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Signs Editorials
Editorial: Signs Economic Commentary
Donald Hunt
Signs of the Times
May 29, 2006
Gold closed at 653.30 dollars an ounce on Friday, down 0.9% from the previous Friday's close of $659.00. The dollar closed at 0.7860 euros on Friday, up 0.4% from 0.7827 for the week. That put the euro at 1.2722 dollars compared to 1.2777 at the end of the previous week. Gold in euros, then, would be 513.52 euros an ounce, down 0.4% from 515.77 for the week. Oil closed at 71.38 dollars a barrel on Friday, up 4.4% from last week's close of $68.36. Oil in euros would be 56.11 euros a barrel, up 4.9% from 53.50 at the end of the previous week. The gold/oil ratio closed at 9.15, down 5.4% from 9.64 for the week. In the U.S. stock market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11,278.61 on Friday, down 1.2% from 11,144.06 at the end of the week before. The NASDAQ closed at 2,210.37, down 0.8% from 2,193.88 for the week. In U.S. interest rates, the yield on the ten-year U.S. Treasury note closed at 5.05%, down one basis point from 5.06 at the previous week's close.
Lay and Skilling from Enron were convicted this week of numerous felonies. It doesn't hurt to throw a few of those people in jail, but Enron just represented an extreme version of a common pattern of corporate behavior. But the trial did provide a glimpse into how the slicker types of psychopaths tend to rise to the top of corporate hierarchies. That is no accident, since the corporation by its very charter is designed to be a psychopath, a self-serving actor that cannot care about others. So human psychopaths rise to the top of corporate, political and military hierarchies, while the corporations move to the top of the world economic hierarchy. In the process of doing that, they have written the rules everyone must follow in order to facilitate their takeover. That, in essence, is neoliberalism, a sophisticated set of rules, arising out of unprecedented cooperation among psychopaths, that helps them maintain power over normal people.
In fact, the basic problems with corporations are structural, and inherent in the forms and rules by which they are compelled to operate. The corporation is not as subject to human control as most people believe it is; rather, it is a largely autonomous technical structure that behaves by a system of logic uniquely well-suited to its primary functions: to make profit, to give birth and impetus to new products and technologies, to expand its reach and powers, and to spread the consumer life-style around the globe. (Jerry Mander, "The Rules of Corporate Behavior," The Case Against the Global Economy, Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds, San Francisco, 1996, p. 310)
Corporate control of world media makes the job easier. They have bored their way into our souls:
The failure to grasp the nature and inevitabilities of corporate structure has left our society far too unconscious and passive to corporate desires and has helped corporations increase their global influence, power and freedom from accountability. More than any other institution (including government), corporations dominate our conceptions of how life should be lived. Corporate ideology, corporate priorities, corporate styles of behavior, corporate value systems, and corporate modes of organization have become synonymous with "our way of life..."
If you switch on your radio, flip on the television, or open your newspaper, corporations speak to you. They do it through public relations and through advertising. U.S. corporations [in 1996] spend more than $150 billion yearly on advertising, which is far more than is spent on al secondary education in this country...
The average U.S. viewer already watches 22,000 commercials every year. Twenty-two thousand times, corporations place images in our brains to suggest that there is something great about buying commodities. (Ibid., p. 310-11)
What about military power, you might ask? Certainly armies are more powerful than corporations. The rise of private military contractors (PMC's) that accompanied the massive outsourcing of core military functions in the United States armed forces has blurred the distinction. Is Blackwater consulting a corporation or a paramilitary army?
In any case, one of the most important achievements of all that propaganda is making the corporate neoliberal economy seem inevitable:
USA – the self-styled CEO of Planet Inc.
By Siv O'Neall
May 26, 2006, 15:44
Neoliberalism is not inevitable
For all those millions and millions of people who have been brainwashed into believing that neoliberalism is the inevitable solution to all our economic and humanitarian problems on the planet, there is news.
The inevitability of the neoliberal economic system is a huge hoax, which has been acted out at the expense of the human race in the sole interest of profit for the few and the total subjugation of the billions of the rest of us. We, the working people, are, so far, obediently bending our backs and making do with the few crumbs the corporate rulers are throwing our way while we accommodate them with out ingrained belief that that's the way the system works, and that's the only way the system can ever work.
Actually, neoliberalism was intended to gradually strangle the economies of the third-world countries and thus seriously degrade the living standards of the people. The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO were set up to make it possible for the rich countries of the world to run the business of the planet, naturally under the judicious leadership and the ultimate profit of the multinational corporations mainly linked to the psychopathic and ruthless mega power that is the U.S. of A. Psychopathic mainly in as much as it is totally impervious to human and geopolitical reality. Europe and Asia were supposed to toe the line or else risk being deprived of their share of the booty...
The brutality of eternal war and destabilization
However, keeping the world in continuous upheaval is the goal of the U.S. statesmen, and the openly expressed goal of the neocons in particular. Aggressive wars, civil wars, economic destabilization and bankruptcy of countries dependent on WTO and the World Bank for survival, are all means to the end of assuring U.S. world dominance. NATO was supposed to play the U.S. game (and did in the case of the Kosovo tragedy). The UN too was seen by the American administrations as a handy tool for enforcing American interests, thus the horrible ploy of the veto power of five countries, a power that has been used innumerable times by the U.S. and by the USSR/Russia, but far less by the other veto holding powers.
The one thing the U.S. administrations fear more than anything else is democracy – with its accompanying openness. Oh, they will mouth the word, but it doesn't have any real meaning any more. Americans are condescendingly allowed to live happily in the fantasy world that hundreds of years of propaganda has created for them, the belief that theirs is a democratic country. And what's more, it is the greatest democracy in the world, the most moral, the most devout, the most compassionate country in the world.
American ignorance and naivety are unlimited and the leaders very carefully see to it that things remain that way. Even looking back on history, it is doubtful if anyone can honestly refer to the rapacious United States of America as a great democracy. Ruthless killings and brutal grabbing of other people's territories have always been the rule of the game, ever since the indescribably cruel decimation of the Native Americans.
Both political options offered those of us living in these so-called democracies support the corporate agenda. Last week, Wayne Madsen republished something he wrote in 2000 about the "left" alternative in the anglo-american countries, called "The Third Way" To A Fascist World: The cryptic international political movement of Clinton and Blair," in which he wrote:
There is another more disturbing aspect to the Third Way agenda. The rights of the individual are increasingly marginalized in nations governed by Third Way leaders. In Blair's Britain this trend has manifested itself into a call by Home Secretary Jack Straw for the elimination of trial by jury for all but the most serious crimes and scrapping the law against double jeopardy, which protects someone from being tried multiple times for the same crime. Straw has also promoted enhanced police surveillance capabilities of communications (wiretapping) and activities (video surveillance). Third Way Britain is rapidly beginning to look like 1984's Airstrip One, the British component of the totalitarian transatlantic realm known as Oceania. George Orwell's Thought Police also seem to have come alive in Third Way Britain. Straw wants to elevate certain public comments to the level of a major crime.
Similarly, the Clinton administration, through its efforts to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies practical unfettered access to communications, including the Internet, is endorsing the Third Way's enmity towards an individual's right to freedom of speech, thought, and assembly. Limiting privacy has been embraced by another philosophical guru of New Age political thought, George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni. He heads the Communitarian Movement, an eclectic assortment of Third Way and global village aficionados. Etzioni, who is greatly admired by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Blair, and Jack Straw, argues that people have nothing to worry about when it comes to government invasion of privacy and that governments must put limits on privacy in the interests of "public safety." Therefore, the Communitarians support drunk driving checkpoints, intrusive security screening of airline passengers, and mandatory drug and alcohol testing for certain professions. The Communitarians decry civil liberties groups as "radicals."
In his book, The Limits of Privacy, Etzioni argues that private companies are more of a threat to an individual's privacy than government. However, the fact that the Third Way philosophy combines government and corporations into an unholy alliance of exploiters presents the real threat to individualism and privacy. Add to that the Third Way's argument that people must surrender all kinds of personal liberties to fight the so-called "Drug War" and "Terrorism War" for the common good smacks of Orwellian Newspeak at its worst. The Communitarians and Third Wayers see privacy-intrusive technologies like biometrics and DNA testing as enabling mechanisms for their "brave new world."
Six years later, we are living the effects of the complete and total lack of privacy.
To finish on a lighter note, given the recent correction in the precious metals market, here is the Mogambo Guru on gold and silver:
The Dollar Collapse
by The Mogambo Guru
Total Fed Credit was up only $1.6 billion last week, and while the custody holdings of foreign banks at the Fed was up a strong $9.2 billion last week, I chose to start off the lecture by dryly saying "The big news, to me, is that the dollar has started collapsing. There are so many ugly ramifications of this that I would not even know where to begin. So, let me merely say that the dollar falling is Unalloyed Bad News (UBN), which means that you and your family are all doomed to die horrible financial deaths, screaming in pain and anger, and let it go at that."
The room erupted in panic and confusion until they finally remembered that I am an idiot, and I obviously don't know what I am talking about. Then they all felt better, until Doug Noland, he of the Credit Bubble Bulletin at the PrudentBear site, said "Everyone wants to believe that an orderly decline in the dollar poses few problems."
Forget An Orderly Decline Of The Dollar
Mr. Noland, if I understand him correctly (and the chances of that are pretty damned slim, given my obvious cognitive limitations and deficits), is slightly less pessimistic than I am about the possibility of an "orderly decline" in the value of the dollar. I am so pessimistic (audience shouts out "How pessimistic, Mogambo?") that security camera video footage reveals screaming in fear, actual foaming at the mouth, and I seem to have embarrassingly peed in my pants, too, out of the same fear. Now, THAT'S pessimistic!
Mr. Noland, because he is a real smart and classy guy, doesn't even mention the dark stain on my pants, but presents, instead, a lot of tightly-argued reasons why an "orderly decline" of the dollar seems improbable. I, on the other hand, am The Mogambo! And I am sure, absolutely sure, more sure than anything I have ever been sure of, and in fact, this is probably the single-most thing that I have been the most sure of in my whole horrible, wasted life, and that is that the decline of the dollar will NOT be "orderly." It will be abrupt and ugly. A quote that comes to mind, although uttered as a comment on people's lives, is "Nasty, brutish and short."
Nasty, Brutish And Short
My Infallible Mogambo Reasoning (IMR) is along the lines of "Suppose I told you that your money would gradually and continuously lose a lot of its value. Maybe half. Or more. My intuition tells me that you would not be happy."
