go there."
The lack of support for the war by blacks -- in uniform or not -- is striking. A poll of Cumberland County residents, commissioned last year by The Fayetteville Observer, showed that 69 percent of whites said the war in Iraq was worth the costs. Only 19 percent of blacks agreed.
The survey, conducted between March 31 and April 18, found that 71 percent of whites with military ties believed the Iraq war was worth fighting, but only 21 percent of blacks with military ties.
Curtis Gilroy, who works on recruiting issues for the Department of Defense, said that sentiment has been noticed nationwide -- and with concern.
"We want to make sure all recruits see the military as a viable career option. But we also understand the reservations that individuals might have," he said.
He noted the influence of adults such as parents, teachers and ministers on young people -- and how their opposition to the war would make them less likely to recommend a military career.
"Mothers, in particular within the black community, play a more prominent role and are far less likely to recommend military service," Gilroy said.
Despite the declines, the percentage of blacks in the military continues to exceed the percentage in the U.S. population. Nineteen percent of the military's active-duty enlisted force is black, compared to 13 percent of the country's population.
And there are young black people who do see that career option, despite or even because of the Iraq war.
Tyrell Rembert, a Westover senior, is a private in the North Carolina Army National Guard. He joined in April 2004 at the age of 17, picking the Guard over active duty so he could begin training before graduation.
He said he joined because he knows people who have served and are serving in Iraq.
"I wanted to be able to help them out, I guess you'd say," he said.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press,
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Dominos Pizza Founder Planning Unconstitutional Catholic Town
Washington Times via Undernews
If Domino's Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan has his way, a town being built in Florida will be governed according to strict Roman Catholic principles, with no place to get an abortion, pornography or birth control.
The pizza magnate is bankrolling the project with at least $250 million and calls it "God's will." Civil libertarians say the plan is unconstitutional and are threatening to sue. The town of Ave Maria is being constructed around Ave Maria University, the first Catholic university to be built in the United States in about 40 . . . During a speech last year at a Catholic men's gathering in Boston, Mr. Monaghan said that in his community, stores will not sell pornographic magazines, pharmacies will not carry condoms or birth-control pills, and cable television will have no X-rated channels. . . Gov. Jeb Bush, at the site's groundbreaking earlier this month, lauded the development as a new kind of town where faith and freedom will merge to create a community of like-minded citizens
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Moon Water: A Trickle of Data and a Flood of Questions
Leonard David
Senior Space Writer, SPACE.com
Mon Mar 6, 9:00 AM ET
NASA is in the process of scripting how best to plant new bootprints on the Moon and take advantage of lunar resources that could prolong human stays on that barren ball of rock.
While the Moon is one desolate world, it could turn out to be a faraway faucet of sorts.
Robotic spacecraft--both the Pentagon's Clementine (1994) and NASA's Lunar Prospector (1998-1999) missions--point to the promise that the Moon is a literal watering hole for crews.
Permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles, called "cold traps," might be repositories of water ice. More importantly, this reserve could be converted to oxygen, drinkable water, even rocket fuel.
However, water ice on the Moon is far from being a slam dunk deduction. There is ongoing dispute about whether or not such frozen caches of water reside in sunshine-deprived lunar craters.
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008 will dive into the issue. Future robotic Moon landers are expected to plop down at polar regions for a spot check too. In the interim, space lawyers are at the ready to voice legal opinions on tapping into any water ice found.
Unique illumination conditions
There is "intriguing evidence" that, potentially, water ice on the Moon exists in fairly significant amounts, said Ben Bussey, a lunar expert at the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.
NASA's Lunar Prospector clearly identified an enhanced signal of hydrogen--an indication that nobody has any qualms with, Bussey told SPACE.com. "But there's the argument ... is it hydrogen or is the hydrogen in a form of water ice?"
The Pentagon's Clementine lunar orbiter yielded data that, some scientists contend, gave a positive indication for ice inside Schackleton crater, situated at the Moon's south pole.
Yet there is controversy about that interpretation, Bussey noted, adding that Earth-based radar of that area, some argue, reflect more a signal of rocks and not ice.
"The [lunar] poles represent the biggest unknowns," Bussey said, leaving the scientific community hungry for new information. "We definitely know that the poles have unique illumination conditions with the potential for permanent sunshine. We know that there's lots of permanent shadow which could contain ice."
In the big scheme of things, looking for ice does not, in itself, merit going back to the Moon.
"But if it's there ... and it is there in enough quantity to be extractable and usable, then I can see there's a potential where you want to use it. It makes your life easier," Bussey said. On the other hand, he questioned, if it is there, is it in a form that makes it viable to be used?
Cometary frost
Apollo 17 moonwalker and geologist Harrison Schmitt questions the availability of water ice at the lunar poles.
For one, NASA's Lunar Prospector detected what must be largely solar wind hydrogen, Schmitt told SPACE.com. The only areas where water ice might be contributing to that signal are places where permanent shadowing exists near the poles, he said.
"Indeed, cometary volatiles--including water ice--probably precipitate as frost in permanent shadow at the lunar poles," Schmitt said, something that has been shown theoretically by a number of researchers. The longevity of this frost, however, is subject to the rate of micrometeorite and solar wind erosion, he noted.
"Unless the cometary frost, including water ice, is buried quickly by fortuitous impact ejecta or is partially protected in a very deep crater with permanent shadow, it will probably disappear in a geologically short time," Schmitt advised.
No doubt, finding cometary frosts in deep, permanently shadowed craters will be scientifically very interesting, the moonwalker said. "However, I would not yet count on finding economically significant water ice deposits."
Schmitt said that potentially substantial amounts of solar wind hydrogen are present everywhere on the Moon along with helium-4, helium-3, carbon and nitrogen. Hydrogen and helium concentrations are clearly higher in polar regions independent of whether there is cometary water ice.
"So those of us interested in lunar helium-3 fusion power are very interested in more precise mapping of hydrogen distribution as a surrogate for helium-3. We hope that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will provide such information," Schmitt said.
Touch the water
The prospect of finding water ice at the Moon's poles is indeed arguable, said Larry Taylor, Director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.
Taylor, like other lunar experts, said it's imperative that we "touch the water." Doing so is the only way to know if water ice is there in the first place. And if truly present and accounted for, then other questions follow: How much, what quality, and how hard to process?
"The only way to solve this major question" of water ice on the Moon, Taylor emphasized, is not from orbit.
"There does not appear to be any instruments that are completely definitive, even from 'near' remote sensing, such as on a simple lander," Taylor told SPACE.com. "It is not only necessary to determine that there might be water ice, but the quantities and composition."
The makeup of any lunar water ice, coupled with some oxygen isotopes, would go a long way toward assigning an origin to the water, Taylor added, be it hydrous meteorites, comets, or water vapor yielded through the interaction between solar wind and impact-melted lunar surface material.
Customary law
Let's say that, indeed, water ice is on hand at the Moon. Use of that material from a legal point of view is seen by some space law experts as contentious.
For instance, could the amount of water ice be extremely limited? So much so that one nation sucking up all of this precious resource could be viewed by other nations as tantamount to a land grab?
"There will be legal implications when the time comes if and when water ice is finally extracted," said Harold Bashor, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Diplomatic Language for the American Graduate School of International Relations and Diplomacy in Paris, France. He is author of "The Moon Treaty Paradox" (Xlibris Corporation, 2004).
"According to international law found in the well-ratified
United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, celestial bodies such as the Moon may be used and exploited, but they cannot be appropriated by any country," Bashor said. "Although the subsequent Moon Treaty has only been ratified by eleven nations, (the United States is not a signatory) it cannot be overlooked since it embodies many of the provisions of the comprehensive Outer Space Treaty and customary law as well."
Peaceful purposes
Bashor said that if a country should decide to utilize lunar water ice--or any other resource--on Earth's celestial neighbor, it would be necessary to inform the United Nations of the activities concerned with such exploitation. Secondly, any use of the Moon must be for peaceful purposes, he said.
"For scientific purposes, as example, a country could use water, minerals and other substances in quantities appropriate for the support of their missions as long as the existing balance of the lunar environment would not be disrupted," Bashor advised.
Furthermore, since the Moon is to be explored and exploited for peaceful uses, Bashor said, countries may not interfere with the activities of any other countries on the Moon, and any conflict must be reported to the United Nations.
No rights of ownership Activities on the Moon may be pursued freely without any discrimination of any kind, and countries can place vehicles, personnel, stations, and facilities anywhere on or below the surface.
"However, neither the surface nor the subsurface of the Moon can become the property of any country or its citizens. Also, there are no rights of ownership for any natural resources in place," Bashor told SPACE.com. "This is generally interpreted to mean that a country may not claim ownership of any resources until they have been extracted. Yet, any extraction is required to be for the benefit of mankind according to the Common Heritage of Mankind principle." Additionally, the Moon Treaty of 1979 provides that an international regime should be established when any exploitation of the Moon is "about to become feasible," Bashor observed. "The purpose of this regime would be the orderly and safe development, management, and sharing of the natural resources of the Moon," he said.
While the use of water ice would be permitted in order to support any mission on the Moon, "any further use would be scrutinized especially if it was for military or other illegal uses," Bashor concluded.
Without protest
"Whether lunar ice exists or not, its legal status can be a good intellectual exercise," suggested Virgiliu Pop, a PhD candidate at Glasgow University in Scotland and a specialist in space law focused on property rights in outer space.
Pop is author of Unreal Estate: The Men who Sold the Moon (Exposure Publishing, 2006).
Interestingly enough, Pop pointed out, the legal status of ice right here on Earth is not completely settled. There is no set answer to the question who owns Earth's South Pole, he advised.
In Antarctica, there is a small sliver, reaching down to the South Pole, claimed at the same time by the United Kingdom, Chile, and Argentina. The 1959 Antarctic Treaty may have frozen territorial claims, but that document did not clarify who owns what in Antarctica, Pop said.
"Nonetheless, ice is used by scientific expeditions. Yet, in Antarctica, ice is abundant. At the same time, while Antarctic icebergs have no clear legal status either, several icebergs have been mined for ice without any protests," Pop explained.
Free for all or free-for-all?
The principal sources of ice in the solar system are the comets. It's the view of Pop that comets and smaller asteroids should not be considered celestial bodies proper. Thus, they would not be subject to national appropriation. They would be treated as floating ore bodies, he suggested, "like icebergs on Earth."
Regarding lunar ice, the Outer Space Treaty provides that the Moon is free for use by all States, Pop added, who are granted free access to all of its areas. At the same time, States Parties are to conduct all their lunar activities with due regard to the corresponding interests of all other States Parties to the Treaty.
"It is of my opinion that astronauts will not encounter any legal troubles when using the native materials of the Moon--ice included--to support their exploration," Pop told SPACE.com. "My own interpretation is that anybody is allowed to use lunar ice, provided there is enough for others to use."
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Police: 7 Teens Invaded Homes For 'Adrenaline Rush'
local6.com
March 6, 2006
Police in Palm Bay, Fla., arrested seven teens in the last several days wanted in connection with a series of home break-ins that were apparently committed because the group wanted an "adrenaline rush," according to a police report.
David Deluna, 18, Matt Rivera, 19, and a 16-year-old were charged with grand theft and burglary charges Monday. Another four suspects were taken into custody and charged on Friday, Local 6 News partner Florida Today reported.
"When these three realized that we were looking for them on Friday, they left together and went to the beach," said Jesse Suelter, a Palm Bay detective working on the case. "We arrested one on Saturday and found the other two sleeping at their residences today."
Police said the seven teens knew each other from work and school. All came from upper middle class homes but told authorities they carried out the crimes for "an adrenaline rush," Suelter told Florida Today.
The teens randomly picked homes to break into during the day and early evening, Suelter said. In one home they stole a gun. In others, cash, electronics and jewelry were taken.
He also said the teens would ring doorbells and if they did not get an answer they would kick in the doors.
"The suspects were very arrogant and the attitude they had was unbelievable. I explained the possibility that one of them could get hurt or shot. One of them told us that he was a big boy and that 'I think I could take 'em,'" Suelter said.
