- Signs of the Times for Mon, 15 May 2006 -


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Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary

Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
May 15, 2006

Gold closed at 716.00 dollars an ounce on Friday, up 4.5% from $685.20 at the end of the previous week. The dollar closed at 0.7737 euros Friday, down 1.5% from 0.7854 for the week. The euro, then, closed at 1.2926, up from 1.2732 dollars compared to the end of the week before. Gold in euros would be 553.92 euros an ounce, up 2.9% from 538.17 for the week. Oil closed at 72.04 dollars a barrel, up 2.9% from $70.01 at the end of the previous week. Oil in euros would be 55.73 euros a barrel, up 1.3% from 54.99 for the week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.94, up 1.5% from 9.79. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow closed at 11,380.99 on Friday, down 1.7% from 11,577.74 at the end of the previous week. The NASDAQ fell sharply, closing at 2,243.78, down 4.4 % from 2,342.57 for the week. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 5.19%, up nine basis points from 5.10 at the previous week's close.

The signs are ominous for the U.S. and world economy. Gold continued its sharp rise, especially in dollar terms, and oil seems to have renewed its climb after a brief pause. The dollar continued to fall. This week, however, saw a decrease in the U.S. stock market after it had approached an all-time high. The political crisis in the United States worsened last week as well, with Bush's approval rating falling below 30%; soon he will be the most unpopular president since the beginning of polling. This week may see an indictment of Karl Rove. Significantly, the mainstream media is paying attention to all of these stories. Even cautious establishment outlets like National Public Radio has pundits worrying that Bush's position is so hopeless he will launch an attack on Iran as a desperate, last-ditch attempt to salvage enough popularity to avoid prison (by keeping Congress in Republican hands). Not surprisingly, then, last week also saw the release of some bad consumer sentiment numbers in the United States, showing the sharpest drop in consumer confidence since Hurricane Katrina.

Let's look at gold and the dollar. A whole range of evidence points to a currency collapse for the dollar. The problem is, this has never happened to the supposed "sole superpower" in the world. The fall of the dollar, which has so far been steady and not catastrophic, may be in for a few sharp shocks ending in disaster. Here's a look at how it might unfold:

How does a currency collapse? And the U.S. $?
Excerpts From - "Gold Forecaster - Global Watch"

May 8, 2006
www.goldforecaster.com

When a currency loses the confidence of its people, its fall becomes exponential, as has happened to the Zimbabwe $, where in 1982 one U.S.$ equaled 1 Zimbabwe $. Today around Z$200,000 buys one U.S. $ if you can find someone idiot enough to sell one for the Z$.
In day-to-day terms, the smallest note in Zimbabwe - a Z$500 - is the size of a U.S.$. The price of a single-ply sheet of toilet paper is more expensive at around Z$867.

The U.S.$ is nowhere near there, but clearly the U.S. Administration has no plan or even desire to rectify the U.S. Trade deficit. Consequently, we are seeing a growing number of Central Banks turning to the Euro for its reserves and away from the U.S.$.

Whilst most observers and particularly U.S. observers like to have tangible facts and numbers with which to mathematically gauge the present and the different possible futures, a collapsing currency situation is not as neatly gaugeable. Indeed it is driven in stages of 'confidence', which are rarely measurable in advance.

For instance we see today the move of the Pension and other long-term funds into the gold E.T.F.' One finds there are no mathematically measurable factors with which to measure the pace of change to these funds. Yes, the number of 'Road-shows' the World Gold Council does affects this move to some extent, but how do you measure the spread of that knowledge and resulting investment in the E.T.F.'s outside of that? How does one measure the forces causing uncertainty and falling 'confidence'.

It is an emotional progression, one that moves in lurches as particular incidents destroy confidence limb by limb. In such a climate a steady degeneration of confidence lead to an effect we shall call a "plateau - cliff" process.

• As confidence is whittled away the currency appears relatively stable.

• Then a particular event will occur that triggers a breakdown and the currency drops suddenly, like falling off a cliff, until it finds a short-term bottom and it holds that level for a period as though on a plateau. The process then repeats itself.

• The degeneration then accelerates, so the fall from the cliff to the next stable plateau happens more quickly.

• Then the height of the cliff [the fall] extends until it grows at an exponential basis.

• The final collapse will occur when the currency is completely discredited and used only by those unfortunate to have no other choice. Alternatively the currency is changed to a new one, one whose issue is backed by assets [Such as land - after the Weimar republic] and limited to a fixed relationship to those assets until confidence is restored by a healthy economy and a balanced Balance of Payments. This provides a basis in which to be confident about currency.

However, were the $ heading for a collapse, the U.S. $, a global reserve asset, nothing in the U.S. such as land or any other fixed U.S. asset would suffice. The asset would have to be accessible by its creditors, outside the States who would have to have a willingness to accept that asset in the case of a default by the U.S. The use of the $ domestically and internationally brings such problems that in the final extreme conditions the $ is inadequate as a global reserve currency.

But for the market to whittle away confidence in the $ would take some time. But we believe that it will happen.

• Look back a couple of years and we saw the $ reigning supreme.

• Then warnings were given against it as the Trade deficit began to grow.

• The Fed or the Administration then allied itself to the euro, giving it the respite it has enjoyed over the last year.

• Now there seems to be a breaking down of the $ of late and some Central Banks switching to the Euro out of the $. These were three distinct stages.

• The next stage is for the $ to fall heavily against the Euro and Euro oriented currencies.

• Next will come the defence of the $ until the weight of selling pressure exhausts the $ against other currencies [please note the U.S. has few foreign currencies left in its hands with which to defend the $, but the Fed put in place measures to allow it intervene in the international foreign exchanges.]

• This could delay the fall for some time, but history has shown that when a Central Bank defends a rate in the market, it gives in periodically and devalues. If insufficient it has to defend again and again.

• I have no doubt that Central Banks will use this defence to unload their dollars back to the States.

• At some stage the U.S. will have to impose Controls to prevent foreign capital from exiting the States and rejecting dollars coming home. These are called Exchange Controls.

• When this happens many currencies will begin facing the same problems as their reserves become suspect too and they cannot defend their own Balance of Payments deficits.

• At this point for the global economy to function adequately, a new "Global Currency" will have to be established and be supplied sufficient so as to regain global confidence. We cannot see this happening without gold in there to a greater or lesser extent. Of course this will have to be at prices believed by all nations, not just individuals!

During this process confidence in the currency will be the measuring factor, a nebulous, unstable element in itself. The process of the decay of confidence is described above. But confidence could well go down dramatically from the point we are at now with the $ in the monetary system. Soon the cliffs will extend until the defence of the currency comes, then a long plateau while the dollar is defended, until the heavy falls begin...

Even Alan Greenspan's predecessor as Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, is sounding the alarm.

"A Really High Gold Price"

By Eric J. Fry

On Tuesday, the Ben Bernanke hiked short-term interest rates to 5% - the 16th straight quarter-point increase - and promised to continue hiking rates "if the data warrant." Over the ensuing three days, global stock marketshare stumbled, the dollar has dropped 2% and the gold price has skyrocketed more than $50.

These financial data are probably not the sort of "data" that Bernanke had in mind, but they are exactly the sort that might warrant a 17th or 18th or 25th rate hike...as a desperate effort to defend the U.S. dollar.

...At $730 an ounce, the gold price has reached its highest level since the beginning of the Volcker era. But beyond this superficial connection, the two eras possess very few obvious similarities, "obvious" being the operative word. Based on the prevailing economic [view], Volcker faced a far more dire situation than Bernanke faces. But we fear that the reality is exactly the opposite.

"Ben Bernanke," writes Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for the Telegraph of London," picks up a chalice brimming with the nastiest of toxins: a current account deficit of 7% of GDP, covered for now by fickle flows of capital from the Chinese central bank and petro-dollar sheikhdoms; a negative flow of global investments earnings for the first time in modern memory; a dollar hanging by a political thread; and hair- raising levels of debt."

Volker's chalice, by comparison was brimming with milk and honey. In 1979, America produced a current account surplus and boasted a national savings rate of nearly 10%. Today, both of these essential balance sheet line-items are in the red.

Meanwhile, we have amassed a few trillion dollars of government debt since the Volcker era. Our crippled national balance sheet, therefore, raises the risk of serious economic crisis, should the dollar's slump become a rout.

And now that the dollar is slumping, while gold is soaring, the unimaginable rout of the dollar is becoming a bit too imaginable.

"How much longer can the dollar's supremacy last?" Paul Volker wondered aloud at the Grant's Interest Rate Observer Conference last month. "And what's the endgame?"

Implicit in Volcker's musing was the clear suggestion that the dollar's days are numbered. "Does this go on forever?" he asked rhetorically about the financing of American consumption by foreign creditors. "What kind of pyramid can you build?"

"There seem to me to be a lot of unknowns that are facing this de facto world currency called the U.S. dollar and its increasing importance in the world," Volcker concluded. "Does that increase in importance have some natural limit?
And if so, what is the endgame?"

"In response to the question posed by Paul Volcker," James Grant remarked, "not a few of the Grant's conference attendees had an answer at the ready: 'A really high gold price.'"

Asian central banks seem to be quietly losing confidence in the dollar - quietly because they want to plan their escape from the burden of holding so many dollars and have everything in place before it happens. They can't afford to spook the market just yet, but the following column which appeared on Bloomberg has a startling quote from China's vice Minister of Finance:

Asia Is Getting Ready to Dump the Dollar Peg: Andy Mukherjee

May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Li Yong, China's vice minister for finance, said he had heard a "rumor" that the U.S. dollar was headed for a 25 percent drop. If the gossip was true, the consequences would be "shocking," he said.

Li's comment, which he made at a discussion on global financial imbalances last week at the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in the Indian city of Hyderabad, was aimed directly at fellow panelist Tim Adams, the U.S. Treasury undersecretary of international affairs.

The unspoken message was: "Don't try to talk the dollar down." And Adams knew better than to ask, "Well, what are you going to do about it?" The answer to that question has already begun taking shape: Asia may be getting ready to fix its currencies to a local anchor, dumping the region's unofficial dollar peg.

Even as they continue to pile up U.S. debt in their foreign- exchange reserves to keep their currencies stable against the dollar, Asian nations, China among them, are preparing for a scenario where the dollar does indeed collapse under the weight of a record U.S. current account deficit.

At the Hyderabad meeting, finance ministers of China, Japan and South Korea got together with their counterparts from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean. The 13-nation group said it would sponsor a research project, titled "Toward greater financial stability in the Asian region: Exploring steps to create regional monetary units."

Asian Currency Unit

This is no innocuous academic exercise. Regional monetary units are a euphemism for a parallel Asian currency, an idea that has been around since the 1997-98 financial crisis and is now, for the first time, entering the realm of policy making.

Both Japan and China are extremely serious about it and are vying to take ownership of the project.

An Asian Currency Unit, or ACU, will be an index that seeks to capture the value of a hypothetical Asian currency by taking a weighted average of several of them. The weight for a particular currency in the index may be determined by the size of the economy and the quantity of its total trade.

What's the big deal with the ACU? Given the data, anyone can set up an index. It isn't that Asia is talking about replacing its national currencies with the ACU. A European-style single currency in Asia is at least decades away. The ACU is an accounting unit; it won't change hands in the physical world.

The ACU will start making a difference when it becomes the fulcrum of exchange-rate management in Asia. There is some sign that Asian nations want to do just that.

A New Peg

Korea, Japan and China agreed in Hyderabad to "immediately launch discussions on the road map for a system to coordinate foreign exchange policy."

The ACU can help a lot in such coordination. It can become a basket peg against which any Asian nation can fix the value of its currency within a band. The ACU, itself, will float.

Why might the ACU work when the now-defunct European Currency Unit, on which the concept is modeled, didn't? One good reason, as noted by economist Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley, is that Europe's need for a parallel currency was satisfied by the dollar.

The ACU may well emerge as a viable currency for denominating export invoices, bank loans and bond issuances if the dollar is no longer perceived as a safe storage of value.

So far, Japan has been driving the ACU concept. Haruhiko Kuroda, a former Japanese vice minister of finance and currently the president of the Asian Development Bank, was vigorously pursuing it. The ADB was going to start computing and publishing several ACUs sometime this year.

China in Control

One such ACU would have comprised 13 members, including the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the Korean won and the currencies of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and the Philippines. Another ACU would have included both the yuan and the Taiwan dollar -- and that would have been anathema to China. Nor would China have liked to peg the yuan to an ACU that was overly dominated by the yen.

Now China has taken control. While the research will still be conducted in Japan, Asean will take the decision on the composition of the ACU. While Japan is a member of this club, its influence is in decline. The association is now firmly under China's thumb.

While China continues to exhort the U.S. not to follow weak- dollar policies, it, like everyone else, can only guess about the longevity of the present global imbalances.

If there is a sudden collapse in the dollar, the U.S. appetite for imported goods may vanish. The Chinese export engine may seize up and its fragile banking system may collapse under a spate of new bad loans. The idea behind the ACU is to buy some insurance, however inadequate, against all of this.

Stalemate

With its "my currency is your problem" attitude, the U.S. has made a negotiated settlement of global imbalances a diplomatic non-starter. China isn't willing to consider the U.S. argument that quicker appreciation of the yuan may prevent a costly adjustment later.

Once again in Hyderabad, Undersecretary Adams tried valiantly to get this message across to Chinese Vice Finance Minister Li. He was wasting his breath.
Li, as Adams noted wryly, "knows all my talking points."

The fact that this correction of a massive structural imbalance in the world economy coincides with the looming collapse of a world political and military hegemony makes the situation all the more perilous. The following article published last week by William Engdahl details how the United States, in a desperate roll of the dice, just lost the Great Game:

America's Geopolitical Nightmare and Eurasian Strategic Energy Arrangements

F. William Engdahl
May 7, 2006

Part I: The disintegration of the Bush Presidency

By drawing attention to Iraq and the obvious role oil plays in US policy today, the Bush-Cheney administration has done just that: They have drawn the world's energy-deficit powers' attention firmly to the strategic battle over energy and especially oil. This is already having consequences for the global economy in terms of $75 a barrel crude oil price levels. Now it is taking on the dimension of what one former US Defense Secretary rightly calls a 'geopolitical nightmare' for the United States.

The creation by Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld and company of a geopolitical nightmare, is also the backdrop to comprehend the dramatic political shift within the US establishment in the past six months, away from the Bush Presidency. Simply put: Bush/Cheney and their band of neo-conservative warhawks, with their special relationship to the capacities of Israel in Iraq and across the Mideast, were given a chance.

The chance was to deliver on the US strategic goal of control of petroleum resources globally, in order to ensure the US role as first among equals over the next decade and beyond. Not only have they failed to 'deliver' that goal of US strategic dominance. They have also threatened the very basis of continued US hegemony or as the Rumsfeld Pentagon likes to term it, 'Full Spectrum Dominance.' The move by Bolivian President Evo Morales, following meetings with Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, to assert national control over oil and gas resources is only the latest demonstration of the decline in US power projection...

Part II: Disintegration of US Eurasia Strategic Influence

A Foreign Policy disaster over China

In this context, the recent diplomatic insult from Bush to visiting China President Hu Jintao, is doubly disastrous for the US foreign position. Bush acted on a script written by the anti-China neo -conservatives, to deliberately insult and humiliate Hu at the White House. First was the incident of allowing a Taiwanese 'journalist,' a Falun Gong member, into the carefully-screened White House press conference, to rant in a tirade against Chinese human rights for more than three minutes, with no attempt at removal, at a White House filmed press conference. Then came the playing of the Chinese National Hymn for Hu. The 'Chinese' hymn, however, was the (Taiwan) Republic of China hymn, not the (Beijing) Peoples' Republic hymn.

It was no 'slip-up by the professional White House protocol people. It was a deliberate effort to humiliate the Chinese leader. The problem is that the US economy has become dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of US Treasury securities. China today is the largest holder of dollar reserves in form of US Treasury paper with an estimated $825 billion. Were Beijing to decide to exit the US bond market, even in part, it would cause a dollar free-fall and collapse of the $7 trillion US real estate market, a wave of US bank failures and huge unemployment. It's a real option even if unlikely at the moment.

China's Hu didn't waste time or tears over the Bush affront. He immediately went on to Saudi Arabia for a 3 day state visit where both signed trade, defense and security agreements. Needless to say, this is no small slap in the fact to Washington by the traditionally 'loyal' Saudi Royal House.

Hu signed a deal for SABIC of Saudi Arabia to build a $5.2 billion oil refinery and petrochemical project in northeast China. At the beginning of this year, King Abdullah was in Beijing for a full state visit. Hmmmmm... Since the Roosevelt-King Ibn Saud deal giving US Aramco and not the British exclusive concession to develop Saudi oil in 1943, Saudi Arabia has been regarded in Washington as a core strategic sphere of interest.

Hu then went on to Morocco, another traditional US sphere of interest, Nigeria and Kenya, all regarded as US spheres of interest. Hmmmm. Only two months ago Rumsfeld was in Morocco to offer US arms. Hu is offering to finance energy exploration there.

The SCO and Iran events

The latest developments around the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Iran further underscore the dramatic change in the geopolitical position of the United States.

The SCO was created in Shanghai on June 15, 2001 by Russia and China along with four former USSR Central Asian republics-- Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Prior to September 11 2001, and the US declaration of an Axis of Evil in January 2002, the SCO was merely background geopolitical chatter as far as Washington was concerned. Today the SCO, which has to date been blacked out almost entirely in US mainstream media, is defining a new political counterweight to US hegemony and its 'one-polar' world.

At the next June 15 2006 SCO meeting, Iran has been invited to become a full SCO member.

Last month in Teheran, the Chinese Ambassador, Lio G Tan announced that a pending oil and gas deal between China and Iran is ready to be signed.

The deal is said to be worth at least $100 billion, and includes development of the huge Yadavaran onshore oil field. China's Sinopec would agree to buy 250 million tons of LNG over 25 years. No wonder China is not jumping to back Washington against Iran in the UN Security Council. The US had been trying to put massive pressure on Beijing to halt the deal, for obvious geopolitical reasons, to no avail. Another major defeat for Washington.

Iran is also moving on plans to deliver natural gas via a pipeline to Pakistan and India. Energy ministers from the three countries met in Doha recently and plan to meet again this month in Pakistan.

The pipeline progress is a direct rebuff to Washington's efforts to steer investors clear of Iran. Ironically, US opposition is driving these countries into each others' arms, Washington's 'geopolitical nightmare.'

At the same June 15 SCO meeting, India, which Bush is personally attempting to woo as a geopolitical Asian 'counterweight' to China, will also be invited to join SCO. As well, Mongolia and Pakistan will be invited to join SCO. SCO is gaining in geopolitical throw-weight quite substantially.

Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mohammadi told ITAR-Tass in Moscow in April that Iranian membership in SCO could 'make the world more fair.' He also spoke of building an Iran-Russia 'gas-and-oil arc' in which the two giant energy producers would coordinate activities.

US out in cold in Central Asia

The admission of Iran into SCO opens many new options for Iran and the region. By virtue of SCO membership, Iran can now take part in SCO projects, which in turn means access to badly-needed technology, investment, trade, infrastructure development. It will have major implications for global energy security.

The SCO has reportedly set up a working group of experts ahead of the June summit to develop a common SCO Asian energy strategy, and discuss joint pipeline projects, oil exploration and related activities. Iran sits on the world's second largest natural gas reserves, and Russia has the largest. Russia is the world's second largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia. These are no small moves.
India is desperate to come to terms with Iran for energy but is being pressured by Washington not to.

The Bush Administration last year tried to get 'observer status' at SCO but was turned down. The rebuff - along with SCO's demands for a reduced American military presence in Central Asia, deeper Russia-China cooperation and the setbacks to US diplomacy in Central Asia - have prompted a policy review in Washington.

After her October 2005 Central Asian tour, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced re-organization of the US State Department's South Asia Bureau to include the Central Asian states, and a new US 'Greater Central Asia' scheme.

Washington is trying to wean Central Asian states away from Russia and China. Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul has not responded to SCO's overtures. Given his ties historically to Washington, he likely has little choice.

Gennady Yefstafiyev, a former general in Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, says, 'The US's long term goals in Iran are obvious: to engineer the downfall of the current regime; to establish control over Iran's oil and gas; and to use its territory as the shortest route for the transportation of hydrocarbons under US control from the regions of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea bypassing Russia and China. This is not to mention Iran's intrinsic military and strategic significance.'

Washington had based its strategy on Kazakhstan being its key partner in Central Asia. The US wants to expand its physical control over Kazakhstan's oil reserves and formalize Kazakh oil transportation via Baku-Ceyhan pipeline, as well as creating the dominant US role in Caspian Sea security. But Kazakhstan isn't playing ball. President Nursultan Nazarbayev went to Moscow on April 3 to reaffirm his continued dependence on Russian oil pipelines. And China, as we noted back in December, is making major energy and pipeline deals with Kazakhstan as well.

To make Washington's geopolitical problems worse, despite securing a major US military basing deal with Uzbekistan after September 2001, Washington's relations with Uzbekistan today are disastrous. The US effort to isolate President Islam Karimov, along lines of the Ukraine 'Orange Revolution' tactics, is not working. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Tashkent in late April.

As well, Tajikistan relies heavily on Russia's support. In Kyrgyzstan, despite covert US attempts to create dissensions within the regime, President Burmanbek Bakiyev's alliance with Moscow-backed Prime Minister Felix Kulov, is holding.

In the space of 12 months Russia and China have managed to move the pieces on the geopolitical 'chess board' of Eurasia away from what had been an overwhelming US strategic advantage, to the opposite, where the US is increasingly isolated. It's potentially the greatest strategic defeat for the US power projection of the post World War II period...

At least the fall of the U.S. Empire offers some hope for Latin America. Here's the syndicated columnist, Charley Reese:

Capitalism Wasn't Working In Bolivia

Charley Reese

Bolivia's newly-elected president, Evo Morales, has nationalized the nation's oil-and-gas industry and says he will nationalize the timber and mining industries, too.

Good for him. Capitalism was obviously not working in Bolivia. How else can you explain that a nation rich in oil, gas and minerals is the poorest nation in South America? Obviously, the nation's wealth was not flowing to the people.

I confess I have no sympathy for corporations, multinational or otherwise. As a noted English cleric observed, the corporation "has neither a body to kick nor a soul to damn." Typically, multinational corporations find it is cheaper to bribe a dictator or crooked politician than to pay honest royalties and taxes. Thus they suck wealth right out of the country.

Morales has given the corporations 180 days to sign a new contract with the state-owned oil company, or they have to leave the country. In the meantime, he has ordered the Bolivian army to watch over the facilities - a smart move on his part - and sent in auditors to determine how much the oil companies should be compensated for the shares they will sell the government.

Morales has also signed a new trade pact with Venezuela and Cuba, so you can be sure he is on the Bush administration's bad-guy list. Our national scold, Condoleezza Rice, will soon be making catty comments about him. Come to think of it, she rarely has anything good to say about anybody but old George W. Unfortunately for her, the only people who pay any attention to anything she says is the lap-dog press in Washington. She is the silliest secretary of state in American history.

Ordinarily, I believe that a property-based capitalism is the best system. Unfortunately, that has been replaced by finance capitalism, and so we have to face the fact that when the super-rich and the giant corporations buy up all the assets and then sit on them, opportunity for average people shrinks almost to nothing.

That's always been the system in Latin America, and now the Bush administration is imposing the system on us. Congress and the president are bought and paid for. The deliberate influx of immigrants is driving down wages. The ability of corporations to shut their American plants and move them overseas is breaking the union movement. Wealth is accumulating in fewer and fewer hands - hence the proliferation of billionaires.

I hope Morales has a good personal security system. He is messing with big money, and messing with big money can get you killed almost quicker than anything else. People should recognize that money is power - the power to hire thugs and murderers, the power to shut down competitors, the power to corrupt the government. The only possible counterbalance to big money is honest government, which more or less lets us out, at least for the moment. One historian's theory on the rise and fall of empires is that when all the wealth accumulates at the top, the people rebel and the wealth is redistributed. Then the process starts all over. That's sounds plausible to me. If you've ever seen the Palace of Versailles, you can understand why the French revolted. That's the best symbol of greed and ego on the planet.

The old German Oswald Spengler, predicted in his book "The Decline of the West" that the Age of Money would be replaced by the Age of Caesars. That seems to be happening. Certainly George Bush is the most Caesar-like president we've ever had. There are so many laws he's decided don't apply to him that he can rightly be called a scofflaw. And like Rome when the republic died, the legislative branch lies supine on the floor, unwilling to challenge the usurper.

I believe men like Morales and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez represent the best hope of breaking the chains of poverty that have held Latin America behind for so many generations. I hope more countries will realize that toadying to the U.S. is the worst thing they can do for their own people.

The American foreign policy today is clearly imperialistic, and as an American whose loyalty is to the Constitution, I fully oppose it. It's too bad the Democrats are too gutless to oppose it, too.


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Editorial: Shanksville-Flight 93: Many Unanswered Questions Still Linger

by Lisa Guliani
WingTV.net

On May 1, 2006, after a 24-hour respite following our participation in New York City's huge April 29th anti-war rally, WING TV returned to the road once again with three destinations in mind: Shanksville, New Baltimore, and Indian Lake, Pennsylvania. Victor Thorn and I wanted to spend a couple of days in these locations and re-tread some of the area covered in our book, Phantom Flight 93: The Shanksville Flight 93 Hoax.

NEW BALTIMORE

New Baltimore is a scenic wilderness, accessed via one long narrow road that stretches for miles, descending deeper with every twist and bend while fringed by dense woods, fishing holes and wide swaths of forested mountain landscape. Eventually the winding country road brought us to a small street dotted with a few houses. We saw a man in his yard and pulled into the driveway to ask him a few questions about 9-11.

The man's name was Dave and he works as a prison guard. After giving him a brief overview of why we were there, he invited us into his home for coffee. We spent the better part of an hour asking him about 9-11, and Dave openly expressed his doubts as to the official government version of events. He told us not to expect to see much of anything at the temporary memorial site for Flight 93 in Shanksville, because there isn't much of anything to see. Dave was very intrigued by all we related to him regarding the anomalous nature of the official story and equally perplexed by the lack of wreckage and debris shown in the photos on the cover of our book. We could see the wheels turning in his head. He said he would ask around and try to learn more information and get back with us. Dave directed us to speak with a woman who works at the post office just down the road from his home who could point us in the right direction for information.

The post office was nothing more than a pint-sized white shack; and the worker there told us we needed to head over to St. John's Church and speak with a woman named Melanie. This would be Melanie Hankinson, to whom we refer in Phantom Flight 93. We found Melanie inside the lovely church and she related to us her story of 9-11. Melanie says the lawn maintenance man from Beauty Lawn heard a loud "bang" and subsequently informed Melanie that there were papers blowing all over the churchyard. Upon inspection, she found not only papers littering the property, but also small pieces of metal. Melanie also told us that the FBI had set up a trailer in New Baltimore after Flight 93 purportedly crashed in the field at Shanksville, and locals were advised to bring all recovered debris to this trailer and hand it over to the Feds. Subsequently, she and other residents of the community dutifully delivered bags of debris to the FBI as directed. Along with papers and checks, Melanie also found small pieces of metal in the churchyard, which she said the FBI identified as pieces of the plane's underbelly. Keep in mind that New Baltimore is roughly 6-8 miles away from Shanksville and the wind speed on the morning of September 11th in that area was only 9-10 mph.

Prior to leaving New Baltimore, we spoke with a woman named Mrs. Oster, whose husband Charlie saw two additional airplanes in the near vicinity of Flight 93 (or something purporting to be Flight 93) on the morning of September 11th. After asking a few questions, she very undeniably said that she, as well as her husband, felt that this airliner had been shot from the sky. Victor then spoke with Mr. Oster via telephone, and he confirmed the sightings of other small white planes flanking Flight 93.

INDIAN LAKE

Indian Lake resembles a picture postcard. It's sprinkled with nice looking homes, a marina, and a couple of sprawling golf courses. We spoke with several folks at both the marina and the private golf course. Please keep in mind that Indian lake is 1-2 miles from Shanksville.

Stephanie Childers works in the Pro Shop at a private golf course. She told us that she saw Flight 93 intact and in the air on the morning of 9-11 from Hoffman's Nursery, approximately 3-4 miles away. She drew us a diagram to illustrate the plane's approach and described how she saw it descending as it flew, and then how it abruptly went into a vertical nosedive and subsequently crashed. She claims to have seen the windows of Flight 93. Stephanie said that at the time it impacted, she thought there was a bomb on the plane.

Standing next to Stephanie Childers was a man named Bob Pile, who had been listening to our discussion. Bob recalled "what seemed like buckets of gravel" hitting the roof of his house on the morning of 9-11 around the time of Flight 93's reported impact. Bob says his home is one mile away from the crash site. He thinks it is very odd that gravel would reach his home over that distance, and had no explanation as to how this might have happened. We asked him how an airplane as large as Flight 93 could fit into a hole of such significantly smaller dimensions and showed him a representative diagram of the plane and crater dimensions, and he shook his head, unable to reconcile the disparity in dimensions.

Another local named Charles McCauley chimed in at this point. McCauley described the debris he'd recovered from his property - black seat backings that the FBI identified as coming from Flight 93. Charles had no idea how these pieces of plane seats could have made their way the few miles to his house. McCauley, like many others, turned this debris over to the FBI. Both Pile and McCauley described lots of paper, parts of magazines, some solid matter (pieces of seats and metal) and checks carried by the wind in the days following 9-11, all of which was determined by the FBI to be from Flight 93.

After touching base with some more folks at Indian lake, we then proceeded to Shanksville. The people at Indian Lake had advised us to contact local realtor Valencia (Val) McClatchey, who took the infamous photo of a red barn with the mushroom cloud behind it, which appears on the cover of our book and has made its way through the vast spectrum of mainstream and alternative media venues since the events of 9-11.