I pause to gauge your reaction, which ranges between homicidal anger and paralyzing fear. Exactly so! Then I go on to say "But that same intuition tells me that you WOULD be happy, very happy, if I told you that I knew of a way to let you keep all your wealth, and you would not lose anything!" Ha! I can see by that smile on your face that I was right!
So how to achieve this miracle of wealth-preservation? All you have to do is sell all your dollars and dollar-denominated assets today, before the dollar is devalued further! Then you'd like to stick someone else with the whole loss!
Now you are ready for today's Mogambo Daily Pop Quiz (MDPQ). The question is "Would YOU stick around to take your share of financial lumps, of up to half of your net worth (or more), meted out month after month, year after year, in a promised 'orderly decline', or would you sell out now, and not take any lumps at all?"
From A Trickle To A Stampede
Hahaha! Me neither! And neither will anybody else! So it's a trick question! At first, a few will say "That stupid Mogambo moron (SMM) is right, for once in his miserable, pathetic life!" and they will rush to the exits to get someplace to dump dollars. And then a few more will rush to get out, as little light bulbs blink "on" above their heads. And then a few more. And then more and more and more until it is a stampede!
Hahaha! A stampede! Maybe it will be an "orderly stampede!" Hahahaha! "Orderly decline, orderly stampede! You say to-may-to, and I say to-mah-to!" Hahaha!
If, on the other hand, you answered "yes" to the question, then I am sorry to tell you that you failed the test, but I will not record your failing grade in your permanent record if you write a little paragraph or two explaining what in the hell is wrong with you, and then I will have pity on you.
Those With Gold And Silver Survived All Stampedes
And it is not just the same dreary story about too many prescription drugs, and too many over-the-counter drugs, and too many illegal drugs, or even that all these people left in a rude rush to dump dollars and dollar-denominated assets, but that the more important point is "Where did they go?" I'll tell you where they went! They went home and quickly scanned the entire course of economic history to find out where all the OTHER people in history went, when THEIR economic system started down the crapper, thanks to the same sorry stupid economic sins we have committed today.
I will save you the trouble of getting up off of your fat, lazy butt to find out, as I share your opinion about getting up off of my fat, lazy butt, and all the damned time, too. So I will simply tell you what happened: Those who bought gold and silver preserved all of their wealth as their currency and economy took a dump, and they actually ended up with a fortune in gold. Everybody else did not.
Gold Draws In Excess Fiat Money
And the reason may be contained in a witticism by reader Greg, who opines "Gold acts as a magnet to draw in excess fiat money."
...But no matter what the reason, they made money by accumulating gold, and the guys who made a fortune in gold went on to make bigger fortunes when they traded the gold for stocks, bonds, houses and real estate at the lows of the economic collapse, and they again prospered as the market values of all these things eventually went back up in the following decades after the collapse.
Get A Taste Of Hyperinflation
And if you want to see the advantage of gold in real-life action, then listen to this, from an essay written by Eric N. Young entitled "The Hyperinflation of Germany, July 1922-November 1923". He writes that in 1923, at roughly the height of the Weimar inflation and the end of Reichmark, "Although a loaf of bread cost $200 million marks in November 1923, it was possible to purchase an entire city block of prime commercial real estate in downtown Berlin for as little as $500 US dollars hard currency. The key was to have real money in the form of gold or silver, or currency backed by those metals."
An entire city block of prime real estate! Thanks to a gold-backed money! Of course, it took a long time (made even longer by WWII, which was, in turn, caused by the German people rebelling against inflation and injustice), but what is an entire city block of commercial real estate in Berlin worth today? Hahaha! A very long time horizon, to be sure, but that's how it works in real life!
Liquidate All Dollar-denominated Assets
So, from this fabulous bit of information we can generate one Fabulous Mogambo Market-Timing Tip (FMMTT) for those who are in the category of "Hyper-Aggressive Speculator", and the sub-species "All-Or-Nothing Risk Tolerance." At this stage of the cycle, the best advice to these people is liquidate every dollar-denominated asset they have (like cash, houses, stocks and bonds and everything in their retirement accounts), and use the money to buy silver and gold and commodities."
And the reason a lot of people don't do that may be for the same reason quizzical reader Roberta R. wonders about when she writes "I am writing to you about the paradigm of cashing in gold for fiat (money). I firmly believe in holding hard assets such as gold or silver; but what I have always had a hard time with is the concept of cashing in the gold. As you stated in your editorial, the Reichmark collapsed so far down that it took 87 trillion of them to buy an oz. of Au.
"This is where my brain begins to hurt. Now I am the proud owner of 87 trillion Reichmarks (FRN's) and maybe I can buy a couple loaves of bread. So, you cash out something with a real intrinsic value and you get fiat junk. But it just seems to me that you are back to square one the minute you sell."
She finished with "Working on a headache, Roberta."
I was happy to tell her that she was exactly right! She WAS back to square one! That's the beauty of gold! The answer why is contained in the problem: How much gold does it take to buy one loaf of bread, which costs $2 a loaf when gold is at $700 an ounce?
435,000 Loaves Of Bread For One Ounce Of Gold
Answer: 1/350th of an ounce. (You can buy 350 loaves of bread with one ounce of gold).
And then how much gold does it take to buy a $200 million loaf of bread when gold is at $87 trillion per ounce? Answer: 1/435,000th of an ounce! You can buy 435,000 loaves of bread with one ounce of gold! Hahaha! A little tiny flake of your gold ounce ought to do it! Hahaha!
So, Roberta, thanks to gold, your buying power has been preserved. THAT'S the beauty of the stuff! And in this particular example, you actually got wealthier, as bread became over 1,000 times cheaper in terms of gold! But notice that the bread cost 100 million times more, in terms of dollars!
****Mogambo sez: The recent $22 plunge in gold and $2 plunge in silver is just the death throes of the scumbags who have engineered the huge short interest in metals futures, and are now being choked to death by it. Every dip like that is Lady Fate smiling on you, letting you buy gold and silver at a temporary bargain! Whee! Lucky you!
The Mogambu Guru's straightforward writings are made possible by The Daily Reckoning.
Richard Daughty aka The Mogambo Guru is general partner and COO of the Smith Consultant Group and can be emailed at RichardSmithGroup@verizon.net.
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Fake Terror/War Imminent?
Israel warns of World Cup terror
Roee Nahmias
ynetnews.com
May 26, 2006
Israel has warned European and American intelligence bodies of possible attempts by Hizbullah cells, led by Imad Mugniyah, to carry out terror attacks during the upcoming World Cup tournament in Germany, the Saudi Al-Watan newspaper reported on Friday.
According to the report, the terror plot is aimed at proving to the international community that Tehran is capable of retaliation if attacked.
Sources in Washington said a joint US-European operations room has been set up to deal with such a scenario; to this end, two American aircraft carriers, along with a French ship are making their way to the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf.
US officials opposed to an attack on Iran fear the Bush Administration would take advantage of such terror attacks to launch an offensive that, according to the officials, would settle the Iranian nuclear crisis and boost the president's approval rating.
The officials added that should the terror attacks be masterminded by a third party, they would still be used to justify an attack on Iran.
Al-Watan also reported that the CIA and European intelligence services have enhanced their activity against Arab and Muslim institutions in Europe following the September 11 attacks. A security official in Brussels told the newspaper that intelligence services planted surveillance equipment in a number of Arab and Islamic embassies and in the officers of major international corporations with ties to Muslim and Arab countries.
The source added that undercover agents, mainly women, have infiltrated Arab and Islamic institutions; e-mails, faxes and phone calls originating from these institutions are also monitored, and even the garbage cans outside the buildings are searched for any information on the nature of the messages relayed by these organizations and their activities, according to the source.
Comment: What a wonderful example of the ridiculous "logic" that is used by American and Israeli governments to explain the bogus war on terror.
Please tell us, what exactly would it benefit Iran to carry out an attack at the World Cup and kill innocent civilians? Obviously, this is the last thing the Iranian government would ever consider doing unless it actually wanted to be immediately "Iraqised" by US and Israeli war planes and troops.
Obviously, the only groups to benefit from such an attack would be the American and Israeli governments, and as such, if an attack occurrs, then it is to those governments and their agencies that we should immediately look for the culprits.
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Europe tries to prevent the next attack
By PAUL HAVEN
Associated Press
May 29, 2006
MADRID, Spain - European intelligence networks have thrown a blanket of surveillance over a small but fiercely violent cast of Islamic militants, many homegrown with no direct links to al-Qaida, whose fingerprints they expect to find on the Continent's next big terrorist attack.
Senior security officials across Europe warned in interviews with The Associated Press that the relative ease and low cost of an attack, combined with the anger and isolation felt by Muslim populations, mean more bloodshed is almost inevitable.
The officials painted a picture of a diverse group of militants with competing agendas, vastly different social and educational backgrounds and a litany of gripes that makes it difficult to predict their next move. While they may be motivated by Osama bin Laden's call for worldwide jihad, they mostly operate independently of al-Qaida's leadership, the officials said.
"There is no profile; they come from everywhere," said Manfred Murck, deputy director of the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which tracks extremist activity in the northern city of Hamburg, home to three of the four Sept. 11 suicide pilots. "You can't concentrate on certain targets, you can't concentrate on certain persons ... Everything is possible, anything goes, and you just have to try and be as close as you can to the whole group."
The two deadliest recent attacks in Europe - the London bombings of last July 7 and the Madrid blasts of March 11, 2004 - dramatically illustrate the problem.
Two of the London bombers had shown up on the periphery of another terror investigation, but authorities did not deem them dangerous enough to merit closer surveillance.
Spanish authorities say they were also monitoring several of the bombers in the months before the Madrid attack - and actually stopped a car carrying the group's military planner in late February, unaware he was leading a caravan of other terrorists transporting explosives. They thought they were dealing with drug traffickers and let them go.
Armed partially with the lessons learned from those bombings, intelligence services throughout Europe are ramping up surveillance, even at the risk of provoking protests from civil liberties groups.
- In Spain, where 191 people died in the bombing of four trains, authorities have tripled the number of agents concentrating on terrorism and are watching some 250 suspected radicals, according to a senior intelligence chief at the heart of the country's counterterrorism operations, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
- In London, where four suicide attackers killed 52 bus and subway passengers, senior police officers say they are concerned about 40 to 60 people living in Britain who have received training at camps in Pakistan or
Afghanistan, and who are believed intent on carrying out attacks. Another 400 are believed to be sympathizers.