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Guards Fault Homeland Security Protection
By LARRY MARGASAK
Associated Press
Mon Mar 6, 2:55 PM ET
WASHINGTON - Guards at the Department of Homeland Security say the agency mishandled a potential anthrax attack on its headquarters, one of several incidents that led two senators to request an investigation of the agency's own security.
The private guards complained that inadequate training led to confusion in handling bomb and biological threats and failure to stop test vehicles that were sent to checkpoints with improper identification.
"I wouldn't feel safe nowhere on this compound as an officer," former guard Derrick Daniels told The Associated Press. Daniels was employed until last fall by Wackenhut Services Inc., the private firm that protects a Homeland Security complex that includes sensitive, classified information.
An envelope with suspicious powder was opened last fall at the headquarters. Daniels and other current and former guards said they were shocked when superiors carried it past the office of Secretary Michael Chertoff, took it outside and then shook it outside Chertoff's window without evacuating people nearby.
The scare, caused by white powder that proved to be harmless, "stands as one glaring example" of the agency's security problems, Daniels said. "I had never previously been given training ... describing how to respond to a possible chemical attack."
"If the allegations brought forward by the whistleblowers are correct, they represent both a security threat and a waste of taxpayer dollars," Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Ron Wyden of Oregon wrote to the agency's inspector general, seeking an investigation.
"It would be ironic, to say the least, if DHS were unable to secure its own headquarters," they wrote.
The IG's office had no immediate response to the request.
Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle said Wackenhut guards are still operating under a contract signed with the Navy, and the agency has little control over their training. A soon-to-be-implemented replacement contract will impose new requirements on security guards, he said.
Daniels, saying he was among the first guards to respond to the white powder incident, said the area where the powder was found wasn't evacuated for more than an hour. Available biohazard face shields went unused. When a belated order was given to evacuate the area, employees had already gone to lunch and had to be rounded up and quarantined.
Doyle, the Homeland spokesman, said the concerns were overblown because all mail going to the Homeland Security complex is irradiated to kill anthrax. "The incident was resolved before anything was moved," he said.
Daniels now works security for another company at another federal building. He is among 14 current and former Wackenhut employees - mostly guards - who were interviewed by The Associated Press or submitted written statements to Congress that were obtained by AP.
Wackenhut President Dave Foley disputed the allegations, saying officers have a minimum of one year's security experience, proper security clearances and training in vehicle screening, identification of personnel, handling of suspicious items and emergency response.
"In short, we believe our security personnel have been properly trained, have responded correctly to the various incidents that have occurred ... and that this facility is secure," Foley said. He declined, however, to discuss any of the current or former employees who have become whistleblowers.
A litany of problems were listed by the guards, whose pay ranges from $15.60 to $23 an hour based on their position and level of security clearance. Among their examples of lax security:
- They have no training in responding to attacks with weapons of mass destruction.
- Chemical-sniffing dogs have been replaced with ineffective equipment that falsely indicates the presence of explosives.
- Vehicle entrances to Homeland Security's complex are lightly guarded.
- Guards with radios have trouble hearing each other, or have no radios, no batons and no pepper spray, leaving them with few options beyond lethal force with their handguns.
Wackenhut is no stranger to criticism.
Over the last two years, the Energy Department inspector general concluded that Wackenhut guards had thwarted simulated terrorist attacks at a nuclear lab only after they were tipped off to the test; and that guards had improperly handled the transport of nuclear and conventional weapons.
Homeland Security is based at a gated, former Navy campus near American University - several miles from the heavily trafficked streets that house the FBI, Capitol, Treasury Department and White House.
Former guard Bryan Adams recognized his inadequate training one day last August, when an employee reported a suspicious bag in the parking lot.
"I didn't have a clue about what to do," he said.
Adams said he closed the vehicle checkpoint with a cone, walked over to the bag and called superiors. Nobody cordoned off the area. Eventually, someone called a federal bomb squad, which arrived more than an hour after the discovery.
"If the bag had, in fact, contained the explosive device that was anticipated, the bomb could have detonated several times over in the hour that the bag sat there," Adams said.
The bag, it turned out, contained gym clothes.
Doyle, the Homeland spokesman, responded to several allegations raised by the guards. He said dogs were replaced because "if you overuse them, their effectiveness drops." The detection equipment that substitutes for the dogs is a better method for detecting explosives, he said.
Guards who used the equipment said it was no match for the reliability of the dogs.
The AP videotaped two vehicle entrances at Homeland headquarters with light security.
One is guarded only during morning and evening rush hours. Movable metal barriers and an unmanned security vehicle only partially blocked the driveway, leaving enough room for a small car or motorcycle to drive through.
Another entrance was guarded with a manned vehicle with two guards but no other barriers.
Doyle said the vehicle entrances were adequate because, in all cases, a 10-foot fence topped with barbed wire separates vehicles from all buildings.
Some guards who continue to work at Homeland, who would speak only on condition of anonymity because of fear of losing their jobs, said they knew of two instances in which individuals without identification got into the sensitive complex.
Another described how guards flunked a test by the
Secret Service, which sent vehicles into the compound with dummy government identification tags hanging from inside mirrors. Guards cleared such vehicles through on two occasions, this guard said, and one officer even copied down the false information without realizing it was supposed to match information on the employee's government badge.
Doyle, the agency spokesman, said such tests are conducted routinely. "I can assure you that if people fail the test they are let go," he said.
Marixa Farrar, a former guard, said two guards always should have been stationed inside the main building where Chertoff had his office, but she often was on duty alone.
One day last fall a fire alarm rang. As employees walked by Farrar, they asked if this was a fire or a test.
"There were no radios, so I couldn't figure out if it was a serious alarm," she said.
There was no fire.
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Super spies, hitmen come out as fallible
Martin Chulov
The Australian
March 06, 2006
THE power base of Arabia is convinced: the dominant drivers of foreign policy in the Middle East are not Washington generals, Syrian chieftains or Iranian mullahs. Much of what goes wrong here can instead be sheeted home to the officers of Israel's spy agency, Mossad.
Last year, it was the massive bomb in downtown Beirut that killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Now it is the simmering civil war in Iraq. In years past, bombs in Jordan, Egypt and even Libya have been blamed on Mossad.
Like most spy services, its leaders prefer to stay silent, letting government spokesmen do the denying for them.
Occasionally, a former chief will defend the agency from more lurid accusations. But for the most part Israel is willing to let the wheat be packed with the chaff, knowing that even apocryphal tales help to reinforce the Mossad legend.
Many Israeli officials were therefore surprised recently to discover a detailed account of the most sensitive side of Mossad's activities, its assassinations of enemies of the Jewish state -- a policy that stemmed from the 1972 massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and has continued ever since.
What has raised most eyebrows is that the account was put together with the co-operation of almost 50 former and current intelligence agents, including the hitmen, all of whom have talked at length to author Aaron Klein on precisely how the hit squads go about their business.
For the first time in Mossad's furtive history, some of its tradecraft is now out in the open.
Those who fear they may be in Mossad's sights would surely be interested to learn that a hit squad's getaway car is always waiting two 90-degree turns to the right. If they were to be knocked off, it would be done by a unit within Mossad known as Caesarea, which would have received its orders only after senior ministers, military intelligence and spy chiefs held a mock trial, during which a defence and a prosecution case is argued before the prime minister.
The modus operandi, started post-Munich, has since extended to Israel's domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, which now regularly carries out assassinations, with the help of the military, of Palestinian suspects in Gaza and the West Bank.
In his book, Striking Back, Klein, a former military intelligence officer lays bare Israel's 25-year campaign to kill the Munich assassins, revealing that only three still live -- among them Abu Daoud, leader of the Black September terror group that carried out the attack.
The book was released on the back of the Steven Spielberg movie Munich, which has been lauded as a work of drama, but also condemned for its lack of historical rigour.
Successive Mossad chiefs who directed the almost three-decade hunt for the Black September terrorists have complained they were not consulted. Klein's account of the hunt is sharply different in key aspects. But he is not a critic of the film, asking' "Why would I shoot the horse I'm riding?"
Striking Back exposes what Mossad has become good at. But it also breaks down the myth of the agency's infallibility, pointing out its many missed opportunities, the times it has gone after soft targets with dubious terrorism connections, and its catastrophic blunders, such as the slaying of an innocent man in Lillehammer, in the belief he was a Black September militant.
The blunders have continued in recent years -- two Mossad agents were caught in New Zealand in 2004 trying to steal identities, another two were caught carrying bogus Canadian passports, and the head of the Hamas group, Khaled Meshaal, is still alive because a Mossad plot to poison him in Jordan in 1997 was bungled.
Across the Middle East, the myth lingers, fuelled by distrust, with many believing Mossad fingers are in every pie. Politicians spoken to in Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt are convinced Israeli agents are stirring the sectarian unrest in Iraq and Lebanon.
Jordanian district MP Mahmoud Abbadi last week laid the blame for the bombing of the Shia shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra squarely with Mossad.
"I don't think that bombing is either an attempt by the Sunnis or the Shi'ites," he said.
"It is from other infiltrators who want to make sectarian strife. Those who bombed the Ali Hadi mosque and those who bombed Sunni mosques are agents for Mossad in the first place, and for the Americans in second place."
Asked this week who killed Hariri on February 14 last year, a spokesman for the Hezbollah group said: "Lebanon has a lot of enemies. It is likely he was killed by one of them."
Pressed on what Israel stood to gain from the assassination, he said: "We have a scorpion living next door to us. You are trying to get into the minds of those who have no rhyme or reason for what they do."
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Justices side with military recruiters
By Stacy A. Teicher | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Military officials might have to run a bigger gantlet of protesters as they search for recruits on America's university campuses. But they no longer have to worry that they'll be shut out altogether because of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy related to gay members of the armed forces.
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that military recruiters must have the same kind of access as other employers coming onto campus to give out information and conduct job interviews, if the campus receives federal money. Most campuses rely on some share of the $35 billion the government channels each year to higher education.
An association of law schools and professors, the Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), filed suit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to challenge the law that ties recruiters' access to federal funding - known as the Solomon Amendment. FAIR argued that campuses should be free to extend their own philosophy of nondiscrimination by requiring recruiters to sign pledges that they would not discriminate before being allowed the use of campus facilities. Under the Pentagon's policy, gay men and women can serve in the military only if they keep their sexual orientation to themselves.
"A military recruiter's mere presence on campus does not violate a law school's right to associate, regardless of how repugnant the law school considers the recruiter's message," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. "The Solomon Amendment neither limits what law schools may say nor requires them to say anything."
Supporters of the law schools' position were undeterred. "We're disappointed with the legal outcome of the case ... but this unanimous opinion is a call to arms to the law school administrations across the country," says Chai Feldblum, a law professor at Georgetown University and a board member of FAIR. The organization hopes "to see every single law school helping students to organize protests" against military recruiters on campus, "because the Supreme Court has told us that the way to exercise our First Amendment beliefs is by speaking out more."
The decision will come as welcome news for the armed services, which have worked diligently to overcome shortfalls in recruiting nationwide. In the last recruiting year, which ended in September, the Army missed its year-long goal for the first time since 1999, falling short of its target by 6,627 recruits. It represented the largest deficit since 1979.
At a time when the Pentagon is relying heavily on the Army in Iraq, recruiting is a matter of crucial importance to the military. Though higher-than-expected reenlistment rates have forestalled fears of a "broken Army," the Pentagon has made recruiting a top priority in recent months, approving enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 and additional bonuses of $1,000 for soldiers who refer new recruits. It has also added more recruiters to the beat.
But with only a tiny fraction of recruits coming from law schools, some see the case as having a more symbolic significance.
"This was a very challenging case in some ways because, as the opinion makes clear, if you go too far in saying that allowing recruitment efforts you don't like violates your First Amendment rights, that might allow employment agencies to refuse to provide services on the basis of race, or religion, or national origin. There has to be some limit there," says Jon Davidson, legal director at Lambda Legal, a gay-rights advocacy group. Despite those intricate issues, the organization joined an amicus brief with the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of FAIR.
Now that the campus-recruitment issue has been resolved, "the next real piece of the fight will go directly to 'don't ask, don't tell' itself," Ms. Feldblum says. She adds that cases challenging the military policy are already under way in Massachusetts and California, and a bill has been proposed in the US Congress to replace the policy with a nondiscrimination clause that includes sexual orientation.