SHANKSVILLE

We spoke with lots of people while in Shanksville, none of whom recalled smelling the unmistakable odor of burning human flesh on 9-11-01. We did call Val McClatchey and met with her at her real estate office. She was initially pleasant and businesslike, but as soon as we showed her our Flight 93 book, McClatchey became very surly, hostile, and defensive. During the first few minutes in her office, she described being at her home on the morning of 9-11 and hearing the purported plane crash. She said she ran and grabbed her camera, which - conveniently enough - was sitting right by the front door, and snapped her famous photo at a distance of one mile from the crash site. When questioned by us, she abruptly poo-pooed the possibility that Flight 93 might have been shot down or brought down by some other means on the morning of 9-11, and became irate when we again produced our diagram, asking how such a massive plane could fit entirely into a crater of such small proportions. We explained how scientifically and physically impossible it would be for this to happen. At this point, McClatchey's eyes began shooting daggers at us, and she became positively livid when we pointed out that the mushroom cloud in her photo is more reminiscent of an ordnance blast than a jet fuel column. She seemed more inclined to discuss the supposed lawsuit she has brought forth against the Associated Press over her 9-11 photo, apparently in an attempt to intimidate us. McClatchey has previously threatened to sue at least one other 9-11 researcher known as "Killtown" regarding this same photograph, a threat which has thus far not amounted to anything.

She then stated that she "didn't want to be around any people who question the government." Incidentally, her photo is prominently displayed throughout the city of Shanksville, in Somerset County, and is being sold at Ida's Restaurant for $20.00. Val funnels $18 from every photo sale to the Todd Beamer Foundation. But I digress. Approximately 10-15 minutes into our interview, McClatchey suddenly and unexpectedly jumped from her seat and rudely threw us out of her office, mocking and labeling us "conspiracy theorists". We point out that this realtor had no intelligent or coherent responses to the valid questions we raised, nor was she able to explain the anomalous nature of the purported plane crash. In fact, she simply dismissed the discrepancies regarding the plane and crater. Why muddy the water with facts, right Val?

We were quite intrigued by this woman's responses and her absolute unwillingness to consider basic inconsistencies with the official story. Our visit with McClatchey has served to fuel our interest even further as to just what is going on in Shanksville. In its wake, 9-11 has provided some interesting "opportunities" for at least some Shanksville locals, and the recent release of Hollywood's United 93 movie promises a potentially lucrative future for the previously unknown (pre-9/11) community. Val McClatchey made it unmistakably clear to us that she intends to milk her 9-11 claim to fame for all it's worth, truth be damned.

Ironically, we tried to use a cell phone several times while in Shanksville and the surrounding areas. We couldn't get a signal at all, no matter where we were, from the ground. This in itself is pretty interesting wouldn't you say, considering all the supposed phone calls made at 35,000 feet on the morning of 9-11?

Also, every person we spoke to told us a different rate of speed regarding Flight 93's final moments prior to impact - the speeds ranging from 330 mph to 700 mph. We couldn't get the same story twice. The more people we spoke to, the more it appeared that hardly anyone actually saw anything firsthand other than multiple sightings of Flight 93 in mid-air on the morning of 9-11. We have located no one to date who actually witnessed the plane crash-landing. Instead, we listened to many accounts from locals who appeared to be repeating what they had been told.

MORE COMMENTS FROM SHANKSVILLE LOCALS

Firefighter Rick King, owner of Ida's Restaurant

Rick couldn't explain how such a huge airplane could fit into such a small sized crater either, but quickly added that he doesn't see anything "unusual or out of the ordinary" about the official story. When asked if accident reports were filed by the NTSB for Flight 93, he stated in the affirmative. We told him the accident report, if any was filed, has not publicly emerged. He had no comment. When asked, he denied noticing any stench of burning human flesh on 9-11. However, he was able to parrot the now all-too familiar unsubstantiated tale of how debris, wreckage and human remains were found at the crash site. Naturally, he had no qualifier for this tale, and no plausible explanation as to why such a seeming wealth of wreckage, remains, and debris is mysteriously absent in publicly available photos of the Flight 93 crash site. We asked how we could locate the Mayor of Shanksville, Ernie Stull, and were advised that the Mayor was in poor health, suffering from congestive heart failure. We decided not to try to question him because of this information. Another interesting observation about Rick King: The entire time we spoke with him, he kept looking nervously from side to side and peering behind him, as if concerned about who might be watching/listening to him talk with us. Less than 15 minutes after coming out to speak with us on the sidewalk, he abruptly ended the interview and ran back into Ida's Restaurant.

Bob Schmucker, "Ambassador of Flight 93 temporary memorial"

Bob told us that the entire fuselage of Flight 93 had been pulled from the crater, describing it as "looking crumpled-up like aluminum foil when they took it out." He told us three local excavating companies were used to dig out whatever was allegedly in the smoking hole, and the excavators had gone as deep as 50 feet. He could not or would not name them. Schmucker stated that we had valid, serious questions and directed us to speak to Somerset coroner and funeral director, Wally Miller, who appears to us to be the point man in this whole mess. Schmucker also stated that a mound on the property allegedly contains both human remains from Flight 93 and ground tree limbs. He cited Wally Miller as the source of this information. This mound is located within the fenced-in area adjacent to the temporary memorial, behind the spot where the crater used to be. The crater is now completely filled in and inaccessible to the public. In fact, they don't even want you walking up to the fence line.

Vicky Rock, correspondent for The Daily American (Somerset County)

Vicky told us that not all of the people allegedly aboard Flight 93 had been identified in the analysis of human remains after the crash. She related to us that a DMORT team had assisted the FBI and the coroner Wally Miller in making positive identifications. DMORT is an acronym for "Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team". DMORT's own website states that all of the people onboard Flight 93 were ultimately identified. However, this local correspondent firmly stated otherwise to us. She suggested we speak with Wally Miller for further clarification, which we did later.

I spoke again with Vicky Rock on May 10, 2006, and once again she refuted Miller's statement regarding the Flight 93 identifications. This time, she cited a recent comment made by a victim family member, Betty Kemmerer, who was related to Flight 93 passenger Hilda Marcin of Mt. Olive, NJ. At a meeting, Kemmerer wanted still unidentified human remains to be entombed at the memorial site. According to Vicky Rock, Kemmerer was told by officials that "they would take care of it".

Curiously, we could not purchase a copy of the September 12th issue of The Daily American from the newspaper's circulation department. We were told these issues are inaccessible and in storage, and were not allowed to photocopy the framed article from that specific date which hung on the wall of the newsroom. So, we had to make a trip to their local library, where we photocopied all of the librarian's collected news clippings pertaining to the days immediately following 9-11. Ms. Rock expressed little - if any - interest when we informed her that several of the purported passengers of Flight 93 have yet to appear on the Social Security Death Index listed as deceased, despite Miller's issuance of presumptive death certificates shortly after 9-11. She did not give us the impression that she was curious about this strange phenomenon, and during my telephone conversation with her on May 10th, she stated that neither she nor the newspaper intends to investigate the passenger list oddities, saying, "We don't think there is any story there". No story there? People issued death certificates who were purportedly killed during a 'terrorist" attack in her own community, yet not showing up on official sources as deceased years later - and this is not worthy of a second look or minimal investigation on the part of the local newspaper? Seems to me the flags at the memorial aren't the only things flapping in the wind. Speaking of furious flapping...

Wally Miller, Somerset Coroner and Funeral Director

This was the man we'd been itching to meet, since Miller was the point man who should have been able to tell us all we needed to know about Flight 93 wreckage, remains, and debris. You would think so, right? We thought Val McClatchey's behavior was suspect, but let me stress to you that it was nothing compared to what we've encountered with Wally Miller. Wally was easy enough to find, but we weren't exactly given the hometown welcome, or a civil greeting for that matter. We distinctly got the impression that he had been tipped off that we were coming to talk to him, and he grew increasingly agitated during the 3-4 minutes we were graced with his presence while standing at the side doorway of his funeral home. We had just finished walking through Wally's funeral home looking for and calling out to him, with no response. The whole place appeared shut-down and by all appearances, nothing was going on there that day in the way of viewings, etc. All the lights were off, no chapels were set-up for wakes, no flowers delivered or set-out in chapel rooms; nothing one would typically expect to see preceding such funerary-type events. When he finally answered the side door, Wally was dressed in jeans, not the somber attire of a busy funeral director. Still, Miller stressed to us how busy he was, how he had a lot going on that day, and how he had no time to talk to us. He made it sound like there were viewings scheduled and families arriving (May 2nd), yet there were zero signs of any of this during our previous walk-through of the funeral home. Plus, our car was the only one in his parking lot.

Wally immediately said he did not want to answer any questions about the movie (which we hadn't intended to ask him about anyway) and followed that up with, "I don't want to answer any questions about the remains or the wreckage." Odd, no? Who else should we ask about the remains and the wreckage if not the man who was one of the first to arrive upon the crime scene and who had jurisdiction over it? He spent the first two and a half minutes of our attempt to speak to him trying to convince us how extremely unavailable he would be that day. We tried to schedule him for later on in the afternoon to no avail. I then asked Miller if he would be open to talking to me on the phone, and he agreed to this. During our final thirty seconds at Wally's side door, I did manage ask him if all the people aboard Flight 93 had been identified, and he agitatedly said "yes".

I then repeated the contradictory comment made to us by correspondent Vicky Rock, whose statements refuted Miller's. Remember, Rock told us on that same day (May 2, 2006) that the Flight 93 identifications were incomplete and not everyone had been positively identified. Miller became even more flustered when I questioned him about this contradiction, barking out, "Yes, yes, everyone was identified." Since Miller was supposedly in charge of the Shanksville crime scene, in our view, he is a man with some answers. Strangely enough, many people had told us to go see Wally and they said he would be happy to talk to us. He has been described as a solid rock of the community and 'Mr. Unflappable". Yet clearly Wally was not happy to see or talk to us. From his demeanor, we might as well have been trying to sell him encyclopedias. Miller is cited in several 9-11 reports as having jurisdiction over this crash site, at least until the FBI descended upon the scene and claimed authority over the investigation.

I have spoken with Wally Miller via phone twice since May 2, 2006. On May 10th, during the first call attempt, Miller pretended not to remember his agreement to talk to me by phone from just a few days ago - and when I refreshed his memory, he promptly snarled, "Nahh, nahh, I've got nothing to say to you people." He then hung up on me. This took place within the span of about 33 seconds. I waited a while and then made a second call to Wally, and this time I managed to keep him on the phone a bit longer. However, Wally "Unflappable" Miller was fit to be tied during this second call. He raised his voice, "What questions? What questions?" And instead of allowing me the time he had previously agreed upon days ago and allowing me to ask my questions, he interrupted repeatedly with, "What is your theory?" I tried to explain that all I wanted to do was ask him some basic questions that really need answers, but he kept yelling instead of answering. In response to the above bellowing, I calmly stated that I didn't think the government has been entirely truthful about the events of 9-11. He responded with, "That's a bunch of hooey!!" He used words like "half-truths" in reference to the comments made to us about the fuselage by Bob Schmucker at the memorial site.

Due to his apparent and unconcealed agitation, it was very difficult talking with Miller, or even asking any of the questions I'd compiled. I brought up the matter of how several people from Flight 93, for whom he had issued presumptive death certificates shortly after 9-11, have not appeared listed as deceased on the Social Security Death Index. He became irate, and his answer was, "I don't work for the Social Security Administration." It's kind of hard for me to believe that Mr. Unflappable has conducted himself in this same fashion during countless hours of interviews he'd given in the past to scores of media correspondents. So WHY would Wally Miller flip out like this with me before I even had an opportunity to ask more than one or two of the 22 questions I'd compiled? In fact, he has acted in this manner from the very first second he saw us at his door. The question is, why?

Considering his strange responses, I asked him if he was under a gag order and unable to talk to me about the wreckage/remains. He quickly denied this, stating that he'd given many interviews before; and then in the same breath he proceeded to hurl a name at me in between the yelling. He told me to contact Bill Crowley from the FBI and ask him my questions. Bill Crowley, eh? So, Miller isn't under a gag order, but he immediately referred me to the FBI for information. This is very interesting, especially since Miller has remained accessible for so many previous mainstream interviews and has spoken at length with journalists over the last 4 ˝ years. He apparently felt comfortable enough in doing those interviews, but curiously, not this one.

Moreover, if you examine those past Miller interviews, they are all pro-official story, pro-government conspiracy theory. They were softball fluff interviews, all vomiting the same questions and canned responses like a script. Obviously, he had no problem maintaining his composure or modulating his voice during those Q & A sessions. You see, those reporters asked Wally, the Rock of Shanksville, the "right" questions. And you can bet your bottom dollar he didn't send mainstream reporters scurrying off to the FBI for answers to their fluffy questions. Nope, he simply fielded them himself. Yet, he became obnoxious, uncooperative, and high-pitched with me on the phone in a matter of minutes, and then punted me to Pittsburgh FBI agent Bill Crowley. Now remember, Wally denies he is under a gag order.

So, suddenly during our second phone call, Miller barked out, "I've read your business card!! Citizens to Discredit (unintelligible word). Are you kidding me?!?" I thought for a second and replied, "Sir, I don't think I gave you a business card. In fact, I know we never gave you a business card." There was a brief pause on the line, and then Wally Miller proceeded to hang up on me once again. How odd is this? In addition, my business card does not bear the words "Citizens to Discredit ..."

It's noteworthy that I had never met or spoken to the Shanksville coroner prior to May 2nd and have only achieved three minutes of actual face time with him thus far beyond the very few minutes he spent yelling at me and hanging up on me on two separate occasions on May 10, 2006. I have come away from these three interactions with a very distinct impression: Wally Miller is afraid to talk to me for some reason, and from where I sit he's not handling the pressure of potentially "dangerous" questions too well. I absolutely have never handed him a business card, so if he did manage to see my card, there are only a few possibilities as to where he might have seen one. Greg Chiapelli and Vicky Rock are two names that immediately come to mind, since we gave both of these individuals a business card. Wally must have realized he slipped up, and so he hung up instead of explaining how he could have read a card I never gave him. Wally ...you're flapping around like a big bird.

From what we could determine from those we spoke with, the FBI took control over everything involving the crash of Flight 93 from the second they arrived. They reportedly remained on the scene for approximately 2 ˝ weeks according to locals. Yet, Wally Miller also must know what was there at the crash site. He's the man who can tell us what we need to know about the plane wreckage, debris field, and human tissue remains identification. Yet, Miller isn't talking. He's flapping and balking, but he sure as hell isn't talking. It seems to me that Miller is owned by the FBI. All indicators point to a cover-up. Not surprisingly, all roads are leading toward the FBI.

Corporal Buncich, Pennsylvania State Police

We asked Officer Buncich if he had any information regarding an area of New Baltimore being cordoned off by the FBI and State Police on 9-11. He did not deny that this may have happened, but said that they had to report to any and all areas where debris/wreckage/remains had been reported on the morning of 9-11 and the days that followed. When asked if we could see copies of the State Police reports, he stated there were no reports filed by the State Police regarding 9-11, which we found most peculiar. No reports filed by the State Police? We were told that the FBI had taken charge of the crash site and investigation, and that they were the information gatherers. Buncich, with a knowing smile, coyly suggested we inquire with the FBI, adding that they would most likely be uncooperative with us.

Greg Chiapelli, Somerset Hospital, Director of Media Relations

Mr. Chiapelli advised us that Somerset Hospital received no bodies from the purported crash of Flight 93 on 9-11. We asked him if he knew of any area cordoned off in New Baltimore by the Feds and State Police, and he denied any knowledge of this. I asked him if he knew of any phone call made to Somerset Hospital on the morning of 9-11, during which ER personnel were advised to prepare to receive victims from two separate plane crashes. He was silent for a moment, and then stated he was unaware of any such call. He then proceeded to tell us that he felt very uncomfortable talking to us and would need to check us out and get clearance before he could speak any further. We asked him why he needed to "check us out" before he could talk to us about 9-11, and he replied "I have never heard of you. I need to check you out first." We provided him with our business cards for this purpose. We couldn't get him to say anything else except that he would contact us once he checked out who we were and what we do. Not surprisingly, we haven't heard from him at this point, so I will now be giving him a call to follow up.

Somerset County Volunteer Firefighter

One unidentified volunteer firefighter remarked to us that the FBI seemed to know what was going on from the minute they arrived upon the Flight 93 crash scene. He was very suspicious of this at the time, and remains so to this day. He told us that the information we want to know is most likely in the hands of the FBI or CIA and will probably never be made public. He didn't actually see anything himself, but simply repeated to us hearsay from other firemen and locals. Over and over, we listened to locals telling us about body parts and fingers being found and how human remains and plane wreckage had been discovered hanging in the infamous Shanksville crash site tree line. Yet, no publicly available photographic evidence to date supports these assertions. We wonder why many people are trying to push the notion that debris and remains would only be ejected onto one side of the crash site (the tree line), rather than on all sides, which makes much more sense. They claim that the reason we can't see any debris/wreckage/remains is because these materials are "obscured" by the trees. Yet, there should be ample evidence of debris/remains and wreckage on the other three sides of the crater as well as the tree line location. Available photos do not show any significant damage to the trees themselves, presenting only a partially burnt tree line. We have looked at some close-up photos of the trees; and no human remains, wreckage, or debris is visible. The damage presented in photos is, just as is the case with WTC 1 and 2, asymmetrical and leaves us with more questions than answers.

CONCLUSION

We also spoke with dozens of other Somerset County locals during our trip, including Terry Butler from Stoystown Auto Wrecker; two different employees of Rollock's Scrap Yard (one of whom said he saw the plane flying belly-up); and the night auditor at a motel in Somerset who provided us with some very interesting information. Needless to say, we will be returning to Shanksville in the near future to do some more digging into this puzzle. Furthermore, if our experiences in the last two weeks are any indication, this mess is going to get even weirder as the days roll by. WING TV will be heading back to Shanksville in the days ahead. The truth is out there somewhere.

[Original]
Comment on this Editorial

Editorial: AIPAC - Lobbies and Whistleblowers Yes!, Spies No!

by James Petras
www.dissidentvoice.org
May 3, 2006

The arrest of two leading members of the principal pro-Israel lobby AIPAC for procuring confidential information from a leading Pentagon official and passing it to an Israeli spymaster seems to be an open and shut case of espionage. This is especially so when the Pentagon employee later confessed and agreed to testify against the accused AIPAC leaders. AIPAC, after reviewing the case, decided to fire the two accused spies and stopped paying their legal expenses. The Israeli agent, recipient of the confidential information fled to Israel, and has refused attempts by the prosecution to interview him. The information disclosed to the Israeli state touched on very sensitive material pertaining to US strategy toward Iran and Iraq and was a grave matter of state, considering that the AIPAC functionaries passed on the information during wartime.

At first, the issue of AIPAC's involvement in a spy ring on behalf of Israel split the major pro-Israel organizations, out of fear of possible repercussions, or anger that it might hurt their credibility on pushing Israel's agenda. However the hard-line Israel Firsters soon went on the offensive, writing editorials, opinion pieces and pressing academic and professional groups to see the issue as a constitutional one of free speech. With time the liberal pro-Israelis jumped on the bandwagon pushing the issue as one of possible persecution of government whistleblowers, who act in the best interest of the government. There are many very solid reasons why the accused AIPAC leaders cannot be considered lobbyists, whistleblowers or investigative reporters seeking out "inside information."

Lobbyists, as we know them since the founding of the republic, represent a particular set of domestic interests (including foreign subsidiaries) pursuing specific sets of policies favoring the domestic groups, which they represent. Lobbyists, who represent the interests of a foreign government, are legal only when they register as foreign agents, pursuing policies, which favor their overseas paymasters. Organizations registered as foreign agents as well as all other organizations which seek and/or obtain confidential documents or information from the US government and transmit the information to foreign governments via spies in their US embassies (or directly overseas) are engaged in espionage and are chargeable as such.

The two former leaders of AIPAC charged with espionage by the Federal Government were not acting for a domestic constituency; they and their organization clearly identify their sole purpose as promoting the interests of the State of Israel. They and their organization did not register as agents of a foreign power, clearly in violation of the pertinent laws. Finally they and their organization did willingly and knowingly receive confidential information from a middle range Pentagon official regarding questions pertaining to US military strategy in a time of war and transmitted it to a Mossad agent doubling as a Political Secretary at the Israeli Embassy.

The US Government's case rests on the testimony of the former Pentagon official, the admissions and videos of the accused that they indeed received the said confidential information and relayed it to a foreign power.

The tendentious arguments put forth by apologists for the accused spies take various forms, usually attempts to blur the line between "common lobby practices" and passing confidential information to a foreign power. One argument is that "most" or "all" lobbyists, (and journalists, pundits and others), secure or try to obtain "inside" information "all the time." But this apology omits the relevant issue of securing and knowingly transmitting strategic military information vital to US war plans to a foreign power with its own specific regional interests in promoting or directing US foreign policy. Hardly a practice "most" lobbyists, if any, pursue. A further elaboration of the argument put forth by prominent ZionCons is that, the foreign power (Israel) is a "staunch ally" of the US, which "shares the same democratic values and strategic interests," converting espionage into merely "sharing intelligence." In fact some ZionCons not only defend the accused spies but chastise the US government for "holding back" information essential for Israel's security and implicitly suggesting that any high level US Administration Middle East policy debates and decisions, in principle, should be open to the Israeli Foreign Office, or at least the minutes should be forwarded to the State of Israel. No country, by law or practice is obliged to share any part of its strategic discussion with any foreign power, ally or not, at any time. This bizarre ideological concoction converts the US into a unique client of Israel... In the same vein, Israel vehemently guards, only for its eyes, all of its strategic discussions, decisions on war and peace, psych warfare, espionage and nuclear weapons plans etc from all US officials at all times. All the major pro-Israeli organizations automatically and wholeheartedly defend Israel's closed policy to the US even as many consider espionage a legitimate exercise in "information sharing".

Predictably extreme ZionCons have even gone so far as to characterize the spy investigation against the leading AIPAC functionaries as an "anti-Semitic" witch-hunt attempting to curtail "legitimate lobbying" activity. No evidence of "anti-Semitism" is ever presented, except for the charging of two Jewish functionaries of AIPAC of receiving and handing over to Israel confidential information. By the same token the trial and conviction of master spy Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, should be liberated and his prosecutors arrested for "hate crimes", i.e. anti-Semitism since Pollard merely exchanged several truckloads of top-secret documents with Israel. In fact, every Israeli Prime Minister has pressured US Presidents for his release to Israel where many consider him a "hero."

Fox News reporter, Carl Cameron, relying on FBI reports, documented the arrest and expulsion of over one hundred Israeli spies blatantly prowling the Pentagon and other government and military facilities between September 11 to December 30, 2001. The sheer scale of Israeli espionage operations in the US and their high-level intelligence and military operatives' access to the offices and intelligence of the US Pentagon during the Paul Wolfowitz-Douglas Feith (numbers 2 and 3 at the Pentagon) tenure may have created a sense of immunity for the AIPAC operatives in passing secret information to Israeli agents. Given the clear-cut distinction between public lobbying for specific legislation favorable to a national constituency and engaging in the secret transmission of top secret war information to a foreign power, the arrest of the "AIPAC Two" offers no threat to legitimate lobbying, to Jewish organizations or even to journalists seeking inside dope to secure a journalistic scoop.

Some Jewish and Gentile legal commentators and journalists have raised the issue of "free speech," that the arrest of the "AIPAC Two" is an infringement of the Bill of Rights and a threat to our Constitution. These legal experts apparently are unaware of the difference between speech ("We are unconditional supporters of the State of Israel") and criminal action -- obtaining highly confidential information and transmitting said information to a foreign government. To argue for "free speech" one would have to call for freedom to act on behalf of a foreign government, in time of war, in accordance with the war agenda of that foreign government. This would mean that Benedict Arnold, a kind of ersatz "lobbyist" for imperial Britain should have been released for passing documents against the independence of the United States, since he was only expressing his opinions...

The issue is not AIPAC's right to stand on a soap box declaring its fealty to Israel at every twist and turn, they have been doing that from the day of their founding and have never been prosecuted. Indeed, they have received the adulation of every President and 95% of the Congressmen and women to the tune of $5 billion dollars a year in "aid" to Israel. What is in question is when securing a yearly tribute from the US taxpayers crosses a clearly demarcated line and enters the arena of securing confidential documents and passing them over to Israel. Publicly securing "big bucks" from Congress to give to the Israeli State is legal, covert espionage for Israeli Intelligence is not or at least unless AIPAC decides to lobby Congress to pass such enabling legislation in which spying for Israel is exempt from our country's espionage laws. The defense of the accused AIPAC spies by certain progressives, including the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff, Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and even Daniel Ellsberg who argue that their prosecution will intimidate whistle blowers from exposing government malfeasance to public scrutiny. Whistle-blowers do not secure confidential information in order to inform foreign governments engaged in war plans (Iran) which will cost US taxpayers billions and the US military thousands of dead and maimed. A whistle-blower is concerned with government or corporate integrity; the activity of the Pentagon official and his AIPAC collaborators compromised the security of the US and increased the military capacity of a foreign government. Whistle-blowers seek to improve governance, the accused spies deliberately called into question out national sovereignty. Concerned whistle-blowers in the past, present and future will not be intimidated by the arrest of a Pentagon official for turning over confidential information to spies of a foreign country; their exposés are public and accord, in most cases, with the publicly articulated ethical norms of their office which are being violated by their higher-ups. The arrested Pentagon official did not go public to denounce his superior in the Pentagon, Zionist Douglas Feith for cooking up false data on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction as he might have. Instead he acted covertly, and transmitted confidential information to Israeli agents to pass on to the state of Israel in order for it to formulate a policy pushing the US toward an unprovoked, preemptive war with Iran. By this, I am suggesting that there is not only a legal basis for the espionage trial of the two AIPAC employees, but a basis for a substantive and informed judgment condemning them for aiding and abetting a brutal, aggressive, colonial power (Israel) to leverage US strategic policies into a murderous attack against Iran.

Finally some ZionCon cynics argue that since the Israel lobby is so influential and the Administration has been and continues to be riddled with pro-Israeli policy-makers, why do they need to burn two key lobbyists in the major lobby group? Since we in the US lack a comparable lobby to AIPAC in Israel and lack insiders privy to the inner workings of their secret services, we can only make some educated guesses. First and foremost, the Israeli state's intelligence services work many sources for intelligence, from official visits by friendly US policy-makers, one-sided exchanges with US intelligence agencies, to information flowing from individual and organized loyalists, to academic research, to paid Israeli agents (like Jonathan Pollard). AIPAC's spying could be simply one more source, to corroborate, confirm or contradict other sources of intelligence. Given the recent unprecedented power of the pro-Israel lobby, where Presidents, Vice Presidents, Cabinet secretaries, Congressional leaders and Governors pledge their unconditional support of Israel and even openly proclaim that US-Middle East wars are for the defense of Israel, there was no reason to suspect that a little AIPAC espionage would result in a federal prosecution. In fact, the US State and the population at large are deeply divided on the issue of fighting Middle East wars for the state of Israel. Israel and its lobby's high-powered campaign for a military attack on Iran has provoked strong opposition from former top officials, the military, the CIA -- both retired and active -- as well as from tens of millions who suffer the consequences of our "foreign entanglements."

A test of strength between the opposing camps is being waged in the prosecution or release of the accused AIPAC spies. A successful prosecution would, at least, raise questions about the purposes and legitimacy of the pro-Israel war lobby. The dismissal of charges, which seems very possible or probable (given the mass one-sided propaganda effort), would be one more victory (this time in the Judiciary branch) for the pro-Israel powerhouse, which already has dominant influence in the Congress and the Executive branches of the government. A judicial victory would mean that the Lobby has political immunity to go about its business of promoting Israeli power by any means necessary. A democracy thrives on dissent; a democracy dies from deceit.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, owns a 50-year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser to the landless and jobless in Brazil and Argentina, and is co-author of Globalization Unmasked (Zed). His book with Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and State Power: Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina, was published in October 2005. He can be reached at: jpetras@binghamton.edu.

Original
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Editorial: Israeli Soldiers Shoot Two International Peace Activists In The Head

International Solidarity Movement
12/05/2006

Israeli Soldiers Shoot Two International Peace Activists In The Head at Bil'in

May 12th, 2006 | Posted in Press Releases, Bil'in Village, Video, ISM Media Alerts, Photos


To view the video footage that Phil, who was hit in the head with a rubber bullet, was filming when he was shot click one of these links: Streaming. Download. In the clip you can see how close the demonstartors were to the soldiers when the soilders opened fire - the sound of the shots fired is clearly audible.

"I saw blood gushing out of his head, and helped bandage it. As we were getting him into the ambulance an Israeli soldier grabbed his long hair and they all tried to stop him from leaving in the ambulance even though they knew he was injured", said American eyewitness Zadie Susser who saw Phillip Reiss from Austraila sitting in shock immediately after he was hit.


At today's Bil'in demonstration, Israeli soldiers shot seven Palestinians with rubber bullets. One Australian and one Danish demonstrator were hospitalised after being shot in the head with rubber bullets at close range.

AFP Cameraman Jamal Al Aruri was shot in the hand with a rubber bullet while he was filming two of his fingers were broken. Adeba Yasin (65) was hit by a rubber coated bullet under her eye while she was sitting on the balcony of her home.

Phillip Reiss (25) from Sydney, Australia was shot as he was running away - he had been filming the demonstration. BJ Lund (21) from Ry, Denmark was also shot as he was standing near army jeeps. Both Phil and BJ are currently in Tel Hashomer hospital in Tel-Aviv. The bullet caused a hemorrhage to Phil's brain, though he is now conscious. BJ required stitches to the head.



Abed Al Karim Khatib (60) was hit by a rubber coated bullet in his private parts, Abed Albased Abu Rahme (15) was hit on his thigh by a rubber coated bullet and Waleed Mahmoud Abu Rahme (20) was hit in his abdomen by a rubber coated bullet. Mohammad Ahmad Issa was hit in the leg with a rubber bullet. Wajdi shokut (18) was hit by a rubber coated bullet in the hand

Ashraf Muhammed Jamal (24) was hit by a tear gas canister aimed at his head.



Abdullah Abu-Rahme (35 and the Co-ordinatior of the Bil'in Popular Committee Against the Wall), Muhammad Al Katib (32, also from the Popular Committee) and Akram Al Katib (34) were beaten.

The demonstration of about 300 people had marched, singing, chanting and waving flags to the gate in the apartheid barrier.

This week, the gate had been locked open, so the Israeli soldiers relied on their jeeps and barbed wire to stop the people of Bil'in from walking into their land. After a while, some of the demonstrators started to open the barbed wire. The Israeli soldiers started hitting people with clubs. A few rocks were thrown from a small group of youth who were away from the main demonstration in front of the jeeps. The soldiers then started firing on the peaceful demonstrators at near point-blank range as they were running away - they were a maximum distance of 10 meters away when shot.