- In Italy, authorities are watching 74 people on suspicion of financing terrorism, said Gen. Pasquale Debidda of the financial police. Germany's Murck said about 170 potentially violent radicals are under surveillance in Hamburg, and that they were believed to have another 2,000 sympathizers.
The numbers look small, but the threat isn't.
In France, authorities have blocked at least a dozen attacks in the past decade, said Louis Caprioli, the former assistant director of the DST, the country's main counterintelligence agency. Tore Bjoergo, a terrorism expert at the Norwegian Police University College, put the number of thwarted attacks throughout Europe at 30 to 40 since 9/11.
Officials and terror experts say the main threat is from homegrown militants, deeply rooted in their adopted countries but still linked to networks in the Muslim world.
Most of the Madrid bombers were North African immigrants. The London attacks were carried out by three British citizens of Pakistani descent and a fourth from Jamaica. And the highly public killing of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh in 2004 was carried out by a Muslim of Moroccan background.
No link to al-Qaida has been established in any of the incidents, though British authorities are still looking into a trip two of the bombers there made to Pakistan in the year before the bombings.
Said Heinz Fromm, Germany's domestic intelligence chief: "One today cannot talk any longer of a central leadership role of al-Qaida." Bin Laden's group has become a "diffuse, amorphous organization" that provides inspiration for attacks, rather than a guiding hand, he said.
Riots in heavily Muslim inner cities of France, and the global Islamic outburst over the publication of Danish cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, have further heated the climate for terrorism.
"We have recorded a significant increase in the number of threats" because of the cartoons, said Lars Findsen, the intelligence chief in Denmark.
The Internet is replacing militant mosques as the main meeting site for potential terrorists, said Sybrand van Hulst, the director of the Netherlands'
CIA equivalent, the AIVD. It has also become their manual.
The Spanish intelligence chief said a search of the Madrid plotters' computers found they had often visited Global Islamic Media, the al-Qaida-linked Web site, before the attack and after, when they needed advice on making their getaway.
Authorities believe they learned how to rig their cell-phone bombs on the Web and even used the same brand of phones - Mitsubishi Trium T110s - as did the group behind the 2002 attacks in Bali.
The official said similarities between otherwise-unrelated attacks were evidence of the Web's power to spread terror information. The suicide attacks in London and those in Casablanca on May 16, 2003, were both carried out using the same peroxide-based explosives, which are easily made with common materials, but are extremely powerful.
The official said the terrorists don't know each other but chat a lot online, sharing their lessons and tactics. "They have recipes (for how to carry out an attack). It is the classic do-it-yourself handbook," he said.
The cost of an attack has also dropped sharply.
The Sept. 11 attacks were complicated and expensive, involving international bank transfers and months of training. The London attacks, according to British Home Secretary John Reid, cost just $15,000.
Comment: Isn't it interesting that world leaders just seem to "know" that more attacks are coming from these "independent" terrorists who "come from everywhere"?
So how do you battle an enemy that is everywhere and nowhere? Why, you do exactly what numerous world governments are doing right now: you clamp down on civil liberties and turn the world into a giant fascist prison. In other words, you eliminate the "freedom, democracy, and way of life" that the alleged terrorists so despise.
Doesn't make much sense, does it?
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Israel tightens NATO ties amid Iran nuke jitters
By Dan Williams
Reuters
May 29, 2006
JERUSALEM - Israel announced on Monday it would fully participate in a NATO naval exercise for the first time, bolstering defense ties with the Western military alliance in the face of arch-foe Iran's nuclear program.
Israeli military officials said the exercise, dubbed Cooperation Mako, would take place next month in the Black Sea and involve simulated combat between missile boat fleets as well as search-and-rescue drills.
"This marks the first time a unit of the Israel Navy will fully participate in an operational NATO exercise," said an Israeli military statement. Israel had previously held only observer status in such maneuvers.
Alon Ben-David, Israel analyst for Jane's Defense Weekly, said Cooperation Mako aimed mainly to improve NATO security missions in the Mediterranean and that Israel was especially interested in combined air force exercises.
"Given Israel's strategic reality, it is crucial to be part of a defensive coalition," Ben-David said.
Israel, Algeria and Morocco agreed in April to join NATO counter-terrorist patrols along their shores.
Ben-David noted Israel has stepped up its cooperation with foreign military forces as part of preparations for a possible showdown with Iran, whose nuclear program and calls for the Jewish state's elimination have raised concern in the West.
Iran, the world's fourth-biggest oil exporter, says it seeks nuclear technology for energy needs only.
Some Western officials have speculated that Israel would eventually apply to join NATO's 26 member-states. "If Iran feels that Israel is ... in the pact, it will behave differently," former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar said in March.
But full membership is seen as unlikely in Israel, given its tradition of going it alone on matters of top military priority.
Believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, Israel sent warplanes to bomb Iraq's atomic reactor in 1981 and has not ruled out similar action against Iran. For now, though, it backs U.S.-led efforts to defuse the dispute with diplomacy.
"A defense pact has advantages and disadvantages," Israel's military chief, Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz, told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper this month. "Under a NATO pact, every decision would require consensus of 26 nations."
President Bush has pledged to defend Israel should it come under Iranian attack. Some analysts interpreted the statement as an admonition to Israel from its chief ally not to launch a preemptive strike on Iran unilaterally.
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Iran says it has conducted research on nuclear fusion
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-29 20:15:29
TEHRAN, May 29 (Xinhua) -- An Iranian nuclear official said Monday that Tehran has conducted research into nuclear fusion, the state-run television reported.
"Iranian nuclear scientists are trying to catch up the advanced world in using nuclear energy through nuclear fusion," Sadat Hosseini, who runs the technical department at the Nuclear Research Center of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, was quoted as saying.
"Iranian scientists have firstly tried nuclear fusion five years ago," he added.
Through nuclear fusion, multiple nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus.
The process of nuclear fusion is accompanied by the release or absorption of energy depending on the masses of the nuclei involved.
Nuclear fusion is employed by certain kinds of atomic bomb. The announcement came during a current visit of Russian Security Council Secretary Igor Ivanov for talks with senior Iranian officials on its disputed nuclear issue.
Tehran is under intense international pressure to stop its uranium enrichment and the United States accuses Iran of using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to achieve an atomic bomb. Iran denied the charge and insisted its nuclear program is only for peaceful use.
The five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany are expected to have more talks on a decision to offer Iran a package of incentives in return for Iran's suspension of its nuclear activities, after their London talks on May 24 stopped short of making a final agreement.
Foreign ministers of the six nations were likely to meet on Thursday in the Austrian capital of Vienna to discuss the matter.
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World powers to guarantee Iran's right to peaceful nuclear use: Russian FM
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-29 21:55:28
MOSCOW, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Russia, the United States and China were ready to guarantee Iran's right to the peaceful use of nuclear energy if Tehran answered the questions raised by the UN nuclear watchdog, Russia's top diplomat said here on Monday.
"Russia supports the efforts to resume talks between Iran and the world community. The United States and China also support them," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted by the Itar-Tass news agency as saying.
Lavrov's remarks came just one day before a teleconference between diplomats of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.
The meeting, grouping Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany, was aimed at finding common ground over "a package of stimuli" for Tehran if it suspends uranium enrichment activities, as well as penalties if it does not, Itar-Tass quoted a Russian foreign ministry source as saying.
The UN Security Council demanded that Iran suspend uranium enrichment by the end of April, but Tehran defied the deadline and announced last month that it had succeeded in enriching uranium and was doing research on advanced enrichment.
Enriched uranium can be used to produce fuel for both power generators and nuclear bombs.
Iran "must be involved in international economic cooperation and the efforts to enhance security in the region," Lavrov said, adding "in parallel, we are ready to guarantee Iran's right to develop peaceful nuclear power engineering."
But all these had to be pinned on Iran's cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he added. "Another condition for the guarantees to nuclear energy engineering for Iran must be Iran's adherence to the treaty on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and to the additional protocol of the treaty," Lavrov said.
However, Iran has reiterated its reserved stance on Moscow's earlier proposal to set up a joint venture for Iran's uranium enrichment on Russia's territory.
Stressing the peaceful nature of its nuclear program and its right to peaceful nuclear technology, Iranian government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told a news conference in Tehran on Monday that Iran's principled position was uranium enrichment on its own territory under IAEA's control.
Negotiations between the European trio -- Britain, France and Germany -- and Iran grounded to a halt in August 2005, when Tehran resumed uranium enrichment.
The United States has accused Iran of developing nuclear weapons secretly, a charge repeatedly denied by Tehran, which insists that its nuclear program is to generate electricity to meet the country's surging demand.
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Israel says it has destroyed Hezbollah's front line positions along border
11:10:26 EDT May 29, 2006
KARIN LAUB
JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel destroyed most of the military positions of Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas along its northern border in the heaviest fighting since it ended its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon, an Israeli commander said Monday.
Sunday's rocket and artillery exchanges killed two guerrillas in Lebanon and wounded two Israeli soldiers, two Lebanese civilians and six militants.
An Israeli newspaper, meanwhile, reported that Iran has equipped Hezbollah with rockets capable of hitting all of Israel's major cities, including Beer Sheva in the south. The Haaretz daily, citing intelligence sources, said the rockets have a range of about 200 kilometres, or double that of weapons previously in Hezbollah's arsenal.
The Israeli commander, Brig.-Gen. Gal Hirsch, declined comment on the Haaretz report.
However, he said Iranian weapons in the hands of Hezbollah, including mortars and missiles, pose "a growing threat" to Israel.
Sunday's cross-border fighting began when Katyusha rockets were fired from Lebanon at Israel's northern Galilee region, hitting an air force base, followed by attacks on Israeli outposts along the border.
In response, Israel unleashed its fiercest artillery barrage since withdrawing from Lebanon in 2000.
"Our main effort was to destroy the front line that Hezbollah has built in the last six years," said Hirsch, who commands an Israeli army division along the border.
Hirsch said Hezbollah had established dozens of frontline outposts along the border with Israel.
"We destroyed most of them," the commander said in a telephone interview.
Witnesses in the border region said several Hezbollah outposts were heavily damaged or destroyed by the Israeli shelling and air raids. Those positions are largely observation posts manned by guerrillas carrying light arms. They are different from the hidden, mobile launch sites where Hezbollah fires Katyusha rockets.
Hirsch said the Israeli military was ready for a Hezbollah attack, having prepared a contingency plan. "We were waiting for them for weeks," he said.
The UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon brokered a ceasefire that took effect Sunday evening, Milos Strugar, a spokesman for the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, told The Associated Press.