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Psych Drugs Used To Manufacture Insanity
Opinion: Evelyn Pringle
Scoop
Tuesday, 7 March 2006, 11:24 am
Many experts say the wide-spread epidemic of mental health problems in the US is man-made. The case of Susan Florence is a testament to this theory of man-made insanity.
While mania, psychosis, anxiety, agitation, hostility, depression, and confusion may be signs of mental illness, these same "symptoms" are referred to as side effects on the labels of the most commonly prescribed psychiatric medications used to treat mental illness.
Once Susan Florence was placed on medication, whenever she experienced a side effect from one drug, her doctor simply prescribed another until she ended up in a drug-induced frenzy for which it would have been impossible to distinguish which drug, or combination thereof, was causing the adverse reactions.
The frenzy got worse and worse until she finally realized that she would have to get off all the prescription drugs if she wanted it to end.
Susan was first prescribed the SSRI antidepressant, Paxil for anxiety. She began experiencing side effects from Paxil immediately and two weeks after she began taking the drug her doctor put her on Klonopin.
Klonopin is used for treating seizure disorders and panic attacks. The package insert says "less serious side effects" that may be likely to occur include drowsiness or dizziness, poor coordination, nervousness, and depression.
It also says, Klonopin may increase the effects of other drugs that cause drowsiness or dizziness, including alcohol, sedatives, other seizure medicines, pain relievers, antidepressants, anxiety medicines, muscle relaxants, antihistamines, and others.
So now Susan has Paxil, an antidepressant, and Klonopin an anticonvulsant, all mixed together in her system even though she never had depression or a seizure disorder.
In 2001, Dr Stefan Kruszewski, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist working for the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, began documenting cases of what he refers to as "insane polypharmacy," the widespread off-label prescribing of drugs for uses not approved by the FDA.
He found Neurontin, a drug with FDA approval for controlling seizures, "was being massively prescribed for anxiety, social phobia, PTSD, social anxiety, mood instability, sleep, oppositional defiant behavior, and attention deficit disorder."
"There's almost no evidence to support these uses," Dr Kruszewski says.
There was no evidence to support placing Susan on an anti-seizure drug and doing so led to more side effects. "Between the Paxil and especially the Klonopin," she said, "I became more sedate than I wanted to be."
Mentioning this side effect, prompted the doctor to add another drug to Susan's regiment. Next, he prescribed Provigil, "as an antidote to psychotropics that had me over-sedated," she explains.
"I think it's supposed to be for narcolepsy," Susan added.
But here again lies the problem. Susan says she never had narcolepsy. "I was just sluggish-feeling," she says, "I didn't feel sleepy at all."
Provigil was approved to treat narcolepsy. According to the August 4, 2005 Wall Street Journal, Provigil was approved by the FDA in 1998, to treat excessive sleepiness and in 2003, it was approved to for the treatment of "shift-work sleep disorder."
The drug was certainly never approved for use in treating adverse reactions caused by the combination of Paxil and Klonopin.
As it turns out, when it comes to off-label use, Provigil is a legend. SG Cowen & Co analyst Eric T Schmidt figures more than 50% of the drug's sales are for unapproved uses, according to Business Week Online on November 4, 2004. "Doctors now prescribe it to treat everything from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to fatigue associated with multiple sclerosis and depression."
The WSJ says doctors wrote 1.9 million prescriptions for Provigil in 2004, generating $414 million in sales for its maker Cephalon, almost half of the company's total revenues.
Susan's case is a perfect example of the vicious cycle that develops when doctors prescribe drugs for unapproved uses. She was given Provigil to counter the sedating effects of Klonopin, which was prescribed to counter the side effects of Paxil.
The adverse reaction that Susan experienced when Provigil was added to the mix was terrifying. "I took one pill and I thought I was coming out of my skin," she says. "It was one of the worst experiences of my life."
"I felt as if someone had climbed inside me," Susan recalls.
"I moved more agitatedly, more stuccato in rhythm; I had trouble concentrating; I couldn't find focus," she said, "and I kept forgetting what I was thinking a second earlier."
"It was nightmarish, because I didn't feel like me," Susan continued, "I didn't think like me, everything felt off."
Twenty minutes after she took the first pill, she called her doctor and told him that she had never felt so depersonalized in her life. "I remember saying that word," Susan recalls.
The doctor explained that the sense of "not being me" was called depersonalization.
Her experience after taking one pill was so horrible that Susan says, "you'd have had to tie me down, hold my nose and open my mouth with pliers to get another one in me."
But was her reaction really due to the Provigil? Its hard to see how anyone could say yes with absolute certainty. Its important to remember that Susan was given Paxil for anxiety.
The latest FDA warnings say SSRI drugs like Paxil can cause anxiety, irritability, hostility, aggressiveness and impulsiveness. Certain behaviors are "known to be associated with these drugs," including "anxiety, agitation, panic attacks, insomnia, irritability, hostility, impulsivity, akathisia (severe restlessness)," according to Proven Dangers of Antidepressants by psychiatrist Dr Peter Breggin.
"Akathisia makes people profoundly agitated, uncomfortable in their own skin, jittery, impulsive," says Dr Joseph Glenmullen, author of Prozac Blacklash.
Akathisia sounds pretty much like what Susan described to me. So was it a reaction to Paxil or Provigil or both?
And Susan's story did not end with Provigil. The mad chemist was not through with her yet.
After reporting the reaction she experienced after taking Provigil, the doctor told her to quit taking the drug. He then prescribed Tenuate, a diet pill that has since been pulled off the market. Tenuate comes with the warning that it may cause dizziness, blurred vision, or restlessness, and that it may hide the symptoms of extreme tiredness.
According to Susan, through it all, she stressed to her doctor that she did not want to take any drug that could be addictive.
Well, on Drugs.com, Tenuate is listed as habit forming. In fact, you can become physically and psychologically dependent on this medication, and withdrawal effects may occur if you stop taking it suddenly after several weeks of continuous use, according to the warnings accessed on March 2, 2006.
Drugs.com says Tenuate is similar to an amphetamine and stimulates the central nervous system. Instructions for use say before taking this medication, tell your doctor if you have an anxiety disorder.
Which means Susan went full circle and was back at square one being the whole nightmare began when she was prescribed Paxil for anxiety.
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More information for injured parties can be found at Lawyers and Settlements.com
By Evelyn Pringle evelyn.pringle@sbcglobal.net
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3D plasma shapes created in thin air
27 February 2006
NewScientist.com news service
David Hambling
The system is being developed by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tokyo, in collaboration with Burton Inc and Keio University.
"We believe this technology may eventually be used in applications ranging from pyrotechnics to outdoor advertising," says a spokesman for AIST. According to Burton Inc, the technology might also be used for emergency distress signals or even temporary road signs.
The display utilises an ionisation effect which occurs when a beam of laser light is focused to a point in air. The laser beam itself is invisible to the human eye but, if the intensity of the laser pulse exceeds a threshold, the air breaks down into glowing plasma that emits visible light.
The required intensity can only be achieved by very short, powerful laser pulses – each plasma dot, or "flashpoint", lasts for only about a nanosecond. But the resulting image appears to last longer due to persistence of vision. As with film and television, the impression of a continuous image is maintained by refreshing the flashpoints.
The demonstration system uses an infra-red laser that creates a hundred flashpoints per second. Currently, these can be projected between two and three metres from the apparatus, in a space of about a cubic metre. Each flashpoint generates a popping sound, resulting in a constant crackling when the display is in operation.
Previous systems used galvanometric mirrors to control the focal point of the beam in two dimensions, to create only 2D images. But the new system adds a high-speed linear motor moving a lens to also control the focal point of the laser in a third dimension, allowing solid shapes to be sketched out.
The researchers behind the demonstration system plan to upgrade it to a higher pulsing rate, which should produce more dots and so smoother images. Future versions should also include moving pictures and AIST claims it should be possible to scale the system up to produce displays of any size. However, only white flashpoints can be created so a colour display will not be possible.
Comment: Hey! I just had a great idea. Why not use this technology to stage a UFO invasion! At the right time, the powers that be could present the 'reality' of life beyond the stars to humanity and everyone would fall down and obey our new masters from outer space. Just a thought, keep it in mind. Ya never know.
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A gospel's rocky path from Egypt's desert to print
By G. Jeffrey MacDonald | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
When the Gospel of Judas first surfaced in Geneva in 1983, scholars wondered if the mysterious text could trigger a reappraisal of history's most infamous traitor.
They never found out, however, because they couldn't afford the $3 million price tag on this second-century gnostic tale. Instead, the fragile pages vanished into private hands and set off on a 23-year, intercontinental journey through fist-pounding negotiations and even periods, reportedly, stuffed inside a Greek beauty's purse.
Now, at long last, the world is about to see the contents. The National Geographic Society last week reported it will publish a translation this spring, when "The Da Vinci Code" film is sure to rekindle interest in gnostic artifacts.
But the saga may be just beginning. That's because thieves apparently lifted the manuscript from the Egyptian desert, kicking off decades of illicit trafficking - and an ethical dilemma: Is it right to pay for and publish stolen documents for the purpose of spreading knowledge?
"The present owners can't sell it because they don't have, in international law, a legal title to something that was stolen," says James Robinson, one of the world's foremost experts on gnostic texts and author of a forthcoming book about the gospel, "The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel." "They're trying to sell the sensationalism of the Gospel of Judas to get as much back as they can from whatever they paid for it."
National Geographic doesn't deny Dr. Robinson's allegation that the text left Egypt without that country's required authorization. Still, the organization stands by its decision.
"Everyone involved believes the materials should be given to Egypt" after scholars finish translating them, says spokeswoman Mary Jeanne Jacobsen. "National Geographic has done its due diligence, and is working with an international team of experts on this artifact to save the manuscript before it turns to dust and is lost forever."
But others worry that those who publish "hot" manuscripts create a tragic incentive. "When you publish material that's the result of recent looting ... you're adding to the value of other pieces similar to it," says Patty Gerstenblith, an expert in culture heritage law at DePaul University Law School in Chicago. That entices others to hunt for treasure, she says, with hopes that even something later branded contraband could still yield a nice windfall.
When an Arabic-speaking Egyptian and his Greek agent first offered the Gospel of Judas to buyers, they sold it as a package with other ancient texts for $3 million - well above the budget of Robinson and other scholars who tried to buy it.
So far, only a handful of inner-circle scholars are familiar with the contents of the Gospel of Judas. Despite the enticing name, experts say it was written at least a century after Judas Iscariot died, so it's apt to be most interesting to academics who concentrate on second-century gnosticism, Robinson says. Gnosticism is a belief system, deemed heretical by early Christian leaders, that preaches salvation via self-knowledge. Some of its followers lionized biblical figures of disrepute.
Though ancient writing was once a bargain compared to art, Professor Gerstenblith says, prices are climbing as a growing pool of middle-class collectors smells an opportunity to make a profit. In this climate, libraries with potentially valuable pieces have in the past decade experienced what she terms a "rash" of thievery. Example: in August 2005, a map dealer got arrested for trying to sneak a pilfered page out of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Other fields with similar quandaries are actively raising their ethical standards in the wake of demands by Italy and Peru this past year that pieces held in American institutions be returned. Last week, the American Association of Museum Directors issued guidelines saying museums shouldn't borrow or lend pieces known to have been stolen or unlawfully moved after 1970, when international standards took effect. But the American Institute of Archaeology faulted those directors for not going far enough in their guidelines to defend against future looting.
By contrast, the American Philological Association (APA), whose 3,000 members study ancient Greek and Roman texts, doesn't address acquisitions issues in its ethics policy, last updated in 1989.
If host nations "want no one to read [an ancient manuscript], that's wrong," says APA Executive Director Adam Blistein. "The world's entitled to know. You want to understand cultures as much as you can, and that means disclosure."
But some researchers say emphasis on disclosure is short-sighted. The dissemination of inadequately documented contents makes scholars increasingly vulnerable to forgeries and threatens to undermine archaeology, says Christopher Rollston, a Semitic studies expert at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn. "It is indubitable that collecting precipitates illicit pillaging of archaeological sites," Dr. Rollston says.