According to Israeli Human Rights group B'Tselem, Israeli Military Regulations stipulate that "the minimum range for firing rubber-coated steel bullets is forty meters. The Regulations emphasize that the bullets must be fired only at the individual's legs, and are not to be fired at children" Israeli soldiers fire rubber-coated steel bullets at Palestinian children during the Bil'in demonstration every week. Israeli demonstrator Matan Cohen was recently shot in the eye during a demonstration in Beit Sira. He now has only partial sight in that eye.

The Israeli military usually uses rubber bullets during demonstrations when Israeli and international activists are present. When Palestinians demonstrate on their own the military uses live ammunition or rubber coated steel bullets.


Two of the demonstrators that were shot from close range were filming the demonstartion. British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith confirmed on the 6th of May he was considering whether to seek the extradition and prosecution of an Israeli soldier who shot dead British cameraman James Miller in Gaza, after a jury in a British inquest unanimously agreed that "Mr Miller was indeed murdered"

Eleven Palestinians have been killed by Israeli soldiers during non-violent demonstrations against the apartheid wall.

On Sunday, May 14, the Israeli Supreme Court will hear Bil'in's legal challenge over the theft of their land by the illegal wall.

Bili'in villagers have been protesting the wall nonviolently for the last 15 months and have become a symbol of Palestinian-Israeli-International cooperation.

The route of the wall in Bil'in is designed to annex the settlement of Modi'n Elite and it's outpost, Matityahu Mizrah, to Israel along with the land belonging to Bil'in so that these illegal settlements can continue to grow.

In a separate court case brought by the village and Peace Now against the new settlement of Matityahu Mizrah, the High Court was told of a land-laundering scheme that allowed the real-estate dealers and settler organizations to convert private land - "purchased" sometimes through dubious means - into "state land.." Then, before the construction of the separation barrier, the land was "returned" to the buyers so that they could establish facts on the ground and press the Defense Ministry into moving the route of the fence to the east of the new illegal neighborhood.

After being prodded by the Supreme Court, the Israel Police's National Fraud Squad opened a criminal investigation into the illegal construction of hundreds of housing units in the Matityahu East "neighborhood" of the Modi'in Ilit settlement.

According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, hundreds of millions of dollars are believed to have changed hands in the affair.


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I Spy


Online Groups Reveal Details, Legalities of NSA Surveillance

By K.C. Jones
TechWeb.com
Fri May 12, 2006

Recent reports that the National Security Agency spied on Americans expand upon allegations in federal lawsuits alleging that telecommunications companies helped the NSA secretly spy on Americans.

In the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class action lawsuit against AT&T, a former phone company technician explained how he thinks he unknowingly assisted the program toward the end of his 22-year career with the company. Though Mark Klein's declaration is under seal, other federal court documents provide a glimpse into how the retired AT&T communications technician believes his company cooperated. Internet liberties advocates claim the programs are illegal.

"Mr. Klein was required to connect fiber optic circuits carrying AT&T customers' private Internet-based data to a device that diverted that same data to a room controlled by the government," his layer wrote in papers filed in federal court last week.
"When reports of the government's extensive surveillance program surfaced in December 2005, Mr. Klein realized that he was a witness to (and unwitting participant in) a massive effort that had the effect, if not the purpose, of violating the rights of millions of Americans."

Klein's lawyer also explained that Klein repaired and maintained fiber optic cables that carry Internet data from all over the world through an AT&T central switch in San Francisco.

"What he observed - that the signal carrying the Internet data over the fiber optic cables was "split" such that an exact copy of the data was redirected to the National Security Agency - had been the topic of public discussion months before he went public with his observations," court document state. The filings were part of an attempt to lift the seal from Klein's full statements, which would likely reveal even more detail.

Intelligence leaders and the White House claim the NSA has always operated within the law and that its surveillance programs are crucial for maintaining national security. They have argued military and state secrets privileges should allow them to keep the details of surveillance under wraps and that presidential war powers allow the surveillance.

A statement released on the non-partisan Center for Democracy & Technology Web site this week, tackles those arguments and claims that the surveillance appears to be illegal no matter how it was done.

"If the program involved real-time interception, it probably violated both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the statute on interception of call detail information in criminal cases," the center's analysis claims. "Both statutes require a court order for interception of information about calling patterns, even if the content of the communication is not collected."

The CDT claims FISA defines "content" in broad terms, including not only the substance of communications but also information that the communication occurred. The group also claims that even non-content information requires a "pen register." The CDT cites two federal laws prohibiting the NSA from retrieving stored information, without obtaining prior judicial approval.

Section 222 of Title 47 of the United States Code requires telecommunications carriers to protect confidentiality of proprietary information relating to carrier services. Section 2702 of Title 18 in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act prohibits electronic communications service providers from knowingly divulging a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber or customer to any government entity without customer consent, subpoena or court order. The privacy act also creates civil liabilities and provides for minimum fines of $1,000 per violation, punitive damages and attorney fees.

"This latest disclosure reinforces what CDT and others in the public interest community have been saying for months," CDT stated. "Congress needs to conduct a comprehensive in-depth and public inquiry into the scope of warrantless domestic surveillance."

The U.S. Department of Justice just closed an investigation into wiretapping the administration claimed was targeted at international communications because investigators were denied access and information. The revelation this week that domestic call information is stored in a huge database that could likely analyze call patterns - and match patterns with other databases containing personal information - is prompting renewed calls for investigation among advocacy groups and elected representatives.

The CDT stated that American citizens and leaders should have a full understanding of whether the "snooping is properly focused," rather than accepting assurances that the NSA spying programs respect the rights of ordinary Americans.



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NSA routing internet data thru Amsterdam to monitor U.S. websites and e-mail

by Tom Flocco

Tulsa-May 15, 2006-TomFlocco.com-An internet routing plot plan verifying the exact travel of website data has revealed that stories and other communications e-mailed from a Pennsylvania computer to be posted at a server in Tulsa, Oklahoma are first routed into Denver / Colorado Springs and then across the Atlantic to Amsterdam, Holland, back through Denver and then to the hosting server in Tulsa.

The discovery was made by the webmaster for TomFlocco.com after becoming curious about the internet route taken by the data and the length of time it took to post a new story when the data only had to travel over the webmaster's phone line across the state to the hosting server in Tulsa.

After contacting a U.S. intelligence source, we were told that Department of Justice (DoJ) investigators have identified an Israeli intelligence internet provider in Amsterdam as a co-conspirator with both the National Security Agency (NSA) and Verizon-MCI in the ongoing Bush administration spy intrusion into the private and personal lives of millions of Americans without their previous knowledge or permission.
Another federal agency official with long-time experience and impeccable credentials told us, "MCI is an NSA shadow company. Just remember that MCI equals NSA and you'll always be correct in your research and investigation."

On February 14, 2005, Verizon announced its intention to purchase MCI for $6.7 billion, after which the company became involved in a strained bidding war with Qwest Communications.

MCI investors sharply criticized the Verizon takeover which was recently finalized; but federal prosecutors probing NSA spying will have reason to subpoena Verizon regarding whether the Bush administration's approval of Verizon's MCI takeover had anything to do with the company's willingness to provide private phone and email records to the NSA to spy on U.S. citizens.

U.S. intelligence sources within the Special Operations Group (SOG) are reporting that NSA computers have been downloading financial and personal files of all American citizens as a result of upgrades to the Echelon satellite network and software program which is part of the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS).

SOG says the NSA has a "7-10 second lead time" which effectively affords the agency the opportunity to delay the release of currency, stock and bond sales transactions permitting a criminal advantage to agency officials and other high-level associates who game the system of the world's financial markets to steal investment capital from both U.S. and foreign citizens throughout the world.

Personal phone service shut down after posting story

A TomFlocco.com phone call on Friday to Verizon seeking comment for this report on why the company provided personal phone records to the NSA without the knowledge or permission of its customers resulted in a "no comment" response from a Verizon spokesperson identifying herself only as Mrs. Singh: "We are not able to comment on whether we have cooperated with the NSA in this matter since this is a classified issue; but we're confident that we are within the law. We are protecting your privacy but we cannot comment further."

When we asked whether Verizon would deny helping the NSA to spy on Americans, Mrs. Singh's response was "we cannot comment on that."

We also asked to speak to the Verizon legal or security departments, or even the consumer public relations department for a comment; but we were told "We appreciate that this matter is causing concern among our customers but it will not be possible for you to speak to either group. We cannot comment on whether we cooperated with the NSA because it's classified."

Later that afternoon, wide news reported indicated that Verizon was sued for $5 billion for illegally providing phone numbers and records to the NSA without the knowledge or permission of Verizon customers.

On Saturday evening after the Friday call to Verizon, we posted a short new story, "Phone companies help NSA spy on personal computers for enemies list" in the IN BRIEF box at TomFlocco.com.

After the story was posted, our personal office hard-line telephone service with Verizon was shut down at about 1:30 am Sunday morning with that office line remaining out of service for over 23 hours before this story was posted online.

Internet IP address logs from this writer's computer firewall security system provide evidence that the Department of Defense (DoD) is conducting surveillance, since logs show DoD internet identification numbers during specific occasions while we conducted phone interviews with intelligence agents and other sources, and also while reports were being researched and word processed for stories regarding White House crime family activities.

NSA spying on dial-up, high-speed internet e-mail and websites for 'enemies list'

A U.S intelligence source wishing to remain anonymous but who has direct knowledge of the operations said U.S. cable internet corporations have joined the widely-reported telephone company operations to assist in compiling the largest database in history on American citizens while "using super-secret 5th generation Cray computers to tap into dial-up, DSL and high-speed broadband internet connections which have satellite voice recognition and keystroke monitoring capabilities."

This is the first indication that the NSA is also monitoring websites and personal e-mail communications of American citizens without their knowledge or permission.

The government official said "the voice patterns and voice print recognition comes from the original Inslaw systems which are hooked up to E-Systems Dallas voice recognition software and linked over to the NSA."

The long-time agent added that "part of the reason they are spying on Americans is to create an 'enemies list' of those critical of George W. Bush," adding "the monitored phrases and words trigger networks of contacts between people around the country who are inter-related to other activists regarding issues such as the Iraq War, NSA spying, illegal immigration and critical reporters."

The unnamed official also told us "the U.S. and foreign intelligence community has been using lead bags for the purpose of preventing satellite surveillance and physical reconnaissance ever since the Bush administration commenced a national spy program."

On condition of anonymity, the source added, "driver's licenses are already set up with chips for future use in capturing financial, medical and other personal and/or private records and information for use by the Bush administration and Congress to maximize tax compliance, national identification or for potential political purposes."  

NSA/Treadstone spy-death lists?

The Bush spy program enemies list "would be used to organize groups for internment camps-particularly the big camp being developed in northeast Yuma county, Arizona where most of the 'problem patriots and activists' would be housed if Mr. Bush is allowed to remain in power during another major terrorist or biological event," said the unnamed federal agent.

An October 27, 2001 report in the Houston Chronicle confirmed the existence of secret surveillance lists, and that NSA lawyers ordered a massive shredding program of the names and phone numbers of innocent Americans in late October, 2001; but the NSA made copies of the unlawful list, according to two former U.S. officials.

Federal prosecutors will likely have interest in the fact that the NSA reportedly mailed the list to then Under Secretary of State and current White House Chief of Staff John Bolton who emailed the list to Treadstone Space #77 in Colorado.

"All political critics of the Bush or Clinton families have had their names, phone numbers and addresses stored by the NSA at Treadstone Space #71/77," said national security expert Thomas Heneghan, who confirmed another federal agent's assertion that the NSA is being assisted by MCI regarding the Bush administration spy operation on the American people.

"#77 is the Colorado division of # 71 in New York State which is also linked to secret FBI Division 5 operations connected to both the Bush and Clinton families without the knowledge of U.S. citizens," added Heneghan.

The national security watchdog said "the Bush-Clinton crime families are planning a bird flu pandemic as an excuse for a temporary martial law government to cover up ongoing corruption and crimes committed against the American people."

A flu pandemic would allow Mr. Bush to suspend constitutional rights and round up patriot critics on the NSA/Treadstone death-spy list where they could transport innocent U.S. citizens who are politically outspoken to internment camps in locations such as the one in Yuma county, referred to earlier by another federal agent.

Heneghan added that U.S. Senate Leader and GOP presidential candidate William Frist and House of Representatives Democratic Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi are both aware of the Treadstone death list and also the Bush administration spy operations conducted by the NSA-both overseas and in the United States.

Representative Rahm Emanuel (D-IL-5) was identified by Heneghan as "an Israeli intelligence operative in Congress who actually carries copies of the updated [NSA/Treadstone] death-spy list to his office each day," raising questions as to whether alleged operatives loyal to foreign governments are only welcome in the U.S. House of Representatives.



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Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

By KATHERINE SHRADER
Associated Press
Sat May 13, 2006

WASHINGTON - A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.
"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

After last year's hurricanes, the agency had an unusually public face. It set up mobile command centers that sprung out of the backs of Humvees and provided imagery for rescuers and hurricane victims who wanted to know the condition of their homes. Victims would provide their street address and the NGA would provide a satellite photo of their property. In one way or another, some 900 agency officials were involved.

Spy agencies historically avoided domestic operations out of concern for Pentagon regulations and Reagan-era executive order, known as 12333, that restricted intelligence collection on American citizens and companies. Its budget, like all intelligence agencies, is classified.

On Clapper's watch of the last five years, his agency has found ways to expand its mission to help prepare security at Super Bowls and political conventions or deal with natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires.

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up - and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

Clapper says his agency only does big pictures, so concerns about using the NGA's foreign intelligence apparatus at home doesn't apply.

"We are not trying to examine an individual dwelling, for example, because what our mission is normally going to be is looking at large areas," he said. "It doesn't really affect or threaten anyone's privacy or civil liberties when you are looking at a large collective area."

When asked what additional powers he'd ask Congress for, he said, "I wouldn't."

Comment: Clapper can spy on anyone, anywhere, at any time. What more power does he need??


His agency also handles its historic mission: regional threats, such as Iran and North Korea; terrorist hideouts; and tracking drug trade. "Everything and everybody has to be some place," he said.

He considers his brand of intelligence a chess match. "There are sophisticated nation states that have a good understanding of our surveillance capabilities," including Iran, he said. "What we have to do is counter that" by taking advantage of anomalies or sending spy planes and satellites over more frequently.

Adversaries who hide their most important facilities underground is a trend the agency has to work at, he said.

NGA was once a stepchild of the intelligence community. But Clapper said it has come into its own and become an equal partner with the other spy agencies, such as the
CIA.

Experience-wise, the agency is among the youngest of the spy agencies. About 40 percent of the agency's analyst have been hired in the last five years.

"They are very inexperienced, and that's just fine. They don't have any baggage," said Clapper, who retires next month as the longest serving agency director. "The people that we are getting now are bright, computer literate. ... That is not something I lie awake and worry about."



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Bush defends spy agency's US phone record collection; Verizon sued

AFP
May 13, 2006

WASHINGTON - US President George W. Bush moved to quell a firestorm over his government's secret collection of telephone records of tens of millions of citizens, insisting they were needed to "target Al-Qaeda".

But the latest controversy has already spawned a major lawsuit against Verizon, one of the telephone companies involved, and members of Congress expressed unease over what they see as erosion of privacy.

The lawsuit, filed in New York on Friday, seeks five billion dollars in damages from Verizon, alleging that the company broke the law by agreeing to provide the National Security Agency with its clients' telephone records.
The plaintiffs argue that phone companies should not cooperate with the NSA, which specializes in electronic espionage, without a proper court warrant based on a well founded "suspicion of terrorist activity or other criminal activity".

But in his weekly radio address, Bush rushed to assure the public the secret program did not target innocent citizens.

"It is important for Americans to understand that our activities strictly target Al-Qaeda and its known affiliates," he said Saturday.

But he gave no answer to questions raised in Congress as to why a program with a purported narrow target would need such a massive database.

The existence of the program was first disclosed this week by USA Today, which said the database compiled by the NSA following the September 11, 2001 attacks contained phone records of tens of millions of Americans provided by AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth.

Officials would not provide any details on how the records were used. But former government security experts and media reports indicated that its genesis lay in US phone numbers found on Al-Qaeda suspects captured overseas.

These numbers, the experts said, immediately became the focus of the NSA's attention, with the circle of surveillance growing exponentially as calls were made to or from the numbers in question.

Specially designed computer programs watch for patterns in these contacts and analyze them to make sure no terrorist cell is operating within the United States.

Bush said the intelligence activities he had authorized were "lawful" and that members of Congress from both parties had been adequately briefed.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he insisted. "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval."

The new controversy follows charges that Bush may have broken the law when he authorized the NSA in the wake of September 11 to conduct wiretaps -- without a court-issued warrant -- of international phone calls made by Americans suspected of terrorist ties.

But while the wiretaps put the White House on the spot, the new revelations could mean a world of legal and financial trouble for the phone companies.

The lawsuit in New York was filed under the 1986 Stored Communications Act, which expressly forbids the companies from turning over customers' records to the government without a warrant.

The statute also gives consumers the right to sue for violations of the act and allows claims of at least 1,000 dollars for each violation.

"If you've got 50 million people, that's potentially 50 billion dollars," said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and a former White House adviser on privacy issues.

A Newsweek poll released Saturday showed that a majority of Americans, 53 percent, believe the NSA's telephone database goes too far in invading privacy.

But in a Washington Post and ABC television poll released Friday, 63 percent said the secret program was acceptable.



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NSA has your phone records; 'trust us' isn't good enough

USA Today Opinion
Fri May 12, 2006

The government is secretly collecting the phone records of millions of Americans.

Stop and think for a moment about the meaning of that simple, startling fact, exposed Thursday in a remarkable report by USA TODAY's Leslie Cauley.

In the narrowest interpretation, of course, it is benign. Possibly even helpful. It means that the National Security Agency (NSA) - the Pentagon-run spy agency that monitors communications - is using a new tool to hunt terrorists: Monitor phone traffic to identify threats and stop them.

This is all it means, President Bush told the public Thursday in a brief appearance aimed at quelling the instant outrage provoked by the story. He assured Americans that their civil liberties were being "fiercely protected" and that the government was "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

In other words, never mind appearances. Trust us.

Well, that is not all it means. Nor can the president's promise to protect privacy be reliably kept.
The fact that the government is trying to track (but not wiretap) every call you make and every call you receive - at home or on your cellphone is, to say the least, disturbing.

It means that your phone company (if you are a customer of AT&T, BellSouth or Verizon) tossed your privacy to the wind and collaborated with this extraordinary intrusion, and that it did so secretly and without following any court order.

That is, unless you're lucky enough to be served by Qwest, the one major phone company that had the integrity to resist government pressure.

It means that unless public opposition changes the government's course, this database will be compiled, updated and expanded into the indeterminate future, through countless administrations with who-knows-what interests and motives.

Only the most naive and unsuspicious soul could trust that it will remain safe, secured and for the eyes only of those hunting terrorists.

One need look no further than past abuses of power to be uncomfortable about the future.
Richard Nixon during Watergate. Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War. J. Edgar Hoover during his long reign as
FBI director.

Even assuming that the Bush administration's motives are pure, and that this program merely looks for patterns of calls that could reveal terror networks, it raises a number of troubling questions:

Is it legal? Bush insists it is, but that's questionable. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires a court order to gather a person's current phone records. A 1934 law requires phone companies to protect customers' privacy. And the Fourth Amendment forbids "unreasonable searches and seizures."

Is it useful? Taken as a whole, such a database is of dubious utility. U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies are already suffering from an abundance of raw information and a dearth of good intelligence. Looking for suspicious patterns among billions of phone numbers seems like the ultimate search for a needle in a haystack.

Is it foolproof? These types of databases invariably have errors. The federal terrorist "watch list," which is used to screen airline passengers, has ensnared a number of innocent travelers - among them Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., and a 23-month-old toddler - whose names are similar to, or the same as, suspects on the list. Once you're mistakenly targeted, the error can be nearly impossible to fix and your life can be turned upside down.

Will it be abused? Maybe not at first. Over time, however, this vast quantity of data is a potentially irresistible tool for government officials who want to zero in on individual Americans.

At the very least, one can imagine this information being used by law enforcement agencies trying to trace people who have attracted their attention but about whom they don't have enough information to justify a court order. Or to look for whistle-blowers who have leaked sensitive information to reporters.

Consider what happened in the 1960s and '70s, the last time federal law enforcement and national security agencies launched mass snooping expeditions against U.S. citizens. The FBI, which became a clearinghouse for the data, sent them to the CIA, the Justice Department and the IRS, where some of the data were used in tax probes.

"Information that should not have been gathered in the first place has gone beyond the initial agency to numerous other agencies and officials, thus compounding the original intrusion," concluded a committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, which investigated and reported on the abuses in 1976. The amount of information was "so voluminous," it was difficult "to separate useful data from worthless detail."

NSA's technological capabilities, the Church Committee wrote, are a "sensitive national asset" valuable to the national defense. Even so, it warned, "if not properly controlled ... this same technological capability could be turned against the American people, at great cost to liberty."

The panel's conclusions about NSA are as valid today as they were then.

The phone record program serves as a powerful reminder of how, in a digital age, records can be compiled and analyzed in ways you are unaware of.

And combined with a separate NSA program (revealed in December by The New York Times) to eavesdrop without warrants on international calls from the USA, it raises the question of what other secret and constitutionally suspect programs the Bush administration might still be shielding.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA for six years and is now Bush's nominee to be CIA director, is a master of evasion. Speaking in January about the international eavesdropping, he said the program is not a widely cast "drift net" but is narrowly "focused" and "targeted."

Perhaps. But, at the time, he was fully aware of a program that is many of the things the other is not. A 2006 version of the Church Committee is needed to investigate the anti-terror programs created in the scary aftermath of 9/11, and the Senate should hold up Hayden's nomination until all its questions are answered.

Creating a huge, secret database of Americans' phone records does far more than threaten terrorists. It is a deeply troubling act that undermines U.S. freedoms and threatens us all.

The White House declined to provide an opposing view to this editorial.



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Dick Cheney pushed for unfettered domestic wiretaps

AFP
May 14, 2006

NEW YORK - US Vice President Richard Cheney pushed after the September 11 attacks for practically unlimited intercepts of domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without court warrants in the hunt for terrorists, a US newspaper reported.

Citing two unnamed senior intelligence officials, the The New York Times newspaper said lawyers for the National Security Agency, reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted in late 2001 that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country.

The NSA's position ultimately prevailed. But just how General Michael Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary NSA officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear, the report said.

President George W. Bush on Monday named Michael Hayden to lead the CIA.
By several accounts, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks, the paper pointed out.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country, The Times said.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970s and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans, the report noted.

As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Cheney and Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, according to The Times.

If people suspected of links to Al-Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done," the paper said.

It quotes one of the officials as saying that there was "a very healthy debate" over the issue.

The vice president's staff was "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the NSA lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not," the official said.

Both officials said they were speaking about the internal discussions because it was important for citizens to understand the interplay between Cheney's office and the NSA.



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War Pimp Cheney's suspicions of Iraq WMD probe, CIA spy outed in legal documents

AFP
Sun May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - US Vice President Richard Cheney was deeply suspicious of a 2002 probe into whether Iraq had tried to purchase uranium ore from Niger, as well as of a CIA operative's personal role in the effort, newly released legal documents show.

The documents, filed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald in federal court here, contain direct evidence that Cheney believed Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative at the time, might have helped engineer a trip to Niger by her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, on a mission not authorized by the White House.
The trip, undertaken on behalf of the CIA, helped dispel suspicions that the government of Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein had tried to procure the ore known as "yellowcake" from the African nation as part of a secret effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.

Charges that Saddam was trying to build an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction served as the prime rationale for the launch the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. No such weapons have subsequently been found.

Wilson publicized his findings in a 2003 article in The New York Times, in which he accused the Bush administration of "exaggerating the Iraqi threat" in order to justify the war.

His conclusion also undercut an assertion made by
President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Shortly thereafter, Plame's name was illegally leaked to conservative columnist Robert Novak, who made it public by including it in his column, effectively ending the woman's
Central Intelligence Agency career.

The documents, filed by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald Friday, do not contain a smoking gun pointing to a specific White House employee behind the leak, which is now the subject of a criminal investigation.

But they show that Cheney was upset by both Wilson's mission to Niger and Plame's suspected role in launching it long before her public outing.

The filing contains a copy of Wilson's article with angry notes scribbled by the vice president on the margins.

"Have they done this sort of thing before?" Cheney queried. "Send an amb. (ambassador) to answer a question? Do we ordinarily send people out pro bono to work for us? Or did his wife send him on a junket?"

According to the documents, Cheney also notified his then-chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA about four weeks before her identity was illegally disclosed.

That contradicts Libby's earlier assertions that he had learned about Plame from the media.

Libby was formally indicted last year for making false statements, obstruction of justice and perjury. The indictment was chiefly based on his denials that he ever discussed Plame's role in the yellowcake matter with journalists.

In his filing, Fitzgerald told the court he planned to use the article with Cheney's notes at Libby's trial, which is expected to begin in January.

He insisted the article had "acutely focused the attention of the vice president and the defendant" and was "relevant to establishing some of the facts" in the case.

Some legal experts believe Cheney is likely to be summoned to testify at Libby's trial.

The Fitzgerald probe is also focused on chief White House political strategist Karl Rove, who has been called to answer questions about the leak five times.

Meanwhile, court papers released last month reveal that Libby testified that he had been "specifically authorized" by
President Bush to disclose the "key judgments" from a 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq.

This authorization is largely seen as part of a broader White House campaign to discredit Wilson and his findings.

More information about the case is likely to come to light in Plame's future book. She is reported to have signed a 2.5-million-dollar deal with Crown Publishing.



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Israel vs. Palestine: View from Afar


The Stability and Value of Israel

May 13 / 14, 2006
By MICHAEL NEUMANN
CounterPunch

Norman Finkelstein ("The Israel Lobby", tries to present a balanced view on the Israel lobby. He succeeds, but that's not all he does. He also offers a set-piece passage proclaiming Israel's value to the United States. Pro-Palestinian writers--and there is no more passionate or impressive defender of the Palestinians than Finkelstein--seem to do this out of reflex, and it's perverse. Finkelstein's claims about Israel's value are just as destructive to the Palestinian cause as any common sense person would suppose.

Fortunately they are also false.
Finkelstein says:

"The claim that Israel has become a liability for U.S. "national" interests in the Middle East misses the bigger picture. Sometimes what's most obvious escapes the eye. Israel is the only stable and secure base for projecting U.S. power in this region. Every other country the U.S. relies on might, for all anyone knows, fall out of U.S. control tomorrow. The U.S.A. discovered this to its horror in 1979, after immense investment in the Shah. On the other hand, Israel was a creation of the West; it's in every respect--culturally, politically, economically--in thrall to the West, notably the U.S. ... Combined with its overwhelming military power, this makes Israel a unique and irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East."


This is untenable. For one thing, Israel's brand of security is not very useful to the United States. Israel's existence is secure but its military position is, shall we say, tense. To varying degrees and in various ways, it is in armed confrontation with all its neighbors. In fact it is in armed confrontation with most of the the neighbors of its neighbors, and many of *their* neighbors too. Then there are longer-range, long-term threats. Iran, though not about to wipe Israel off the map, is strong and growing stronger. Should Musharraf fall, Israel may well acquire a nuclear-armed enemy in Pakistan, and any change in the Gulf States or Egypt would almost certainly usher in much more militantly anti-Israel rgimes.

No doubt, for the foreseeable future, Israel could obliterate even its strongest enemies with nuclear weapons, perhaps at the price of its own obliteration: is this the sort of security America ought to value? Compare Israel to the some of the allies who, over the years, have actually committed troops to reinforce American ventures--England, for example, or France, Canada, Germany, Holland, Poland, Italy and Australia. These are countries whose local strategic situation enables them to send large proportions of their military resources hundreds or thousands of miles from their border, for long periods of time. The are pretty well without enemies and don't need to threaten nuclear holocausts to keep their opponents at bay. Israel is not such a country.

In arguing for Israel's stability, Finkelstein asserts that "...what's most important at the popular level. Israel's pro-American orientation exists not just among Israeli elites but also among the whole population." Is that so? I thought there were Palestinians living in Israel. They probably aren't ferociously pro-American or even ferociously Zionist. Their numbers and birth rate are significant enough to constitute what's called a demographic time bomb. In addition there are Israeli dissidents who, like Mordechai Vanunu, are willing to compromise Israel's most important military secrets. Yes, Israel is quite stable, but one must not exaggerate.

Furthermore, what does 'projecting US power' mean? What exactly is this projection system supposed to be? If the US sends troops to the region, it does not do so via Israel. If it sends ships, it does not use Israeli ports. If it sends aircraft, it does not use Israeli airfields. It may use Israeli intelligence a bit, but it also uses Jordanian, Saudi and Egyptian intelligence, and its own monitoring systems do not depend on Israeli satellites. Israel does not supply the US with oil or other vital resources for its military operations. Israeli banks do not wire secret US funds to Middle Eastern capitals. Nor, contrary to Zionist fantasy, is Israel a 'beacon of democracy' to any nation. For thirty years, Israel has granted no say in its government to the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territories, over whom it holds the power of life and death: if anything would sour Middle Eastern people of democracy, it would be Israel's version of it. Israel and the US collaborate on defense projects and some military training, but this is trivial. Western Europe or Canada could easily take up the slack were these relations severed. And most likely at least the Canadians would not spy on the US or sell US technology to China, like some other country one could mention here.

The countries that help US efforts in the Middle East--with oil, bases, airfields, intelligence, ports, pretty much everything--are the Gulf States. These are also the countries which, along with Syria and Egypt but unlike Israel, actually fought side by side with the Americans against Iraq in 1990. Finkelstein apparently thinks these countries might fall out of US control 'tomorrow'. In the first place, Finkelstein has an odd notion of tomorrow; he cites the example of Iran in 1979. That was almost 30 years ago! Iran was utterly unlike the Gulf States: unlike the Shah, their rulers largely share their subjects' religious convictions, do a far better job of providing for their welfare, and have a far more manageable territory to control.

It is true that pundits have been predicting the collapse of Gulf states any day now. The trouble is that 'any day now' has lengthened into many years, with no sign of any such collapse.