Tensions along the border rose after a senior official in the violent Palestinian group Islamic Jihad was killed in a car bomb in the southern Lebanese town of Sidon last week. Israel has denied involvement.
President Emile Lahoud blamed Israel for Sunday's fighting and urged the world to intercede "to put an end to Israel's aggressive actions."
But Israel put the onus on Beirut to maintain the peace, saying the Lebanese government was responsible for maintaining order.
Israel has urged the Lebanese government to disarm militias and send regular troops to the south, but the government has refused.
Hirsch said he's seen a strong presence of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in southern Lebanon. "Hezbollah is a wing of the Iranian effort to create a front line against the West," he said, noting that the Iranians train and supply Hezbollah fighters.
The Israeli commander said that in the event of renewed Katyusha attacks, Israel would again retaliate harshly, and perhaps step up its response.
In Lebanese towns and villages near the border with Israel, people swept up broken glass and reopened their shops and schools Monday. Village squares filled with market stalls and customers as police surveyed the destruction.
In the southeastern Lebanese village of Sohmor, people prepared to bury one of the slain Hezbollah guerrillas, Youssef Mohammed Alaeddine, 36. The other militant killed was a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.
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Steering Into a Third Intifada
by Patrick J. Buchanan
May 26, 2006
When there is no solution, there is no problem, observed James Burnham, the former Trotskyite turned Cold War geostrategist.
Burnham's insight came again to mind as President Bush ended his meeting with Ehud Olmert by announcing that the Israeli prime minister had brought with him some "bold ideas" for peace.
And what bold ideas might that be?
Olmert wants Bush to remain steadfast in refusing to talk to the Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority. He wants U.S. support for Israel's wall that is fencing in large slices of the West Bank and all of Jerusalem, forever denying the Palestinians a viable state. He wants U.S. recognition of Israeli-drawn lines as the final borders of Israel. And he wants America to remove the "existential threat" of Iran.
In the six months before he proceeds unilaterally with this Sharon-Olmert plan, he will be happy to talk with Mahmoud Abbas, the isolated Palestinian president he has called "powerless."
What is the Bush plan to advance our interests in the Middle East? There is none. For five years, the Bush policy has been to sign off on whatever Sharon put in front of him. And now that Bush is weak, he is not going to pick a fight he cannot win and, in candor, he does not want.
For Bush has signed on to the Sharon agenda. And if he had a policy that clashed with the Sharon-Olmert Plan, political realities would prevent his pursuing it.
Consider: Suppose Bush declared that Ehud Olmert's proposed withdrawals from the West Bank were insufficient, that an official Palestinian presence in East Jerusalem was imperative, and that the United States needed to aid the Palestinians whom Israel is starving out and to talk in back channels to Hamas, even as we talked to Libya's Col. Gadhafi to convince him to give up terrorism and his weapons of mass destruction.
Bush's and America's stock might rise worldwide. But here in the United States, it would be another story altogether.
We would hear the cry of "Munich!" from neoconservatives, echoed by evangelical Christians and the religious Right. "Bibi" Netanyahu would be a fixture on Fox News, which would be asking hourly if Bush had taken leave of his senses.
Then, as his father did on the loan guarantees for Israel that he briefly held up in 1991, Bush would capitulate.
Thus Israel will pursue the Sharon-Olmert Plan to completion. There will be withdrawals from isolated settlements and outposts, but no negotiations with a Palestinian Authority to agree on permanent borders and two states.
The West Bank wall will soon encompass all of the suburbs of Jerusalem for miles around. Palestine will be divided into three parts: Gaza and two enclaves on the West Bank. There will be no Palestinian official presence in Jerusalem. No viable nation.
Meanwhile, America will be called upon for new sums of money to subsidize the Sharon-Olmert Plan, even as we are prodded to do our duty and emasculate Iran.
As Olmert is the pilot setting the course, and Bush has signed on as crew to his "bold ideas," our destination is easy to foresee.
The United States alone will recognize Israel's new borders, and her annexations of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem as Israel's exclusive capital. Israel will ask for and the United States will accede to Israel's request that we commit ourselves militarily to defend Israel's new frontiers. No Arab government will recognize the new borders. America's Arab friends will be further estranged.
Every demagogue bidding for power in the Islamic world will, like Iran's Ahmadinejad, play the Palestinian card.
The suffering of the Palestinian people under the U.S.-Israeli sanctions regime will further radicalize them into hating us as they do Israel. The struggle between Hamas and Fatah over diminishing aid and resources will intensify, degenerating into civil war. Iran will move into the vacuum. Eventually, with aid cut off and no hope of negotiations, Hamas will revert to terror and the third intifada will begin.
Western Europe, its Muslim populations growing in numbers and militancy, will neither recognize Israel's borders nor endorse U.S. policy. Europe is not going to side with 5 million Israelis, whom they believe to be in the wrong, against 300 million Arabs, who will be 500 million at mid-century.
Rightly, Americans say we will not let Israel be destroyed. But why must we acquiesce in Israel's annexations of Arab land? Why must we remain silent to her deprivations of the Palestinians?
These questions will puzzle the historians who investigate the astonishing and swift end to U.S. hegemony in the 21st century.
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Israel arrests Palestinian PM's daughter at border: sources
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-29 21:51:47
GAZA, May 29 (Xinhua) -- Israeli security forces arrested Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haneya's daughter at the Erez Crossing on the Gaza-Israel border, sources at Haneya's office revealed Monday.
The sources said that Haneya's daughter, who was traveling with families and relatives of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, was to visit her fiancé imprisoned in an Israeli jail in the southern Israeli town of Beer Sheva.
Haneya's office contacted officials in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza and in Jerusalem to interfere and release Haneya's daughter.
The Israeli security forces said that the girl was stopped at Erez because she carried a fake identity card.
Every Monday, and in coordination with the ICRC, the Israeli army allows families to visit their imprisoned family members in Israeli jails.
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Lies For War
Bush 'planted fake news stories on American TV'
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
29 May 2006
Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.
Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.
The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.
"We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them," said Diana Farsetta, one of the group's researchers. "I would say it's pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air."
Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. "They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like," she said.
The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission's enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group's report.
The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying "Thank you Bush. Thank you USA" in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.
Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer's product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe'en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel - in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.
Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world's largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. "We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video," said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. "In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure."
The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. "Essentially it's corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news," he said. "The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told."
The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).
Federal authorities are actively investigating dozens of American television stations for broadcasting items produced by the Bush administration and major corporations, and passing them off as normal news. Some of the fake news segments talked up success in the war in Iraq, or promoted the companies' products.
Investigators from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are seeking information about stations across the country after a report produced by a campaign group detailed the extraordinary extent of the use of such items.
The report, by the non-profit group Centre for Media and Democracy, found that over a 10-month period at least 77 television stations were making use of the faux news broadcasts, known as Video News Releases (VNRs). Not one told viewers who had produced the items.
"We know we only had partial access to these VNRs and yet we found 77 stations using them," said Diana Farsetta, one of the group's researchers. "I would say it's pretty extraordinary. The picture we found was much worse than we expected going into the investigation in terms of just how widely these get played and how frequently these pre-packaged segments are put on the air."
Ms Farsetta said the public relations companies commissioned to produce these segments by corporations had become increasingly sophisticated in their techniques in order to get the VNRs broadcast. "They have got very good at mimicking what a real, independently produced television report would look like," she said.
The FCC has declined to comment on the investigation but investigators from the commission's enforcement unit recently approached Ms Farsetta for a copy of her group's report.
The range of VNR is wide. Among items provided by the Bush administration to news stations was one in which an Iraqi-American in Kansas City was seen saying "Thank you Bush. Thank you USA" in response to the 2003 fall of Baghdad. The footage was actually produced by the State Department, one of 20 federal agencies that have produced and distributed such items.
Many of the corporate reports, produced by drugs manufacturers such as Pfizer, focus on health issues and promote the manufacturer's product. One example cited by the report was a Hallowe'en segment produced by the confectionery giant Mars, which featured Snickers, M&Ms and other company brands. While the original VNR disclosed that it was produced by Mars, such information was removed when it was broadcast by the television channel - in this case a Fox-owned station in St Louis, Missouri.
Bloomberg news service said that other companies that sponsored the promotions included General Motors, the world's largest car maker, and Intel, the biggest maker of semi-conductors. All of the companies said they included full disclosure of their involvement in the VNRs. "We in no way attempt to hide that we are providing the video," said Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for Intel. "In fact, we bend over backward to make this disclosure."
The FCC was urged to act by a lobbying campaign organised by Free Press, another non-profit group that focuses on media policy. Spokesman Craig Aaron said more than 25,000 people had written to the FCC about the VNRs. "Essentially it's corporate advertising or propaganda masquerading as news," he said. "The public obviously expects their news reports are going to be based on real reporting and real information. If they are watching an advertisement for a company or a government policy, they need to be told."
The controversy over the use of VNRs by television stations first erupted last spring. At the time the FCC issued a public notice warning broadcasters that they were obliged to inform viewers if items were sponsored. The maximum fine for each violation is $32,500 (£17,500).
Comment: "Now, here's the thing guys, how the hell are you meant to know what is actually happening in the world when they are planting lies as truth in the mainstream media. And don't for a second think that this is the full extent of the lies that they publish as truth.
Just to make it more personal, think about your attitudes to "terrorists" and the "war on terror" and that those attitudes are very likely based on lies. Is anyone happy that their opinion that "saddam was a bad man and had to be removed" for example was given to you by way of lies from the Bush and Blair governments?
Do we all feel good that when we hear about Iraqi insurgents being killed and we think "we'll they are just terrorists anyway", that this belief is based on a lie and that Iraqi insurgents are just ordinary people like you or I who are trying to resist a foreign and brutal occupying power? What about when we rationalize the murder of 200,000 Iraqi civilians by thinking to ourselves: "we'll they were probably supporting the terrorists anyway". How does it feel to know that such an unfeeling and uncaring attitude about the suffering of innocent people has been foisted upon us as a result of the U.S. government selling us lies as truth?
How does it feel to realise that you have been psychopathized by the psychopaths in power in America, Israel and Britain? How does it feel to think that some of their inhumanity has rubbed off on you?
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Investigation reveals new Tillman questions
By Scott Bronstein and Jamie McIntyre
CNN
Saturday, May 27, 2006
CNN finds accusations of negligence and deceit in Army probes
Cpl. Pat Tillman died April 22, 2004, in Afghanistan, shot down in a confusing firefight on a dusty ridge in a war he gave up a lucrative NFL career to fight.