Custodians of rare books and epigraphy wonder if the high-profile case might be a sign of a dawning era of new acquisition standards in their field. One example: libraries with books tracing to Soviet or Nazi incursions increasingly must defend the legitimacy of their ownership.
"All of this is a series of attitudes [toward ownership] that are really very, very recent" and still developing in case law, says Daniel Traister, curator of the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. "In [the art] field, we're used to it. In books and manuscripts, it's still somewhat new."
Collectors and scholars of written material are apt to keep resisting for a while, Gerstenblith says. The reason: their fields have traditionally emphasized the universal value of writings, whereas other archaeological finds are understood to be virtually meaningless when divorced from their place of origin. But as disciplines collaborate, she suggests, those with the most demanding ethical standards will influence the others.
"To say, 'I can study this [written material]. I don't care that it was looted' is an attitude that will become the dinosaur, and it will change," Gerstenblith says. "They're definitely behind where the archaeologists are, and that's going to take time" to close the gap.
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A Nation Polarized Between Rich and Poor - America's Bleak Jobs Future
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
ICH
6 Mar 06
On February 20 Forbes.com told its readers with a straight face that "the American job-generation machine rolls on. The economy will create 19 million new payroll jobs in the decade to 2014." Forbes took its information from the 10-year jobs projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, released last December.
If the job growth of the past half-decade is a guide, the forecast of 19 million new jobs is optimistic, to say the least. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll jobs data, from January 2001 - January 2006 the US economy created 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs and 1,039,000 net new government jobs for a total five-year figure of 2,093,000. How does the US Department of Labor get from 2 million jobs in five years to 19 million in ten years?
I cannot answer that question.
However, the jobs record for the past five years tells a clear story.
The BLS payroll jobs data contradict the hype from business organizations, such as the US Chamber of Commerce, and from "studies" financed by outsourcing corporations that offshore jobs outsourcing is good for America. Large corporations, which have individually dismissed thousands of their US employees and replaced them with foreigners, claim that jobs outsourcing allows them to save money that can be used to hire more Americans. The corporations and the business organizations are very successful in placing this disinformation in the media. The lie is repeated everywhere and has become a mantra among no-think economists and politicians. However, no sign of these jobs can be found in the payroll jobs data. But there is abundant evidence of the lost American jobs.
Information technology workers and computer software engineers have been especially heavily hit by offshore jobs outsourcing. During the past five years (Jan 01 - Jan 06), the information sector of the US economy lost 645,000 jobs or 17.4% of its work force. Computer systems design and related lost 116,000 jobs or 8.7% of its work force. Clearly, jobs outsourcing is not creating jobs in computer engineering and information technology. Indeed, jobs outsourcing is not even creating jobs in related fields.
For the past five years US job growth was limited to these four areas: education and health services, state and local government, leisure and hospitality, financial services. There was no US job growth outside these four areas of domestic nontradable services.
Oracle, for example, which has been handing out thousands of pink slips, has recently announced two thousand more jobs being moved to India. How is Oracle's move of US jobs to India creating jobs in the US for waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, state and local government and credit agencies, the only areas of job growth?
Engineering jobs in general are in decline, because the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers are in decline. During the last five years, the US work force lost 1.2 million jobs in the manufacture of machinery, computers, electronics, semiconductors, communication equipment, electrical equipment, motor vehicles and transportation equipment. The BLS payroll job numbers show a total of 70,000 jobs created in all fields of architecture and engineering, including clerical personal, over the past five years. That comes to a mere 14,000 jobs per year (including clerical workers). What is the annual graduating class in engineering and architecture? How is there a shortage of engineers when more graduate than can be employed?
Of course, many new graduates take jobs opened by retirements. We would have to know the retirement rates to get a solid handle on the fate of new graduates. But it cannot be very pleasant, with declining employment in the manufacturing sectors that employ engineers and a minimum of 65,000 H-1B visas annually for foreigners plus an indeterminate number of L-1 visas.
It is not only the Bush regime that bases its policies on lies. Not content with outsourcing Americans' jobs, corporations want to fill the remaining jobs in America with foreigners on work visas. Business organizations lie about a shortage of engineers, scientists and even nurses. Business organizations have successfully used pubic relations firms and bought-and-paid-for "economic studies" to convince policymakers that American business cannot function without H-1B visas that permit the importation of indentured employees from abroad who are paid less than the going US salaries. The so-called shortage is, in fact, a replacement of American employees with foreign employees, with the soon-to-be-discharged American employee first required to train his replacement.
It is amazing to see free-market economists rush to the defense of H-1B visas. The visas are nothing but a subsidy to US companies at the expense of US citizens.
Keep in mind this subsidy to US corporations for employing foreign workers in place of Americans as we examine the Labor Department's projections of the ten fastest growing US occupations over the 2004-2014 decade.
All of the occupations with the largest projected employment growth (in terms of the number of jobs) over the next decade are in nontradable domestic services. The top ten sources of the most jobs in "superpower" America are: retail salespersons, registered nurses, postsecondary teachers, customer service representatives, janitors and cleaners, waiters and waitresses, food preparation (includes fast food), home health aides, nursing aides, orderlies and attendants, general and operations managers. Note than none of this projected employment growth will contribute one nickel toward producing goods and services that could be exported to help close the massive US trade deficit. Note, also, that few of these jobs classifications require a college education.
Among the fastest growing occupations (in terms of rate of growth), seven of the ten are in health care and social assistance. The three remaining fields are: network systems and data analysis with 126,000 jobs projected or 12,600 per year; computer software engineering applications with 222,000 jobs projected or 22,200 per year, and computer software engineering systems software with 146,000 jobs projected or 14,600 per year.
Assuming these projections are realized, how many of the computer engineering and network systems jobs will go to Americans? Not many, considering the 65,000 H-1B visas each year (650,000 over the decade) and the loss during the past five years of 761,000 jobs in the information sector and computer systems design and related.
Judging from its ten-year jobs projections, the US Department of Labor does not expect to see any significant high-tech job growth in the US. The knowledge jobs are being outsourced even more rapidly than the manufacturing jobs were. The so-called "new economy" was just another hoax perpetrated on the American people.
If offshore jobs outsourcing is good for US employment, why won't the US Department of Commerce release the 200-page, $335,000 study of the impact of the offshoring of US high-tech jobs? Republican political appointees reduced the 200-page report to 12 pages of public relations hype and refuse to allow the Technology Administration experts who wrote the report to testify before Congress. Democrats on the House Science Committee are unable to pry the study out of the hands of Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez. Obviously, the facts don't fit the Bush regime's globalization hype.
The only thing America has left is finance, and now that is moving abroad. On February 22 CNNMoney.com reported that America's large financial institutions are moving "large portions of their investment banking operations abroad." No longer limited to back-office work, offshoring is now killing American jobs in research and analytic operations, foreign exchange trades and highly complicated credit derivatives contracts. Deal-making responsibility itself may eventually move abroad. Deloitte Touche says that the financial services industry will move 20 percent of its total costs base offshore by the end of 2010. As the costs are lower in India, that will represent more than 20 percent of the business. A job on Wall St is a declining option for bright young persons with high stress tolerance.
The BLS payroll data that we have been examining tracks employment by industry classification. This is not the same thing as occupational classification. For example, companies in almost every industry and area of business employ people in computer-related occupations. A recent study from the Association for Computing Machinery claims:
"Despite all the publicity in the United States about jobs being lost to India and China, the size of the IT employment market in the United States today is higher than it was at the height of the dot.com boom. Information technology appears as though it will be a
growth area at least for the coming decade."
We can check this claim by turning to the BLS Occupational Employment Statistics. We will look at "computer and mathematical employment" and "architecture and engineering employment."
Computer and mathematical employment includes such fields as "software engineers applications," "software engineers systems software," "computer programers," "network systems and data communications," and "mathematicians." Has this occupation been a source of job growth?
In November of 2000 this occupation employed 2,932,810 people. In November of 2004 (the latest data available), this occupation employed 2,932,790, or 20 people fewer. Employment in this field has been stagnant for the past four years.
During these four years, there have been employment shifts within the various fields of this occupation. For example, employment of computer programmers declined by 134,630, while employment of software engineers applications rose by 65,080, and employment of software engineers systems software rose by 59,600. (These shifts might merely reflect change in job or occupation title from programmer to software engineer.)
These figures do not tell us whether any gain in software engineering jobs went to Americans. According to Professor Norm Matloff, in 2002 there were 463,000 computer-related H-1B visa holders in the US.
Similarly, the 134,630 lost computer programming jobs (if not merely a job title change) may have been outsourced offshore to foreign affiliates.
Architecture and engineering employment includes all the architecture and engineering fields except software engineering. The total employment of architects and engineers in the US declined by 120,700 between November 1999 and November 2004. Employment declined by 189,940 between November 2000 and November 2004, and by 103,390 between November 2001 and November 2004.
There are variations among fields. Between November 2000 and November 2004, for example, US employment of electrical engineers fell by 15,280. Employment of computer hardware engineers rose by 15,990 (possibly these are job title reclassifications). Overall, however, over 100,000 engineering jobs were lost. We do not know how many of the lost jobs were outsourced offshore to foreign affiliates or how many of any increase in computer hardware jobs went to foreign holders of H-1B or L-1 visas.
Clearly, engineering and computer-related employment in the US has not been growing, whether measured by industry or by occupation.
Moreover, with a half million or more foreigners in the US on work visas, the overall employment numbers do not represent employment of Americans. Perhaps what corporations and "studies" mean when they claim offshore outsourcing increases US employment is that the contacts companies make abroad allow them to bring in more foreigners on work visas to displace their American employees.
American employees have been abandoned by American corporations and by their representatives in Congress. America remains a land of opportunity--but for foreigners--not for the native born. A country whose work force is concentrated in domestic nontradable services has no need for scientists and engineers and no need for universities.
Even the projected jobs in nursing and school teachers can be filled by foreigners on H-1B visas.
In the US the myth has been firmly established that the jobs that the US is outsourcing offshore are being replaced with better jobs.
There is no sign of these jobs in the payroll jobs data or in the occupational statistics. Myself and others have pointed out that when a country loses entry level jobs, it has no one to promote to senior level jobs. We have also pointed out that when manufacturing leaves, so does engineering, design, research and development, and innovation itself.
On February 16 the New York Times reported on a new study presented to the National Academies that concludes that outsourcing is climbing the skills ladder. A survey of 200 multinational corporations representing 15 industries in the US and Europe found that 38 percent planned to change substantially the worldwide distribution of their research and development work, sending it to India and China. According to the New York Times, "More companies in the survey said they planned to decrease research and development employment in the United States and Europe than planned to increase employment."
The study and discussion it provoked came to untenable remedies. Many believe that a primary reason for the shift of R&D to India and China is the erosion of scientific prowess in the US due to lack of math and science proficiency of American students and their reluctance to pursue careers in science and engineering. This belief begs the question why students would chase after careers that are being outsourced abroad.
The main author of the study, Georgia Tech professor Marie Thursby, believes that American science and engineering depend on having "an environment that fosters the development of a high-quality work force and productive collaboration between corporations and universities."
The Dean of Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks the answer is to recruit the top people in China and India and bring them to Berkeley. No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad, that is where the cutting edge resides.
The United States is the first country in history to destroy the prospects and living standards of its labor force. It is amazing to watch freedom-loving libertarians and free-market economists serve as full time apologists for the dismantling of the ladders of upward mobility that made the America of old an opportunity society.
America has begun a polarization into rich and poor. The resulting political instability and social strife will be terrible.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at:
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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Housing Slowdown Ripples Through Economy
By DAVID KOENIG
AP Business Writer
6 Mar 06
DALLAS - The five-year housing boom is indeed over, judging from growing statistical evidence and the performance of some of the nation's leading builders, and the slowdown is already rippling through the economy.
In the last week, the Commerce Department reported that January sales of new single-family homes fell 5 percent _ the fourth decline in seven months _ and the backlog of unsold new homes hit a record. And the National Association of Realtors said used home sales slipped 2.8 percent in January, the fourth straight drop and 5 percent below January 2005.