All dissent has been suppressed with ease and terror attacks have had only the most limited success. Moreover there is no chance whatever that the US would permit hostile forces to take over the Gulf States: precisely because Iran is lost, Gulf States oil is indeed indispensable. The idea that Gulf States governments, with full US support a stone's throw from their cities, could not prevail over any revolt arising from their sparse, well-off populations, is laughable. Moreover these countries are quite as much 'in thrall' to the US as Israel. Indeed one wonders which Arab states have not moved *closer* to the US since 1979--even Syria, which was a military ally of the US in the first war with Iraq. So, in the first place, Israel offers nothing to the US, and, in the second, other countries provide very secure bases for US action. The most secure bases of all, though, float on the sea. The US relies on its fleet and can easily launch devastating attacks without any land bases at all. So the geopolitics that make Israel an essential base are quite mystifying.

Then Israel is supposed to have indispensable, overwhelming military power. If the power is indispensable, why did the US dispense with it on the only occasions when it might have come in handy, namely the last two Gulf Wars? If it is overwhelming, why is it that Israel was almost overwhelmed in its last real war, in October 1972, when it avoided defeat only because the US came in and replaced the weapons it had lost in the fighting? Why couldn't Egypt replace Israel as a US ally? Is it somehow less capable of receiving massive US aid? Egypt's instability--which is probably less than supposed--would quickly vanish were it so lucky as Israel with American largesse, and were America to wean itself of its attachment to Israel, which discredits all Middle Eastern governments that receive US support.

As a last resort, proponents of the 'valuable ally' dogma insist that Israel intimidates its neighbors. That's true, but it's not the point. Why would anyone think that the US needs Israel to do this? America can, has, and does intimidate Israel's neighbors, and their neighbors, very effectively, all on its own. Why then is Israeli intimidation so valuable?

The view that Israel is an indispensable ally is a contagious disease of the Zionist imagination. We are taught to regard Israel as standing shoulder to shoulder with the US government in some nebulous battle. What battle is that? The US fights all its battles without Israel, and always has. As for Israel's supposed prowess in all things military, technological and espionage related, this is another myth. Israel has had all manner of intelligence pratfalls and certainly did not spare the US from the Middle Eastern attackers on 9-11, nor did it ever get Iraqi military capabilities right.

Last time we looked, its battlefield performance was less than impressive, though of course it is very good at bullying Palestinians armed with the equivalent of slingshots--oh, and sometimes slingshots are literally all they have to fight with. But the idea that Israel is an indispensable US ally is more than false; it is deadly to the Palestinians.

If Israel is indispensable, then the Palestinians might as well forget about having minimally tolerable lives, because only breaking the US-Israel alliance can spare them their agonies.

The break cannot occur unless America realizes that Israel is a huge liability: it is not as if the American government will suddenly gush with compassion for the Palestinians and change its ways out of pure altruism. The rest of the world doesn't matter: it could hardly be clearer that Israel, with America as its ally, can thumb its nose at the rest of the world.

That's the situation which the false doctrine of Israel as valuable ally perpetuates.

Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. Professor Neumann's views are not to be taken as those of his university. His book What's Left: Radical Politics and the Radical Psyche has just been republished by Broadview Press. He contributed the essay, "What is Anti-Semitism", to CounterPunch's book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. His latest book is The Case Against Israel. He can be reached at: mneumann@trentu.ca.



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A promised land of their own

By Larry Garber
14 May 2006

According to Profs. Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, there is a monolithic, pernicious "Israel lobby" representing American Jews, influencing the United States to act against its own interests.

According to recent research by the American Jewish Committee, four out of five American Jews do identify with Israel, but that leaves many, including Haaretz's Shmuel Rosner, wondering about "the fifth Jew." Are there really a million American Jews who feel no link to Israel - and if so, why? Additionally, a recent report focusing on attitudes of the 20- to 40-year-old Jewish cohort demonstrates that young American Jews find the Holocaust to be a more compelling reason to "feel Jewish" than Zionism. And, according to Haaretz's Amiram Barkat, writing in response to A.B. Yehoshua's comments ("Alienated Jews," May 7), some Israelis return the favor, deprecating the relationship with American Jews as a "harmful anachronism."
There are many contradictions here. No matter how sloppily the Walt-Mearsheimer article was researched and written, few Jews deny that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other large Jewish institutions lobby successfully for Israel. Meanwhile, along with the outrage mainstream leaders have voiced about their portrayal, there may be for some a lingering feeling of "if only" the lobby was indeed as omnipotent and united as Walt and Mearsheimer fear.

In truth, there is not one lobby on behalf of Israel but many, and the relationship between American and Israeli Jews is complicated. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of American Jews who take issue with some or all of the positions voiced by AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. And, to the dismay of many Americans who work to support a secure and democratic Israel, there is a growing disconnect between American Jews and the Zionism many of us used to take for granted.

Why is this so? Research on the topic demonstrates that some of the fracture can actually be attributed to good news: American Jews feel so comfortable in their lives and their positions in society that they no longer see themselves in a Diaspora, but in a promised land of their own. For many, the Zionism of 50 years ago was rooted in the legacy of the Holocaust, and represented safe haven of last resort. Nowadays, one would have to look long and hard for Americans who truly distrust the viability of their future in the United States.

But not all the news is good. Many American Jews find it hard to square their civil rights values with the behavior of successive Israeli governments. For them, the expansion of settlements as a reflection of the nationalist-religious dream of a greater Israel leads inevitably to ongoing human-rights abuses. On other issues, too, those who care about social justice are uneasy when they see Israel as a country with broad social inequities, poor education and growing environmental problems.

While Israelis have the benefit of a democratic electoral system that allows them to change direction, American Jews too often are unable to square their impressions of Israel with their personal ethics and values. They believe their only choice is "Israel right or wrong," or apathy and disconnection from Israel.

This is a false dichotomy. Just as the United States has an ACLU, a People for the American Way and several versions of NOW, the Sierra Club and the Alliance for Justice, which focus on the inequities and challenges facing American society, Israel has parallel organizations, in many cases modeled after their American counterparts and nurtured by the New Israel Fund (NIF). Indeed, the 140 or so Israeli organizations we currently support provide many American Jews with meaningful opportunities for affinity and cooperation.

For 27 years, NIF has funded and trained thousands of activists who help Israel live up to the promises enshrined in its own Declaration of Independence and values informed by the Jewish tradition and international human rights norms. This willingness to speak directly about Jewish values, and to implement programs promoting Jewish awareness, while maintaining an absolute commitment to equality and social justice, serves to counter the apathy many Israelis, particularly in the younger generation, feel about their Jewishness.

A global Gallup poll sponsored by the BBC recently discovered that Israelis have more faith in their democracy than almost any other nationality - including U.S. citizens. It's time for more Americans to share that optimism. Striving for social justice, a peaceful future and full-fledged civic participation for all segments of society will serve to ensure Israel's survival as decidedly as the correct foreign policy and military decisions.

Instead of wasting energy on those, both left and right, who misrepresent Israel and its American supporters, those who care about Israel's future in the broadest sense should make their voices heard in both countries. When we make clear that our bond is based on both ancient Jewish and contemporary universal values, the way will be cleared for a better, stronger and more multifaceted relationship between the world's two largest Jewish communities.

Larry Garber is executive director of the New Israel Fund.

Comment: Jeff Blankfort comments, "The New Israel Fund, a liberal Zionist operation, is a haven for Jews who don't like Israeli policies but wish to support Israel and feel good doing it, despite the fact that the NIF's impact on Israeli life is next to invisible compared to the harsh reality that Israel has imposed on the Palestinians. What Garber does not say, because it would expose his disingenuousness, is that the NIF locks arms with AIPAC and every other Jewish mainstream organization when it comes to (1) supporting Israel as a Jewish state and (2) continuing US financial and military assistance, plucked from the pockets of US taxpayers. Notice that Garber has also to add his criticism of "how sloppily the Walt-Mearsheimer article was researched and written," without bothering to actually challenge any of the facts that the two professors presented and documented."

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2,500 American, French immigrants to arrive this summer

By Zohar Blumenkrantz and Amiram Barkat

Some 2,500 new immigrants from North America and France will come to Israel on eight special El Al flights this summer, Haaretz has learned.

Six of the flights will take off from New York and Toronto between July and September, and two more will arrive from Paris and Marseilles in July. The flights will be jointly sponsored by the Jewish Agency, the French organization Ami and the North American group Nefesh B'Nefesh.

Last year, some 2,700 new immigrants and another 300 returning Israelis arrived from North America. Immigration from North America, which has been on the upswing for the past three years, is expected to reach 3,500 people this year, with an equal number arriving from France.
The number of immigrants from France totaled 2,100 in 2003, rose to 2,415 in 2004 and reached 3,000 in 2005. The rise in the number of French Jews moving to Israel is proportionally more significant, since half a million Jews live in France, as opposed to some 6 million Jews in the United States.



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A hot paper muzzles Harvard

By Eve Fairbanks, Eve Fairbanks works at the New Republic as a reporter-researcher.
May 14, 2006

DID YOU THINK there was a controversy in academia over "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the paper by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer contending that a shadowy "Israel Lobby" - including everyone from the New York Times and Hillary Clinton to Pat Robertson and Paul Wolfowitz - has seized control of American foreign affairs? I did too, but let me tell you: We were wrong.

When professors Walt and Mearsheimer (of Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively) went public with their paper in the London Review of Books on March 23, it seemed the whole world started screaming. From columnists Richard Cohen and Max Boot to historian Tony Judt and Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, public figures battled in the pages of the major papers. Accusations of anti-Semitism and divided loyalties flew. The magazine I work for published three articles on the paper in a single week.
Of course, if the paper caused such uproar in the public sphere, you'd think academia (and particularly the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where Walt is the academic dean) would be, as the Harvard Crimson put it, the ultimate "field of battle." And as far as conspiratorial rumors and unexplained reversals go, it has been.

The Kennedy School pulled its name off the article, nervous to be associated with the argument that an expansive lobby is undermining American interests on behalf of the Jewish state. Bob Belfer, the fabulously wealthy (and Jewish) oil baron who endowed Walt's chair at the Kennedy School, was hopping mad. Angry donors reportedly threatened to retract gifts. Whispers began that faculty relationships were fraying, and gossip circulated that campus forces were plotting to oust Walt from panels and boards. Harvard had to deny that his decision to step down as dean had anything to do with the paper.

But something else happened at Harvard, something strange. Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle - and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

A couple of weeks ago, keeping in mind Henry Kissinger's famous aphorism that academic quarrels are so vicious because the stakes are so small, I began calling around Harvard, expecting to find a major fight flourishing. Spirited exchanges! A divided faculty! Parties canceled! Walt egged!

Instead, most people I spoke to assured me that, at Harvard, there is no controversy. Most everyone, they said, agreed about the paper. But what they all "agreed" on, hilariously, depended on whom I was talking to.

One anecdote illuminated the puzzle. At a faculty meeting, the paper came up, and the department head remarked that she was sure everyone had the same reaction when they read it - approval. One professor piped up: "No, this article is rubbish!" The room became very quiet. Finally, someone changed the subject. Through moments like these, a de facto consensus developed not to discuss the paper at all.

Most professors I reached wouldn't speak on the record about the flap because they didn't want their feelings to become known on campus. Walt ignored my requests for comment. Harvard's Alan Dershowitz, one of just a few professors who have conspicuously denounced the paper, says that when he was scheduled for a BBC face-off with Mearsheimer, the author mysteriously canceled moments before airtime.

Most fishily, one Kennedy School professor who had previously gone public with his opinions clammed up completely, explaining cryptically to me that even chatting off the record about the paper isn't "the right thing for me to do at this time." Another senior Kennedy School professor admitted that he was baffled by the dearth of discussion of the paper. "We debate everything else here," he said.

The closest we've gotten to open academic argument over the paper is an online petition circulated by Juan Cole, a media-hungry professor-blogger at the University of Michigan, condemning the paper's critics for "McCarthyite race-baiting." It has garnered nearly 1,000 professors' signatures.

But even Cole's petition - many signers of which haven't read the paper - exemplifies how, instead of knocking heads over the paper's core argument, it's become acceptable merely to debate drier questions of academic standards. Critics condemn the paper as shoddy scholarship; supporters, such as Cole, insist that the academic world's primary ethic is the right to say whatever you believe.

But make a list of how professors have come out on this divide and you'll find it is an awfully neat proxy for deeper ideological divisions. Those who dislike the U.S. relationship with Israel suddenly find themselves champions of free speech; those supportive of Israel are recast as defenders of high standards of scholarship. It's just that nobody can talk about that schism.

So is this collective campus lip-sealing evidence that Mearsheimer and Walt are right that the Israel Lobby squelches criticism? No, because professors fear taking a stand on either side.

Professors I spoke to offered various reasons they must tiptoe around the paper: That its style was too provocative. That they're skittish after witnessing Harvard President Larry Summers' ouster for making fractious comments. That the long-running PC wars have made them tired of controversy. That it's too "personal."

Most interestingly, they explained that topics related to the Middle East, though they provoke some of the deepest divisions in opinion between faculty members, are just too strewn with ideological landmines for them because academics are supposed to be above dogma - an explanation that also sheds light on why most Middle East studies departments languish in mediocrity and lack influential senior faculty.

And most sadly, professors admitted that academia's notorious office politics - in uniquely volatile combination with all these other reasons - interfere with natural reactions to the paper, resulting in a collective response that one described as "nervous laughter."

"A lot of [my colleagues] were more concerned about the academic politics of it, and where they should come down, in that sense," another Ivy League professor told me, ruefully.

But isn't this all a little bit ironic? Mearsheimer and Walt clearly wrote their paper to be provocative. They took pleasure in breaking a taboo - only to see another one erected around their work. And universities ought to be the centers of debate about ideas, right? "It's perhaps not a great reflection on academia - perhaps we should be more out there," mused Princeton's Andrew Moravcsik, who calls himself an "idealist" about his profession.

Comment from Jeff Blankfort: An interesting way to take a knock at the Mearsheimer-Walt paper which is extensively documented and footnoted which one would not know from any of the paper's critics or this article. It should be clear that those who support the paper are afraid to speak out because they are aware, as Mearsheimer and Walt, indicated, that they would be smeared with the brush of anti-semitism. This writer, of course, ignores that, and smears Juan Cole, the only US based academic who has supported the paper as a "a media-hungry professor-blogger."

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Game theory

14/05/2006
By Gideon Levy

This was an especially short masked ball: Two or three months and the "boycott" party of the Palestinian Authority ended. It was also an especially stupid masked ball: Hamas can now brandish a real achievement. Israel and the world have surrendered unconditionally, and the flow of money to the territories is being renewed.

The problem is that some of the masks have remained, and the foolishness continues: Israel and the world will not transfer monies "directly" to the Hamas government, but rather by means of a special "Hamas bypass" mechanism. This unnecessary mask will also be removed quickly.

What has Israel gained from this game? Nothing. It has only lost. The pictures of shortages and distress have been chalked up, and rightly so, to Israel. And how does the world look when it dances, just like that, automatically, to Israel's pipe? Apart from another several thousand families who have joined the circle of poverty in the occupied territories, nothing has come of this cat-and-mouse game that the world played, under Israel's coaching, with the elected Palestinian government. A Nobel Prize that was given to an Israeli for game theory was certainly not intended for games like these.
Now the world needs to pause for a moment and ask itself, how come one small country can make a mockery of it in this way and cause great powers to act in such an unintelligent way? Anyone who examines the decision by the Quartet to boycott the Hamas government cannot but wonder where Israel gets the power to squeeze out more and more decisions that are contrary to the international interest and, in fact, to its own interests. The world, which is not interested in a humanitarian disaster in Rafah, should have immediately rejected the Israeli demand to stop transferring aid to the territories, instead of being dragged into this farce that has not yet ended. Will Israel's imagined diplomatic strength serve it in the long term? Certainly not. The day will come when the world will tire of the unnecessary games Israel and the United States force upon it.

It is necessary to go back to the two eternal verities: First of all, the Palestinian people elected Hamas in democratic elections, which were held at the initiative of the United States and with Israel's agreement; secondly, the state of Israel bears the responsibility for the fate of the population in the occupied territories. You wanted elections? Hamas was elected. You wanted to topple the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization? Here are the results. You want occupation? You have to pay the price. There is no way of escaping this.

The 165,000 families whose meager living comes from the PA have had to live for the past two months without a salary. In such a poor and shaky economy this is of tremendous significance. The vast majority of 3.5 million Palestinians are living in acute economic distress, to which the shortage that derives from the aid freeze has now been added. In the occupied territories a people is living that has no way to support itself, as all of the possibilities are closed to it, it has no way of entering the labor market in Israel, it has no sea port or airport and scores of barriers prevent it from moving around. It has no way out.

The world has chosen to take indirect responsibility for what is happening: Instead of bringing about an end to the occupation, it prefers to grant aid. For the fans of the occupation in Israel this is a very convenient solution, so it is impossible to understand why Israel has tried to sabotage this, too. Why is transferring money through the incorrupt Hamas unacceptable and transferring money through the corrupt Fatah acceptable? The assumption that economic pressure on the PA will lead to the fall of the elected government was a crazy idea. Pressure of this kind only reinforces Hamas and hostility toward Israel. There is no "Hamas bypass" road. Israel and the world must recognize this. Any diplomatic or economic progress will henceforth go through the headquarters of the movement that was elected to govern. Just as the economic boycott held up for only a few weeks, the diplomatic boycott will also not last long. Sweden has already welcomed in its territory two representatives of Hamas, the other European countries will follow suit, the United States will have to join in, and Israel's turn will also come, hideously late, of course, and it will recognize the Hamas government. Therefore, it is necessary to ask: Why wait? The lesson from the short-lived economic boycott must be learned now. Israel has already missed the Abu Mazen train and he is now the Palestinian Shimon Peres: It's pleasant to talk to him but what he says no longer has much influence or significance. Yet, nevertheless, having allotted half a year to diplomatic negotiations, Israel must immediately initiate a meeting with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) if it really wants to negotiate. Instead of traveling to Washington and Cairo, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert should have gone to Ramallah first.



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Hamas and Israel's "Right to Exist"

May 12, 2006
By VIRGINIA TILLEY
CounterPunch

To the great consternation of most of the world, the European Union, followed now by Norway and Canada, has halted payments to the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority (PA). The stated reason is that Hamas has not recognized Israel's "right to exist" or "renounced violence," but the action so violates all common sense that its logic requires our closer scrutiny.

Let us first be clear: no conceivable good can come from this policy. It will slash the PA's capacity to govern a shattered and desperate population. It will wreck the capacity of Hamas to mediate and contain tense factional divides. It could even demoralize and destroy the Palestinians' long-standing commitment to democracy, ruining Palestinian political stability and therefore any possibility of peace negotiations. So why impose sanctions that can only result in dangerous disintegration of the political situation?
A certain withered diplomatic logic does underlie this measure. The PA itself was invented in 1995 to administer Oslo's implicit two-state solution. Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel's "right to exist" would seem to negate the diplomatic agreement that established the terms of its own authority. Until it agrees to those terms, the international community might deem that Hamas has rendered the PA's legitimacy uncertain.

Unfortunately for its proponents, this rationale has crashed on one glaring pitfall: the premise that Israel itself supports the terms of Oslo or the Road Map. Prime Minister Olmert has openly declared the "Road Map" a dead letter. His stated policy of "ingathering" settlers into the major West Bank settlement blocs is accepted by everyone as signaling Israel's intent permanently to annex major portions of the West Bank. The advancing Wall and settlement construction are ample material evidence that this plan is Israel's real program and is already half-achieved. No one disagrees that these developments signify permanent territorial dismemberment of any Palestinian "state." No one disagrees that the terms of Oslo have vanished like the morning mist.

It must therefore be evident even to the EU, Norway, and Canada that Israel has negated the diplomatic agreement that established the terms of its recognition by the Palestinians. So why pretend that Israel has not openly cast onto the trash heap of history the very peace deal that these countries now insist Hamas endorse?

The first answer is too obvious to belabor: craven capitulation to US pressure. The entire international community has been cajoled or threatened into continuing lip service to the Road Map while standing by passively as the US and Israel render the Road Map obsolete. Diplomatic nonsense always requires some political or moralistic palliative, however. The cover story is that Hamas's recognizing Israel's "right to exist" and abandoning armed struggle will somehow restore the diplomatic conditions of the Road Map, trigger comprehensive Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank, and allow peace finally to break out. Let us take this argument step by step.

First, it is simply unbelievable. All agree that Israel's withdrawal of major settlement blocs in the West Bank (especially, the major cities of Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel, and Gush Etzion) is not foreseeable. The Israeli government itself has declared them permanent. No international actor or combination of actors has the political will and/or clout to change Israeli policy. Israel will not withdraw the major settlement blocs under any circumstances short of a national emergency. Hamas's suddenly waxing nice will not constitute that emergency.

Second, the argument adopts specious Israeli claims about Arab logics that only dwindling ranks of Israel's die-hard supporters still believe. Israeli propaganda holds that Arab "hatred" for Israel is irrational, born solely of Judeophobia, religious zealotry, and cultural backwardness, and that tough measures can therefore leverage Arab capitulation to reality even while the occupation continues. In this view, Israel's hold on the West Bank is not really an "occupation," serving a program of land annexation, but only a benign "administration," forced on Israel by collective Arab and Palestinian unwillingness to recognize Israel's "right to exist."

The funding cut-off endorses this fantasy in holding that Hamas has rejected Israel's authentic "promise of peace" due to its rejectionist Islamic dogma and not because Hamas has graphic evidence that Israel has no intention of permitting Palestinians a viable state. In this twisted view, cutting vital funds should make Hamas rethink this "irrationality," abandon its "extremism," recognize Israel's "right to exist," and end all hostile actions toward it. Hamas and the PA will then be rewarded (it is hinted vacantly) with a return to the Road Map.

Aside from its transparent tomfoolery (full awareness the US and Israel are eliminating the conditions for the Road Map as quickly as possible), deeper problems plague this papery notion. For if we look more closely at what Hamas is being asked to do, none of it makes sense either.

What does a "right to exist" mean exactly? There is no "right to exist" for states under international law. The formula has arisen in international diplomacy uniquely regarding Israel. It does not mean simply diplomatic recognition, which is the "fact" of existence. It does not mean recognizing Israel's "right to self-determination," either, or we would be using that famous term.

Let us pretend for a moment that Hamas is being asked to recognize Israel in the normal diplomatic sense. In this case, however, the EU position is unsupportable, because diplomatic recognition of a state routinely requires one bit of vital information: "right to exist" where? Israel's borders are not set. Even its plans for those borders are not known; with impressive brashness, Mr. Olmert has announced that we will not know until 2010.

It is entirely legitimate for Hamas to require firm confirmation of Israel's borders before recognizing it. It should also be incumbent on the international community to confirm where those borders will be before insisting that Hamas recognize Israel's "right" to them. Otherwise, recognizing Israel's "right to exist" could be construed to mean that Israel has a "right to exist" within whatever borders it chooses in coming years.

As the Palestinians stand to lose most of what is left of their homeland to this fuzziness, Hamas is refusing to endorse it. Is this extremist Islamic intransigence, warranting a funding freeze? Let us run a little thought experiment: Would Canadian, or Norwegian, or English, or French governments be called on the international carpet for not recognizing the "right to exist" of a neighboring state that is, with military force, settling its own ethnically defined population within contiguous walled cities and enclaves in Canadian, Norwegian, English or French national territories, while promising to carve those nations into "cantons?"

Absent clear borders, recognizing Israel's "right to exist" must mean something else. And of course it does. Clearly implicit in the term is Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state. In other words, the "right" Hamas is being required to endorse is that Israel can legitimately compose itself as a state in Palestine that is populated and run primarily by Jews, primarily for Jews. Such a state would thus be authorized by Hamas to sustain whatever laws and policies necessary to preserving its Jewish majority, even rejecting the return of Palestinian refugees mandated by international law. Or building a massive Wall on Palestinian land designed to protect the Jewish state from the "demographic threat" of mass non-Jewish citizenship-i.e., the Palestinians. Israel's would also be legitimized for past actions on the same agenda, such as expelling the Palestinians from their homes in 1948, and for its future plans, such as confining Palestine's indigenous people to cantons.

Israel's leadership has declared all these measures necessary to preserve Israel as "a Jewish and democratic state," as phrased in Israel's Basic Law (and reiterated by Mr. Sharon, Mr. Olmert, and almost every Israeli party across the political spectrum). Yet it is not the fact of this open policy of ethnic cleansing, but Israel's right to pursue it, that is expressed in the phrase, "right to exist."

Hence bitter reluctance by the PLO, the Arab states, and much of the Muslim world to do so for many decades. They abandoned that position in 1989-90, as a pragmatic gesture toward a two-state solution. Cannot the EU then insist that Hamas recognize Israel's "right to exist" if the PLO, the PA, and all other governments in the world have recognized it?

The problem is that the quid pro quo that supported this recognition, formalized in the Oslo process, is now clearly wrecked by Israel's unilateral annexations of land. Carving the West Bank into cantons has eliminated any hope of a viable Palestinian state. The two-state solution is not working. In these conditions, should Hamas recognize Israel's "right to exist" if it is recognized to be eliminating Palestinian sovereignty altogether?

The more embarrassing problem, however, is that the EU itself has not explicitly recognized Israel's "right to exist" in this sense. Nor has Canada, or Norway. The United Nations has not done so, either. They haven't, because they can't.

This may take some people by surprise, but the UN has not used the term "Jewish state" since 1947. Resolution 181 then called for a "Jewish state" and an "Arab state," with gerrymandered borders designed to craft Jewish and Arab majorities in each state. But the attempt was rendered obsolete when Zionist forces established "Israel" on a much greater swath of territory that had, in total, held a substantial Arab majority, and expelled most of the Arab residents. As refugees, according to the Geneva Conventions, those Arab residents have the right to return to their homes, villages, towns and cities. But their return would eliminate the Jewish majority in what became "Israel," so Israel hasn't allowed this.

Hence the UN cannot confirm Israel as a Jewish state (i.e., a state that can legitimately sustain a Jewish majority) without contradicting international law regarding the right of refugees. When the UN refers to "Israel" today, it does not understand Israel as the "Jewish state" in the old ethnic-majority terms of 1947, because Israel can be granted no "right" to an ethnic demography that would prevent the return of refugees.

Also, times have simply changed. In 1947, ethnic nationalism still made some belated sense, although it was already discredited by the dreadful abuses wreaked by Germany and Japan. Today, recognizing the "right" of any state to compose itself legally as an ethnic-majority state would clearly flout UN conventions on human rights and non-discrimination. The UN and EU therefore cannot openly endorse Israel's right to compose itself as one. It would make hash of international efforts in Rwanda, the Sudan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and many other crisis spots.

So the US has lured the EU, Canada, and Norway into a trap. If they hold that Hamas must recognize Israel as a Jewish state (with a right to preserve an ethnic-Jewish majority), then they must state clearly that it endorses ethnic-majority governance. But them themselves cannot explicitly endorse Israel's right to ethnocracy, because it would contradict international law as well as its own diplomacy in a host of other conflict zones, so on what grounds does they require Hamas to do so?

Worse for them, they are adhering to international norms in insisting that the State of Palestine must comprise a stable democracy that secures equal rights for all its citizens irrespective of religion or race. But if they hold Palestine to this standard, then why are they not holding Israel to the same standard?

But if they did hold Israel to that standard, then the entire rationale for a two-state solution would evaporate. The Road Map is based on the supposition that the only peaceful solution in Palestine is to establish one state for Jews and another for everyone else. If Israel's "right to exist" does not entail sustaining a Jewish majority (which necessitates discriminatory legislation, ethnic cleansing, land grabs, and social engineering), then the ethnic logic supporting two states disappears. Why agree to compose two secular-democratic states sitting next to each other in this small land? No one can articulate an answer, because ethnic demography is their only rationale.

So what are the EU, Norway and Canada requiring Hamas to do? Recognize Israel as an ethnic state with a "right to exist" wherever it decides to set its borders-even though doing so would not only mean Palestinian national suicide but would violate principles that govern their own diplomacy as well as their own internal laws and values about nondiscrimination? Or is Hamas supposed to evade the issue by recognizing Israel's "right to exist" simply as a normal state, even though "normal" (non-ethnic) status would then obligate Israel to permit Palestinian refugees to return-thus implying that the EU, Norway and Canada do not support Israel in sustaining a Jewish majority?

This conundrum should have diplomats, parliamentarians, and foreign ministries huddled in their back rooms trying to sort out their own positions, rather than attempting to starve the Palestinians into Hamas's capitulation. For it is not only the funding freeze that has become rampant nonsense. The entire Road Map logic has become nonsense, too.

May its dutiful proponents in foreign capitals lie sleepless in their beds contemplating their own confusion and the terrible bloody consequences it is likely to wreak.

Virginia Tilley is associate professor of Political Science and International Relations, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock. She is currently at the Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa and available at tilley@hws.edu.



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Hamas supports Palestine 'next to Israel'

Ynet News
12/05/2006

Though still refusing to officially recognize Israel's existence, in a letter to the EU Hamas offers to espouse the alternate wording of 'establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel' support the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel; Palestinian source: Russia behind initiative.

The Palestinian government under the Hamas supports the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, according to a message reportedly transferred by Hamas to the European Union via various Arab countries including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Ynet has learned.
A Palestinian source told Ynet Friday that the message declared the Palestinians' willingness to openly and officially endorse the establishment of Palestine on the borders of June 1967, as long as they did not have to publicly and officially recognize Israel's right to exist.

According to the Palestinian source, Hamas has decided it would consent to this phrasing -"the recognition of a Palestinian state next to Israel" - in order to bypass the international demand to officially recognize Israel's existence. The letter notes that ensuing political negotiations would be steered by the PLO and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the source said.

Russia was apparently involved in convincing Hamas to adopt this phrasing of accepting in principle neighboring Palestinian and Israeli states, without recognizing Israel, the source said, and in return, the Russians played an important role in the Quartet's decision to grant the PA a special aid package, and promised to urge the renewal international aid.

Hamas hopes for renewed ties with EU

The Palestinian cabinet and Hamas hope that the next step after receiving financial aid from Russian and their other allies in the Gulf, an official channel of contact would open with the European Union that will allow renewed funding of the PA.