At his memorial service, mourners remembered the 27-year-old Tillman as an inspiration to thousands of Americans. California's first lady Maria Shriver was among those supporting the family, recalling how much Tillman gave up to fight for his country in Afghanistan.
"Pat had it all," she said. "Intelligence, movie star good looks, a loving wife, athletic prowess, fame. A lucrative and promising career. Who among us could walk away from riches and a job we love?"
Tillman did.
The former safety for the Arizona Cardinals gave up a multimillion dollar pro football deal the day after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, to enlist as an elite Army Ranger. He explained his decision in a rare interview just before he went into the Army.
"My great-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor," he said. "And a lot of my family has given up -- you know, has -- has gone and fought in wars. And -- I really haven't done a damn thing, as far as laying myself on the line like that."
But Tillman's devotion to "duty, honor, country" ended with his death in a desolate section of Afghanistan.
And it wasn't until 26 days after the memorial service -- more than a month after his death -- that the Army would publicly acknowledge what the Rangers who were with him in combat knew almost right away: Tillman died in "friendly fire." He was hit in the head by three bullets fired by U.S. soldiers who say they mistook him for the enemy.
Much -- but not all -- of the story of what went wrong that April day in 2004 can be found in thousands of Army documents obtained by CNN. And while the heavily blacked-out documents provide some answers -- they also raise substantial questions that three separate Army investigations have failed to resolve.
'Friendlies! Cease fire!'
Tillman's platoon was on a mission in eastern Afghanistan, along the Pakistan border. His platoon was trying to flush out enemy Taliban or al Qaeda fighters. The platoon's problems began with a broken-down Humvee, which had to be towed by a local truck and was slowing the platoon.
The platoon was split into two groups, on orders of a commander at a base far away, according to Army documents. The split was ordered over the objections of the platoon leader. But the base commander was concerned that the broken vehicle was delaying the mission.
Cpl. Pat Tillman was with the first group that pressed on, moving safely through a deep canyon and arriving at a small village. The second group -- with the Humvee in tow -- included Tillman's younger brother Kevin, who enlisted with Pat after September 11.
That second convoy followed a different route but found the terrain too rugged.
So they backtracked and followed the first group deep into the narrow canyon. Although they were just a half hour back, the first group was unaware the second group was coming up behind them.
In the canyon, the second group was ambushed from above by enemy fighters. To add to the confusion, in the deep canyon, the two groups lost radio contact.
But Pat Tillman's group heard the gunfire back in the canyon and turned back to help. Tillman -- as described in his Silver Star citation -- showed great courage under fire in leading a small rifle team -- including an Afghan soldier -- to the top of a ridge to engage the enemy.
Down below, a Humvee armed with a .50-caliber machine gun and four soldiers with other weapons pulled out from behind the truck and broken Humvee.
As they emerged from the canyon, the soldiers in the vehicle were firing with an abandon that one Army investigator said demonstrated gross negligence. The soldiers later said that they thought the enemy was all around them. As they fired in all directions, they began hitting U.S. troops. The platoon leader was hit in the face and another soldier shot in the leg.
From Tillman's position up on the ridge came anguished cries of alarm. First, the Afghan soldier was shot and killed by the soldiers in the Ranger vehicle. The soldier standing alongside Tillman described what he witnessed in a sworn statement.
"A GMV [vehicle] with a .50-cal rolled into our sight and started to unload on top of us," he said.
"Tillman and I were yelling 'Stop! Stop! Friendlies! Friendlies! Cease fire!' But they couldn't hear us."
According to another sworn statement obtained by CNN, the driver of the Humvee was initially confused when he saw the Afghan soldier with Tillman on the ridge -- and then realized others in his Humvee were firing on fellow Rangers.
"I yelled twice 'We have friendlies on top!'" said the driver. "The crew must have not heard me because my vehicle opened fired on them. I screamed, 'No!' and then yelled repeatedly several times to cease fire. No one heard me."
'We thought it was over'
Tillman threw a smoke grenade to signal they were Rangers, and for a few moments, it appeared to work.
"We thought the battle was over," said the soldier next to Tillman. "So we were relieved, getting up stretching out and talking with one another when I heard some 5.56 rounds coming from the vehicle. They started firing again. That's when I hit the deck and started praying."
But Tillman didn't get down in time. He was hit.
"I know this because I could hear the pain in his voice as he called out: 'Cease fire! Friendlies! I am Pat (expletive) Tillman damn it!'" the soldier said. "He said this over and over again until he stopped."
Moments later, a sound caught the attention of the soldier next to Tillman.
"I heard what sounded like water pouring down," he said. "I then looked over at my side to see a river of blood coming down from where he was. I had blood all over my shoulder from him and when I looked at him, I saw his head was gone."
Fourth investigation launched
It has been two years since Pat Tillman was shot to death by his fellow Army Rangers in Afghanistan. There remain many unanswered questions about precisely how that happened.
In part because of the family's anger and disillusionment, the Pentagon has launched a fourth investigation -- a criminal probe into whether Tillman's death was negligent homicide -- as well as a separate review of whether the Army engaged in any intentional deception.
"Simply put, the family is not satisfied with the information they're getting," said Col. Joseph G. Curtin, a U.S. Army spokesman. "They've asked for more details, and simply put, we owe the family honest answers."
The initial investigation -- conducted by an Army captain that CNN has identified as Richard Scott -- contains much harsher judgments than those reached in a later probe by a one-star general.
In a sworn deposition given five months after Tillman's death, Scott said that some stories "have changed. They have changed to, I think, help some individuals."
Scott said that in retelling, some distances have grown longer, some lighting conditions worse and even the position of the allied Afghan soldier was changed.
In his deposition, Scott said of one soldier in the lead vehicle that fired on Tillman: "I think [he] demonstrated gross negligence. ... He recognized the individual, the [Afghan] soldier wasn't shooting in his direction but shot and killed him anyway."
Scott noted that the Rangers in the lead vehicle firing on Tillman were not under fire at the time, and "there were numerous attempts to signal to that lead vehicle that the friendlies were upon that ridge line."
The documents show the numerous attempts to signal the lead vehicle included soldiers yelling into radios to cease fire, Tillman's smoke grenade, the driver of the vehicle yelling to cease fire, and finally Tillman and the soldier next to him waving their arms frantically over their heads.
But the firing continued, with no attempt to properly identify the targets, Scott asserted.
It was -- in Scott's opinion -- a lack of discipline that should have brought serious punishment.
"The other difficult thing, though, was watching some of these guys getting off, what I thought -- with what I thought was a lesser of a punishment than what they should've received," he said.
Uniform burned
The documents reviewed by CNN show the officer who made the original decision to split the platoon was later granted limited immunity to change his testimony about who above him knew about his order. He later explained that it was only a clarification of his original testimony.
Tillman's uniform was burned by soldiers after his death. The Army's most recent investigation concludes Tillman's uniform and body armor should have been preserved, but the latest report disputes that it was burned in an attempt to cover anything up.
"Nothing could be further from the truth," concludes the report, which says the soldiers thought they were disposing of a "biohazard."
The Army said, so far, seven soldiers have received various reprimands.
"There were three officers and four enlisted personnel that were, all of them, were disciplined, all received administrative reprimands, one soldier was demoted and fined and three others were dismissed from the Ranger regiment itself," Curtin told CNN.
While no one was found "grossly negligent" nor "less than truthful" in the follow-up investigations --- more serious charges could result from the ongoing probe, which covers questions of criminal negligence, intent to cover up and the awarding of Tillman's Silver Star.
The Army said it learned a lesson from the delay in notifying the Tillman family about how their son died. The Army now has new procedures to ensure suspected friendly fire deaths are reported right away.
"The unit erred on the side of caution to get all the facts first to determine that indeed a friendly fire event had occurred," Curtin said. "And that shouldn't have happened. In hindsight, as soon as it was suspected they should have told the family about it."
"The bottom line is we will go where the truth leads us," said Curtin. We will get the answers to the best of our abilities."
For some of Pat Tillman's family that promise rings hollow. After two years of frustration, they wonder if a government investigation will ever uncover the truth.
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Iraq violence leaves 15 dead
AFP
Sat May 27, 2006
BAGHDAD - At least 15 people were killed in a series of attacks in Iraq, with the restive city of Baquba, where seven died, bearing the brunt of the violence.
The US military said Saturday that a marine was killed "in enemy action" in the restive western province of Al-Anbar on Friday, bringing the number of US military dead since the March 2003 invasion to 2,465, according to an AFP count based on Pentagon figures.
In Baquba, gunmen shot up the convoy of Kahtan al-Bawi, chief office administrator for the police and brother of city chief of police Gassan al-Bawi, killing him and two other officers.
Five workers were killed when insurgents opened fire on their workshop in Baquba, north of Baghdad, where they were repairing car tires and welding door and window frames, according to police.
Nearby, gunmen killed a former Baath-era police officer and a relative as they traveled in their car while three police officers were wounded in a roadside bombing west of the city.
Hadi Abdul Mohsim, director of the Baquba branch of the Iraqi Association for the Defense of Human Rights, was wounded in a gun attack on his vehicle north of the city.
In Baghdad, one police officer was killed and another wounded when a bomb was set off against their patrol in the upscale Mansur district, an interior ministry source said.
Another two police officers were shot dead in separate incidents in Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein, and another in Kirkuk.
In Samarra, a merchant in the city's central Bazaar was killed by gunmen, and in the
Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad four people were hurt when a roadside bomb exploded.
Clashes between insurgents and an Iraqi army patrol in the capital's western Al-Jamia area left a soldier and a civilian wounded.
A spokesman for British forces in Basra also said 10 suspected insurgents were arrested in the southern city for possession of automatic rifles and explosives.
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Afghans riot after US troops kill four
AFP
Monday May 29, 2006
Rioting and gunfire broke out in the centre of the Afghan capital, with violent demonstrations by hundreds of people in the streets after US troops shot dead at least four civilians, witnesses said.
Several volleys of gunfire were heard near the diplomatic quarter as around 1,000 people marched towards the area chanting "Death to America" and "Death to (President Hamid) Karzai", an AFP reporter said.
"We are hearing a lot of gunshots," UN employee Marina Walter said from a government office in the centre of the city. The United Nations ordered all its employees to stay where they were and declared the city a no-go zone, she said.
The marchers torched a police box in the centre of the city and a large poster of Karzai, an AFP photographer said.
Some of the demonstrators were also beating journalists, he said.
A chanting crowd of about 100 people had also gathered outside the main emergency hospital, to which some of the those wounded in the earlier incident involving US troops had been brought, an AFP reporter there said.