Builders also reported a few hiccups. Upscale Toll Brothers Inc. said signed contracts in the November-January period fell 21 percent from a year ago, and KB Home reported more buyers backing out of contracts.
Still, the prospect of a housing slowdown appears less frightening than it did a few months ago, according to those who track the industry. There seems to be little concern that a much-touted housing bubble will lead to a collapse in sales and prices.
New Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last month housing would enter a moderate slowdown but not a crash.
William Mack, a housing analyst for Standard & Poor's, predicted "a soft landing. The overall market is just taking a step back."
Explanations for the recent cooling-off vary. Many people bought homes during the past five years and are staying put. Some analysts blame a decline in consumer confidence. And interest rates have been rising, especially for adjustable mortgages that allowed people to buy more expensive homes than they could have afforded with a 30-year loan.
"We started to see the strain in July and August, and by the fourth quarter the market definitely had slowed," said Layne Marceau, president of the Northern California region for Shea Homes, one of the nation's largest private builders.
Rising prices and interest rates pushed more buyers out of the market. When prices finally did cool, sellers couldn't command a high enough price on their old house to buy the new one, said Marceau, who believes the slowdown is temporary.
Builders don't like to cut prices _ it angers customers who paid more _ but last week, Centex Corp. advertised $25,000 off on select homes in the Dallas area after making a successful similar offer in California. Around the country, builders are throwing in incentives ranging from financing help to free upgrades like swimming pools and granite countertops. Some equal 10 percent of the home's list price.
The median price of an existing single-family home has declined since peaking at $219,700 in July to $210,500 in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. Few analysts expect a sharp drop in national averages, although they say there could be further declines in some areas that have been among the hottest markets in recent years.
David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said California, Las Vegas, Florida and the Washington, D.C., area "have the largest potential for a price slowdown."
The rising prices in those markets were fed by speculators who bought homes intending to "flip" or sell them for a quick profit, Seiders said. "The biggest fear I have is investor-owned units coming back on the market in large numbers," he said.
Analysts said markets in Florida and the Carolinas seemed to be holding up well. Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. reported last week that home contracts jumped 61 percent in the Southeast but fell nearly 11 percent in the Southwest and 37 percent in the West during the November-January period. The builder's profit was flat with a year earlier.
The slowdown that is showing up in national statistics hasn't reached all parts of the country.
"I've never seen a market as good as this," Mike Mishler said as he took a break from making finishing touches on a $1.6 million lakeside home near Dallas. "Maybe it will slow down in a couple years, but right now we have lots of California folks coming in, and empty-nest people looking for new homes."
Mishler, president of the local builders association, says Texas markets are holding up because they are affordable _ the median price in Dallas is $145,000 compared to the national average of $213,000. But even in Dallas, the inventory of unsold homes rose to a record in the fourth quarter.
By price, the middle and upper ends of the new-home market did best in with solid increases in everything above $200,000, reflecting strongest markets were in high-priced areas along both coasts. That pattern mostly continued in January, although there was a dip in the $400,000 to $750,000 segment compared to January 2005.
Housing has played a major role in the economic recovery since 2001, so even slower growth in home sales and prices could have major repercussions.
Asha Bangalore, an economist for The Northern Trust Co. in Chicago, estimates housing created 43 percent of all new jobs from late 2001 until mid-2005. That included the obvious, such as jobs in construction and mortgage services, but also retail and service jobs that were created because consumers tapped their rising home equity to buy more things.
"The housing slowdown that we are seeing is very modest, not alarming, but I think the ripple effects are going to be enormous because of the employment factor," she said.
For now, home builders are busy finishing the houses that customers ordered last year. In a sense, their 2006 results are already on the books, and they expect another good year.
"This will either be our most profitable or our second-most profitable year in the company's history," Joel Rassman, chief financial officer of Horsham, Penn.-based Toll Brothers, told investors this week. Its profits rose about 50 percent in 2004 and nearly doubled last year.
Investors, however, have been bidding down the stocks of home builders since July, prompting executives to complain that their companies are undervalued despite record earnings. The nine largest publicly traded builders have seen their shares fall 14 to 44 percent since their peaks, with Toll Brothers and Hovnanian the biggest losers.
Alex Barron, an analyst in San Francisco for JMP Securities, said builder stocks have been trading at relatively low multiples of their earnings since the late 1990s because investors always believed the strong housing market was too good to last.
"Investors kept saying, 'Next year housing will go down,'" Barron said. "I guess they're finally right."
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Throwing Consumers to the Wolves
By Howard Karger, AlterNet. Posted March 7, 2006.
A federal bankruptcy judge says the new bankruptcy law is good for one thing: allowing creditors to make more money off the backs of debt-ridden consumers.
Frank Monroe is one pissed-off federal bankruptcy judge. Just before Christmas, Judge Monroe was forced to deny Guillermo Sosa, an Austin, Texas, house painter, and his wife, Melba Nelly Sosa, emergency bankruptcy protection to avoid foreclosure on their mobile home. While sympathetic to the Sosas, Judge Monroe's hands were tied by the new bankruptcy law. The so-called Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) required that the Sosas receive consumer credit counseling before filing for bankruptcy. Unaware of this stipulation, they had failed to do so, making them ineligible.
In his angry ruling [PDF], Monroe wrote that "the parties pushing the passage of the Act had their own agenda … to make more money off the backs of the consumers in this country. … To call BAPCPA a 'consumer protection' act is the grossest of misnomers."
The BAPCPA went into effect on Oct. 17, 2005. Banks and other lenders promised it would stop deadbeats from abusing the bankruptcy system, save billions, and lower interest rates for responsible borrowers. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., predicted the bill would recoup "billions … in losses associated with profligate and abusive bankruptcy filings."
That did not happen. On the contrary, Bankrate data found that the average credit card interest rate actually rose 1 percent in the six months following the passage of the Bankruptcy Act.
Panicked debtors trying to beat the Oct. 17 deadline filed more than 2 million bankruptcy petitions in 2005, 32 percent more than in 2004. Some 500,000 people filed for bankruptcy in the two weeks alone before the Act took effect. This uptick in filings cost Bank of America $320 million, JP Morgan Chase predicted their credit card defaults would top $2.3 billion and Discover Card lost $180 million. On the other hand, credit card companies will undoubtedly make up this loss, and more, in the long run.
Who are the "deadbeats" Congress is trying to weed out?
Leslie Linfield of the Institute for Financial Literacy says, "Almost half [of bankruptcy filers] have incomes below $20,000 a year, and almost 40 percent indicate that their indebtedness is due to illness or injury." The other half may be workers pushed into an economic corner. A 2006 Federal Reserve study found that real median income dropped 6 percent from 2001 to 2004, while average family income fell by 2.3 percent. The gap between stagnant or declining wages and the rising cost of living is partly being made up by debt. For example, Americans who roll over credit card balances owe anywhere from $5,100 to $14,000, depending upon whose numbers are used. High debt levels are fueled by easy credit that helps lessen the pressures on business to increase wages.
The Bankruptcy Act erected four major hurdles to deter bankruptcy. First, the Act makes it harder for people to qualify for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy that would erase most of their debt. Instead, most debtors have to file for Chapter 13, in which they face a three- to five-year court-ordered repayment plan.
Second, the Act requires more documentation from filers, including pay stubs and tax returns, and subjects them to a means test based partly on their average income over the past six months.
Third, the law muzzles and restrains bankruptcy attorneys -- the bane of the credit industry. Bankruptcy attorneys are labeled as "debt relief agencies," which prohibits them from dispensing certain kinds of financial advice. Other restrictions imposed on attorneys include the responsibility of vouching for the accuracy of information provided by clients. Because of these restraints, lawyers must spend more time on each case and bill more. Houston bankruptcy attorney Jeff Norman estimates that he charges 20 percent to 30 percent more due to the new law.
Lastly, BAPCPA requires all filers to undergo credit counseling through a Department of Justice (DOJ) approved agency before and after filing for bankruptcy. Credit counseling agencies can provide filers with a counseling certificate after one or two sessions, or they can develop a debt management plan (DMP) based on consolidating credit card balances into a negotiated agreement with creditors. In turn, creditors may lower interest rates and forgive fees.
This is an inherent conflict of interest since the majority of agency revenues come from the 8 percent to 15 percent voluntary Fair Share contribution paid by creditors on each payment they receive. Because of this arrangement, credit counseling agencies are actually soft touch collectors for credit card companies.
The $40 to $100 for a compulsory credit counseling session is a burden on already destitute filers. While creditors believe that debt counseling will push 30 percent to 50 percent of bankruptcy filers into repayment plans, this just isn't happening. A survey by the National Association of Bankruptcy Attorneys (NACBA) of six DOJ approved credit counseling agencies found that 96.7 percent of their 61,335 customers were too insolvent to repay their debts. Rather than being overspending deadbeats, 79 percent were in financial trouble due to job loss, medical bills, death of a spouse or divorce.
Institutional creditors are neither naive nor ill-informed. Armed with sophisticated information systems, most know they can't stop bankruptcies. Insolvent debtors simply cannot repay their debts. The primary goal of BAPCPA is to create a gauntlet of obstacles that will make filing more drawn out and complicated. The intent is to delay Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings for as long as possible, since each month a consumer is not in bankruptcy relief there's a chance they'll pay at least a portion of the payment. Delaying tens of thousands of bankruptcies for a month or two will result in millions for creditors. This partly explains why compulsory credit counseling was included in the law, even though a Visa-funded study found that 74 percent of consumers drop out before finishing their DMP.
Liberal credit policies and minuscule minimum payments on credit card balances kept some cardholders in debt for decades This system ticked along nicely until federal regulatory agencies became concerned about high consumer debt and required that minimum monthly payments be raised from 2 percent to 4 percent. Overnight, monthly payments on a $9,000 (18 percent APR) credit card balance doubled from $180 to $360. This was a tipping point for some consumers with high balances.
Not coincidentally, this change occurred at roughly the same time the new bankruptcy law was passed. With less possibility for a bankruptcy escape, creditors had borrowers just where they wanted them.
Prudent lenders target creditworthy consumers. Conversely, they assume a greater risk when they seek out less creditworthy customers who pay higher interest rates. Higher potential profits have always been associated with greater risks. One problem with the new bankruptcy law is that it shifts the risks from the lender to the borrower without giving the borrower anything in return. For example, the high rates charged in subprime loans are less defensible now that the risk has shifted. The Act also insulates lenders from the risk of lending by not holding them liable for their credit issuance decisions. Lenders want it both ways -- extend subprime credit to borrowers with shaky credit histories and then make it impossible for them to get out of the debt. The Bankruptcy Act is an invitation to exploit the growing subprime market with less risk for lenders.
Poor and moderate-income consumers are being forced into a corner by stagnant salaries, high debt and rising prices. John Rao of the National Consumer Law Center recounts that Congress was warned that bankruptcy filings were a symptom not a disease. Rao is right. Bankruptcy is not a disease, but a symptom of a society racing to the bottom in terms of wages and benefits -- an "ownership society" in which citizens own most of the risks, and a society where conservatism is anything but compassionate.
Not surprisingly, BAPCPA excludes anything relating to Chapter 11 or business bankruptcies, an area where consumers desperately need protection.
Judge Monroe wrote in his ruling that by passing the Bankruptcy Act, Congress ignored the scores of judges, academics and lawyers who spoke out about the flaws of the Act. "It should be obvious to the reader at this point how truly concerned Congress is for the individual consumers of this country," he wrote. "Apparently, it is not individual consumers of this country that make the donations to the members of Congress that allow them to be elected and reelected and reelected and reelected."
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Housing Slowdown Ripples Through Economy
By DAVID KOENIG
AP Business Writer
Mar 06 3:01 PM US/Eastern
The five-year housing boom is indeed over, judging from growing statistical evidence and the performance of some of the nation's leading builders, and the slowdown is already rippling through the economy.
In the last week, the Commerce Department reported that January sales of new single-family homes fell 5 percent _ the fourth decline in seven months _ and the backlog of unsold new homes hit a record. And the National Association of Realtors said used home sales slipped 2.8 percent in January, the fourth straight drop and 5 percent below January 2005.