The source noted that Hamas committed to maintaining calm among the Palestinian factions, and enforcing the Islamic Jihad, which has been responsible for all suicide bomb attacks in Israel in the past year, to refrain from terrorism, on the condition that financial aid was renewed.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad recently reached an understanding that if financial support is resumed, the Jihad would also commit to the cease-fire. The agreement was reached by leaders of the organization abroad, which are generally thought to be more fanatical.

In recent days, especially since the last meeting between Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas is holding heated discussions on instituting an official stance that would hopefully ease the international community's isolation of the Palestinian government, without surrendering its position against recognizing Israel. Hamas has addressed the issue in public this week as well. Hamas parliament speaker Khaled Suleiman said that his party has no problem in recognizing a Palestinian state next to Israel according to the 1967 borders.

Comment: This entire "recognition of Israel's right to exist" is one massive distraction. Whether or not Hamas states "officially" that Israel has a right to exist is irrelevant since Hamas has no resources, and never will have, to do anything about Israel's right to exist. This entire sham is simply stalling for time to allow Israel to maneuver the Palestinians into a position where it can either deport them or murder them en masse. You think we are exaggerating? We wish we were.

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Israel vs. Palestine: On the Ground


Israeli court upholds spousal citizenship ban

Last Updated Sun, 14 May 2006 13:12:19 EDT
CBC News

Israel's highest court has narrowly upheld a controversial law that is keeping some families apart by prohibiting Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from living in the country.
The High Court of Justice voted 6-5 on Sunday to uphold the Citizenship and Entry law, rejecting petitions brought by civil-rights groups, members of the Israeli parliament and Arab-Israeli families.

The law, implemented in July 2003 at a time of rising violence, bans Palestinians from moving to Israel to live with their spouses, who are mostly Arab Israelis.

Government lawyers argued that the law prevents Palestinians from entering Israel to carry out attacks, while critics said it's racist and violates human rights.

Three of the judges said that while the law violated human rights, the damage was not "disproportional."

Amnesty International had condemned the law, saying it discriminates on "the basis of ethnicity and nationality" and denies Palestinians "the fundamental right to family life."



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Israeli troops fire tear gas at Palestinian high school graduation ceremony, injuring two girls

IMEMC & Agencies
13 May 2006

Two Palestinian girls, students of the Anata secondary school in East Jerusalem, were injured Thursday when Israeli troops fired tear gas canisters at schoolgirls and their parents who were gathered for the school's graduation ceremony.

Eyewitnesses said that the troops raided the school and fired tear gas at the crowd, hitting one girl in the leg and causing another girl to faint as a result of inhaling the gas.

The headmistress of the school condemned the raid on a day she hoped would be joyous for the graduates, and called upon international human rights organizations to pressure Israeli authorities to stop harassing Palestinian schoolchildren. Children are often the target of Israeli troops' aggression -- more than 1,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces since the beginning of the current violence in 2000.

Anata secondary school is targeted by Israeli forces on an almost daily basis, as the school lies in the path of the Israeli annexation Wall. The Wall is currently being constructed through the middle of the school's playground. Students and teachers have tried to maintain their education despite the Wall, but the nearly daily attacks by Israeli soldiers on the schoolchildren has made this extremely difficult, according to the school's headmistress.




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IDF has fired more than 5,100 shells at Gaza in six weeks

Haaretz
14/05/2006



Israel Defense Forces artillery batteries deployed along the Gaza Strip border have fired more than 5,100 shells at "launch areas" for Qassam rockets since March 31, mainly in northern Gaza, according to the army's figures.

The IDF stepped up its response to Qassam rocket fire two and a half months ago. Most of the artillery response consists of explosive shells fired by a battery deployed near Kibbut Nahal Oz.

Southern Command officials claim that the shelling has reduced the number of Qassam rockets fired at the Negev and, more importantly, has reduced their accuracy. They say the missile operators are afraid to remain in the targeted areas and therefore do not take the time to aim the launchers precisely.

Five Palestinian civilians have been killed as a result of IDF artillery in the past ten weeks, including a young girl and a teenager.

The pattern of Israel's shelling changes frequently. Usually, a heavy Qassam bombardment will provoke a few hundred IDF shells within a 24-hour period, but occasionally the shelling is suspended for some days.

The artillery shelling was initiated by former prime minister Ariel Sharon shortly after the completion of the IDF's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in September, though Sharon had been talking about the need for a beefed-up response to Qassam rockets long before then.

The IDF has since reduced the distance of its artillery fire from Palestinian homes and farmland, from 300 meters to only 100 meters. Several human rights groups petitioned the High Court of Justice over the change, but the justices refused to order a suspension of the shelling. Israelis living near the border have also complained about the shelling, saying it does not help, and is only scaring them and their children.


Comment: "Scaring them and their children". Now, we wonder, why would Israel want to scare Israeli citizens? 5,100 shell in 6 weeks is a massive amount compared to the one of two useless qassams that are fired ever so often. Is this a rational response? Or does Israel just really really want to create the impression that it is under threat and at war?

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Palestinian Families Split Up By Israeli Racism

15 May 2006
Herald Sun

ISRAEL'S high court has narrowly upheld a controversial law that bars Palestinians in the occupied West Bank from living with spouses and children who are Arab citizens of Israel.

The law, passed in 2002 at the height of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, is believed to have kept hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Palestinians from moving to Israel to live with their families.

The court voted 6-5 against a petition to strike it down.

"This is a very black day for the state of Israel and also a black day for my family and for the other families who are suffering like us," said Muad el-Sana, an Israeli-Arab lawyer who is married to a Palestinian woman from the West Bank town of Bethlehem.

"The Government is preventing people from conducting a normal family life just because of their nationality," el-Sana said.

The Government has repeatedly said the law was based on security concerns. But there is also a fear that the country's Jewish majority could be threatened if too many Palestinians are granted citizenship.

Critics of the law have slammed it as racist and discriminatory. Amnesty International called on Israel to repeal it.
"I had hoped and expected the high court to be the last arena for protecting democracy," said MP Zehava Galon.

"In essence we are talking about a means to halt the demographic threat. There are no real security issues."

Orna Kohn, a lawyer from Adalah, a group that fights for the rights of Israeli-Arabs, said the ruling caused "grave damage to the basic rights of thousands of people".

"I am afraid the message the Supreme Court relayed today will allow additional racist legislation," she said.

The court had granted el-Sana's wife, Abir, a temporary injunction preventing her deportation. But el-Sana said the ruling made it almost impossible for them and their two children, aged two and five months, to live together

Comment: What is so surprising about a racist Israeli law? The state of Israel was founded on racism.

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Shops Demolished Again in Northern Jordan Valley

Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign
May 14th, 2006


The continual harassment of the Palestinian population in the Jordan Valley has escalated with the destruction of 13 sheds used as shops by Palestinian farmers to sell their products. Occupation Forces attacked the people, took away their goods and demolished the shops.

On May 14th at 9 a.m., military bulldozers arrived to demolish the sheds between Bardala and 'Ein al-Beida along Road 90. They declared the area a closed military zone and blocked shop owners from reaching the area, under the pretext that the road was "closed for Palestinians". Road 90, the road that leads from the north to the south of the Jordan Valley, has long since been usurped for settlers-only use and for cars from Palestine '48. However, it remains a place for Palestinian farmers to sell their produce.

When Occupation Forces arrived, the group of people present defended the sheds and clashes erupted. The soldiers threatened to "break the arms" of the people - reminding them of Rabin's orders during the first Intifada. All 13 shops were eventually destroyed, and approximately 150-200 boxes of vegetables stolen by the Occupation. The shops and vegetables belonged to farmers from the Sawafta and Fuqaha families.

It is the third time since the beginning of this year that the Occupation demolished these shops, as the farmers re-build their shops and defy the Occupation's orders and violence. Farmers in the area are seriously threatened by isolation of Jordan Valley and the continuous attacks of the Occupation. All connections with the outside world and their markets have been severed, and within the Valley house demolitions and fines under all sorts of pretexts challenge the determination of the people to resist Occupation of their land.


Comment: Anyone who cannot see the very obvious parallels with Nazi Germany and its treatment of Jews is not looking closely enough, or hiding their heads in the sand.

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Israel's Policy of Displacement: PA Interviews Jeff Halper

Political Affairs
14/05/2006

Editor's note: Jeff Halper is the coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

Israel's policy of demolishing Palestinian homes is part of this plan of displacement. Between 1948 (after the fighting subsided) and the mid-1960s, Israel systematically demolished more than 400 entire Palestinian villages – two-thirds of the villages in Palestine. This was done both to "transfer" the Palestinians out of the country and to prevent the return of the refugees. Even today some 150,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel remain trapped in more than 100 "unrecognized villages," living since 1948 in sub-human conditions
Editor’s note: Jeff Halper is the coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

Political Affairs: Your organization, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, works to stop home demolitions in the Occupied Territories. Can you describe the reason Palestinian homes are being destroyed there?

Jeff Halper: Displacement, dispossession is the essence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Zionist movement asserted exclusive claims to Palestine/the Land of Israel in the name of the Jewish people. The term "transfer" was first used by the World Zionist Organization in 1911, and in 1948 it was largely carried out – some 750,000 Palestinians were made refugees, about 75 percent of the Palestinian population. The occupation of the West Bank, "east" Jerusalem and Gaza in 1967 completed the conquest of the country. Since then Israeli has attempted to induce the emigration of as many Palestinians as possible and confine the rest to a collection of impoverished enclaves on BOTH sides of the "Green Line," its own Arab citizens as well as the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s "convergence plan," for which he is seeking American support, will impose once and for all a permanent, institutionalized domination of Israel over a tiny, non-viable and only semi-sovereign Palestinian Bantustan.

Israel’s policy of demolishing Palestinian homes is part of this plan of displacement. Between 1948 (after the fighting subsided) and the mid-1960s, Israel systematically demolished more than 400 entire Palestinian villages – two-thirds of the villages in Palestine. This was done both to "transfer" the Palestinians out of the country and to prevent the return of the refugees. Even today some 150,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel remain trapped in more than 100 "unrecognized villages," living since 1948 in sub-human conditions, bereft of all social services (including water, electricity and schools), their shacks threatened with demolition.

Since 1967 Israel has demolished a further 12,000 Palestinian homes in the Occupied Territories. Contrary to common assumptions, in 95 percent of the cases these demolitions had nothing to do with security. Thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished in the course of military invasions of civilian population centers as a form of collective punishment. Listen to the testimony of Moshe Nissim, the indomitable driver of a massive D-9 Caterpillar bulldozer, an army reservist who labored for three days and nights without getting down from his cab to demolish Palestinian homes in the Jenin refugee camp during the March 2002 "Operation Defensive Shield."

For three days I just erased and erased. The entire area. I took down any house from which there was shooting. To take it down, I would take down several more. The soldiers warned with a speaker, that the tenants must leave before I come in, but I did not give anyone a chance. I did not wait. I didn’t give one blow, and wait for them to come out. I would just ram the house with full power, to bring it down as fast as possible. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. Others may have restrained themselves, or so they say. Who are they kidding? Anyone who was there, and saw our soldiers in the houses, would understand they were in a death trap. I thought about saving them. I didn’t give a damn about the Palestinians, but I didn’t just ruin with no reason. It was all under orders.

Many people where inside houses we set out to demolish. They would come out of the houses we where working on. I didn’t see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. and I didn’t see house falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn’t care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses, but it was difficult to see, there was lots of dust everywhere, and we worked a lot at night. I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn’t mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.

I didn’t stop for a moment. Even when we had a two-hour break, I insisted on going on….I had plenty of satisfaction. I really enjoyed it. I remember pulling down a wall of a four-story building. It came crashing down on my D-9. My partner screamed at me to reverse, but I let the wall come down on us. We would go for the sides of the buildings, and then ram them. If the job was to hard, we would ask for a tank shell. I couldn’t stop. I wanted to work and work. There was this officer who gave us orders by radio – I drove him mad. I kept begging for more and more missions. On Sunday, after the fighting was over, we got orders to pull our D-9’s out of the area, and stop working on our ‘football stadium’, because the army didn’t want the cameras and press to see us working. I was really upset, because I had plans to knock down the big sign at the entrance of Jenin – three poles with a picture of Arafat. But on Sunday, they pulled us away before I had time to do it.

I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin, lots of satisfaction. I kept thinking of our soldiers. I didn’t feel sorry for all those Palestinians who were left homeless. I just felt sorry for their children, who were not guilty….(quoted in "7 Days," Yedioth Ahronoth Supplement, May 31, 2002)


Amnesty International, in its report Under the Rubble: House Demolition and Destruction of Land and Property (May 2004) comments that "The largest single wave of destruction carried out by the Israeli army was in the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002. The army completely destroyed the al-Hawashin quarter and partially destroyed two additional quarters of the refugee camp, leaving more than 800 families, totaling some 4000 people, homeless. Aerial photographs and other evidence show that much of the house destruction was carried out after clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen had ended and Palestinian gunmen had been arrested or had surrendered." Moshe Nissim, like the other once-lowly bulldozer drivers, became the heroes of the invasion, earning medals of valor from the army command.

A second major reason for the demolition of Palestinian homes is the lack of building permits. Although Palestinians seek to build homes on their own private property, the Israeli authorities refuse to grant them permits. Thus, in addition to thousands of homes that have been demolished in the Occupied Territories, we must also take into account the tens of thousands of homes that should have been built to provide minimal adequate housing to the Palestinian population but were not because of the lack of permits. In Jerusalem, for example, 10,000 "illegal" houses exist in the Palestinian sector, almost all with demolition orders, but another 25,000 housing units are lacking. This is an entirely artificial and induced housing shortage, since Palestinians own sufficient lands in the city and have the resources to build. But it is part of the policy of "quiet transfer" that uses administrative, planning and legal mechanisms to force Palestinians out of the city, thereby ensuring a large Jewish majority.

The house demolition policy represents a policy of displacement, of one people dispossessing another, taking both their lands and their right to self-determination. Since people cannot survive or function without a house, the Message of the Bulldozers is clear: "Get out. You do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948 and prevented your return, and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."

The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) resists demolitions of all kinds. As Israelis we block bulldozers coming to demolish, we chain ourselves in the houses, we conduct campaigns to mobilize opposition to the policy in Israel and abroad, we turn to the courts and, when demolitions finally occur, we rebuild demolished homes with the Palestinians as political acts of solidarity and resistance. We have come to see house demolitions as the very essence of the conflict between our two peoples: Israel’s exclusive claim to the entire country in the name of the Jewish people at the expense of another people living in the country, a people being dispossessed by our own country. This is what gives the policy of house demolitions its special significance. When, as Israelis, we resist home demolitions and rebuild demolished homes as acts of civil disobedience, we are acknowledging the rights of both people to share the country. We are affirming our recognition that Palestinian claims carry equal authority to our own. And we are proclaiming loudly: We refuse to be enemies!

PA: Prior to his incapacitation, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon adopted a policy of withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. This policy met with praise from his supporters and was strongly criticized by others. Can you explain your view?

JH: Israeli withdrawal or "disengagement" from Palestinian territories is a subterfuge, sand in the eyes. Following the immense success of Sharon’s "disengagement" from Gaza (which has left the population literally imprisoned and starving), Ehud Olmert has announced his intention to determine the permanent borders of Israel during the remainder of Bush’s term in office (i.e. until January 2009). This means annexing the massive settlement blocs, "Greater" Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley to an Israel that expand from the present 78 percent of the country to around 85 percent, confining the Palestinians to five isolated, impoverished and non-viable "cantons" (Sharon’s term) – the majority of the country’s population reduced to a truncated 15 percent of its land. The international community, led by the US, will put pressure on the Palestinians to accept this Bantustan as their ‘state.’

Of course, Olmert’s plan is presented with a positive spin characterized by terminology to do Orwell proud. Hitkansut or ‘withdrawing into oneself’ in Hebrew is the operational phase of ‘separation’ from the Palestinians, and seems exactly what the public wanted (a full 85 percent of Israeli Jews support the construction of the Wall, or "Separation Barrier"). Perhaps that is the reason it generated no public discussion, no dissent and ended up a non-issue. It does not mean, however, withdrawal of Israel back to its pre-1967 territory, but rather a "convergence" of Israeli settlers scattered throughout the West Bank into Israel’s major settlement blocs. Though the idea of leaving territories densely populated by Palestinians sounds good to Israeli Jews, it really means apartheid. And it will be imposed unilaterally because Israel has nothing to offer the Palestinians. True, they get 70-85 percent of the Occupied Territories, but only in truncated enclaves. Israel retains control of all the borders, Palestinian movement among the cantons, all the water and the richest agricultural land, the large settlement blocs including "greater" Jerusalem (which accounts for 40 percent of the Palestinian economy), the Palestinians’ airspace and even their communications. Indeed, Israel retains all the developmental potential of the country, leaving the Palestinians with only barren and disconnected enclaves. Israel expands onto 85 percent of the entire country, leaving the Palestinians – the majority population or soon to be – with only about 15 percent, and that truncated, non-viable and only semi-sovereign. A Bantustan a la apartheid South Africa.

PA: What is the status of the Israeli Wall and its role in the continuing conflict?

JH: The Wall (or the "Separation Barrier" as Israel calls it) will be 95 percent complete by the end of 2007. It is composed of massive concrete slabs eight meters (26 feet) high around Palestinian population centers, an electrified fence fortified with cameras, watchtowers, trenches and electronic gates in the more rural areas. Altogether the Barrier is twice as high as the Berlin Wall and five times longer (more than 500 miles). And it is not linear as the Berlin Wall was. It includes secondary walls, fences, trenches, roadblocks and checkpoints that lock Palestinians into a maze of enclaves. In Jerusalem alone 55,000 Palestinians will be trapped in their neighborhoods, completely surrounded by towering walls. Thousands of Palestinians will be trapped between the border and the Barrier, as well as their richest agricultural land, much of which will be untellable.

An entire people is literally being imprisoned in concrete cells – and the Wall, a $2 billion project, will be permanent. Although it is sold as a "security" barrier, in fact it is a border defining the Palestinian Bantustan. Built so that Israelis don’t see it, much of the Barrier divides Palestinian communities rather than separating between Jews and Arabs.

PA: Some observers of the elections in Israel are optimistic about the new ruling coalition's view of the peace process. Do you share this optimism? If so, why? If not, why not?

JH: For all the reasons discussed above I cannot say I am optimistic about the near future here. Israel feels that it is "winning," and it might be right. The US (and especially Congress) supports the Convergence Plan to the hilt, Europe is passive, the Arab and Muslim governments (though not the peoples) have abandoned the Palestinians in favor of relations with Israel (and through it, with the US), the Palestinians are isolated, imprisoned and incapable of mounting a new Intifada, Israel is poised to impose unilaterally a regime of apartheid with international approval.

Still, I am optimistic in the long run. Injustice, in the end, is unsustainable. It contains the seeds of its own destruction. By its very nature injustice is oppressive, exploitative, violent and immoral. It cannot be normalized and pushes oppressive regimes into extreme actions of repression that finally cannot be accepted by the international community. This is the case of the Israeli Occupation, I believe. I cannot say exactly how or when it will collapse, but like the South African apartheid regime it will collapse. I only hope the Palestinians will not be decimated by then.

PA: How has the political landscape in the Israel-Palestine struggle changed as a result of Bush policies in the Middle East (e.g. the Iraq war, the nuclear crisis with Iran, its stance toward other countries in the region and support for Israel)?

JH: One of the reasons Israel feels empowered is its success in prodding the US to attack and weaken other Middle Eastern regimes. Egypt and Jordan have been neutralized by massive American aid; Turkey is one of Israel’s closest military partners; Iraq (which Israel and its neo-con allies in the Bush administration pushed the US to attack) has been fragmentized, and Iran is on the way. So we are seeing the establishment of a Pax Americana/Israeliana over the Middle East. This is scary given the Pentagon’s recently published plan, entitled "The Long War," projecting a 20-year war against "radical Islam." Just as Israel was at the center of neo-con plans for American Empire, just as it has acted as America’s hired gun throughout the world, so we can expect a highly armed Israel to act at the beck and call of its American masters in the Long War (see my article in Counterpunch, "Israel as an Extension of American Empire"). Given its usefulness to the US, allowing Israel its Occupation is a small price for the US to pay.



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Australian Shot By IDF In West Bank

World News Australia
13/05/2006

An Australian man is being treated in an Israeli hospital after being shot in the head during a protest in the West Bank, according to activist group the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

The pro-Palestinian group says Israeli soldiers started throwing sound grenades and firing rubber bullets during the demonstration, injuring seven people, including Phil Reiss from Sydney and a Danish demonstrator.

ISM spokeswoman Zadie Susser Mr Reiss, who had been volunteering with the organisation for two weeks, was seriously injured after being shot in the head at close rang with the rubber bullets.

"He was standing with a video camera filming and they shot him," she told AAP. "Phil walked a little bit then sat down, and me and an Israeli activist helped him get up and the blood was spurting out of his head."
"We got him out of the line of fire and ... as we were getting him into the ambulance an Israeli soldier grabbed his long hair and they all tried to stop him from leaving in the ambulance even though they knew he was injured," Mr Susser added.

Moderate condition

Ms Susser said Mr Reiss had hemorrhaging in his brain and was being treated in Tel Hashomer, a hospital in Tel Aviv, "We spoke to the doctor a few hours ago and he told us Phil was in a moderate condition," she said.

She said ISM is a non-violent, Palestinian-led movement committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land.

The violence occurred during a weekly demonstration protesting against the building of Israel's barrier at the West Bank town of Bilin.

The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade confirmed a 29 year old man had been injured, but could not confirm his name at this stage.



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Money Matters


The US dollar takes a pounding over deficit

By Steve Johnson and John Authers
Financial Times
Fri May 12, 2006

The US dollar suffered a severe sell-off on Friday, taking it to its weakest level against a trade-weighted basket of currencies since October 1997, in a tumble that helped to trigger falls across world equity markets.

Worries about US inflation, which have intensified since the US Federal Reserve's rate-setting open market committee met on Wednesday, sparked further sharp losses for US stock markets. The Nasdaq Composite fell a further 1.3 per cent after a 2 per cent fall on Thursday, while the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies was down more than 5 per cent for the week.

US government bonds also suffered, bringing the yield on the benchmark 10-year bond to its highest level in four years.
The dollar has lost 7 per cent against the euro, yen and sterling since the start of April - a slide that will in turn intensify worries about inflation in the economy. Traders are concerned about the role a weaker dollar will have in correcting the US current account deficit, which is now about 7 per cent of GDP.

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

Marc Chandler, economist at Brown Brothers & Harriman in New York, said: "Precisely what officials feared would happen from the large global imbalances is now taking place in reaction to their clumsy attempt to 'fix the problem'. Volatility in the capital markets is rising. Global equities are tumbling."

In Japan, the Nikkei 225 stock average fell 1.5 per cent to 16,601.78, its lowest finish in seven weeks, while in London, the benchmark FTSE-100 index suffered its worst one-day fall in two years, closing 129.9 points, or 2.15 per cent, weaker at 5,912.1. This was a two-month low.

Later the selling also spread to Latin America where the main market indices for Mexico and Brazil fell 1.57 per cent and 1.73 per cent respectively.

Inflation fears have increased sharply since the Fed's open market committee meeting warned that further interest rate rises may yet be necessary. "It opened some eyes," said Brian Williamson, an equity trader at Boston Company Asset Management.

In New York, the dollar ended at $1.293 to the euro and at $1.894 against sterling. Against the yen, it stood at Y110.02. Traders thought a correction was likely.



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Inflation data may give stocks whiplash

By Caroline Valetkevitch
Reuters
Sun May 14, 2006

NEW YORK - Fasten your seat belts.

Stock investors could be in for a bumpy ride this week with widely watched inflation gauges likely to dictate the market's direction.

Worries about inflation and rising interest rates drove stocks down sharply late last week as gold hit a 26-year high and the Fed failed to give Wall Street a clear signal that it was ready to pause after nearly two years of raising rates.

Any signs of further price pressures on the economy in this week's data on consumer and producer prices could give investors more reason to sell.
"Investors are just going to be very sensitive to any type of overheating of the economy," said Owen Fitzpatrick, head of the U.S. equity group at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management in New York. "Any pickup on any inflation numbers will be magnified."

The U.S. Producer Price Index for April, expected at 8:30 a.m. (1230 GMT) on Tuesday, and the Consumer Price Index, scheduled for release at the same time on Wednesday, will be among this week's most important economic indicators.

Economists polled by Reuters forecast that overall PPI went up 0.8 percent in April, and core PPI, excluding volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.2 percent. They see overall CPI up 0.5 percent in April, and core CPI, up 0.2 percent.

MIXED MESSAGE FROM THE FED

The Federal Reserve gave the market a mixed view last week of future interest-rate policy, saying more rate rises may be needed while leaving the door open to a possible pause in its nearly two-year campaign of tightening credit.

The news cooled bullish stock market momentum that had pushed the Dow Jones industrial average up earlier in the week to within 100 points of its all-time high of 11,750.28, set on January 14, 2000.

The Fed has raised rates 16 times since late June 2004. It pushed the benchmark federal funds rate up last week to 5 percent, as expected. But the Fed caught Wall Street off guard by saying future moves would depend on how the economic outlook unfolds.

Analysts said that could mean increased market volatility as investors will be even more focused on economic data in the coming weeks.

On Friday, the economic data failed to dispel investors' worries about rising inflation and interest rates, which on Thursday had sparked stocks' biggest decline in nearly four months. Among Friday's reports, Labor Department data showed U.S. import prices surged 2.1 percent in April, exceeding expectations.

"Until the Fed quashes the notion that they're getting behind the curve on inflation, there will be turbulence in the market," said Jeff Schappe, chief investment officer at BB&T Asset Management in Raleigh, North Carolina.

For the past week, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 1.71 percent, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index dropped 2.62 percent and the Nasdaq Composite Index slid 4.24 percent.

In the week ahead, Tuesday's economic calendar also calls for April housing starts, along with April numbers for U.S. industrial production and capacity utilization.

"I believe the slowdown in housing will be reflected in (the housing starts) report, and that will make the market a little more comfortable with the view that the Federal Reserve can justify a pause when it meets in June," said Anthony Chan, chief economist at J.P. Morgan Private Client Services.

GOLD, OIL AND INFLATION

Skyrocketing gold prices and persistently high oil prices have put inflation back on top of the worry list for investors. New York gold futures jumped on Friday to $732 an ounce and crude traded at around $72 a barrel.

For gold, that was the highest price for a front-month futures contract since January 1980 when it hit a record of $850. That sends a chill through investors who remember that the prime rate hit 21.5 percent in December 1980. This week, big U.S. banks raised the prime rate to 8 percent.

"I think $700 gold is starting to spook people. It's usually a harbinger of global inflation trends ... That's going to flash red in the minds of some portfolio managers," said Fred Dickson, market strategist and director of retail research at D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

Last week, the price of U.S. crude for June delivery rose 2.6 percent to settle Friday at $72.04 a barrel.

Concerns about oil producer Iran's nuclear ambitions, fuel supplies heading into the U.S. vacation season, and a pipeline explosion on Friday in Nigeria, another major oil-producing country, have kept crude prices high.

"The equity market will continue to watch oil prices, and oil prices so far have been unfriendly," Chan said.

EARNINGS WRAP: TECH AND RETAIL

Computer maker Dell Inc., whose profit warning last week jolted the tech sector along with negative outlooks from other companies, could put investors on edge again when it reports earnings on Thursday.

Rival Hewlett-Packard Co., a Dow component, is set to report results on Tuesday.

Earnings from major retailers, including Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Limited Brands, also are expected this week.

Their financial scorecards come at the end of a mostly stronger-than-expected first-quarter earnings reporting period. About 69 percent of the 456 S&P 500 companies that have reported first-quarter earnings so far have exceeded analysts' estimates, compared with about 66 percent a year earlier, according to Reuters Estimates.

First-quarter earnings are forecast to increase about 14 percent from a year ago, Reuters Estimates said.



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Consumer mood buckles as high gas prices bite

By Ros Krasny
Reuters
Fri May 12, 2006

CHICAGO - Consumer optimism buckled in May to its lowest since Hurricane Katrina, a survey showed on Friday, hit by $3 per gallon gasoline, rising mortgage interest rates and a souring political climate.

Earlier, the government offered some positive news on the economy as the US trade deficit narrowed unexpectedly in March based on a surge in export demand -- but rising import prices kept alive jitters about inflation.

The University of Michigan's closely watched sentiment survey slumped to 79.0 in May from April's final 87.4, far below the median Wall Street forecast for a reading of 86.1.
"The sharp decline reflects the impact of rising gasoline prices and the low approval ratings of President Bush," said Asha Bangalore, economist at Northern Trust Co.

The report stirred worries that many Americans will stay away from the shopping malls over the next few months as they spend more to fill up their cars -- although the link between consumer sentiment and actual spending is often tenuous.

"If sentiment stays at this level -- it might even decline further -- you should expect a serious slowing in second quarter and third quarter consumption," said Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist with High Frequency Economics.

The dollar fell on news of weakening consumer sentiment, while U.S. stock indexes stumbled for a second straight day on the jump in import prices and worries about higher interest rates. The Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 1 percent to 11,380.99 points.

Treasury debt yields rose as inflation worries fueled by rising import prices overshadowed concerns about weak consumer optimism. The benchmark 10-year Treasury note was down 12/32 in price, to yield 5.19 percent, up from 5.16 percent on Thursday.

The Michigan reading was the lowest since 1993, excluding a one-month plunge in October after Hurricane Katrina. Both elements of the report -- current conditions and expectations -- tumbled based on a survey of about 500 households.

The median inflation expectation also rose, suggesting that respondents were worried about higher prices eroding their financial well-being.

"Job security is holding up reasonably well. But expectations on housing, stocks and gasoline are looking pretty harmful for consumers," said Richard Iley, senior economist, North America, at BNP Paribas in New York.

"Underneath the surface, it (consumer confidence) is pretty brittle."

The report was consistent with ideas on Wall Street that the
Federal Reserve will end its almost two-year run of interest rate increases in June to brace for a slowdown in economic growth from the torrid first-quarter pace.

The housing sector -- notable now for stagnant prices and bulging inventories -- is likely to lead the way.

Analysts suspect extremely low job approval rates for President Bush are also eating into confidence. A new Harris Interactive poll on Friday in The Wall Street Journal Online showed Bush's job approval rating fell to a new low of 29 percent from 35 percent in April.