Police, soldiers and troops from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force were arriving, he said.
There were reports of other demonstrations and gunfire in other areas of the city, including outside the Serena Hotel, which is just across the road from the presidential palace. Security forces appeared to have stopped all traffic.
The unrest erupted after US troops shot dead at least four people when they opened fire on a crowd of Afghans after a traffic accident with a US military vehicle.
"There was a military flatbed truck which had a mechanical failure, maybe a brake problem, and it crashed into some civilian vehicles," Lieutenant Tamara Lawrence said.
An angry mob then torched a police station and vehicles in protest, prompting Afghan police to start shooting. Local media put the number of dead at between 20 and 30 but this could not be immediately confirmed.
An intelligence officer who did not want to be identified said initial reports were that seven people had been killed in the shootout with the US soldiers and nine wounded.
"We have absolutely no reports of coalition forces firing," said a US coalition spokesman, Colonel Tom Collins.
"These traitors killed at least 10 people. Death to them," a protestor named Ahmadullah said told an AFP reporter, referring to the American troops.
Another said: "These cowards opened fire into the crowd and killed them like sheep. First they drove into the people's cars, destroyed them and then fired onto the people who were only throwing stones at them.
"They are not brave soldiers. They are just backstreet, bad-driving thugs. They think Afghanistan is a playground where they can practise shooting," he said, without giving his name.
"We have absolutely no reports of coalition forces firing," said a US coalition spokesman, Colonel Tom Collins.
ISAF said it had some reports that warning shots were fired.
"We have unconfirmed reports that some warning shots were fired but I can't confirm who those warning shots were fired by," Major Toby Jackman said.
The accident had damaged about 12 vehicles and killed one person, with two others in a critical state, he said.
Jackman said the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had despatched a helicopter to the area but was told to leave.
The chopper "had to take off again on the request of the police -- it was not helping with the crowd situation," Jackman said.
ISAF had units on hand to assist local forces but "the situation with the crowd needs to calm down a bit... we don't want to enflame the situation," he said.
The Afghan parliament broke off regular business and went into an emergency session to discuss the violence, calling for calm.
The interior ministry set up a team to go to the area to establish the number of dead and wounded.
The incident comes just over a week after a major coalition strike against Taliban insurgents in the south of Afghanistan. The country's main human rights group said that attack killed about 34 civilians.
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Hunger strike spreads among Guantanamo prisoners
By Jane Sutton
Reuters
Monday, May 29, 2006; 12:43 PM
MIAMI (Reuters) - Seventy-five prisoners at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo were on a hunger strike on Monday, joining a few who have refused food and been force-fed since August, a military official said.
Cmdr. Robert Durand, a spokesman for the Guantanamo detention operation, called the hunger strike an attempt by the prisoners to gain media attention and pressure the United States to release about 460 men held there as enemy combatants.
Detainees are counted as hunger strikers if they miss nine consecutive meals, and most of the 75 hit that mark on Sunday, Durand said. Most are refusing food but continuing to drink liquids, he said.
One of the recent group is being force-fed through a tube inserted through the nose and into the stomach, as are three others who have been on a hunger strike since August 8, Durand said.
Hunger strikes have flared periodically since the first suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were taken to the U.S. base in southeast Cuba in 2002.
Durand said the current hunger strike may be timed to a series of hearings scheduled in June by the U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo, which are formally called commissions.
"This new hunger strike is likely a coordinated, but short-term, effort designed to coincide with the military commissions hearings scheduled for the next several weeks, as defense attorneys and media normally travel to Guantanamo to observe this process," Durand said by e-mail.
He said it may also be related to an outbreak of violence at the camp on May 18, when two detainees tried to commit suicide by overdosing on hoarded medicine. Several others attacked guards who rushed into a communal barracks to stop an attempted hanging that was later determined to be a ruse.
The two who overdosed are expected to recover fully and remain under observation at a hospital inside the detention camp, Durand said.
"They are alert, talking, walking and recovering," he said.
Human rights groups have long criticized the indefinite detention of foreign captives at Guantanamo. President George W. Bush said recently he would like to close Guantanamo, but administration officials said many of those held there are dangerous men who should remain locked up somewhere, if not at Guantanamo.
Military officials said 287 Guantanamo prisoners have been freed or transferred to other governments, and negotiations are ongoing to return more than 100 others to their homelands for continued detention.
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At least 1,000 British troops desert since Iraq war, BBC reports
by Lachlan Carmichael
AFP
Sun May 28, 2006
LONDON - At least 1,000 troops have deserted Britain's armed forces since the US-led war was launched in Iraq three years ago, the BBC reported.
Britain's defence ministry said however it knew of only "a handful of deserters since 1989".
During 2005 alone, 377 people deserted and are still missing, the British Broadcasting Corporation said on its website, adding that so far this year another 189 are on the run.
Without explaining how it arrived at the figures, it said some 900 deserters have evaded capture since the Iraq war started in March 2003.
Lawmaker John McDonnell told parliament on Monday that the "number of abscondees has trebled since the invasion of Iraq" as he registerd opposition to a government bill to sentence deserters to a maximum of life in prison.
McDonnell, who is among a leftwing group within the governing Labour party, said Sunday that the ministry of defence's denial "flies in the face of all the other evidence and the experience of soldiers on the ground.
"My understanding is there are a lot more seeking to avoid service, through different mechanisms," he said.
The BBC cited lawyers who represent troops at courts martial as saying that growing numbers of soldiers are seeking advice from them about avoiding service in Iraq, even if they want to stop short of deserting.
Justin Hugheston-Roberts, who represented Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, jailed for eight months for refusing to follow orders over a deployment to Iraq, said: "There has been an increase, a definite upturn."
Ben Griffin, a member of the elite Special Air Service (SAS), told his commanding officer this year that he was not prepared to return to Iraq because he said he saw US forces carrying out what he thought were illegal acts.
Griffin, who was allowed to leave the military, told the BBC that he believed many other British troops shared his views, though he would advise them to speak out rather than actually desert if they think the war is wrong.
"I can't speak for others, but there's a lot of dissent in the army about the legality of war and concerns that they're spending too much time there," he told the BBC.
In response to the BBC report of at least 1,000 deserters, a defence ministry spokeswoman told AFP: "It's not true.
"I think they are talking about the number in the army who remain absent without leave (AWOL). There have been a handful of deserters since 1989," she said.
"But basically there's no significant rise in the number of soldiers going absent without leave each year," she added.
The ministry recorded 2,670 AWOL cases in 2001, 2,970 in 2002, 2,825 in 2003, 3,050 in 2004, 2,725 in 2005, and 426 through April of 2006.
In contrast with desertion, which means that "somebody doesn't want to serve on the frontline or whatever," AWOL means that a soldier is ill or has not reported for duty, usually because of "domestic circumstances," she said.
"Most of those will then return most of the time after a couple of days, perhaps," she said.
Nor does any evidence suggest that Iraq was causing them to go AWOL, said the spokewsoman, though she did not have a breakdown of reasons for why they went AWOL.
Some 111 British troops have died in Iraq. Some 7,200 British servicemen and women are currently deployed in southern Iraq and neighboring Kuwait, where members of the Royal Air Force and other personnel are based.
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Unrealists
By Dimitri K. Simes
Having an honest and serious foreign policy debate is not an easy thing in contemporary American political culture. Television sound bites, bumper-sticker clichés passing for ideas, single-issue interest groups and highly partisan politics all work against a thoughtful evaluation of realistic U.S. options. Yet even for the sole superpower, acting in a state of delusion is not a prescription for a successful foreign policy.
Take Iraq. It should be apparent by now that the United States went into Iraq without a serious foreign policy debate. There was little critical examination of intelligence justifying the war, what the war was supposed to accomplish, or what postwar planning would be required. How did this happen?
Beginning in the late 1990s, a highly vocal group of neoconservatives-many involved in the Project for a New American Century-started a crusade for regime change in Iraq. In letters, articles and speeches, they argued that there was no other way to deal with Iraq than by wholesale regime change-and they did not hesitate to attack those who disagreed with their assessment as unpatriotic or cowardly. Removing Saddam Hussein was deemed to be such a priority that, almost immediately after 9/11, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was arguing that the United States should attack Iraq before dealing with Al-Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan.
Champions of regime change in Iraq were certainly not limited to Jewish Americans or, even more generally, to supporters of Israel. But it is also clear that many of those who were vociferous proponents of the Iraq invasion were also those who enthusiastically endorsed and even encouraged policy proposals advanced by the segment of the Israeli political spectrum in Benyamin Netanyahu's corner of the Likud Party-essentially requiring the United States to promote permanent revolution in the Middle East as the only way to ensure Israel's security and survival. Those who disagreed with this agenda were accused of being soft on terror and, in more recent years, of being "enemies of democracy", unsympathetic to Israel, or worse.
The important yet troubling discussion of the Israeli lobby this spring is a dramatic illustration of our difficulty in having an honest conversation about U.S. foreign policy among ourselves. The "scandal" started when two professors-John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago (who is also a valued member of The National Interest's Advisory Council) and Stephen Walt of Harvard University-published a "working paper" that concluded that U.S. foreign policy has been twisted by the "Israel Lobby" to such a degree that it no longer reflects fundamental American interests and values.
I disagree with many points in the paper, beginning with its first footnote, which asserts that the very existence of an Israel lobby suggests that a pro-Israel policy "is not in the American national interest." Policy in the modern American system is not determined by a council of the learned and the disinterested. Fundamental to our democracy is the notion that those with an interest in shaping decisions should organize, advise and advocate-and anyone who wants a role needs a lobby.
Also, although they acknowledge that what they call "the Lobby" is in fact a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations", Mearsheimer and Walt never made sufficient distinctions among the many groups and individuals who support Israel to varying degrees for varying reasons. Being committed to Israel's secure existence does not necessarily make someone a member of "the Lobby", and grouping together organizations and individuals with very different philosophies and agendas only confuses both who Israel's supporters are and how they exercise influence in Washington. Some groups, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, are clearly lobbyists and would not deny it. Others have strong affection for Israel but act entirely on their own without any direction from anyone inside or outside the United States. And there are people like me, who disagree with specific Israeli policies on many occasions, particularly on the settlements, but are not prepared to dictate to Israel how to protect itself while it is subject to regular terrorist attacks and menacing threats from Iran. (And here I must note that Mearsheimer and Walt might have had greater credibility if they had acknowledged that Israel never had a credible Palestinian partner willing and able to assure the security of the Jewish state in exchange for territorial concessions.)