Builders also reported a few hiccups. Upscale Toll Brothers Inc. said signed contracts in the November-January period fell 21 percent from a year ago, and KB Home reported more buyers backing out of contracts.
Still, the prospect of a housing slowdown appears less frightening than it did a few months ago, according to those who track the industry. There seems to be little concern that a much-touted housing bubble will lead to a collapse in sales and prices.
New Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said last month housing would enter a moderate slowdown but not a crash.
William Mack, a housing analyst for Standard & Poor's, predicted "a soft landing. The overall market is just taking a step back."
Explanations for the recent cooling-off vary. Many people bought homes during the past five years and are staying put. Some analysts blame a decline in consumer confidence. And interest rates have been rising, especially for adjustable mortgages that allowed people to buy more expensive homes than they could have afforded with a 30-year loan.
"We started to see the strain in July and August, and by the fourth quarter the market definitely had slowed," said Layne Marceau, president of the Northern California region for Shea Homes, one of the nation's largest private builders.
Rising prices and interest rates pushed more buyers out of the market. When prices finally did cool, sellers couldn't command a high enough price on their old house to buy the new one, said Marceau, who believes the slowdown is temporary.
Builders don't like to cut prices _ it angers customers who paid more _ but last week, Centex Corp. advertised $25,000 off on select homes in the Dallas area after making a successful similar offer in California. Around the country, builders are throwing in incentives ranging from financing help to free upgrades like swimming pools and granite countertops. Some equal 10 percent of the home's list price.
The median price of an existing single-family home has declined since peaking at $219,700 in July to $210,500 in January, according to the National Association of Realtors. Few analysts expect a sharp drop in national averages, although they say there could be further declines in some areas that have been among the hottest markets in recent years.
David Seiders, chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders, said California, Las Vegas, Florida and the Washington, D.C., area "have the largest potential for a price slowdown."
The rising prices in those markets were fed by speculators who bought homes intending to "flip" or sell them for a quick profit, Seiders said. "The biggest fear I have is investor-owned units coming back on the market in large numbers," he said.
Analysts said markets in Florida and the Carolinas seemed to be holding up well. Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. reported last week that home contracts jumped 61 percent in the Southeast but fell nearly 11 percent in the Southwest and 37 percent in the West during the November-January period. The builder's profit was flat with a year earlier.
The slowdown that is showing up in national statistics hasn't reached all parts of the country.
"I've never seen a market as good as this," Mike Mishler said as he took a break from making finishing touches on a $1.6 million lakeside home near Dallas. "Maybe it will slow down in a couple years, but right now we have lots of California folks coming in, and empty-nest people looking for new homes."
Mishler, president of the local builders association, says Texas markets are holding up because they are affordable _ the median price in Dallas is $145,000 compared to the national average of $213,000. But even in Dallas, the inventory of unsold homes rose to a record in the fourth quarter.
By price, the middle and upper ends of the new-home market did best in with solid increases in everything above $200,000, reflecting strongest markets were in high-priced areas along both coasts. That pattern mostly continued in January, although there was a dip in the $400,000 to $750,000 segment compared to January 2005.
Housing has played a major role in the economic recovery since 2001, so even slower growth in home sales and prices could have major repercussions.
Asha Bangalore, an economist for The Northern Trust Co. in Chicago, estimates housing created 43 percent of all new jobs from late 2001 until mid-2005. That included the obvious, such as jobs in construction and mortgage services, but also retail and service jobs that were created because consumers tapped their rising home equity to buy more things.
"The housing slowdown that we are seeing is very modest, not alarming, but I think the ripple effects are going to be enormous because of the employment factor," she said.
For now, home builders are busy finishing the houses that customers ordered last year. In a sense, their 2006 results are already on the books, and they expect another good year.
"This will either be our most profitable or our second-most profitable year in the company's history," Joel Rassman, chief financial officer of Horsham, Penn.-based Toll Brothers, told investors this week. Its profits rose about 50 percent in 2004 and nearly doubled last year.
Investors, however, have been bidding down the stocks of home builders since July, prompting executives to complain that their companies are undervalued despite record earnings. The nine largest publicly traded builders have seen their shares fall 14 to 44 percent since their peaks, with Toll Brothers and Hovnanian the biggest losers.
Alex Barron, an analyst in San Francisco for JMP Securities, said builder stocks have been trading at relatively low multiples of their earnings since the late 1990s because investors always believed the strong housing market was too good to last.
"Investors kept saying, 'Next year housing will go down,'" Barron said. "I guess they're finally right."
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Treasury Dept. Moves to Avoid Debt Limit
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER
AP Economics Writer
Mar 6, 1:18 PM EST
WASHINGTON -- Treasury Secretary John Snow notified Congress on Monday that the administration has now taken "all prudent and legal actions," including tapping certain government retirement funds, to keep from hitting the $8.2 trillion national debt limit.
In a letter to Congress, Snow urged lawmakers to pass a new debt ceiling immediately to avoid the nation's first-ever default on its obligations.
"I know that you share the president's and my commitment to maintaining the full faith and credit of the U.S. government," Snow said in his letter to leaders in the House and Senate.
Treasury officials, briefing congressional aides last week, said that the government will run out of maneuvering room to keep from exceeding the current limit sometime during the week of March 20.
Snow in his letter notified lawmakers that Treasury would begin tapping the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, which Treasury officials said would provide a "few billion" dollars in extra borrowing ability.
Treasury officials also announced that on Friday they had used the $15 billion in the Exchange Stabilization Fund, a reserve that the Treasury secretary has that is normally used to smooth out volatile movements in the value of the dollar in currency markets.
Treasury has also been taking investments out of a $65.3 billion government pension fund known as the G-fund.
Officials have said that once the debt limit is raised, the investments taken out of the pension funds would be replaced and any lost interest payments would be made up. The formal title for the G-fund is the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System.
Democrats hope to use the upcoming congressional debate over raising the debt limit to highlight what they see as the failings of the administration's economic program with its emphasis on sweeping tax cuts.
An actual default on the debt, a situation when the government misses making payments to current bondholders, is a doomsday scenario considered highly unlikely given what it would do to the government's credit rating.
It is expected that after intense debate, Congress will approve an increase in the current $8.18 trillion debt limit by perhaps $781 billion.
But Rep. Charles Rangel, the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said Monday that any further increase in the debt limit should be tied to legislation that would get future deficits under control.
"Simply raising the limit on George W. Bush's credit card and crossing our fingers won't solve anything," Rangel, D-N.Y., said in a statement. "Any long-term debt limit increase must be accompanied by a serious effort to bring our budget back to the balance we achieved under the Clinton administration."
Treasury Department spokesman Tony Fratto said it was critical for Congress to act before leaving for a spring recess on March 17. He said Snow planned a number of meetings with lawmakers this week to discuss the urgency of taking action.
The administration has sent Congress a budget that on paper would cut the deficit in half by 2009, the year President Bush leaves office.
But Democrats contend the administration met its deficit-reduction goal only by leaving out major spending items such as the full costs of the Iraq war. They say the deficit will not improve unless Bush abandons his effort to make his first-term tax cuts permanent.
Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., said last week that under President Bush the total of the deficits has increased by $3 trillion, a 40 percent increase from where the national debt - the total of previous deficits - stood when Bush took office in January 2001.
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US gasoline, diesel fuel retail prices soar: gov't
Mon Mar 6, 2006
By Tom Doggett
Reuters
U.S. drivers saw gasoline prices soar an average 7.7 cents a gallon over the last week, while truckers paid the most for diesel fuel since November, the government said on Monday.
The national price for regular unleaded gasoline jumped to $2.33 a gallon, up 33 cents from a year ago and the highest level in a month based on the federal Energy Information Administration's survey of service stations.
The price increases in many cities were much higher, skyrocketing more than 19 cents a gallon in just one week in Chicago and more than 16 cents in Cleveland.
The average diesel fuel price paid by truckers increased 7.4 cents to $2.55 a gallon, up 38 cents from a year earlier and the most expensive since November 14, the EIA said.
The rising pump prices arrived as the busy spring driving season gets under way. They reflect expensive crude oil based on traders concerns about potential disruptions in world crude oil supplies.
U.S. crude oil, which accounts for about half the cost of making gasoline, fell on Monday after OPEC members signaled they would not cut oil production levels when the cartel meets this meek.
Crude for delivery in April fell $1.26 to $62.41 at the New York Mercantile Exchange.
In the EIA's latest weekly survey, the West Coast had the most expensive gasoline, with the price up 3.9 cents at $2.42 a gallon. Los Angeles topped the survey of cities, with gasoline up 5.6 cents at $2.51 a gallon.
The Gulf Coast states had the cheapest gasoline at $2.25 a gallon, up 9.3 cents. Among major cities, Houston had the best deal at the pump, but it was still up 3.5 cents at $2.14 a gallon.
The EIA report also showed prices, rounded to the nearest penny, up 19.1 cents at $2.46 in Chicago; up 4.8 cents at $2.41 in Miami; up 16.2 cents at $2.38 in Cleveland; up 3 cents at $2.30 in New York City; up 5.7 cents at $2.28 in Seattle and up 3.8 cents at $2.21 in Boston.
Truckers on the West Coast paid the most for diesel at $2.71 a gallon, up 8.8 cents from last week. The Gulf Coast states had the cheapest diesel at $2.50 a gallon, up 5.6 cents.
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Cunningham's Corruption Connections
by Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney
Amanda Terkel and Payson Schwin
6 Mar 06
On Friday, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-CA) was sentenced to 8 years and 4 months in federal prison for taking $2.4 million in bribes in exchange for lucrative defense contracts, among other crimes. It was the longest sentence ever meted out to a congressman. While it's the last we'll hear from Cunningham for some time, the larger scandal is just beginning to unfold. The same defense contractors who were playing Cunningham with cash and favors were working other members of Congress and top administration officials. Once all the facts are on the table, the Abramoff scandal may pale in comparison.
THE CIA CONNECTION: The CIA is investigating "the connection between the agency's No. 3 official and a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham." That official, Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, "is a lifelong friend of Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes," the federal contractor who "gave Cunningham $630,000 in bribes in exchange for federal contracts," according to court documents. (According to the American Prospect, the pair "named their sons after each other and share a private wine locker at Washington’s Capital Grille restaurant.") The CIA "is investigating whether Foggo helped Wilkes gain CIA contracts." According to several CIA officials, "Wilkes has several CIA contracts, ranging from providing CIA agents with bottled water and first-aid kits to performing unspecified work in Iraq." (The CIA budget is secret, so it's impossible to know precisely how much business Wilkes is doing with the agency.) Wilkes has even "set aside an office next to his executive suite where Foggo could work when he leaves the CIA."
THE KATHERINE HARRIS CONNECTION: Defense contractor Mitchell Wade has admitted "to lavishing more than $1 million in cash, cars, a boat, antiques and other bribes on convicted Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham." He also funneled $32,000 in illegal donations to Rep. Katherine Harris (R-FL). Harris initially told Sarasota Herald-Tribune reporter Tom Lyons, along with other journalists, that "she didn't have any idea" why employees from Wade's company, MZM, donated the money. She insisted "all those MZM-connected people -- who didn't live in Florida and whose $2,000 checks arrived in bundles -- just liked her stands on the issues and wanted to see her re-elected." But Wade's plea agreement revealed that he took Harris "to dinner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, Citronelle, and asked her to help the company get a defense contract." (Talking Points Memo notes "the restaurant's prix-fixe menu starts at $85, well over the Congressional $50 gift limit.") A source told the Washington Post that "Harris made such a request for funding, but it was not granted." Lyons' take: "Let's not make this fuzzy: U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris lied." (More on the Harris connection here.)
THE JOHN DOOLITTLE CONNECTION: Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) has acknowledged that he "helped steer defense funding, totaling $37 million" to PerfectWave, a company run by Brent Wilkes. PerfectWave "officials and lobbyists helped raise at least $85,000 for Doolittle and his leadership political action committee from 2002 to 2005." Doolittle has "written to U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales asking to be investigated." He claims that the criticism is being generated by a conspiracy of "labor union bosses, radical feminists and extreme environmentalists."