TRADE DEFICIT FALLS AS U.S. EXPORTS JUMP

Earlier, the Commerce Department said record high exports pushed the trade deficit down to $62 billion in March, its lowest since August and a second straight month of narrowing.

Exports, including to China, climbed to new highs, suggesting a weaker dollar is boosting demand for US goods.

Wall Street analysts had expected the gap to widen to about $67 billion on the back of higher oil import volumes.

"The trade gap is definitely better than expected, which is good any way you look at it," said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poor's Ratings Services in New York.

US exports of $114.7 billion in March included record shipments to Canada, Mexico, the European Union, China and South and Central America.

Exports were especially strong for industrial supplies and materials, such as petroleum products and plastics, and capital goods, which include industrial machines and computers.

Analysts said the data could prompt an upward revision in estimates of first-quarter US economic growth, previously reported at a 4.8 percent annual rate.

Still, the overall U.S. trade deficit for the first quarter of 2006 was $196.2 billion, on a pace to exceed the record of $723.6 billion for the whole of 2005.

The politically sensitive trade gap with China, which hit a record $202 billion in 2005, widened in March to $15.6 billion. U.S. exports to China were a record $5 billion, while imports from that country were $20.5 billion.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that the cost of imported petroleum jumped 11.5 percent in April, the biggest gain since March 2005.

The increase boosted overall US import prices by an unexpectedly sharp 2.1 percent in April, although nonpetroleum prices were flat, the report showed.

The import price report suggests a prolonged decline in the value of the dollar is beginning to show up in higher prices on imported goods, said Kevin Flanagan, fixed income strategist with Global Wealth Management at Morgan Stanley.

"I feel that is something we need to pay more attention to," Flanagan said.



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Economic Impact of Immigrants Unclear

By ALEX VEIGA
AP Business
May 14, 2006

LOS ANGELES - The debate over immigration reform resumes on Capitol Hill this week - so brace for a barrage of conflicting claims over whether the millions of people here illegally drain or fill the government's wallet.

Illegal immigrants cost $20 billion each year in education, health care and other public services. They contribute more than $7 billion annually in Social Security taxes they'll never claim.

Those are just some of the statistics that lawmakers and interest groups from both sides will trot out starting Monday when the Senate begins discussing what would be the most sweeping immigration reform legislation in 20 years.
Do illegal immigrants take more than they contribute? Or is it the other way around? Despite volumes of studies cited by both sides, no one knows for sure.

And answers often reflect the opinions of who's talking as much as the reality of illegal immigrants in the United States today, according to academics who study the issue.

"Because of the politically charged nature of this, people are going to cherry-pick their results," said V. Joseph Hotz, a labor economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who doesn't believe a definitive study is possible.

One reason is the nature of the population in question.

"Anything that is illegal, the data is going to be suspect," said Vernon Briggs, a labor economist at Cornell University who has been studying immigration issues for 40 years.

That won't stop Congress from wrestling with that bottom line and other issues.

Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., has said he is committed to passing immigration reform legislation by Memorial Day. The bill up for debate would include additional border security, a new guest worker program and provisions opening the way to eventual citizenship for many of illegal immigrants in the country. The House passed a bill late last year that would criminalize illegal immigrants and those who offer them assistance.

Pressure to act quickly has intensified. A majority of Americans now cite anxiety over immigration as one of the most important problems facing the nation, according to a recent poll by The Associated Press and Ipsos.

Yet compiling hard data has been difficult.

Even the number of illegal immigrants in the country is debated. The generally accepted figure is about 11 million, but some researchers peg the number as high as 20 million.

In diverse areas such as Los Angeles, illegal immigrants can rent an apartment and open a checking account with little more than an ID from their home country. That kind of anonymity hampers researchers trying to tally how many are here - and how much they cost in public services.

That uncertainty hasn't stopped advocates on both sides from citing research that seems to make their case.

To fill in the blanks, researchers often assume the bulk of illegal immigrants have little or no formal education or skills; are likely to live at or below the poverty level; contribute little in the form of taxes; and take advantage of public services.

One report both sides cite as one of the most definitive is nearly a decade old. In 1997, the National Research Council concluded that all immigrants - not just those here illegally - had a negative fiscal impact on state and local services but at the federal level received less in services than they paid in taxes.

In California, the state with the highest population of foreign-born residents, citizen households were saddled with an annual tax burden of $1,178 from the use of public services by immigrants, according to the study.

Pro-immigrants groups counter that whatever the answer - whether immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in services or the other way around - the economic importance of illegal immigrants is undeniable.

"You don't know whether a guy who is loading boxes on a truck or onto a ship on the docks pays his taxes or not," said Benjamin Johnson, director of the Washington-based Immigration Policy Center, which calls itself nonpartisan but pro-immigrant. "But you know what that worker means as a cog on the economic wheel."



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Move of Halliburton Meeting Draws Fire

By KELLY KURT
Associated Press
May 14, 2006

DUNCAN, Okla. - Halliburton earned a record $2.4 billion last year, but Houston executives will forgo Texas-sized luxury when they come to this rural Oklahoma county seat this week.

Shareholders, who have gathered for the company's annual meeting since 2003 at Houston's lavish Four Seasons Hotel, will meet Wednesday in the modern, but far humbler setting of Duncan's convention center. Those staying the night can choose the Holiday Inn, with rooms opening onto the parking lot, and the Chisholm Suites Hotel, which takes its name for the cattle trail that once passed here.

Halliburton Co. says it moved its meeting to this company town of 22,500 to honor its southern Oklahoma roots. The company's critics accuse it of running to a prairie outpost to hide.
"They're relocating to a city where they don't actually have to be accountable to their own shareholders," said Maureen Haver, spokeswoman for the Houston Global Awareness Collective and one of 15 protesters arrested at Halliburton's meeting last year. "They're going to a town they have in their pocket."

The oilfield services conglomerate is not alone in taking big business to middle America's smaller places.

International Business Machines Corp. recently held its annual meeting in Tulsa, Oklahoma's second largest city, and Pfizer Inc. met in Lincoln, Neb., locations where both New York-based companies have operations.

Joseph Horgan, a representative for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, came to Tulsa to represent the union's concerns and ended up riding out a tornado warning in a parking garage. Days later, he followed Pfizer to Lincoln.

Both meetings, he said, were convened far from concentrations of active shareholders, limiting participation by those with beefs about high executive pay and other business practices.

"They were trying to escape scrutiny by active owners," he complained after the IBM meeting.

IBM and Pfizer say changing their meeting locations is nothing new and that doing so gives shareholders in different regions of the country the chance to show up and executives the chance to showcase local facilities. Both reported average meeting attendance.

"In many cases, we have retirees who are shareholders and it gives them an opportunity to attend the meeting and listen to management talk about business," said Pfizer spokesman Paul Fitzhenry, who listed other recent meetings in Ann Arbor, Mich., Groton, Conn., and St. Louis.

Halliburton's annual meetings have drawn 200 to 500 protesters in recent years.

The company, once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, has drawn criticism for its big government contracts, some awarded without competitive bidding. Its KBR unit provides support services for troops stationed in the Middle East.

But the company denies trying to escape critics by moving to this quiet town, where Old Glory waves on Main Street and old timers drink coffee at the downtown drug store.

"We are holding our meeting in Duncan because we are a company that values our tradition and spirit of innovation - much of which started in Duncan more than 80 years ago," spokeswoman Cathy Mann said. "We are excited to showcase this heritage for our shareholders."

Erle P. Halliburton's oilfield services company incorporated in Duncan in 1924. It moved its headquarters in 1961 to Dallas and later to Houston but remains Duncan's top employer.

The 2,400 workers at Halliburton's manufacturing, technology center, field camps and administrative offices here grossed more than $126 million last year.

"Almost everyone we know is related to Halliburton or retired from Halliburton, or a spouse works there," said Mindy Borgstadt, whose husband is an engineer for the company.

Residents see their futures so inextricably linked to Halliburton that even those with only praise for the company were afraid to share it for publication, lest it divert from the company line.

"If it hadn't been for Halliburton, Duncan wouldn't be this kind of town at all," explained retired Halliburton engineer Tex Hamilton, envisioning an abandoned speck on the map instead of a humming little city full of fellow retirees.

About 100 shareholders attended last year's meeting, but Mann wouldn't speculate how many will make the trip to Duncan.

A group that accuses Halliburton of war profiteering, Oklahoma Veterans for Peace, received a permit for 300 demonstrators outside the meeting at the Simmons Center, a venue Halliburton helped fund. The group's organizers expect to be joined by anti-globalization activists and other protest groups, including Houston Global Awareness.

Extra law officers and other security will be on hand, and a nearby middle school will close for the day for the students' safety. Last year's arrests followed a sit-in at the Houston hotel where the meeting took place.

City Manager Clyde Shaw said protesters aren't something he's had to deal with in the planning for other annual draws, including the "World's Largest Garage Sale" in July. A group of Duncan residents have obtained a permit to hold a pro-Halliburton counter demonstration.



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Chavez Plans Cheap Oil for Europe's Poor

By VERONIKA OLEKSYN
Associated Press
May 13, 2006

VIENNA, Austria - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Saturday that he wants to provide cheap heating oil for low-income Europeans, proposing a plan similar to the one he carried out in parts of the eastern United States.

Chavez said Venezuela has two oil refineries in Germany and one in Britain but did not provide further details about which countries could benefit from the proposal.
"I want to humbly offer support to the poorest people who do not have resources for central heating in winter and make sure that support arrives," Chavez said at a gathering in Vienna of activists and representatives of social movements and non-governmental groups.

The so-called alternative summit was held in parallel to a three-day summit of leaders from the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean that concluded earlier Saturday in the Austrian capital.

This past winter, Venezuela delivered cut-rate oil to low-income Americans through Citgo, the Houston-based subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil company. Some Chavez critics charged the heating aid program was an attempt to embarrass President Bush and was more an attempt to score political points than it was an act of charity.

In other comments during his speech that lasted more than two hours, Chavez - known for his anti-American rhetoric - said that the "final hours of the North American empire have arrived."

"So now we have to say to the empire: 'We're not afraid of you. You're a paper tiger," he added.



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British Inventor Unveils 8000 MPG Car

Julie Farby
All Headline News
May 12, 2006

London, England - A British inventor unveils the world's most fuel-efficient vehicle, a three-wheel "TeamGreen" car capable of doing 8,000 miles to the gallon.

The 45-year-old inventor, Andy Green, from the University of Bath, built his budget eco-motor for just Ł2,000, and will be the sole British contender for the title of the world's most fuel-economic car in a global competition being held later this month.

It has taken Mr. Green more than two years to design and build the car, which will be the fourth eco-vehicle he has built. He holds the British record for fuel-efficiency, with 6,603 miles to the gallon in a previous car.

According to the report, the new vehicle is powered by a single cylinder four-stroke engine with a capacity of just 35cc and runs with a special management system incorporating fuel injection.

A spokesman for Bath University says, "Andy Green is keeping the spirit of the lone British inventor who takes on the world very much alive."




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For Your Health


House approves study of uranium exposure in U.S. military

By DAVID GOLDSTEIN
The Kansas City Star
Sat, May. 13, 2006

WASHINGTON - Veterans groups and advocates worried about the health effects of depleted uranium on soldiers won a victory this week.

The House included an amendment in the defense policy bill that it passed Thursday ordering the Pentagon to study the impact of depleted uranium exposure on troops and their children. The Senate could begin debate on the bill this month.

Depleted uranium, or DU, is what remains after natural uranium's radioactive fraction is removed for use as nuclear fuel or weapons. Because DU is very dense, the military uses it for armor-piercing weapons and armor protection, and in some tanks.
Troops have been exposed to it during the gulf war, in Bosnia and in Iraq.

"If DU poses no danger, we need to prove it with statistically valid and independent scientific studies," said Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott of Washington, the amendment's author, who has been sounding an alarm for several years. "If DU harms our soldiers, we all need to know it and act quickly."

Veterans groups and other activists contend that when equipment containing DU is destroyed on the battlefield, exposure to the dust poses radioactive risks to military personnel, as do embedded fragments.

Many refer to it as the next Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used in Vietnam that was thought at the time to be harmless.

The military has said studies over the past 50 years have proved the health risks of DU to be "minimal."

"While natural and depleted uranium are considered chemically toxic, they are not considered a radiation hazard," according to a Pentagon Web site at 7apr.htm.

The World Health Organization has said no increases in leukemia or other cancers have been linked to exposure to depleted uranium.



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Report: Suicidal troops sent into combat

Updated: 10:04 p.m. ET May 13, 2006
Associated Press

HARTFORD, Conn. - U.S. military troops with severe psychological problems have been sent to Iraq or kept in combat, even when superiors have been aware of signs of mental illness, a newspaper reported for Sunday editions.

The Hartford Courant, citing records obtained under the federal Freedom of Information Act and more than 100 interviews of families and military personnel, reported numerous cases in which the military failed to follow its own regulations in screening, treating and evacuating mentally unfit troops from Iraq.
In 1997, Congress ordered the military to assess the mental health of all deploying troops. The newspaper, citing Pentagon statistics, said fewer than 1 in 300 service members were referred to a mental health professional before shipping out for Iraq as of October 2005.

Twenty-two U.S. troops committed suicide in Iraq last year, accounting for nearly one in five of all non-combat deaths and was the highest suicide rate since the war started, the newspaper said.

'Chemically active time bombs'

Some service members who committed suicide in 2004 and 2005 were kept on duty despite clear signs of mental distress, sometimes after being prescribed antidepressants with little or no mental health counseling or monitoring. Those findings conflict with regulations adopted last year by the Army that caution against the use of antidepressants for "extended deployments."

"I can't imagine something more irresponsible than putting a soldier suffering from stress on (antidepressants), when you know these drugs can cause people to become suicidal and homicidal," said Vera Sharav, president of the Alliance for Human Research Protection. "You're creating chemically activated time bombs."

Although Defense Department standards for enlistment disqualify recruits who suffer "persistent post-traumatic symptoms," the military also is redeploying service members to Iraq who fit that criteria, the newspaper said.

"I'm concerned that people who are symptomatic are being sent back. That has not happened before in our country," said Dr. Arthur S. Blank, Jr., a Yale-trained psychiatrist who helped to get post-traumatic stress disorder recognized as a diagnosis after the Vietnam War.

'Recruiting has been a challenge'

The Army's top mental health expert, Col. Elspeth Ritchie, acknowledged that some deployment practices, such as sending service members diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome back into combat, have been driven in part by a troop shortage.

"The challenge for us ... is that the Army has a mission to fight. And, as you know, recruiting has been a challenge," she said. "And so we have to weigh the needs of the Army, the needs of the mission, with the soldiers' personal needs."

Ritchie insisted the military works hard to prevent suicides, but is a challenge because every soldier has access to a weapon.

Commanders, not medical professionals, have final say over whether a troubled soldier is retained in the war zone. Ritchie and other military officials said they believe most commanders are alert to mental health problems and are open to referring troubled soldiers for treatment.

"Your average commander doesn't want to deal with a whacked-out soldier. But on the other hand, he doesn't want to send a message to his troops that if you act up, he's willing to send you home," said Maj. Andrew Efaw, a judge advocate general officer in the Army Reserves who handled trial defense for soldiers in northern Iraq last year.



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Biotech Firm Raises Furor With Rice Plan

By PAUL ELIAS
AP Biotechnology Writer
May 14, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO - In its quest to genetically engineer rice with human genes to produce a treatment for childhood diarrhea, tiny Ventria Bioscience has made an astonishing number of powerful enemies spanning the political spectrum.

Environmental groups, corporate food interests and thousands of farmers across the country have succeeded in chasing the company's rice farms out of two states. And critics continue to complain that Ventria is recklessly plowing ahead with a mostly untested technology that threatens the safety of conventional crops grown for the food supply.
"We just want them to go away," said Bob Papanos of the U.S. Rice Producers Association. "This little company could cause major problems."

Ventria, with 16 employees, practices "biopharming," the most contentious segment of agricultural biotechnology because its adherents essentially operate open-air drug factories by splicing human genes into crops to produce proteins that can be turned into medicines.

Ventria's rice produces two human proteins found in mother's milk, saliva and tears, which help people hydrate and lessen the severity and duration of diarrhea attacks, a top killer of children in developing countries.

But farmers, environmentalists and others fear that such medicinal crops will mix with conventional crops, making them unsafe to eat.

The company says the chance of its genetically engineered rice ending up in the food supply is remote because the company grinds the rice and extracts the protein before shipping. What's more, rice is "self-pollinating," and it's virtually impossible for genetically engineered rice to accidentally cross breed with conventional crops.

"We use a contained system," Ventria Chief Executive Scott Deeter said.

Regardless, U.S. rice farmers in particular fear that important overseas customers in lucrative, biotechnology-averse countries like Japan will shun U.S. crops if biopharming is allowed to proliferate. Exports account for 50 percent of the rice industry's $1.18 billion in annual sales.

Japanese consumers, like those in Western Europe, are still alarmed by past mad cow disease outbreaks mishandled by their governments, making them deeply skeptical of any changes to their food supply, including genetically engineered crops.

Rice interests in California drove Ventria's experimental work out of the state in 2004, after Japanese customers said they wouldn't buy the rice if Ventria were allowed to set up shop.

Anheuser-Busch Inc. and Riceland Foods Inc., the world's largest rice miller, were among the corporate interests that pressured the company to abandon plans to set up a commercial-scale farm in Missouri's rice belt last year.

But Ventria was undeterred. The company, which has its headquarters in Sacramento, finally landed near Greenville, N.C. In March it received U.S. Department of Agriculture clearance to expand its operation there from 70 acres to 335 acres. Ventria is hoping to get regulatory clearance this year to market its diarrhea-fighting protein powder.

There has been little resistance from corporate and farming interest in eastern North Carolina. But the company's work has raised the hackles of environmentalists there.

"The issue is the growing of pharmaceutical products in food crops grown outdoors," said Hope Shand of the environmental nonprofit ETC Group in Carrboro, N.C. "The chance this will contaminate traditionally grown crops is great. This is a very risky business."

Deeter points out that there aren't any commercial rice growers in North Carolina, although the USDA did allow Ventria to grow its controversial crop about a half-mile from a government "rice station," where new strains are tested. The USDA has since moved that station to Beltsville, Md., though an agency spokeswoman said the relocation had nothing to do with Ventria.

The company, meanwhile, has applied to the Food and Drug Administration to approve the protein powder as a "medical food" rather than a drug. That means Ventria wouldn't have to conduct long and costly human tests. Instead, it submitted data from scientific experts attesting to the company's powder is "generally regarded as safe."

Earlier this month, a Peruvian scientist sponsored by Ventria presented data at the Pediatric Academics Societies meeting in San Francisco. It showed children hospitalized in Peru with serious diarrhea attacks recovered quicker - 3.67 days versus 5.21 days - if the dehydration solution they were fed contained the powder.

Ventria's chief executive said he hopes to have an approval this year and envisions a $100 million annual market in the United States. Deeter forecasts a $500 million market overseas, especially in developing countries where diarrhea is a top killer of children under the age of 5. The
World Health Organization reports that nearly 2 million children succumb to diarrhea each year.

But overcoming consumer skepticism and regulatory concerns about feeding babies with products derived from genetic engineering is a tall order. This is especially true in the face of continued opposition to biopharming from the Grocery Manufacturers Association of America, which represents food, beverage and consumer products companies with combined U.S. sales of $460 billion.

Ventria hopes to add its protein powder to existing infant products. There is no requirement to label any food products in the United States as containing genetically engineered ingredients.

The company also has ambitious plans to add its product to infant formula, a $10 billion-a-year market, even though the major food manufacturers have so far shown little interest in using genetically engineered ingredients. But Deeter says Ventria can win over the manufacturers and consumers by showing the company's products are beneficial.

"For children who are weaning, for instance, these two proteins have enormous potential to help their development," Deeter said. "Breast-fed babies are healthier and these two proteins are a big reason why."



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Avian Flu Wanes in Asian Nations It First Hit Hard

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
The New York Times
May 14, 2006


Even as it crops up in the far corners of Europe and Africa, the virulent bird flu that raised fears of a human pandemic has been largely snuffed out in the parts of Southeast Asia where it claimed its first and most numerous victims.

Health officials are pleased and excited. "In Thailand and Vietnam, we've had the most fabulous success stories," said Dr. David Nabarro, chief pandemic flu coordinator for the United Nations.
Vietnam, which has had almost half of the human cases of A(H5N1) flu in the world, has not seen a single case in humans or a single outbreak in poultry this year. Thailand, the second-hardest-hit nation until Indonesia recently passed it, has not had a human case in nearly a year or one in poultry in six months.

Encouraging signs have also come from China, though they are harder to interpret.

These are the second positive signals that officials have seen recently in their struggle to prevent avian flu from igniting a human pandemic. Confounding expectations, birds making the spring migration north from Africa have not carried the virus into Europe.

Dr. Nabarro and other officials warn that it would be highly premature to declare any sort of victory. The virus has moved rapidly across continents and is still rampaging in Myanmar, Indonesia and other countries nearby. It could still hitchhike back in the illegal trade in chicks, fighting cocks or tropical pets, or in migrating birds.

But this sudden success in the former epicenter of the epidemic is proof that aggressive measures like killing infected chickens, inoculating healthy ones, protecting domestic flocks and educating farmers can work, even in very poor countries.

Dr. Nabarro said he was "cautious in interpreting these shifts in patterns" because too little is known about how the disease spreads.

Other officials agreed.

"To say the disease is 'wiped out' there is probably too strong, too positive," said Dr. Wantanee Kalpravidh, chief of flu surveillance in Southeast Asia for the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, which fights animal diseases. The governments of Thailand and Vietnam "believe they got rid of it," she said, "but they also believe that it might be coming back at any time."

Very different tactics led to success in the two countries.

While Vietnam began vaccinating all its 220 million chickens last summer, Thailand did not because it has a large poultry export industry, and other nations would have banned its birds indefinitely. (Vaccines can mask the virus instead of killing it.)

Instead, Thailand culled wide areas around infected flocks, compensated farmers generously and deputized a volunteer in every village to report sick chickens.

It vaccinates fighting cocks, which can be worth thousands of dollars, and even issues them passports with their vaccination records so they can travel, Dr. Nabarro said.

Government inspectors sample birds everywhere; in February, Thailand reported that samples from 57,000 birds had come back negative.

According to Dr. Klaus Stöhr, a flu specialist at the World Health Organization, Thailand and Vietnam also delivered the antiviral drug Tamiflu to even the smallest regional hospitals and told doctors to treat all flu patients even before laboratory diagnoses could be made.

Dr. Nabarro particularly praised the leaders of the two countries for ordering high-level officials - deputy prime ministers - to fight the disease, and for making sure that enough cash to entice farmers to hand over their birds for culling flowed down official channels without being siphoned off.

Hints suggest that the disease is also being beaten back in China, the country where it is assumed to have begun. International officials tend to greet official public health reports from China skeptically, in part because it concealed the outbreak of the SARS virus there for months. It did not officially report any bird cases for years, even though many scientists contend the virus incubated there between its first appearance in humans in Hong Kong in 1997 and the current human outbreak, which began in Vietnam in 2003.

Some top Chinese officials have blamed the reluctance of local officials to report bad news to Beijing. Dr. Nabarro said he recently met a vice premier "who made it clear that they are absolutely determined to get the fullest possible cooperation from provincial authorities."

China's reported human cases have remained low: 8 last year and 10 this year.

Perhaps more important, its poultry cases - which lead to human cases and increase the risk of a mutant pandemic strain - seem to be dropping.

According to the World Health Organization, China said it had outbreaks in 16 provinces in 2004. In 2005, it reported outbreaks in only 12 provinces, but one in November was so large that 2.5 million birds were culled to contain it.

After that, the Agriculture Ministry announced that it would vaccinate every domestic bird in China, which raises and consumes 14 billion chickens, ducks and geese each year. The official news agency reported about the same time that a fake flu vaccine, possibly with live virus in it, might have spread the disease.

Dr. Stöhr, who is in charge of W.H.O. flu vaccine efforts, said he was told by Chinese agriculture officials that the country was now producing 46 billion doses of poultry vaccine a year, and was supplying vaccines to Vietnam.

China's most recent monthly reports describe much smaller outbreaks than were previously common: findings of a few dead wild birds and culls of 126,000 birds in one spot and 16,000 in another, for example.

"We are hopeful that China has turned the corner," Dr. Nabarro said.

In Cambodia and Laos, which separate Thailand and Vietnam, the situation is vague.

Laos has reported no human cases and last reported poultry outbreaks two years ago. Cambodia's reported human cases dropped to two this year, from four last year. No poultry outbreaks were reported, but surveillance is so spotty that some must have occurred and gone unnoticed, Dr. Kalpravidh said, because the country's six human victims were infected by poultry.

Cambodia was slow to compensate farmers for their birds because of problems with corruption in a previous cash-for-guns program.

Health specialists generally agree that there is little clear chance of infected birds landing in the United States.

Where the Southeast Asian governments have taken action, however, the risk of the virus returning is ever present, Dr. Nabarro said.

For example, he said, it probably exists in Vietnam in Muscovy ducks, which can harbor the virus but do not get sick, and it has turned up in isolated birds in open-air markets near the Chinese border. (Single birds do not constitute an outbreak.) Since Chinese farmers can get three times as much for a chicken in Vietnam as they can at home, the temptation to smuggle persists.

"Tomorrow, the whole thing could change again," Dr. Nabarro said. "We need to be on the alert at all times."



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Japan Confirms 26th Mad Cow Disease Case

AP
Sat May 13, 2006

TOKYO - Japan has confirmed its 26th case of mad cow disease, this one in a 5-year-old Holstein in the country's north, the Agriculture Ministry said Saturday.

Meat inspectors in the northern state of Hokkaido found Thursday that a dairy cow tested positive for the disease, the ministry said in a statement. A panel of Agriculture Ministry experts confirmed the infection Saturday, according to ministry official Akiko Suzuki.
"All meat, internal organs and parts from this cattle will be incinerated, and there is no danger that they will be circulated in the market," the ministry statement said.

The confirmation comes as Japanese and U.S. officials prepare to meet as early as next week to discuss lifting Tokyo's ban on American beef.

Japan initially banned U.S. beef in December 2003, following the first discovery of mad cow disease in the United States.

That ban was eased last December to allow the importation of meat from cows aged 20 months or less - seen as posing a lower risk of having the disease - but the ban was later tightened following the faulty beef shipment in January.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is a degenerative nerve disease in cattle. Eating contaminated meat products has been linked to the rare but fatal human variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.



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First baby in Britain designed cancer-free

By Mark Henderson, Science Editor
The Sunday Times
May 13, 2006

A WOMAN is pregnant with Britain's first designer baby selected to prevent an inherited cancer, The Times can reveal.

Her decision to use controversial genetic-screening technology will ensure that she does not pass on to her child the hereditary form of eye cancer from which she suffers.

Although they did not have fertility problems, the woman and her partner created embryos by IVF. This allowed doctors to remove a cell and test it for the cancer gene, so only unaffected embryos were transferred to her womb.
The couple are the first to take advantage of a relaxation in the rules governing embryo screening.

When the technique was developed in 1989 it was allowed only for genes that always cause disease, such as those for cystic fibrosis. However, it was approved last year for the eye cancer, which affects only 90 per cent of those who inherit a mutated gene.

The pregnancy will increase controversy over the procedure, which the Government's fertility watchdog authorised on Wednesday for genes that confer an 80 per cent lifetime risk of breast and bowel cancer.

Critics argue that the action is unethical because it involves the destruction of some embryos that would never contract these illnesses if they were allowed to develop into children. Even those that would potentially become ill could expect many years of healthy life first, and some of the disorders involved are treatable or preventable.

The mother-to-be, who wishes to remain anonymous, conceived after receiving treatment from Paul Serhal, of University College Hospital, London.

Mr Serhal has pioneered the use of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to detect heritable cancers in Britain, though it has been used successfully before in the United States. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority's (HFEA) decision to award him licences to screen for retinoblastoma and a form of bowel cancer were reported exclusively in The Times. Mr Serhal is treating several couples with the disorder.

"We are all elated," he said yesterday. "We are talking about annihilating this abnormal gene from the whole family line. We do this often, but it is always extraordinary when it comes off."

Mr Serhal's clinic is planning to apply to screen a patient's embryos for the BRCA1 gene that raises the lifetime risk of breast cancer to 80 per cent.

Though the HFEA has now agreed in principle that such screening will be allowed, clinics must still obtain a separate licence for every patient.

Retinoblastoma accounts for 11 per cent of all cancers that develop in the first year of life. In almost half of cases, it is caused by an inherited mutation in a gene called RB1. Parents with this defective gene have a 50 per cent chance of passing it on to a child, and it causes tumours in 90 per cent of those who inherit it. The mutation also raises the lifetime risk of suffering other cancers from a third to more than half.

Libby Halford, chief executive of the Childhood Eye Cancer Trust, a retinoblastoma charity, welcomed the news. "This gives families a choice," she said. "We know now that there is an effective test."

Josephine Quintavalle, of the embryo rights group Comment on Reproductive Ethics, said: "We mustn't forget the embryos that were not given a chance to live. This is a worrying application because we are looking at a condition that is treatable."



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Cardiologist says Vioxx still a risk after stopping

By Bill Berkrot
Reuters
Fri May 12, 2006

NEW YORK - A leading cardiologist on Friday disputed Merck & Co's interpretation on the safety of patients once they stop taking Vioxx, saying they remained at high risk of heart attacks or strokes for some time afterward.

Dr Steven Nissen, interim chairman of cardiology at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, said Merck misrepresented an analysis of data from a follow-up review of patients involved in the trial that led to the pain medication being pulled from the market.
"It's important that we inform people about this because patients who have taken the drug will need increased surveillance by their physicians and increased awareness of their risks in the year subsequent to stopping the drug. And that risk may extend beyond a year; we simply don't know," Nissen told Reuters in a telephone interview.

Merck said on Thursday that patients who took Vioxx in the study had no greater risk of heart attacks or strokes a year after stopping the medication than those who got placebos.

While there were 28 heart attacks or strokes in the Vioxx group compared with 16 in the placebo group, Merck said those numbers failed to reach statistical significance.

"In the one year after Vioxx was stopped there was a 75 percent greater risk of having an adverse event," Nissen said.