One can also fault Mearsheimer and Walt for a lack of nuance or sensitivity. They do not express any special sympathy for the Jewish predicament in the Middle East or in Europe, the Holocaust notwithstanding. On a personal level, as someone who experienced anti-Semitism firsthand in the Soviet Union, I would have welcomed a little more understanding on their part-but there is a great difference between not being particularly sympathetic to a person or group and expressing bigotry or hatred, such as anti-Semitism. Nothing in Mearsheimer and Walt's paper merits the latter accusation.
Still, Mearsheimer and Walt are serious people raising serious issues in a serious way. They-and by extension all Americans who want a rational discussion about U.S. foreign policy-deserve better than the virtual lynching to which they were subjected by some influential pundits. A former Israeli official commented that it is "certainly time for a debate. Sadly, if predictably, response to the Harvard study has been characterized by a combination of the shrill and the smug"-including charges of bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism.1
So what made Mearsheimer and Walt's critics so mad? Their lack of nuance and subtlety hardly explains the fury-and their main points can be easily substantiated. There is a powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States, which together with its allies has a major impact on U.S. policy toward Israel and the Middle East in general. Critics of Mearsheimer and Walt, who are having a good time ridiculing their suggestion that the very presence of the Israel lobby demonstrates that supporting Israel is not in the national interest, should also admit that lobbies are created to influence policy and Israel's lobby is no different. Likewise, it is hardly controversial that the Israel lobby is probably the most influential ethnic lobby in America. As Nicholas Goldberg wrote in the Los Angeles Times: "It seems silly to deny that a powerful lobby on behalf of Israel exists. The real question is how pernicious it is. Does it, in fact, persuade us to act counter to our national interest-or is it a positive thing?"2 This is what reasonable people should debate.
Since the interests of no two states completely coincide, it is a legitimate question to ask what the costs and benefits are of supporting another state that finds itself in a difficult fight against many opponents and what might be the price of making its enemies our enemies. Israel's opponents control enormous oil reserves and have used them in the past to penalize U.S. support of Israel, as during the 1973 oil embargo. Today, widespread hostility toward Israel in the Middle East and among Muslims in general contributes to hostility toward the United States, including, but not limited to, terrorism. Simply raising these points should not be grounds for vitriolic attack. And ignoring facts because they are inconvenient is irresponsible and offensive.
But this is exactly what Martin Peretz, the editor-in-chief of the New Republic, did. He attacked Maryland University professor and Brookings scholar Shibley Telhami for being a "simpleminded person" for his observations, cited by Mearsheimer and Walt, that "no other issue resonates with the public in the Arab world, and many other parts of the Muslim world, more deeply than Palestine. No other issue shapes the regional perceptions of America more fundamentally than the issue of Palestine."3 A "pathetic citation", Peretz says, even though Telhami has drawn this conclusion from extensive and vigorous polling in the Arab and Islamic world-and his assessments are substantiated by U.S. government studies.
But pointing out that U.S. support for Israel complicates America's standing in the Arab and Muslim world does not mean that one believes that abandoning Israel would be a net positive for the United States. Abandoning a long-standing ally costs credibility-and credibility is one of a great power's most important assets. Any perception that American support for Israel could be jettisoned-particularly as a result of hostile pressure-would embolden the Jewish state's enemies and other extremists, destabilizing the whole region. Moderate, pro-American Arab regimes would be their next victims. Finally, U.S. moral commitments to Israel (as the land of the long-suffering Jewish people and a fellow democracy) are not to be discounted.
But critics of Mearsheimer and Walt are offended by the very idea that American support of Israel could ever be to America's disadvantage-just as they were offended by those who questioned the magnitude of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein or who pointed out that constant calls for regime change (as embodied in the 1998 bipartisan Congressional resolution) and ongoing military strikes might create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their response was to attack the credibility and character and even the patriotism of those who think otherwise. Even Brent Scowcroft, who as national security advisor in the George H. W. Bush Administration played a key role in defeating Saddam during the Gulf War, was the victim of a vicious and highly personal assault. Predictably, the bulk of the character assassination directed at Mearsheimer and Walt has come from individuals who bear the lion's share of responsibility for our predicament in Iraq, yet who want to use name-calling as a way of precluding any honest examination of how it happened.
One of the most shameless responses to Mearsheimer and Walt came from Johns Hopkins professor Eliot Cohen, who-without providing any evidence-accused them of being anti-Semites. He was offended that Mearsheimer and Walt mentioned him in passing-in one of their footnotes-as part of the neoconservative network eager to use U.S. power to reshape the Middle East. How dare they even imply (which they did not) that his loyalty might be questioned when the American flag flew from his porch and his oldest son-the third generation of his family to serve as an officer in the U.S. Army-was about to return from duty in Baghdad?4
Of course, Cohen's fellow neoconservatives have never had any shame in painting their opponents as would-be traitors. (Remember the "unpatriotic conservatives"?)5 They are now shocked to receive a tiny dose of their own medicine. But this is not about name-calling; it is about accountability for the policy positions one has articulated. Cohen had a long record of public advocacy in favor of regime change in Iraq, years before 9/11. He also called for the overthrow of the Iranian government in 2001, when the moderate and pro-reform, if ineffective, President Khatami was in charge rather than the current firebrand Ahmadinejad. And Cohen was not just an outside advocate; as a member of the Defense Policy Board, he directly contributed to deliberations that led to the current American debacle in Iraq. His book Supreme Command (2002) publicly celebrated Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's tendency to disregard the advice and assessments of the professional military in planning for the Iraq campaign and its aftermath-and we know the results.6
All of us can make mistakes, particularly policy analysts. I myself did not think that Mikhail Gorbachev would be both bold and blind enough to undertake reforms that would destroy his own system. Afterward, I thought and even wrote about the reasons for my-and others'-errors in judgment about Gorbachev and hopefully learned some useful lessons. What is particularly repugnant about polemicists like Cohen is that instead of taking a decent interval to analyze their mistakes, they move at full speed to wrap themselves in the American flag to attack others.
Lawrence Kaplan, in attacking realists and other pragmatic conservatives in 2000, opined: "Were foreign policy intellectuals held to the same standards of accountability as doctors and lawyers, a substantial slice of the commentariat would have been sued for malpractice or disbarred"-commenting on the "declinists" at the time of the Soviet collapse. But many neoconservatives don't want that standard applied to them. This is precisely what Mearsheimer has been doing for the last two years. In these pages last fall, he wrote:
Neoconservatives and realists have two very different theories of international politics, which were reflected in their opposing views on the wisdom of invading and occupying Iraq. Actually, the war itself has been a strong test of the two theories. We have been able to see which side's predictions were correct. It seems clear that Iraq has turned into a debacle for the United States, which is powerful evidence-at least for me-that the realists were right and the neoconservatives were wrong.
Is this, perhaps, the real source of the vehement response to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper?
Quite a few realists, starting with Henry Kissinger (and including me), reluctantly supported the war in Iraq. We believed the assurances presented about his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and were concerned that in combination with Saddam's reckless behavior and the U.S. commitment to regime change, they made a policy of containment unsustainable, especially after September 11. But no realist was in favor of the almost unlimited goal of transforming Iraq and the Middle East, especially with the limited resources envisaged at the time.
Let me make one final observation: Israel is an important friend and ally of the United States, but that does not mean that there is anything inappropriate about discussing openly and seriously not only the advantages, but also the challenges, with which this relationship presents the United States. Israelis do it all the time. Unless one thinks that Israel's case for American support is weak, or that most Americans are secret anti-Semites who are just looking for an excuse to abandon the Jewish state, talking honestly about the U.S. relationship with Israel should be unobjectionable. We may, and sometimes clearly should, decide to stand by Israel no matter what-like we did with our nato allies. As a democracy, however, we should be allowed to make this and other foreign policy decisions with open eyes and on the basis of a free debate. Unfortunately, some of the loudest advocates of spreading American liberty to the far corners of the world seem distinctly intolerant of freedom at home.
Dimitri K. Simes is president of The Nixon Center and publisher of The National Interest.
1Daniel Levy, "So Pro-Israel that It Hurts", Ha'aretz, March 25, 2006.
2"Who's Afraid of the 'Israel Lobby'?", March 26, 2006.
3"Oil and Vinegar", New Republic (April 10, 2006).
4"Yes, It's Anti-Semitic", Washington Post, April 5, 2006.
5"Guess Who Hates America? Conservatives" was the tag line of a piece by Lawrence F. Kaplan in the New Republic that attacked people like James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, Senator Pat Roberts, Richard Haass and others, including me, as "false prophets" with a "yearning to see U.S. power erode" and with a "reflexive sympathy for America's detractors abroad", (June 26, 2000).
6Benjamin Schwarz's review made this telling point: "Cohen disguise[s his] policy advocacy as objective history. . . . Cohen resurrects the old saw that war is too important to be left to the generals. But it's equally true that history is too important to leave to policy advocates" ("The Post-Powell Doctrine", New York Times, July 21, 2002).
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The deadliest war in the world: Congo's simmering conflict has killed 4 million
Time.com
Sunday, May 28, 2006
In Congo, a nation of 63 million people in the heart of Africa, a peace deal signed more than three years ago was supposed to halt a war that drew in belligerents from at least eight different countries, producing a record of human devastation unmatched in recent history.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates that 3.9 million people have died from war-related causes since the conflict in Congo began in 1998, making it the world's most lethal conflict since World War II.
By conventional measures, that conflict is over. Congo is no longer the playground of foreign armies; the country's first real election in 40 years is scheduled to take place this summer, and international troops have arrived to keep peace.
Meanwhile, mining firms have returned, and cell phone companies -- particularly welcome in a country that has just a few thousand fixed lines serving more than 60 million people -- are doing a booming business.
But the suffering of Congo's people continues. Fighting persists in the east, where rebel holdouts loot, rape and murder. The Congolese army, which was meant to be both symbol and protector in the reunited country, has cut its own murderous swath, carrying out executions and razing villages.
Even more deadly are the byproducts of war, the scars left by years of brutality that disfigure Congo's society and infrastructure. The country is plagued by bad sanitation, disease, malnutrition, corruption and dislocation. Routine and treatable illnesses have become weapons of mass destruction.
In many respects, Congo remains as broken, volatile and dangerous as ever, which is to say, among the very worst places on Earth. And yet Congo rarely makes daily news headlines, and its troubles are often low on international donors' lists of places to help.
There are various explanations for the neglect. Perhaps the global reservoir of wealth and good will only runs so deep. Perhaps the attention and outrage being spent to stop another African tragedy, the genocide in Darfur, has left the world too exhausted to take on Congo's.