THE DUNCAN HUNTER CONNECTION: House Armed Service Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-CA), "perhaps Cunningham's closest friend in Congress," helped companies that have employed Wilkes -- ADCS Inc.and Audre Inc. -- secure over $190 million for a system to "convert printed documents to computer files" that the Department of Defense (DoD) said it didn't need. (This included "a $9.7 million contract for ADCS to digitize historical documents from the Panama Canal Zone that the Pentagon considered insignificant.") A 1994 report from the General Accounting Office noted that the DoD "already had the tools for such work." The San Diego Tribune notes, "Cunningham, Hunter and their House allies didn’t care. Audre and ADCS were generous with contributions – and ADCS executive Brent Wilkes allegedly was bribing Cunningham." The Tribune concludes, "This isn't governance. This is looting." (Hunter has also "faulted federal prosecutors" for being too tough on Cunningham.)
THE JERRY LEWIS CONNECTION: Wilkes also employed a lobbyist named Bill Lowery, paying him about $200,000 between 1998-2000. What did all that money buy? Access to House Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA). According to a three month investigation by Copley News Service, Lewis "has greenlighted hundreds of millions of dollars in federal project for clients" of Bill Lowrey. Meanwhile, "Lowery, the partners at his firm and their clients have donated 37 percent of the $1.3 million that Lewis' political action committee received in the past six years." Copley reports, "[T]he essential ingredient in the Lew-Lowery relationship is earmarking, the congressional practice in which special projects, sometimes derided as 'pork,' are slipped quietly into the federal budget without public review." Virtually every client who has signed up with Lowery in recent years "cashed in with earmarks." Lowery was also tight with Cunningham, paying the staff's $1,800 bill for its 2001 Christmas party at a fancy Washington, D.C. restaurant.
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Bush asks Congress for 'line-item veto' power
Mon Mar 6, 2006
By Caren Bohan
Reuters
President George W. Bush, who has never vetoed legislation, asked the U.S. Congress on Monday to give him a line-item veto that would allow him to propose canceling specific spending projects.
But the proposal faces hurdles because an earlier version that Congress passed under former President Bill Clinton was rejected by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional.
Bush said the 1998 court decision "should not be the end of the story," and said the legislation he offered to Congress was crafted in a way to satisfy the court's concerns.
"By passing this version of the line-item veto, the administration will work with the Congress to reduce wasteful spending, reduce the budget deficit and ensure that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely," he said.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said he would introduce the bill.
In striking down the Clinton-era line-item veto by a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court said Congress was not authorized under the Constitution to hand the president that power.
The White House said its proposal would differ from that 1996 law, which allowed the president to reject specific spending items after a bill was passed by Congress.
Under the Bush proposal, the president would propose getting rid of items he considered wasteful and then send the package back to Congress. Congress would have 10 days to hold an up or down vote on the package of proposed changes.
"With this proposal, I think the responsibilities of the two branches would be well balanced in that the president would have the ability to line out an item, but only with the approval of a majority of Congress," White House budget director Joshua Bolten said.
Democrats, who have criticized Bush's tax cuts as fiscally reckless, said a line-item veto was no panacea for deficits.
"The Bush administration has spent us into record deficits and piled mountains of debt onto our children," House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said. But she added, "budget experts agree that the line-item veto would do little to control deficits."
Comment: And the similarities with Nazi Germany just keep mounting up.
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US reports strong earthquake in Indian Ocean
www.chinaview.cn 2006-03-07 08:41:42
LOS ANGELES, March 6 (Xinhuanet) -- A strong temblor of magnitude 6.2 hit Mid-Indian Ocean at 11:13 local time (18:13 GMT), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported on Tuesday.
The epicenter of the quake was located at 270 kilometers southeast of the Amsterdam Island, a French colony in the Indian Ocean, the USGS said in a report.
The earthquake occurred 10 kilometers under the seabed, according to the report. Seismologists are monitoring this temblor,the USGS said.
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Olive oil fed 2000 BC foundries
ANSA
March 6, 2006
Nicosia - Olive oil was used as fuel for foundries before it became one of the glories of the Mediterranean cuisine, Italian archaeologists believe.
A team from Rome has discovered that the Mediterranean's first foundries were fuelled by olive oil and not, as previously believed, by charcoal.
Exploring a dig site in southern Cyprus which has already yielded the oldest wine and silk in the Mediterranean, the Italians unearthed copper-smelting ovens dating back to 2,000 BC.
They found that the walls were covered with thick, black resin.
Samples of the mysterious pitch-like substance were sent back to Rome from the site at Pyrgos Mavroraki near Limassol for analysis at the Institute of Technologies Applied to Art (ITABC).
It turned out to be the burnt residue of olive oil.
"It's the first time in the history of metallurgy that this fuel has been found in place of charcoal," said ITABC's Maria Rosaria Belgiorno.
The first historical evidence of olive oil being added to food is much later, she said.
Belgiorno said similar furnaces to the Pyrgos ones had been found at equally olive-rich ancient sites in Jordan and Syria.
"Mediterranean metallurgy was born in the places where we have the first evidence of olive-oil extraction," she said.
Copper from Cyprus is known to have been the most prized in the Mediterrean in the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1600 BC), she said. "This was probably because olive-oil smelting leaves fewer impurities from the ore." "It was therefore practically ready, without purification, to be mixed with tin to produce bronze". The world's first bronze is believed to have been produced in Asia Minor at about 3,500 BC, the conventional beginning of the Early Bronze Age, Charcoal ovens have been found in Asia Minor and elsewhere - but never any trace of olive oil. Charcoal, a slow, steady fuel produced by heating wood in airless chambers, was used right up until the Industrial Revolution when it was replaced by coke, or distilled coal. So why did the ancient Cypriot smelters use oil, Belgiorno was asked.
"Well, you need good axes to cut enough wood to produce sufficient coke for large-scale smelting. In Cyprus back then they only had rudimentary tools".
"The discovery of olive oil's potential was probably serendipitous. A few olives may have fallen into a fire and people were surprised at how well they burned. So they decided to extract the oil".
As well as 18 ancient ovens, fragments of oil presses, vats and pouring ducts have been found at Pyrgos. A model of the ancient Cypriot mines has been built at Blera near Viterbo, at the experimental archaeology centre Antiquitates.
"The smelting chamber was pre-heated to about 6-700 degrees C with wood, and then oil was added to reach the melting point of 1,083 degrees," said Angelo Bartoli of Antiquitates.
"They were pretty clever about preventing the oil flames blowing back into their faces," Bartoli said.
"The oil was fed into the chambers in reeds, with the feeding point covered by an improvised cap such as an upturned jar."
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Sun's next 11-year cycle could be 50 pct stronger
By Deborah Zabarenko
Reuters
6 Mar 06
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Sun-spawned cosmic storms that can play havoc with earthly power grids and orbiting satellites could be 50 percent stronger in the next 11-year solar cycle than in the last one, scientists said on Monday.
Using a new model that takes into account what happens under the sun's surface and data about previous solar cycles, astronomers offered a long-range forecast for solar activity that could start as soon as this year or as late as 2008.
They offered no specific predictions of solar storms, but they hope to formulate early warnings that will give power companies, satellite operators and others on and around Earth a few days to prepare.
"This prediction of an active solar cycle suggests we're potentially looking at more communications disruptions, more satellite failures, possible disruptions of electrical grids and blackouts, more dangerous conditions for astronauts," said Richard Behnke of the Upper Atmosphere Research Section at the National Science Foundation.
"Predicting and understanding space weather will soon be even more vital than ever before," Behnke said at a telephone news briefing.
The prediction, roughly analogous to the early prediction of a severe hurricane season on Earth, involves the number of sunspots on the solar surface, phenomena that have been monitored for more than a century.
TWISTED MAGNETIC FIELDS
Every 11 years or so, the sun goes through an active period, with lots of sunspots. This is important, since solar storms -- linked to twisted magnetic fields that can hurl out energetic particles -- tend to occur near sunspots.
The sun is in a relatively quiet period now, but is expected to get more active soon, scientists said. However, there is disagreement as to whether the active period will start within months -- late 2006 or early 2007 -- or years, with the first signs in late 2007 or early 2008.
Whenever it begins, the new forecasting method shows sunspot activity is likely to be 30 percent to 50 percent stronger than the last active period. The peak of the last cycle was in 2001, the researchers said, but the period of activity can span much of a decade.
The strongest solar cycle in recent memory occurred in the late 1950s, when there were few satellites aloft, no astronauts in orbit and less reliance on electrical power grids than there is now.
If a similarly active period occurred now, the impact would be hard to predict, according to Joseph Kunches of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Space Environment Center in Colorado.
"It's pretty uncertain what would happen, which makes this work more relevant," Kunches said.
"What we have here is a prediction that the cycle is going to be very active, and what we need and what we're of course working on is to be able to predict individual storms with a couple days or hours in advance so the grids can take the action," Behnke said.
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Stopping the next extinction wave
By Richard Black
Environment Correspondent, BBC News website
A scientific study pinpoints 20 areas in the world where animals are not at immediate risk of extinction, but where the risk is likely to arise soon.
The regions include Greenland and the Siberian tundra, Caribbean islands and parts of South East Asia.
The London-based research team believes its work will help conservationists prevent extinctions through early intervention - prevention, not cure.
It is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study concentrates on a concept called "latent extinction risk".
This means animals are not under threat right now, and may not be classified as in danger according to the Red List, the internationally accepted database of threatened species.
But the pattern of human development means they could be sent on a fast track to extinction in the near future, perhaps overtaking other species currently in higher-risk classifications.
"We can see this leap-frogging happening now, for example with the Guatemalan howler monkey, which was classified as being on the 'least concern' list in 2000 but which moved to the 'endangered' list in 2004 as it lost much of its forest habitat," said study leader Dr Marcel Cardillo, from Imperial College London.
"We hope conservationists will use our findings to pre-empt future species losses rather than concentrating solely on those species already under threat."
Ox and reindeer
The scientists calculated the latent extinction risk for more than 1,500 non-marine mammals.
Re-inforcing the conclusions of other groups, they find that species at particular risk tend to have relatively large bodies, live in small areas and reproduce relatively slowly; these include, they say, the North American reindeer, the musk ox, the Seychelles flying fox and the brown lemur.
Perhaps surprisingly, areas identified as containing species with a particularly large latent extinction risk exclude well-known biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon and Congo basins, and include sub-Polar regions in northern Canada, northern Russia and Greenland.
"I am surprised that paper doesn't pick up the Amazon and Congo basins, regions where there is a large number of animal species with small ranges," observed Thomas Brooks of the Center for Applied Biodiversity Science (Cabs) in Washington DC, a division of Conservation International.
One reason for this may be poor information. Some databases of plants and animals are badly in need of revision - a flaw which scientific groups led by IUCN, the World Conservation Union, are trying to address through improving background studies of various species and ecosystems.
Ahead of the curve
Conservation International is one of a number of groups which already tries to mount "preventative" programmes rather than waiting until very few members of a species remain.
"It's widely recognised among conservation practitioners that wherever we have the opportunity we should get ahead of the curve and implement proactive conservation measures," Dr Brooks told the BBC News website.
"Proactive solutions tend to be cheaper and easier.
"But the magnitude of human impacts on biodiversity is such that most conservation programmes will inevitably be reactive."
Some "last-chance" programmes have proved successful. In Yellowstone National Park, grizzly bears have recovered enough to come off the US endangered species list; while in the UK, numbers of stone curlew breeding pairs have doubled over the last 20 years.
Through the Convention on Biological Diversity, the international community has set itself the goal of making a "substantial reduction in the rate of loss of biological diversity" by 2010.
But overall, extinctions are coming at 100 to 1,000 times the normal background rate, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a vast attempt to audit the Earth's ecological health which was published last year.
It concluded that a third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction.
It also concluded that although humanity is the cause, humanity will ultimately be among the losers.
Reducing biodiversity will, it says, impact societies at a number of levels, including diminishing the availability of economically valuable natural goods such as timber and compromising "ecosystem services" such as fresh water and biodegrading bacteria.
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Levees Overtop in Calif.'s Sonoma County
AP
Mon Mar 6, 9:45 PM ET
SCHELLVILLE, Calif. - A storm that dumped about two inches of rain in Sonoma County overnight flooded part of a highway for several hours as water overtopped nearby levees, officials said.