"What this means is that, surprisingly, in the year following discontinuation of Vioxx the relative risk remains approximately as high as it was when people were actually taking the drug. That is very clear from the data," Nissen said.

Merck withdrew Vioxx from the market in September of 2004 after a three-year study showed it doubled the risk of heart attack and strokes in patients taking it for at least 18 months.

Nissen said because there was a relatively small total number of adverse heart events in the follow-up year, Merck was able to claim no statistically significant difference even though the actual numbers tell a different story.

"What is important is that the hazard stays constant even after you stop the drug," Nissen said.

In response to Nissen's comments, Merck said it stands by what it said in Thursday's statement and subsequent conference call.

"We were as transparent as possible in this whole process," Merck spokesman Michael Heinley said. "We were trying to get out as much as we could recognizing there were a lot of people interested in this data."

Merck is facing more than 11,500 lawsuits from people who claim to have been harmed by Vioxx, or their survivors.

The company's general counsel said on Thursday that the one-year follow-up data should shield it from lawsuits that might be filed by people who suffered heart attacks or strokes after they were no longer taking Vioxx.

But Nissen said: "What counts is the relative risk as you go forward, and the bottom line is there is a constant risk even after the drug is stopped.

"That is the only clear message from the study. The rest is spin," he said.



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Gaia's Revenge


Indonesia's Merapi volcano explodes with gas

By Tomi Soetjipto
Reuters
Mon May 15, 2006

KETEP, Indonesia - Indonesia's Mount Merapi volcano exploded with clouds of hot gas and ash rain early on Monday, sending some villagers who had been reluctant to leave scurrying for safety.

Gray ash covered some vegetation and rooftops in the area of Ketep, 10 kms (six miles) from the base of the mountain, and many houses appeared deserted after residents evacuated.

Not everyone was gone, however. Some people cleaned ashes off their houses and others opened shops, while commercial mini-buses continued to run.
The mountain "has exploded already", the head of the Merapi section at the Center of Vulcanological Research and Technology in Yogyakarta told Reuters.

He cautioned, however, that the mountain's eruption process could be gradual rather than a sudden burst.

From Ketep, the top of Merapi was totally obscured by thick gray and white clouds, which trailed down the volcano's slopes.

Earlier, Ratmono Purbo, the head of the vulcanology center in Yogyakarta near the volcano, told reporters the mountain was spewing clouds of hot gas and was raining down ash.

Neither are new since activity picked up in recent weeks on Merapai, one of the most menacing volcanoes in the Pacific "Ring of Fire", and there have been several lava flows in past days.

But Purbo said of Monday's hot clouds: "This is the biggest pile we have so far, adding that they "are billowing out of the crater for four kilometers (2.5 miles)".

Indonesia raised on Saturday the alert status of Merapi to the highest level, also known as code red or danger status, although experts said they could not predict when it would erupt.

They have described the mountain as being in an "eruption phase" for weeks, but are looking for a substantial amount of volcanic material to be ejected straight into the sky to a substantial height to qualify it as a full eruption.

The top alert level for the mountain means residents can be forced to evacuate. Authorities moved more than 5,000 people living near the volcano to shelters in safe areas after the new alert level.

Thousands more moved earlier, but some have refused to leave their homes while others have continued to return during the days to tend livestock, collect grass, or otherwise carry on their daily routines.

Indonesian media reports said many who previously held back were leaving on Monday, carried in hundreds of trucks and cars.

Some residents would rather rely on natural signs than official orders.

They say those signals would include lightning around the mountain's peak or animals moving down its slopes.

Officials put the total number of residents on and near the mountain at around 14,000.



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Wellington wakes up to moderate earthquake

May 15 2006 at 02:16AM

Wellington - A magnitude five earthquake hit central New Zealand early on Monday, shaking the nation's capital, Wellington, and waking many residents, police said.
There were no immediate reports of injury or damage from the moderate quake, which struck at 5.32am local time (17h32 GMT on Sunday).

The tremblor was centred 40km north-west of the capital and 60km below the earth's surface, GNS Science, the nation's geological agency, said in a statement.

The earthquake was felt throughout the Wellington region.

New Zealand sits above an area of the earth's crust where two tectonic plates are colliding and records more than 14 000 earthquakes a year - but only about 150 are felt by residents.




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Twenty-one dead as tropical storm lashes the Philippines

by Jason Gutierrez
AFP
Sat May 13, 2006

MANILA - Tropical storm Chanchu continues to lash the Philippines, leaving at least 21 people dead as heavy rains triggered landslides and left parts of the country under water.

Floodwaters submerged two provinces in the central Visayas region and several villages in Leyte's Sogod town were cut off after landslides and floods damaged a bridge and vital highway.
Chanchu was tracking west-northwest towards the South China Sea and was expected to have moved on by Sunday morning, the state weather bureau said.

In the worst accident during the storm, motorboat Mae Ann 5 capsized just off the central city of Masbate Friday.

Officials are unsure how many passengers were aboard, but coast guard spokesman Lieutenant Commander Joseph Coyme said 21 bodies had been fished out of the water.

"As of the report we got before 12 noon, there were 21 dead bodies recovered and 18 survivors," Coyme told AFP.

"Our operations will be continuing for the rest of the day, and we advise fishermen and ferries in affected areas not to venture out to sea because of huge waves," Coyme said.

Masbate remains "isolated considering that there is no electricity and there is no communication in the province as of now," said provincial police chief Senior Superintendent Eugenio Alcuvindas.

A second ferry, which was docked at a port in Albay province, sank, but there were no reports of casualties.

Coyme said another missing ferry with over 700 passengers on board had been located after hours of searching rough seas.

Two tugboats were dispatched to help the Filipinas Princess, which was reported missing at the height of the storm Friday night but was found anchored in a cove near Mindoro island south of Manila.

"The vessel took shelter in a cove because of high winds and waves. We are in contact with them and tugboats have been sent to rescue them," Coyme said.

The civil defense office said over 23,000 people in the eastern and central regions have been evacuated, while nearly 8,000 people were stranded in major ports after the coast guard suspended sea travel.

Heavy rains and strong winds were continuing to pound several provinces Saturday in the main island of Luzon. Power, which had been down in many areas, had been partly restored as of Saturday, it said.

Fallen trees and debris blown by the wind also littered some streets in Manila and in nearby suburbs.

Large suburban areas near Manila were also without electricity after trees and fallen billboards toppled lines, the Manila Electric Co. said adding that repairs were being rushed and services should resume later in the day.

Chanchu was packing maximum sustained winds of 95 kilometers (58 miles) per hour near the center with gusts up to 120 kilometers per hour, the weather bureau said.

Its chief, Graciano Yumul, said Manila and nearby provinces, as well as the island of Marinduque to the south, would continue to experience strong winds and rain. Storm warnings in some other areas were lowered.

"It is heading towards the South China Sea and by theory the weather should be better once that happens," Yumul told DZMM radio.

"But we are monitoring this because once it exits to the South China Sea it would intensify and there is a danger it could make a U-turn back to the Philippines," he said.



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Storm kills 10 in Bangladesh

Reuters
Sat May 13, 2006

DHAKA - At least 10 Bangladeshis were killed and dozens of others injured in lightning strikes during a violent rainstorm, weather officials said on Saturday.

They said the country experienced this year's heaviest rainfall on Friday, including about 50 mm (two inches) recorded in the capital Dhaka.

The deaths were reported from outside Dhaka -- in Gopalganj, Patuakhali and Jessore towns -- and were mostly caused by lightning during the 80 kph (50 mph) storm.

Strong winds flattened many homes, damaged crops and uprooted trees and electric poles, local officials said.




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N.H. Declares Emergency Over Flooding

By DAVID TIRRELL-WYSOCKI
Associated Press
May 14, 2006

CONCORD, N.H. - Gov. John Lynch declared a state of emergency and activated the National Guard on Sunday as torrential rain washed out roads, flowed over dams and forced people from their homes.
"It's a very serious situation," Lynch said, adding that forecasters were predicting 12 to 15 inches of rain by the end of the storm in parts of southern New Hampshire. "It continues to change and the situation continues to worsen."

Some areas had seen 7 inches of rain by midday Sunday and forecasters said up to 5 more inches might come during the day.
About 100 residents were evacuated from their homes in Wakefield because of concerns about two dams in the area, the state Office of Emergency Management said. At least a dozen dams were being closely watched.

Officials also reported a railroad culvert and embankment washed out in Milton, with train tracks suspended in midair. And the local emergency management office in Hooksett said the town essentially was closed because so many roads were flooded.

Tom Johnson said water was flowing on Sunday into the basement of his Salem home, where a pump that handles 1,500 gallons of water an hour was not keeping up.

"There are areas in my backyard that are probably 3 feet deep and climbing as we speak," Johnson said.

In Maine, flooding was reported on 60 roads in the southern part of the state, said governor's spokeswoman Crystal Canney. Shelters were set up in Kennebunk and Ogunquit.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney declared a state of emergency on Sunday, activating the National Guard and various state services to help communities respond to the storm.

Boston had picked up 4.35 inches of rain in 24 hours. Farther north, Newburyport collected 5.83 inches over the same period, according to the
National Weather Service.

Flooding in New Hampshire in October killed seven people, carried off homes and washed away miles of roads down to bedrock.



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Plane Carrying Kennedy Hit by Lightning

AP
Sunday, May 14, 2006

A plane carrying U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy from western Massachusetts to his home on the coast was struck by lightning Saturday and had to be diverted to New Haven, Conn., his spokeswoman said.

The eight-seat Cessna Citation 550 plane lost all electrical power, including communications, and the pilot had to fly the plane manually, according to spokeswoman Melissa Wagoner. No one was hurt.

The Democrat had just delivered the commencement address at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and was on his way to his Cape Cod home when the plane was struck around 4 p.m., she said.

The jet landed safely at New Haven at 4:11 p.m., said Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Arlene Murray. A report was filed with the agency, which will look into the incident, she said.

Kennedy planned to stay in Connecticut overnight because he was scheduled to return to western Massachusetts on Sunday to deliver a commencement address at Springfield College, Wagoner said.




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Two more women killed by Florida alligators

15/05/2006

The bodies of two women, both killed by alligators, have been found less than a week after a similar death in Florida, a state that had seen just 17 confirmed fatal attacks by the animals in the previous 57 years.

A 23-year-old woman staying at a secluded cabin near a spring that feeds into the Lake George was attacked yesterday at a recreation area, said Marion County Fire-Rescue Capt. Joe Amigliore. The lake is about 80 kilometres southeast of Gainesville.

"The people she was staying with came around and found her inside the alligator's mouth," Amigliore said. "They jumped into the water and somehow pulled her out of the gator's mouth."

The woman, whose name was not released, was pronounced dead at the scene. Her stepfather, who had tried to help her, was treated on the scene for a hand injury, said Amigliore.

In Pinellas County, the death of another woman whose body was found early yesterday in a canal 30 kilometers north of St. Petersburg also was blamed on an alligator, authorities said.
The woman's body had been in the water for about three days, authorities said.

She suffered animal bites that were consistent with an alligator, which "did play some part in the victim's death", according to a preliminary autopsy. The cause of death was pending and the medical examiner's final report will not be released for at least four weeks, the sheriff's office said.

"We don't know the condition she was in when this happened," said state wildlife spokesman Gary Morse.

Authorities were baiting traps in their searches for both alligators Sunday.

On Wednesday, construction workers found the dismembered body of a Florida Atlantic University student in a canal near Fort Lauderdale. A medical examiner concluded that the 28-year-old woman was attacked near the canal bank and dragged into the water.

On Saturday, wildlife officers captured a ten-foot alligator in Sunrise that they believe fatally attacked Yovy Suarez Jimenez while she was out jogging.

Suarez's death was the 18th confirmed fatal alligator attack in Florida since 1948. Nine other deaths are unconfirmed, mainly because it was not clear whether the person was already dead when the alligator attacked.

What provoked the attacks in three separate Florida counties was unknown, but state wildlife officials said alligators are generally on the move looking for mates and food this time of year.

"As the weather heats up, the alligators' metabolism increases and they have to eat more," Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman Willie Puz said Sunday. "They might be moving more, but that just shouldn't mean increased alligator attacks."

Florida residents are warned not to swim in heavily vegetated areas, feed wildlife or walk pets near the water, especially between dusk and dawn when gators are more active, Morse said.

"There are some things that can cause alligators to associate people with feeding opportunities," Morse said.



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Space rock could make 2036 a killer year

BY MICHAEL CABBAGE
The Orlando Sentinel
Sun, May. 14, 2006

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Mark your calendar for Sunday, April 13, 2036. That's when a 1,000-foot-wide asteroid named Apophis could hit the Earth with enough force to obliterate a small state.

The odds of a collision are 1-in-6,250. But while that's a long shot at the racetrack, the stakes are too high for astronomers to ignore.

For now, Apophis represents the most imminent threat from the worst type of natural disaster known, one reason NASA is spending millions to detect the threat from this and other asteroids.
A direct hit on an urban area could unleash more destruction than Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake combined. The blast would equal 880 million tons of TNT or 65,000 times the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Objects this size are thought to hit Earth about once every 1,000 years, and, according to recent estimates, the risk of dying from a renegade space rock is comparable to the hazards posed by tornadoes and snakebites. Those kind of statistics have moved the once-far-fetched topic of killer asteroids from Hollywood movie sets to the halls of Congress.

"Certainly we had a major credibility problem at the beginning - a giggle factor," said David Morrison, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. "Now, many people are aware this is something we can actually deal with, mitigate and defend against."

In 1998, lawmakers formally directed NASA to identify by 2008 at least 90 percent of the asteroids more than a kilometer (0.6 mile) wide that orbit the sun and periodically cross Earth's path. That search is now more than three-quarters complete.

Last year, Congress directed the space agency to come up with options for deflecting potential threats. Ideas seriously discussed include lasers on the moon, futuristic "gravity tractors," spacecraft that ram incoming objects and Hollywood's old standby, nuclear weapons.

To help explore possible alternatives, former Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart has formed the B612 Foundation. The organization's goal is to be able to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.

"You can watch all of the golf on television you want, but if you want to go out and break par, it's going to take a lot of playing," Schweickart said. "And you're going to learn a lot that you thought you knew, but you didn't."

Throughout their 4.5 billion-year history, Earth and its neighboring planets have been like sitting ducks in a cosmic shooting gallery.

A glance at our moon shows the scars left by countless collisions with asteroids and comets. In fact, the moon is thought to have been created when part of the early Earth was ripped away in a cosmic impact with an object the size of Mars.

Earth also has scars, but most have been hidden by vegetation or eroded by geologic processes such as rain and wind. About 170 major impact sites, including northern Arizona's 4,000-foot-wide Barringer Crater, have been identified around the globe.

Within the past century, an extraterrestrial chunk of rock about 200 feet wide is thought to have caused a 1908 blast near Tunguska, Siberia, that leveled 60 million trees in an area the size of Rhode Island. Researchers theorize the object exploded four to six miles above the ground with the force of 10 million to 15 million tons of TNT.

Few outside scientific circles took the threat posed by near-Earth objects seriously until 1980. Then, Luis and Walter Alvarez published a study based on geologic evidence that concluded a cataclysmic asteroid or comet impact 65 million years ago caused the mass extinction of two-thirds of all plant and animal life on Earth - including the dinosaurs.

Dubbed the Great Exterminator, the colossal object was estimated at 7 miles in diameter and created a blast hundreds of millions of times more destructive than a nuclear weapon. Objects that size are thought to hit Earth about every 100 million years.

NASA scientists studying satellite photos bolstered the Alvarezes' theory with the discovery in 1991 of an impact crater 125 miles wide buried beneath the northwestern corner of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Three years later, NASA photos of another sort drove home the potential for cosmic collisions in our part of the solar system.

Spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope of Comet Shoemaker-Levy's collision with Jupiter showed 21 comet fragments, some more than a mile wide, producing colossal fireballs that rose above the giant planet's cloud deck.

"I think the most important development for getting this (public awareness) going was the Alvarezes' research that the dinosaurs went extinct as the result of an impact," Morrison said. "We were faced with a real example where an impact had done terrible damage."

In 1998, a year in which the asteroid-disaster flick Armageddon was the top-grossing movie worldwide, Congress held hearings that led to the creation of a Near Earth Object Program office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

That year marked the beginning of the Spaceguard Survey aimed at discovering 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids more than a kilometer wide.

Today, astronomers at five primary U.S. sites work on the survey, which NASA funds with about $4 million annually. Scientists estimate there are 1,100 near-Earth asteroids that are larger than a kilometer wide. With two years to go, they have found 834, or about 76 percent, of the estimated total.

Congress directed NASA in December to look at expanding the search to asteroids larger than 140 meters (460 feet) in diameter and completing the new survey by 2020. Objects that size are capable of destroying a city.

The more often an asteroid or comet is sighted, the more precisely its orbit can be calculated. Researchers hope that radar observations of Apophis taken last weekend by the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico could make the odds of a collision even more remote.

"I always use the analogy of a hurricane," said Don Yeomans, manager of the Near Earth Object Program. "When it first forms in the Caribbean, you have no idea where it's going to hit. If you continue to track the hurricane over days and weeks, the future path becomes more predictable."

That uncertainty led former astronaut Schweickart to send a letter to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin last June proposing to land a radio transponder on Apophis to better track its course. For now, the space agency plans to simply monitor the asteroid during passes this year and in 2013.

In 2029, seven years before the possible impact, the asteroid will come closer to our planet than the television and weather satellites that beam back signals from 22,300 miles above. Astronomers' big fear is that Apophis will pass through a gravitational "keyhole" that will put it on a collision course with Earth in 2036. "For all practical purposes, it (a mission) would have to be done before the 2029 flyby to take advantage of the leverage afforded by that encounter," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer in the Near Earth Object Program. "That means the 2036 impact needs to be addressed by 2026, 10 years earlier."

There is considerable debate about how to stop an asteroid or comet once astronomers have determined it will pass too close for comfort.

One idea would use a laser cannon on the moon or atop a spacecraft to shift the threatening object's course. Another involves slamming a spaceship into the object to nudge it away. A slight push a decade or so before a possible collision would translate into a wide miss years later.

Astronauts Ed Lu and Stanley Love published an idea last year for a "gravitational tractor" to change an asteroid's orbit. A nuclear-powered spacecraft would be launched toward the rock and hover near it, using gravity to slowly divert the intruder.

A fallback option using readily available technology involves detonating a nuclear weapon near the threat to shove it off course. It might be the only alternative if an object is discovered only a few months before impact.

Most experts agree the response will depend on the specific threat.

"You have to discover and know your enemy before you can even imagine what kind of mission or deflection you would do," Morrison said.

In recent months, some of the larger political questions are starting to be widely discussed.

If the Earth is threatened, NASA almost certainly would help lead the response. But who ultimately makes the decision on how to proceed? The United States? The United Nations? What about cases where deflecting an object away from an endangered region might move its course across another area? And how likely does a threat have to be to warrant taking action?

Schweickart is convinced those sorts of decisions should be made by the entire planet. He has begun work on a draft treaty he hopes to present to the United Nations by 2009.

As for Apophis, NASA scientists are confident the knowledge they've gained will prevent the asteroid from becoming the next cosmic catastrophe.

"Apophis is not going to hit the Earth. Period," Chesley said. "Whatever the impact probabilities that we compute right now are, we're not going to let it."



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Amerika


Poll: Clinton outperformed Bush

CNN
Friday, May 12, 2006

In a new poll comparing President Bush's job performance with that of his predecessor, a strong majority of respondents said President Clinton outperformed Bush on a host of issues.

The poll of 1,021 adult Americans was conducted May 5-7 by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Respondents favored Clinton by greater than 2-to-1 margins when asked who did a better job at handling the economy (63 percent Clinton, 26 percent Bush) and solving the problems of ordinary Americans (62 percent Clinton, 25 percent Bush).

On foreign affairs, the margin was 56 percent to 32 percent in Clinton's favor; on taxes, it was 51 percent to 35 percent for Clinton; and on handling natural disasters, it was 51 percent to 30 percent, also favoring Clinton.
Moreover, 59 percent said Bush has done more to divide the country, while only 27 percent said Clinton had.

When asked which man was more honest as president, poll respondents were more evenly divided, with the numbers -- 46 percent Clinton to 41 percent Bush -- falling within the poll's margin of error. The same was true for a question on handling national security: 46 percent said Clinton performed better; 42 percent picked Bush.

Clinton was impeached in 1998 over testimony he gave in a deposition about an extramarital sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinksy. He was later aquitted by the Senate.

Comment: Clinton was impeached, and yet according to this poll, most Americans seem to think that Clinton did a much better job than Bush in office...

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Laura Bush doesn't believe bad polls

Reuters
Sun May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON - First lady Laura Bush said on Sunday she does not believe opinion polls showing her husband's approval ratings at record low levels.

Interviewed on Fox News Sunday, Laura Bush said she did not think people were losing confidence in President George W. Bush, despite a series of polls showing support for him at its lowest point in his five-year presidency and among the lowest for any president in the past 50 years.

"I don't really believe those polls. I travel around the country. I see people, I see their responses to my husband. I see their response to me," she said.

"As I travel around the United States, I see a lot of appreciation for him. A lot of people come up to me and say, 'Stay the course'."
Many recent polls have put Bush's job approval rating below 35 percent. One, the Harris poll, published last Friday, measured his approval at 29 percent, the first time any survey has put his support below the 30 percent mark. Two other polls published last week put his job approval at 31 percent.

In a separate interview on ABC's "This Week," Laura Bush said her husband's popularity was suffering because the country had been through a difficult year.

We've had a very, very difficult year, starting with the hurricane last September, but already because of the terrorist attack in 2001 and then the war on terror since then," she said. "He's the one that has to make the hard decisions. And, of course, they don't please everyone."

Mrs. Bush complained that when her husband's popularity was high, newspapers did not put that on the front page. Now it was low, they took great delight in highlighting the fact.

Asked if she thought the media had been unfair, Mrs. Bush said: "No, I don't think it's necessarily unfair. I think it's just, you know, I think they may be enjoying this a little bit."



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New Bush spokesman Tony Snow has bumpy first day on the job

AFP
Saturday May 13, 2006

Conservative ex-journalist Tony Snow has conceded that his first outing as President George W. Bush's new spokesman was "just a mess," as he apologized for a bumpy first day on the job.

Snow, until last month a radio talk host, had been recruited in part to smooth tempestuous relations between the White House and the media.

But an effort to foster bonhomie with reporters badly misfired when he chose to hold his first press chat in his pleasant, but far-too-small White House office.
The choice of venue found a couple dozen reporters crammed uncomfortably into the room while a couple dozen others cooled their heels out in the hall.

"I had this wonderful idea that this would be nice and collegial and relaxed," Snow explained of the reasoning behind moving the daily White House "gaggle" -- or informal chat session with reporters -- from the traditional briefing room to his less-accommodating quarters.

"I didn't realize it would be so highly attended," Snow said apologetically, asking for "a little forbearance" on day one of his new job.

"It obviously at this point is just a mess," he said of his first-ever White House media session.

The new spokesman also offered a mea culpa for an unannounced schedule change which found a over 20 hapless journalists arriving at the meeting midstream.

"I apologize. It's just flat my fault," he said, while also blaming the snafu on the "vagaries of the schedule today."

Snow replaces recently-departed press secretary Scott McClellan in a broader White House shakeup. His arrival was part of a broad White House effort to polish its image and to bolster Bush's sinking popularity ratings. On Friday, the president's popularity plummeted into the 20s for the first time.

The Wall Street Journal, in a poll released Friday, reported that only 29 percent of Americans now believe the president is doing a good job, in the most recent of several polls to indicate a slump in public support for the US leader.

For a decade employed by the Fox radio and television networks, Snow is known for his sometimes acerbic commentary and political positions considerably to the right of many other broadcast journalists.

On occasion, he has even quite vocally criticized the policies of his new boss as not sufficiently conservative.

Snow said he had received assurances from the president that he would be at the table during major policy discussions and not merely a mouthpiece for the administration. On Friday, he said that so far that has proved to be the case.

"The president makes the rules, but yes, I've been granted access," he told reporters.

The conservative journalist was a speech writer for Bush's father, former president George H. W. Bush, and anchored the "Fox News Sunday" television program before moving to radio.

Known for his unvarnished commentary, Snow appeared equally candid in many of his answers to reporters Friday.

"I'm not even going to fake it," he said in response to one reporter's question on immigration reform.

And he good-naturedly deflected questions on foreign affairs and changing currency rates, saying he did not want to exceed his knowledge as "the new kid on the block."

"I do not want to set off global tempests," Snow told reporters, "because I frankly just don't know enough on those (topics)."

With respect to proposed improvements in the format of White House briefings, Snow reassured reporters Friday that any changes would be made "in full consultation with you guys."



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Minutemen, protesters square off at Capitol

By Andy Sullivan
Reuters
Fri May 12, 2006

WASHINGTON - Illegal immigration protesters wrapped up a cross-country caravan on Friday with a rally in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol, as immigrant-rights activists chanted for them to "go away."

Members of the Minuteman Project and other border-patrol groups warned the United States was in danger of being overrun by Mexicans if the Senate passes a bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants a chance to earn citizenship.
"They should be rounded up and deported, every single one of them," John Clark of the American Immigration Control Foundation said to a cheering crowd of about two dozen. "Leave them here and in 10 years this will not be the United States of America."

Fifty yards away a similar number of counter-protesters chanted "Minutemen go away, immigrants are here to stay" behind a line of police.

Millions of Latinos have taken to the streets in massive protests to demand greater civil rights in recent weeks. Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist said such protests underlined the growing threat posed by the estimated 11.5 to 12 million illegal immigrants now in the country.

"They are not assembling to protect their rights. They are assembling to strip us of our rights," Gilchrist said.

Gilchrist and others launched a convoy from Los Angeles on May 3 to push for increased spending and active military involvement on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of thousands of migrants enter the country illegally each year.

Only a handful of vehicles were in the convoy when it left Los Angeles, a number that Gilchrist said swelled to 50 during the cross-country trek.



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Bush considers deployment of troops along US-Mexico border: reports

AFP
Fri May 12, 2006

WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush, in a nationally-televised speech on Monday, is expected to propose tougher immigration enforcement measures along US-Mexico border, including the use of additional troops, US media reported.

The New York Times and other media reported that the president is likely to discuss the deployment of national guard troops -- a move governors in US border states have advocated for some time.
The reports came on the same day that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held talks in Washington with his Mexican counterpart General Clemente Ricardo Vega on border issues.

"We have many important things to coordinate with Mexico, for example the border, the war against narcotics trafficking, joint training," said Pentagon spokesman Jeff Gordon.

On Monday Bush is expected to propose measures for tougher border enforcement as part of his comprehensive immigration reform plan, which until now had focused almost entirely on putting in place a guest worker program that could legalize the status of the roughly 11.5 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that the president would offer revisions to his past immigration proposals, but declined, other than in the most general terms, to say what Bush would say in the speech.

"The president will be laying out his comprehensive proposal for immigration reform," said Snow, the president's new chief spokesman.

His remarks Monday will come on the same day the Senate is expected to renew its debate on immigration reform and legalizing the status of illegal immigrants, which has been stalled for more than a month.

Bush will give the speech at 8:00 pm (0000 GMT) Monday from the White House.

"The president at this point is more focused on trying to tackle such issues as immigration," said Snow, who said Bush's decision to make a speech on the issue was influenced at least in part by the legislative schedule.

"The Senate has agreed to take this up," Snow said. "This is crunch time on the issue."

Bush has called for the creation of a temporary guest worker program for illegal immigrants, but popular sentiment is in favor of strengthening border patrols to stem the inflow, some polls have shown.

Senate Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist on Friday gave his backing to the deployment of new troops on the border with Mexico.

"I would support that," Frist told CNN television, when asked about the idea.

Frist said the federal government should use "their resources -- it could be national guard -- to come in to secure those borders."

An official said the Pentagon is one step ahead of him.

"We already have the National Guard on the border working with the governors" of the US states where they are stationed, Jeff Gordon, Pentagon spokesman, told AFP.

"In Arizona, they work with Governor Janet Napolitano and not with the federal government," he said.

Meanwhile, a protest Friday near the Congress building against illegal immigration turned into a shouting match Friday when it met supporters of undocumented workers.

Separated by dozens of police officers, about 50 members of the Minuteman Project yelled, "Go home" to counter-demonstrators who replied in Spanish, "We are here and we're not leaving."

The Minutemen launched last year its own patrols on the US-Mexico border claiming the government was failing to protect its citizens from the influx of illegal Mexican workers.

Comment: The Associated Press article on the same topic opened with the following:
"Once again the Bush administration is turning to the military to help solve a domestic problem. But instead of hurricane aid or preparations to cope with avian flu, the Pentagon is being asked to possibly provide thousands of National Guard troops to shore up the U.S. border with Mexico, as part of President Bush's effort to gather support for an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws."
Bush's pattern of using the military to solve domestic problems continues...

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Schwarzenegger says National Guard on border 'Not right way to go'

Drudge Report Flash
Fri May 12 2006

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has come out against putting National Guard troops on the border, as President Bush will suggest on Monday night in a nationally televised speech.

"There is all kinds of talk about now that should we use the National Guard," Schwarzenegger explains. "I think that the key thing is that we secure our borders. Going the direction of the National Guard, I think is maybe not the right way to go because I think that the Bush administration and the federal government should put up the money to create the kind of protection that the federal government is responsible to provide."

"Not to use our National Guard, soldiers that are coming back from Iraq, for instance, and that have spent a year and a half over there and now they are coming back. I think that we should let them go to work, back to work again."




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Middle East Mayhem


Israel's Mossad remains in charge of Iran nuclear file

AFP
May 13, 2006

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has decided that Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, will remain in charge of the Iranian nuclear file.

With his decision, Olmert rejected an appeal by the Israeli army's military intelligence service to assume responsibility for
Iran, the army radio added Saturday, without giving further details.

Known by its Hebrew acronym AMAN, the military intelligence service, with an estimated 7,000 employees, is regarded as Mossad's chief rival.

Olmert's decision comes on the heels of a meeting with Mossad chief Meir Dagan, the hawkish political advisor to former prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli media reported that Mossad's annual budget was doubled last year largely due to increased concerns over the Iranian nuclear program.

In recent months, US, Arab and Israeli newspapers have been rife with speculation about the likelihood of an American or Israeli attack against Iran's nuclear sites. American and Israeli officials have denied those reports.

In December, Dagan, 60, predicted Iran would be able to manufacture a nuclear bomb within one to two years.

Israeli fears of Iran were heightened after Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map last October.

Mossad answers to a parliamentary sub-committee made up of members of the defense and foreign affairs committees in the Israeli legislature.

On June 7, 1981, Israeli war planes destroyed the Iraqi nuclear plant at Osirak, close to Baghdad.



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Israel, Turkey plan pipeline project

www.chinaview.cn
2006-05-12

JERUSALEM - Israel and Turkey are negotiating the construction of a giant energy and water project that will transport water, electricity, natural gas and oil via underwater pipelines to Israel, Jerusalem Post reported on Friday.

The proposal was confirmed by senior officials in Israeli National Infrastructure Ministry.

"The whole premise is based on the assumption that Turkey is becoming a major hub for energy in the region," said Gabby Levy, the director of International Relations at the National Infrastructure Ministry.

The water would be earmarked for Israel as well as for the Palestinian territories and Jordan, all of them suffering from chronic water shortages. The natural gas and electricity would be geared for Israeli use, Levy said.

According to the proposal, the oil sent to Israel from Turkey would then be transferred by tankers to the Far East, including India, China and South Korea, he added.


Comment: It seems that Turkey is one Arab nation that puts money above any idea of solidarity with its Arab neighbors.

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Guard Unit Established by U.S. Suspected in Death Squad-Style Executions

Washington Post
Sunday, May 14, 2006

BAGHDAD -- Iraq's Interior Ministry has taken its first steps to rein in the Facilities Protection Service, a unit of 4,000 building guards that U.S. officials say has quietly burgeoned into the government's largest paramilitary force, with 145,000 armed men and no central command, oversight or paymaster.

Last month, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr accused the Facilities Protection Service, known as the FPS, of carrying out some of the killings widely attributed to death squads operating inside his ministry's police forces. A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition that he not be identified further, said Saturday he believed that members of the FPS, along with private militias, were the chief culprits behind Iraq's death squads.

L. Paul Bremer, then U.S. administrator of Iraq, signed an order establishing the Facilities Protection Service in 2003, aiming to free American troops from guarding Iraqi government property and preventing the kind of looting that erupted with the entry of U.S. forces and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.


Comment: "Central command" for this paramilitary force? The CIA.

"Oversight? Rumsfeld's "Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group" (P2OG)

Paymaster? The U.S. Government.

Target? Iraqi civilians, scientists, Universtity professors and Judges.

The goal? To "create" civil war and neutralize anyone in a position to oppose the complete co-opting of the government in Iraq by the U.S. and Israeli governments.

In October 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld invented a secret army - one of his pet projects. Military affairs analyst William Arkin wrote in the Los Angeles Times on October 27th 2002:

In what may well be the largest expansion of covert action by the armed forces since the Vietnam era, the Bush administration has turned to what the Pentagon calls the "black world" to press the war on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The Defense Department is building up an elite secret army with resources stretching across the full spectrum of covert capabilities. New organizations are being created. The missions of existing units are being revised. Spy planes and ships are being assigned new missions in anti-terror and monitoring the "axis of evil."

The increasingly dominant role of the military, Pentagon officials say, reflects frustration at the highest levels of government with the performance of the intelligence community, law enforcement agencies and much of the burgeoning homeland security apparatus. It also reflects the desire of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to gain greater overall control of the war on terror.

Rumsfeld's influential Defense Science Board 2002 Summer Study on Special Operations and Joint Forces in Support of Countering Terrorism says in its classified "outbrief" -- a briefing drafted to guide other Pentagon agencies -- that the global war on terrorism "requires new strategies, postures and organization."

The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.


Can you see the fine line here that could be easily crossed allowing this covert group to actually carry out what appear to be Muslim terrorist attacks? With such groups running around blowing things up in Iraq, how can we know who is carrying out the daily attacks that are being attributed to one Iraqi sect or another? Note the comment by Arkin that Rumsfeld's covert terror group is designed to gain "greater overall control of the war on terror". Note that the goal is not to win the war on terror, but to "control" it, i.e. to manage it and ensure it continues along U.S government lines. Which leaves us with the question of what is the real source of the "war on terror". Who really kicked this sick game of bloody murder into play?

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Basra in crisis as governor implicates security chiefs in terror

AFP
Sat May 13, 2006

BASRA, Iraq - The governor of the southern Iraqi province of Basra suspended the city's police chief accusing him of links to groups involved in terrorism as US President George W. Bush described militias as one of Iraq's main challenges.

Governor Mohammed Musabah al-Waili said he was also demanding the resignation of the commander of the Iraqi army's Basra-based 10th Brigade, General Abdul Latif Thaban.
"He is not cooperating with us and is being loyal to his politics and not the law," said the governor in his statement which also suspended police chief Major General Hassan Sawadi.

Waili said the two security chiefs were suspected of links to "sabotage groups, from outside the city and abroad, that are carrying out sabotage and terrorist attacks".

"We have noticed that some border guards and some of the leadership in the army have doubtful links to wanted people," Waili said.

The governor also accused two prominent Shiite clerics of sharing the blame for a recent upsurge in violence in the city and warned of impending attacks against the city.

The crisis in Basra came amid renewed demands from the White House for a clampdown on the Shiite militias which stand accused of infiltrating the security forces for sectarian ends.

"Perhaps the main challenge is the militia that tend to take the law into their own hands," Bush said following a meeting with US former secretaries of state.

"It's going to be up to the government to step up and take care of that militia so that the Iraqi people are confident in the security of their country," he said, making it clear the US military should not be expected to get involved with the militia threat.

British General Robert Fry added in a teleconference from Baghdad on Friday that the key to resolving the militia issue lies in politics.

Fry said Maliki must first "engage the political constituencies, which are connected to the main militias, lay out quite clearly what his political objectives are, and invite those political leaders to enter the legitimate political process and not remain outside of it.

"Before any form of military action was to have been taken, you first of all need political and also public consultation," he said.

As talks continue over the formation of prime minister designate Nuri al-Maliki's new government, there is intense scrutiny over the candidate for the interior ministry -- a key institution in any attempt to confront the militias.

A number of names have been put forward for the job, including independent Shiite Qassem Dawoud and the current minister, Bayan Baqr Solagh.

Solagh, a member of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), one of the main Shiite parties, has been criticized for his ties to militias and his inability to rein in sectarian-related bloodshed.

A final government line-up is expected to be announced Monday, a day after parliament reconvenes.

The British-patrolled city was long considered more peaceful than the restive centre and west of Iraq, but growing infilitration of the security forces by Shiite militiamen has seen an upsurge in violence.

Two Sunni clerics and a Sunni politician have been murdered in the city in recent days.

Four British service personnel also died last week when their helicopter crashed. British troops who went to their assistance came under attack by an angry mob.

Violence elsewhere in Iraq raged on on Saturday, with at least nine dead in insurgent attacks, five of them in the main northern city of Mosul.

Authorities also recovered six bodies around the country.

In northern Iraq, five prisoners who escaped from a high-security prison jointly run with the US-led coalition have been recaptured by Kurdish forces, a Kurdish security official told AFP.

In south Baghdad, a US soldier on patrol was killed when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb in the pre-dawn hours.

His death brought the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion to 2,431, according to an AFP tally based on Pentagon figures.



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Forty killed in day of Iraq carnage

AFP
May 14, 2006

BAGHDAD - Forty Iraqis were killed in a day of bloodshed, including attacks near Baghdad airport, as prime minister designate Nuri al-Maliki moved closer to announcing a cabinet five months after elections.

Maliki was poised to unveil a cabinet that leaves the key security ministries vacant, a prominent member of his Shiite alliance said, amid hopes that filling Iraq's power vacuum would help quell the raging violence.
Fourteen Iraqis were killed and six wounded in a pair of suicide car bombings at the checkpoint leading to the Baghdad International Airport.

Two vehicles packed with explosives were detonated in a parking lot near the checkpoint, the US military said in a statement, adding that the attacks did not target the base itself.

The violence came as Maliki appeared set to break weeks of deadlock over the new government by leaving the controversial interior and defense portfolios vacant and instead keeping them in his own hands for the time being.

"I think prime minister Nuri al-Maliki will announce the government without interior and defense," Bahaa al-Aaraji, an MP close to Shiite radical leader Moqtada al-Sadr, told reporters on the sidelines of a parliamentary session.

"He will be the acting minister of interior and defense and then, maybe after two or three weeks, he will appoint the appropriate people for these jobs," he said.

An MP from Maliki's own Dawa party, Hassan al-Seniad, had already raised the possibility of the premier designate keeping some portfolios in his own hands as he bids to finalise a cabinet line-up in the next 48 hours.

But the manner in which the new premier has conducted the talks drew an angry response from one of the smaller factions in his Shiite United Iraqi Alliance, which announced that it was abandoning the list on which it fought December's parliamentary elections.

"Our decision is final," said Sabah al-Saadi, spokesman for the Fadhila party, which holds 15 of the alliance's 128 seats in the 275-seat parliament.

"Even if they give us the oil ministry now, we will not rejoin the negotiations," he said.

The party held the oil ministry in the outgoing government but reports suggested the portfolio was likely to go to Shiite independent Hussein Shahristani in the new line-up.

Fadhila's walkout was matched by threats to quit the talks from the main Sunni Arab bloc, whose participation in a national unity government is seen as vital if the sting is to be taken out of the insurgency raging in Sunni areas.

"If we don't get our rights, we will review our participation in the entire political process," warned Salman al-Jumayli, an MP with the National Concord Front.

"We are still negotiating to form the government and are asking for the ministries of education, health and planning.

"We still have not received any answers to these demands," he said.

The Sunnis would also like to retain the defense ministry, especially if the interior ministry remains with one of the main Shiite parties.

Aside from the attack on Baghdad airport, three other bombs killed 11 people around the city.

In the north between Kirkuk and Tikrit, a convoy of Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari's bodyguards was hit by a bomb killing three and wounding three, though the Kurdish politician was not travelling in the motorcade.

In the oil-refining town of Baiji, the scene of much recent unrest, gunmen shot dead a man in front of his home before fleeing, said police, who said the victim may have been working for US forces.

Clashes between insurgents and police as well as a suicide car bomb claimed the lives of a policemen and two civilians in the northern city of Mosul.

Eight people were killed and six were wounded in and around the restive city of Baquba, where three kidnappings also took place, police said.

Outside the city, insurgents late Saturday destroyed at least two small shrines of local Shiite holy figures, the Abdullah bin Ali shrine in the village of Wajhiya and the Tamim shrine, both in mixed Sunni-Shiite areas.

Meanwhile, two British soldiers were killed Saturday and one other wounded after a roadside bomb exploded in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, the Ministry of Defence said.

Their deaths bring to 111 the number of British troop fatalities in Iraq since the March 2003 US-led invasion.

Also in Basra, some 2,000 followers of Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani marched in protest at allegations from the regional governor linking local clerics to terrorism.

The demonstration came a day after Basra governor Mohammed Musabah al-Waili blamed two prominent Shiite clerics, seen as Sistani envoys, for a recent upsurge in violence in the city.

Waili had also suspended the city's police chief Major General Hassan Sawadi and demanded the resignation of the commander of the Iraqi army's Basra-based 10th Brigade, General Abdul Latif Thaban.



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Around the World


52 dead after second night of gang attacks on Brazil police

AFP
Sun May 14, 2006

SAO PAULO - At least 52 people, including 35 police officers, have been killed after a second night of organized gang attacks on Sao Paulo police stations.

The onslaught against police stations and barracks which began Friday left 14 suspected attackers and three bystanders dead and another 50 people injured, including 36 police officers, six attackers and eight bystanders, officials said Sunday.

Since late Friday more than 100 attacks have been launched by the gang in the southern Brazil state, in apparent reprisal for the transfer of jailed gangsters to a high-security prison, officials said.
At the same time, scores of people have been taken hostage in uprisings in at least 18 prisons. The Sao Paulo prisons syndicate said about 250 guards have been taken hostage in the past 48 hours, while local media said 130 remained held by prisoners on Sunday.

Media also reported that a number of prisons have been closed to visitors Sunday, normally a day for families to visit jailed convicts.

The attacks were carried out by the powerful "First Capital Command", Sao Paulo's largest criminal gang.

They were apparently reacting to the transfer of 765 gang members from their current prisons to higher-security facilities.

The transferees included Marcos Wilian Herbas Camacho, aka Marcola, considered the gang's chief.

The gang was organized in penitentiaries in the 1990s and was responsible for uprisings in 20 prisons in February 2001.

In November 2003, they launched a series of attacks on security forces that left 11 officers and seven gang members dead.

They initiated a new round of violence at the beginning of this year. In January there were six attacks against police stations, leaving three officers dead.

On April 8 four more officers were killed in more attacks.

The group has taken advantage of factional divisions among Sao Paulo's gangs to methodically establish their power, said Emilio Henrique Dellazoppa, the director of a program studying violence at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.

The First Capital Command "has the clear objective of challenging the state," Dellazoppa told AFP.

He said it was likely that the gangs had achieved a unified leadership and the violence revealed the weakness of the authorities.

"The attacks reveal the incapacity of the legitimate powers to prevent violence from becoming legitimate, in both the street and the prisons," he said.

Dellazoppa added that the prisons were now controlled by criminal organizations, and not by the state.



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U.S. to restore relations with Libya

From Elise Labott
CNN
Monday, May 15, 2006

WASHINGTON -- The United States will restore full diplomatic relations with Libya and remove the North African country from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, the State Department announced Monday.

The removal from the terrorism list is expected to take place after a 45-day waiting period.

"We are taking these actions in recognition of Libya's continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya has provided to the United States and other members of the international community in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001," said a statement from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Once full diplomatic ties are established, an ambassador to Libya will replace the current charges d'affaires, and an embassy will be established in Tripoli.

"Today's announcements are tangible results that flow from the historic decisions taken by Libya's leadership in 2003 to renounce terrorism and to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs," Rice said.

The move is likely to have a major impact on oil markets, and could even bring down fuel prices, CNN National Security Correspondent David Ensor reported.

After decades of thumbing his nose at the West, which made him an international pariah, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi made an abrupt about-face after the fall of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003, renouncing support for terrorism and agreeing to give up Libya's missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

In early 2004, Libya handed over its nuclear components and documents related to the country's weapons of mass destruction program, which were taken to a U.S. facility in Tennessee.

Later that year, the United States ended a 18-year trade embargo against Libya and lifted a ban on travel there by Americans.

After meeting with Rice last September, Libyan Foreign Minister Abd al-Rahman Shalgam pledged that his country would "cooperate in good faith" in providing additional information about the 1988 bombing of Pam Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which killed 270 people.

A Libyan intelligence agent was convicted of planting the bomb, and Gadhafi's government agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the victims' families.



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Chávez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent society

John Pilger
Saturday May 13, 2006
The Guardian

I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog. Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform", "popular democracy", "equity", "social justice" and, yes, "freedom".

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Chávez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent society

Venezuela's president is using oil revenues to liberate the poor - no wonder his enemies want to overthrow him

John Pilger
Saturday May 13, 2006
The Guardian

I have spent the past three weeks filming in the hillside barrios of Caracas, in streets and breeze-block houses that defy gravity and torrential rain and emerge at night like fireflies in the fog. Caracas is said to be one of the world's toughest cities, yet I have known no fear; the poorest have welcomed my colleagues and me with a warmth characteristic of ordinary Venezuelans but also with the unmistakable confidence of a people who know that change is possible and who, in their everyday lives, are reclaiming noble concepts long emptied of their meaning in the west: "reform", "popular democracy", "equity", "social justice" and, yes, "freedom".

Article continues
The other night, in a room bare except for a single fluorescent tube, I heard these words spoken by the likes of Ana Lucia Fernandez, aged 86, Celedonia Oviedo, aged 74, and Mavis Mendez, aged 95. A mere 33-year-old, Sonia Alvarez, had come with her two young children. Until about a year ago, none of them could read and write; now they are studying mathematics. For the first time in its modern era, Venezuela has almost 100% literacy.

This achievement is due to a national programme, called Mision Robinson, designed for adults and teenagers previously denied an education because of poverty. Mision Ribas is giving everyone a secondary school education, called a bachillerato. (The names Robinson and Ribas refer to Venezuelan independence leaders from the 19th century.) Named, like much else here, after the great liberator Simon Bolivar, "Bolivarian", or people's, universities have opened, introducing, as one parent told me, "treasures of the mind, history and music and art, we barely knew existed". Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela is the first major oil producer to use its oil revenue to liberate the poor.

Mavis Mendez has seen, in her 95 years, a parade of governments preside over the theft of tens of billions of dollars in oil spoils, much of it flown to Miami, together with the steepest descent into poverty ever known in Latin America; from 18% in 1980 to 65% in 1995, three years before Chávez was elected. "We didn't matter in a human sense," she said. "We lived and died without real education and running water, and food we couldn't afford. When we fell ill, the weakest died. In the east of the city, where the mansions are, we were invisible, or we were feared. Now I can read and write my name, and so much more; and whatever the rich and their media say, we have planted the seeds of true democracy, and I am full of joy that I have lived to witness it."

Latin American governments often give their regimes a new sense of legitimacy by holding a constituent assembly that drafts a new constitution. When he was elected in 1998, Chávez used this brilliantly to decentralise, to give the impoverished grassroots power they had never known and to begin to dismantle a corrupt political superstructure as a prerequisite to changing the direction of the economy. His setting-up of misions as a means of bypassing saboteurs in the old, corrupt bureaucracy was typical of the extraordinary political and social imagination that is changing Venezuela peacefully. This is his "Bolivarian revolution", which, at this stage, is not dissimilar to the post-war European social democracies.

Chávez, a former army major, was anxious to prove he was not yet another military "strongman". He promised that his every move would be subject to the will of the people. In his first year as president in 1999, he held an unprecedented number of votes: a referendum on whether or not people wanted a new constituent assembly; elections for the assembly; a second referendum ratifying the new constitution - 71% of the people approved each of the 396 articles that gave Mavis and Celedonia and Ana Lucia, and their children and grandchildren, unheard-of freedoms, such as Article 123, which for the first time recognised the human rights of mixed-race and black people, of whom Chávez is one. "The indigenous peoples," it says, "have the right to maintain their own economic practices, based on reciprocity, solidarity and exchange ... and to define their priorities ... " The little red book of the Venezuelan constitution became a bestseller on the streets. Nora Hernandez, a community worker in Petare barrio, took me to her local state-run supermarket, which is funded entirely by oil revenue and where prices are up to half those in the commercial chains. Proudly, she showed me articles of the constitution written on the backs of soap-powder packets. "We can never go back," she said.

In La Vega barrio, I listened to a nurse, Mariella Machado, a big round black woman of 45 with a wonderfully wicked laugh, stand and speak at an urban land council on subjects ranging from homelessness to the Iraq war. That day, they were launching Mision Madres de Barrio, a programme aimed specifically at poverty among single mothers. Under the constitution, women have the right to be paid as carers, and can borrow from a special women's bank. From next month, the poorest housewives will get about Ł120 a month. It is not surprising that Chávez has now won eight elections and referendums in eight years, each time increasing his majority, a world record. He is the most popular head of state in the western hemisphere, probably in the world. That is why he survived, amazingly, a Washington-backed coup in 2002. Mariella and Celedonia and Nora and hundreds of thousands of others came down from the barrios and demanded that the army remain loyal. "The people rescued me," Chávez told me. "They did it with all the media against me, preventing even the basic facts of what had happened. For popular democracy in heroic action, I suggest you need look no further."

The venomous attacks on Chávez, who arrives in London tomorrow, have begun and resemble uncannily those of the privately owned Venezuelan television and press, which called for the elected government to be overthrown. Fact-deprived attacks on Chávez in the Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher's and Blair's one true way, follow a travesty of journalism on Channel 4 News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan president of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an absurd fantasy. The reporter sneered at policies to eradicate poverty and presented Chávez as a sinister buffoon, while Donald Rumsfeld was allowed to liken him to Hitler, unchallenged. In contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic record, having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote and having caused the violent death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd political survival tale.

Chávez is, of course, a threat, especially to the United States. Like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who based their revolution on the English co-operative moment, and the moderate Allende in Chile, he offers the threat of an alternative way of developing a decent society: in other words, the threat of a good example in a continent where the majority of humanity has long suffered a Washington-designed peonage. In the US media in the 1980s, the "threat" of tiny Nicaragua was seriously debated until it was crushed. Venezuela is clearly being "softened up" for something similar. A US army publication, Doctrine for Asymmetric War against Venezuela, describes Chávez and the Bolivarian revolution as the "largest threat since the Soviet Union and Communism". When I said to Chávez that the US historically had had its way in Latin America, he replied: "Yes, and my assassination would come as no surprise. But the empire is in trouble, and the people of Venezuela will resist an attack. We ask only for the support of all true democrats."



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Britain Alarmed by Russian Nuclear Reactors

15.05.2006
MosNews

Britain needs to build nuclear reactors or be left at Russia's mercy, Trade Secretary Alistair Darling has been warned by a group of MPs, to The Daily Record said Monday.

Since Russia is building atomic plants despite its huge oil and gas reserves, experts fear it is in order that it can make other countries reliant on its fuel exports - and so influence their foreign policy.

The threat is highlighted in a dossier by a Scots-led cross-party group of MPs and Peers.

Chairman and Glasgow MP John Robertson said: "We could be in a position where if we didn't agree with something a country did - war in Chechnya say - we'd have to shut up."




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Red Alert!


Parents charged with rape of newborn

The Jackson Sun
May 13, 2006

Tennessee - McKenzie police have charged two Carroll County parents with raping their child.

Jonathan Wayne Goodrum, 19, and Kristina Louise Sawyer, 18, are charged with raping their 1-day-old girl before she was taken home from McKenzie Regional Hospital about six weeks ago, said McKenzie Police Lt. Tim Nanney.
While both parents have been charged, Sawyer's bond was reduced because police still are investigating what role, if any, she played in the possible rape of her child, Nanney said. She was charged because "I could not exclude her from being part of it, so I had to charge her also," he said. "I could not exclude her at the time from being a participant of it."
Nanney said hospital officials notified police of the possible rape after noticing injuries to the child's rear during a routine examination given before newborns are released from the hospital.

"There were some skin tears in and around the private (back) area of the child," he said.

The investigation led to the child's parents, Nanney said, and there was no indication that any hospital worker was involved in the incident.

"Based on the investigation, we ruled out everyone but the mom and the dad," Nanney said.

The Tennessee Department of Children's Services has placed the baby girl with a relative, Nanney said. The parents are not allowed to have contact with the girl, who is now about 6 weeks old.

The couple was engaged to be married and was living at the Value Inn Motel on Highland Drive in McKenzie at the time of the incident. Sawyer is a McKenzie native, and Goodrum also has relatives living in Carroll County, though Nanney did not know his hometown.

Goodrum is being held in the Carroll County Jail in lieu of $100,000 bond. Sawyer's bond was reduced to $5,000 after her arraignment. Nanney did not know if she still was being held or had been released.

While no trial date has been set, Nanney said one probably would not occur before September.



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Fla. Mother Charged With Killing Her Baby

AP
May 14, 2006

MIAMI - A woman accused of killing her 9-month-old baby and wounding her 3-year-old daughter said demons told her to do it, police said Saturday.

Police found Liset Hernandez, 36, in a closet holding the toddler, who had multiple stab wounds Friday night. The infant girl, who was slashed in the chest and abdomen, was found wrapped in a white sheet in the bathroom sink, officials said.

"She confessed totally to the murder and the child abuse, citing that demons made her do it," Miami Detective Delrish Moss said.

Hernandez was charged with one count of first-degree murder and one count of aggravated child abuse. She was being held without bond.

The toddler hospitalized Saturday in serious condition.




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Mom recovering after dad shoots 2 kids

AP
Sunday, May 14, 2006

SWANTON, Ohio -- The grandfather of two young children shot to death by their father said Sunday the family was struggling to cope with the violent loss.

"Those two kids were A-number one," said Jim Staczek, whose daughter was stabbed during Saturday's attack. "They were smart as a whip, both very good children."

Autopsy reports said the young brother and sister were shot three times each before their father, Clarence Saunders, 58, fired one bullet into his head during a brief standoff with police at their northwestern Ohio home.
Fulton County Coroner Harry Murtiff said 10-year-old Lauren was shot in the chest, abdomen and back, and 5-year-old Jacob was shot in the heart, left cheek and right flank.

The children's mother, Patricia Saunders, who told authorities she was stabbed by her husband before the standoff, was recovering at St. Vincent Medical Center in Toledo, her father said.

She is "doing well, and we expect a full recovery," Staczek said.

Clarence Saunders called 911 around 7 a.m. and reported that his wife was bleeding from a cut to the abdomen, authorities said.

"What did she cut herself on, sir?" the dispatcher asked, according to a tape of the 911 call.

"I don't know. I'm just, I'm just frantic, and she is, too," Saunders replied.

Patricia Saunders told medical personnel her husband had stabbed her, and they summoned sheriff's deputies to the house near Swanton, about 30 miles west of Toledo.

Deputy Rick Brock, who entered the home after learning children were inside, was shot twice in the shoulder, the sheriff's office said.

After several calls to the home went unanswered, officers entered the home and found the three bodies, authorities said.

Hospital officials would not release the deputy's condition on Sunday, and the sheriff's office said it did not know.

Clarence Saunders had worked as a contract employee in the University of Findlay's environmental and emergency management school, spokesman Suzanne English said. Neighbors said he taught at several colleges.

Patricia Saunders is president of Alternative Management, an employment agency and personnel and safety consulting company based in Swanton.

Staczek declined to comment on marital problems that his daughter may have been having with Saunders. "Everybody has problems," he said.



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Quirks


Bush Demands That Iran Halt Production of Long Letters

Truthdig
Andy Borowitz
May 12, 2006

Days after receiving an 18-page letter from Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President George W. Bush called the lengthy missive "an act of war" and demanded that Iran halt its production of long letters at once.

At the White House, aides said that writing a letter of such length to President Bush, who is known for his extreme distaste for reading, was the most provocative act Mr. Ahmadinejad could have possibly committed.

"Everyone knows that the last book the president read was 'My Pet Goat,'" one aide said. "Expecting him to read an 18-page letter is really asking for it, and that Iranian dude must have known that."

According to those close to Mr. Bush, the president was infuriated upon receipt of the 18-page letter and asked aides if it was some kind of joke.

The president then demanded that the letter be boiled down to a one- or two-page format, or possibly adapted to a DVD version, just as he had ordered for news reports on Hurricane Katrina.

In Tehran, President Ahmadinejad said he was "taken aback" by Mr. Bush's refusal to read an 18-page letter, but said that all his future communications to the U.S. president would be in short, easy-to-read instant-messaging format.

In his first IM to President Bush, released to the press today, President Ahmadinejad writes, "Am building nukes. R U angry? LOL."

Elsewhere, Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden vowed today that as director of the CIA he would push the agency to find new and better sources of false intelligence.




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Ark's Quantum Quirks

Ark
Signs of the Times
May 15, 2006

Ark

We are hermanos




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Let Us Prey


Abuse Scandal Has Changed View of Priests

By JOHN SEEWER
Associated Press
Sat May 13, 2006

TOLEDO, Ohio - Few people dared to say anything bad about priests in 1980, when Sister Margaret Ann Pahl was found stabbed to death in a hospital chapel. Even when the hospital's chaplain emerged as the only suspect, witnesses were reluctant to implicate the priest.

But the sex abuse scandal that has since swept through the Roman Catholic Church has changed the way people view clergy.

"Times are very different in many ways," Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates said after the Rev. Gerald Robinson was convicted last week of murdering the nun 26 years after her death.
Prosecutors reminded jurors of that in their final arguments, telling them it would have been difficult right after Pahl's death to convince a jury that a priest was capable of murder.

"All the scandals that have occurred have certainly changed the climate," Chris Anderson, an assistant prosecutor, said after the verdict. "People still hold priests in high reverence, but this may change things."

Robinson, 68, was sentenced Thursday to a mandatory term of 15 years to life in prison for murdering Pahl, 71, a day before Easter.

Jurors needed just six hours last week to determine that he choked and stabbed her in what prosecutors called a "rage killing." They say he grew angry with her because she was a dominating, strict figure.

The two worked together at Mercy Hospital, where she supervised nurses before retiring to become the chapel caretaker.

Robinson became a suspect within two weeks of the killing. Some hospital employees pointed the finger at him right away, but others were hesitant.

Grace Jones, who testified at the trial that she saw Robinson leave the chapel with a duffel bag in hand, was hesitant to get involved in 1980, Anderson said.

"She told us that a black woman couldn't accuse a priest of doing anything wrong back then," Anderson said. Her account was a key moment because it placed the priest at the murder scene and contradicted his claim that he was in his room that morning.

The nun's nephew, Lee Pahl, said no one wanted to believe a quarter-century ago that a man of God could do anything wrong. "If this was 1980, people wouldn't be nearly as open to believing that a priest could do this," he said.

Some studies suggest that people no longer view priests as being holier than themselves or better human beings than themselves, said James Davidson, a Purdue University sociologist who specializes in Catholicism.

"It's true that if you look back at the pre-Vatican II days of the 1940s and 1950s, Catholics did look up to priests. They occupied a higher status than lay people. Both priests and lay people understood this to be the case," Davidson said.

The sex abuse scandal has had a profound effect.

Clergy molestation cases first drew national attention in the mid-1980s, with the case of an abusive priest in the Diocese of Lafayette, La. New claims came to light over the next decade or so, but the scandal broke wide open in January 2002 with the case of a predator priest in the Archdiocese of Boston. Studies commissioned by the nation's bishops found that the total number of accusations against U.S. Catholic clergy now stands at more than 12,000 since 1950.

Now, some people automatically assume that an accused priest must have done it, said James Hitchcock, a history professor at St. Louis University who has written about the church.

"They might not have been so quick to say that in 1980," he said, adding that reverence for priests can cut both ways.

"If you think he did do something bad, the shock and anger could be greater," he said. "So instead of giving him a free ride, people might be more inclined to say he should pay for it."

Robinson's defense attorney, John Thebes, said he didn't think the verdict hinged on whether Robinson was a Catholic priest or on the sex abuse scandals.

"The two, to me, aren't similar," Thebes said. "The only similarity is that he's a priest."



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