Heavy rains washed out a section of the highway at Schellville early Monday, prompting state transportation officials to close less than a mile of road until the water receded by noon.
Meanwhile, a levee on private property near Sonoma Creek overtopped just before 8 a.m. Monday, flooding the owner's vineyard, officials said.
No damage to homes or businesses was reported, said Sandy Covall-Alves, a Sonoma County emergency services coordinator.
Sonoma Creek is prone to flooding and most homeowners in the area are prepared, officials said.
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Cyclone alert for Indian Ocean island of Reunion
AFP
Sun Mar 5, 3:00 PM ET
SAINT DENIS, Reunion - France's Indian Ocean island of Reunion was under a cyclone warning for Sunday and Monday because of a tropical storm passing close by, authorities said.
Tropical storm Diwa was 230 kilometres (140 miles) off the island Sunday and was expected to move farther away, the state weather service Meteo-France said.
Nevertheless, its proximity was whipping up gusts of up to 120 kilometres an hour on Reunion and producing lashing rain. Some 10,000 homes were without electricity and 20,000 were without running water as a result.
Authorities also said that spot flooding had hit several communities and roads Saturday night.
"Reunion will remain in the zone of influence of the phenomenon Sunday and Monday," a Meteo-France forecaster, Philippe Caroff, said.
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For First Time, Flu Spreads From Birds
By MELISSA EDDY
Associated Press
6 Mar 06
VIENNA, Austria - Three cats have tested positive for the deadly strain of bird flu in Austria's first reported case of the disease spreading to an animal other than a bird, state authorities said Monday.
The sick cats were among 170 living at an animal shelter where the disease was detected in chickens last month, authorities said.
The World Health Organization called bird flu a greater global challenge than any previous infectious disease, costing global agriculture more than $10 billion and affecting the livelihoods of 300 million farmers.
Poland reported its first outbreak of the disease, saying Monday that laboratory tests confirmed that two wild swans had died of the lethal strain.
Dr. Margaret Chan, who is spearheading WHO's efforts against bird flu, told disease experts meeting in Geneva to discuss bird flu preparations that the organization's top priority was to keep the deadly strain from mutating into a form easily passed between humans. That could trigger a global pandemic.
Since February, the virus has spread to birds in 17 new countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, she said.
"We truly feel that this present threat and any other threat like it is likely to stretch our global systems to the point of collapse," said Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO's director of epidemic and pandemic alert and response.
WHO spokeswoman Maria Cheng said experts hope to isolate outbreaks and establish agreements allowing international health authorities to respond quickly, testing viruses and putting in place measures to contain the disease.
In Austria, all the cats from the affected shelter have been moved to a location where they will remain under observation. The shelter has been closed, Health Minister Maria Rauch-Kallat told reporters in Vienna.
"We have decided to put all the cats in quarantine," Rauch-Kallat said. "Here they will be observed by veterinarians and experts in the coming days and weeks."
German authorities last month confirmed that a cat on the Baltic Sea island of Ruegen had succumbed to the deadly virus, which it is believed to have caught by eating an infected bird.
That would be consistent with a pattern of disease transmission seen in wild cats in Asia.
German officials have warned pet owners to keep their cats indoors and dogs on a leash in areas where the disease has been detected
Austria confirmed the nation's first case of H5N1 in a wild bird last month and has since detected several dozen cases in birds, including 29 in Styria.
According to WHO, several tigers and snow leopards in a zoo and several house cats were infected with H5N1 during outbreaks in Asia in 2003 and 2004.
Poland announced that the infected swans were found dead Thursday in Torun, about 120 miles northwest of Warsaw. Samples were being sent to Britain for further tests.
According to the latest WHO figures, the H5N1 strain has killed at least 95 people since 2003, mostly in Asia, and devastated poultry stocks. Scientists are concerned that the virus could mutate into a form easily spread between people, sparking a pandemic.
Meanwhile, a top animal health official with the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said developed countries had responded slowly to bird flu, failing to control the disease in Asia and not doing enough to prepare poor countries, particularly in Africa, for its spread.
"In 2004 we said it will be an international crisis if we don't stop it in Asia, and this is exactly what is happening two years later," said Joseph Domenech, head of FAO's Animal Health Service.
"We were asking for emergency funds and they never came. We are constantly late."
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H5N1 bird flu reaches Poland, experts fear pandemic
Agence France Presse
6 Mar 06
The deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu swept into Poland, a laboratory confirmed, as world health experts prepared for a feared mutation of the virus that could kill millions.
Tests on two swans in Poland confirmed the presence of disease, which has killed at least 94 people since 2003 as it raced through Asia, then into Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
"Yes, we have confirmed that it is definitely H5N1," said Poland's national Pulawy laboratory deputy director laboratory Jan Zmudzinksi.
Samples were being sent for further examination in the European Union's laboratory in Weybridge, Britain, he said.
Poland set up a crisis unit in the northern city of Torun where the outbreak was detected. A hygiene-security zone has been erected over a three-kilometer (1.8-mile) radius.
The highly pathogenic strain of H5N1 has spread on rare occasions from birds to humans and has proven deadly in about half of those cases, most of them in Asia where it is still claiming lives.
In Indonesia's capital Jakarata, a 25-year-old woman who was five months pregnant died Monday with symptoms of bird flu after being in close contact with chickens, hospital officials said.
The deepest fear is that the bird flu virus could mix with a human influenza and acquire the capacity to jump from human to human, sparking off the next global flu pandemic.
In Geneva, World Health Organisation experts opened a three-day meeting to refine plans to rapidly detect and contain a potential pandemic even as it erupts.
Pandemic fears have climbed sharply since the emergence of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in China in late 2002 and now H5N1, WHO special adviser on avian influenza Margaret Chan told the health experts.
"Events in recent weeks justify that concern," WHO special adviser on avian influenza Margaret Chan told the health experts.
"H5N1 avian influenza has spread to affect wild and domestic birds in 17 new countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East," Chen told the meeting, most of which is to be held behind closed doors.
Some experts warned that H5N1 was not the only potential source for a future pandemic.
"Even if H5N1 stays in its animal box, this plan would be an investment for the future," said Angus Nicoll of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Besides the human threat, the disease has enormous economic consequences.
Its arrival in Europe has led to a plunge in consumption of poultry.
France, the European Union's largest poultry exporter, reported the disease spreading with 30 incidences of H5N1.
The French government allocated from Monday 52 million euros (63 million dollars) in aid to poultry farmers, whose produce has been totally or partially banned by 46 countries.
In Germany -- where a cat has been confirmed to be the first mammal in Europe affected by H5N1 -- the government said at the weekend it was checking a suspected new case in a wild goose.
In Africa, bird flu has been detected in Nigeria, neighbouring Niger and Egypt. Nigeria has promised protective equipment for a three-billion-euro emergency eradication plan by Niger.
In Asia, China's health ministry was quoted by Xinhua news agency as saying Sunday that a 32-year-old man who frequented poultry markets had succumbed to bird flu in Guangdong, the first case in the province.
Hours later, Hong Kong, which suffered the world's first reported major bird flu outbreak among humans in 1997 when six people died, suspended imports of live poultry and pet birds from Guangdong for three weeks.
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China's latest bird flu death adds to worries for HK
Reuters
Tue Mar 7, 4:29 AM ET
HONG KONG - China's latest human death from bird flu is causing alarm in Hong Kong because it is the first in a Chinese urban area and the victim probably caught the virus from supposedly healthy poultry, the city's health minister said on Tuesday.
The 32-year-old man fell ill after visiting a live poultry market several times to conduct research in southern Guangdong province, which borders Hong Kong. He died last Thursday, the ninth person to die of bird flu in China.
"He is an urban resident, he had no contact with farms or any poultry from the villages. His only exposure is the wet markets, which has poultry which are supposedly safe for consumption and safe for the public," Hong Kong's health minister York Chow said.
"And Guangdong province is one of the best (in China) in terms of supervising the control of avian flu. Since last year, it has immunized all its poultry through vaccination," he told a news conference.
Guangdong has not reported any outbreaks of the H5N1 avian flu virus in birds over the past year, and the man's death has heightened fears among experts that there might be poultry that are infected by the virus but which are not sickened by it.
Chow said Chinese authorities were investigating if the virus might have undergone any genetic changes and if there were problems with vaccines used in the country.
The man did not seek medical help until he was very sick and he died after spending just four days in hospital, Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday.
The government had tested more than 100 people who had been in contact with the man, but none were found to be infected with H5N1, Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua told a news briefing in Beijing.
"Guangdong pays great attention to bird flu," Huang said, adding that Hong Kong did not have to worry about poultry imports from the province. "Human cases still only happen by chance."
The virus has killed 95 people in East Asia and the Middle East since late 2003. Most of the victims contracted the disease directly from sick poultry, but experts fear the virus could mutate and spread easily among people, sparking a pandemic.
The virus made its first known jump to humans in Hong Kong in 1997, killing six people.
The city banned live chicken imports, day-old chicks and pet birds from Guangdong after China confirmed late on Sunday that the man died of H5N1.
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Indonesian boy becomes latest suspected bird flu death
AFP
Tuesday March 7, 4:36 PM
A four-year-old boy has become the sixth person in Indonesia feared to be infected with the H5N1 strain of avian flu to have died in the last eight days, health workers have said.
The boy died Monday at the state-run Sayidiman Hospital in Magetan, East Java, less than 10 minutes after arriving, Sudarsih, a nurse, told AFP.
He was suffering symptoms of the virus, which Indonesian authorities have confirmed has killed 20 Indonesians, she said, adding that he had a history of contact with poultry.
The boy's death follows five recent suspected bird flu deaths: a pregnant woman, 25, on Monday; a 10-year-old Saturday; a brother and sister last Wednesday; and a three-year-old last Tuesday.
The woman was from Jakarta, where most of Indonesia's bird flu deaths have been recorded, but the siblings and 10-year-old were from Central Java's Boyolali district and the three-year-old died in Central Java's Semarang.
Local positive tests, which are usually considered reliable, are sent to a World Health Organisation (WHO)-affiliated laboratory abroad for confirmation.
Indonesia's last confirmed fatality was on February 25.
Meanwhile in Jakarta, five more suspected bird flu patients were admitted overnight at Sulianti Saroso Hospital, the capital's main centre for treating bird flu patients, its deputy director Sardikin Giriputro said.
The five, two of them children, came from several districts in Jakarta and the nearby town of Bekasi in West Java, and had all been in contact with sick chickens, Giriputro said.
Hospital spokesman Ilham Patu said the hospital was now treating a total of seven suspected bird flu patients. Five people were discharged Monday after being cleared, he said.
Infections have been found in birds in 26 of Indonesia's 33 provinces.
Experts fear that H5N1, which has killed more than 90 people since 2003, mostly in Asia, may mutate into a form that can pass between humans, sparking a deadly pandemic.
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New fears as Chinese man dies of bird flu
James Meikle and agencies
Tuesday March 7, 2006
The Guardian
Health officials in China were yesterday investigating a man's death from bird flu in a province where no poultry outbreaks have been reported since 2004.
The development came as the World Health Organisation warned that the outbreak in poultry in recent years was unprecedented and posed a greater challenge than any previous emerging infectious disease.
The death of a 32-year-unemployed man in Guangdong, southern China, reinforces questions over whether surveillance for H5N1 is strong enough. Human cases were also identified in Turkey and Iraq before alerts about the virus in flocks.
Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, was quoted in Hong Kong newspapers as saying that the latest death "may be an indication that poultry is infected but not showing symptoms. This is even more dangerous and serious because people can get infected without any warning."
Health experts are wondering whether vaccination of poultry is helping to mask the disease. British officials are refusing to place big orders for the vaccines, except as a fall-back for rare and exotic birds, believing that they do not stop birds from carrying disease. But the chief scientist, Sir David King, revealed last week that he had been watching progress in China, where vaccination of birds is most widespread, because of hopes that vaccines being developed there are easier to administer and more effective.
In Styria, southern Austria, three cats from an animal shelter that took in H5N1 infected birds also tested positive for the disease, the second such transfer reported in Europe during the current outbreaks.
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