But a choice like that comes with a cost.
Congo represents the promise of Africa as much as its misery. Its fertile fields and tropical forests cover an area bigger than California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Texas combined.
Its soils are packed with diamonds, gold, copper, tantalum (known locally as coltan and used in electronic devices such as cell phones and laptop computers) and uranium. The waters of its mighty river could one day power the continent. And yet because Congo is so rich in resources, its problems, when left to fester, tend to suck in its neighbors in a vortex of exploitation and chaos.
And so fixing Congo is essential to fixing Africa.
Says Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch: "If you want peace in Africa, then you need to deal with the biggest country right at its heart."
The task is enormous. Over the past year, Time reporters who visited the worst hit areas in the east of the country found much of it in ruins. Roads and railway lines have washed away or simply disappeared into the jungle. Hospitals and health clinics have been destroyed.
Electricity, for those lucky enough to receive it, is patchy. Refugees fleeing fighting between government troops and rebels talk of beheadings, rapes, massacres and villages being torched.
The gripping stories from Congo, coming eight years after the start of fighting, sound eerily familiar to the reports of atrocities committed in Darfur. In that sense they are powerful admonishments to those who believe the West's responsibilities in Darfur may have been lifted with the signing of a peace agreement in early May: Congo's warring parties, too, say they are abiding by a peace deal, monitored by U.N. troops.
But the dying continues. Congo provides tragic proof that in some places, peace and war can look a lot alike.
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Rockin 'n Rollin, Bakin 'n Drowin
Indonesia struggles to cope as quake toll passes 5,100
by Elisia Yeo
AFP
May 29, 2006
BANTUL, Indonesia - Indonesia struggled to cope with the scale of the earthquake disaster, with aid trickling in for thousands of injured and homeless survivors who faced a difficult third night in the open.
As the death toll from Saturday's quake passed 5,100, foreign rescue teams and international aid workers fanned out across the quake zone in central Java, distributing much-needed food, water, tents and tarpaulins.
But ongoing power cuts hampered rescue work, and fresh rains as night fell spelled more misery for some 200,000 people made homeless by the disaster. Some of them expressed anger that help was not reaching them more quickly.
"The government does not have any willingness to help," said Hariyantini, a housewife living in a village near the city of Yogyakarta.
On the roads to Bantul, the district hardest-hit by the 6.3-magnitude quake, and to Yogyakarta, desperate people clutched signs reading "please give aid" and held out buckets to collect money from passers-by.
Another sign read "Where is the pemkot?", or local government.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who visited quake survivors on Monday, acknowledged aid was slow to arrive.
"We have to manage this well. I ask the local governments to be more diligent and more active," he said.
His government declared a three-month state of emergency in the zone, where wooden beams from collapsed houses stuck up like toothpicks, and broken ceiling tiles and bricks littered the ground.
Survivors -- too terrified to return home as hundreds of aftershocks rattled the region -- hung out washing on lines strung between trees, or spread what little clothing they had left on blue tarpaulins they used for shelter.
Adding to their fear, Mount Merapi -- a volcano north of the quake's epicenter -- became increasingly active Monday, belching clouds of hot gas and ash as lava trails ran down its slopes.
Vice President Yusuf Kalla said the government had allocated 75 billion rupiah (eight million dollars) for emergency aid.
And the relief effort got a much-needed boost as Yogyakarta's damaged airport was reopened, allowing humanitarian aid flights to arrive.
More international rescuers landed in the devastated region, including a 20-strong search and rescue team from Taiwan and an 87-member Malaysian rescue team which headed out of Bantul in a convoy.
"I heard there are no more bodies trapped in the rubble," team commander Ahmad Zailani told AFP, explaining that his team hoped to help construct temporary housing for survivors or clear some of the rubble.
Hospitals overwhelmed with five times their normal patient load begged for more medical staff and supplies to treat the thousands of injured who overflowed from their wards, raising fears of the spread of disease.
"Waste management in the hospitals is now critical. There is human waste everywhere. The situation is quite serious," said UNICEF spokesman John Budd.
Budd said that United Nations agencies were trying to encourage people to stay near their homes to prevent makeshift refugee camps from forming, which would create sanitation and water problems.
At Yogyakarta's Sardjito hospital, patients lay on mats in dirty hallways and outside corridors with only thin sarongs to protect them from the rain.
"The first thing we need is nurses during this first week. We must have them," the hospital's disaster team chief Sutaryo told AFP.
Medical teams from around the world began flying into Java on Monday in response to the appeal, with Australia and Japan sending doctors and nurses in addition to large cash donations.
Paris-based aid charity Medecins sans Frontieres has deployed a surgical team in the quake zone, centred on the lush green farming belt south of Yogyakarta, Indonesia's ancient cultural centre.
"We have to get to the outlying areas, where the dead and injured have not yet been counted," said Vincent Cauche, Indonesia coordinator for the non-governmental organization Medecins du Monde.
"We presume that the injured there have not had access to health care facilities, as their wounds have prevented them from travelling."
Pakistan, which is still coping with the aftermath of a devastating quake last October that killed 73,000 people, sent a special flight laden with tents, blankets, medicines and food.
The quake was Indonesia's third major disaster in 18 months, following the 2004 Asian tsunami catastrophe that killed 168,000 in Sumatra and another quake that killed more than 600 people in Nias in March last year.
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Strong earthquake hits Papua New Guinea
AFP
May 28, 2006
Sydney - A strong earthquake measuring 6.2 on the Richter scale hit Papua New Guinea Sunday but there were no immediate reports of casualties or damage, Geoscience Australia said.
The earthquake struck at 0312 GMT about 39 kilometres (24 miles) deep in PNG's island of New Britain, 605 kilometres northeast of the capital Port Moresby, a spokeswoman told AFP.
There was no risk of the quake sparking a tsunami "and we've had no reports of any damage at all" in the sparsely-populated area, she said.
A 6.2 magnitude earthquake is classified as "strong". A temblor of the same size killed 3,300 people and left 200,000 homeless in neighbouring Indonesia on Saturday.
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Earthquake in ocean near Tonga
AFP
May 28, 2006
Washington - An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.9 shook the ocean floor early Sunday near the Pacific islands of Tonga, smaller than initially estimated, the US government said.
The US Geological Survey originally estimated a 6.7 magnitude.
The USGS said the epicenter of the tremor, which occurred at 0336 GMT, was located 143 kilometers (89 miles) north-northeast of the island nation's capital, Nuku'alofa.
No reports of casualties or damage were immediately available.
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Earthquake jolts northern Philippines, no damage or injuries
AFP
May 28, 2006
Manila - An earthquake measuring 5.3 on the Richter scale jolted the northern Philippines Sunday with no report of damage or injuries, an official said.
The epicenter was located about 125 kilometers northeast of the coastal city of Laoag in Ilocos Norte province at about 5:00 pm local time.
"The quake happened near the sparsely inhabited Babuyan Islands," Robert Tiglao, duty officer at the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology, told AFP.
"Earthquakes of this size are considered quite normal here in the Philippines," he said.
"We record earthquakes almost on a daily basis," Tiglao added.
In March an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale rocked buildings in the capital Manila.
The Philippines sits on what is commonly referred to as the Pacific "Ring of Fire", a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that encircles the Pacific Ocean basin.
On Saturday a quake hit the Indonesian island of Java to the south of the Philippines, killing about 4,000 people.
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6.2 Quake Strikes Indonesia
by Bhimanto Suwastoyo
AFP
Sat May 27, 2006
YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia - A powerful earthquake in Indonesia killed more than 3,000 people, reducing whole villages to rubble in the nation's worst catastrophe since the 2004 Asian tsunami.
Countless victims were buried alive when the 6.2 magnitude quake struck at dawn, turning houses into tombs of stone and setting off panic in a country that has been plagued by natural disasters.
An official at the social affairs ministry's disaster relief centre said at least 3,002 people were dead and more than 2,500 seriously injured in the quake on the south coast of Java island.
The Indonesian Red Cross said some 200,000 people had been displaced. The death count was being updated almost by the hour.
Victims who survived went streaming into overwhelmed hospitals, bloodied and terrified, as tens of thousands more were left homeless around the ancient city of Yogyakarta on Java's densely populated south coast.
"I have never gone through an earthquake this strong during my entire life," said Jodi Riwono, 46, who was trapped unconscious in the wreckage of his home before a grandson pulled him to safety.
"I do not know what we did," said Riwono, his legs covered in purple bruises. "But we must have sinned for God to be angry like this."
First news of the quake set off frightening memories of the Indian Ocean tsunami two years ago, as thousands of panicked residents fled to higher ground, fearing a repetition of the deadly giant waves.
The area had already been on edge for weeks amid fears that the nearby volcano at Mount Merapi, rumbling with molten lava for weeks, would erupt.
Many could not escape the quake and were buried under collapsed buildings or struck by flying rocks and debris as the temblor devastated towns and villages near Yogyakarta, 400 kilometres (250 miles) from the capital Jakarta.
Damage to roads, power and telecommunications was hampering the rescue effort, said a local police chief, Sampurnojati.
"Electricity is out and communication is difficult," he told ElShinta radio.
One of the worst hit areas was the Bantul district south of Yogyakarta, which was flattened.
"There is only one house remaining standing," said Ngadiyo, 63, crouching in front of his ruined house. "But even that is not safe any more."
Emergency crews rushed to the worst-hit areas as officials warned the death toll could rise. Hospitals struggled to cope with the crush of victims.
Heru Nugroho, spokesman for the Sardjito hospital in Yogyakarta, told AFP that around 1,500 victims were being treated at the site, many of them badly injured and waiting in corridors.
People lay with broken arms and legs on the tiled floors of the hospital, which were covered in blood.
"We have been working non-stop since this morning," said Agus, a nurse at nearby Muhammadiyah hospital. "There is still a lot to do."
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono raced to the area, urging rescuers to work round the clock and ordering the military to evacuate victims as soon as possible.
"The first priority is to save lives," he said.
The quake forced the closure of the airport in Yogyakarta, Detikcom news portal said, with buildings damaged and cracks in the runway. Flights were diverted to the nearby city of Solo.
A tsunami scare started when a police official told local radio that the earthquake was to be followed by tidal waves.
"We panicked," local resident Clemon Cilik told the state Antara news agency. "We were ready to flee." The killer waves never came, but the fear was evident on the frightened faces of the locals.
Aid agencies were sending tents and food to the area to help those left homeless, while an appeal for blood donors was launched.
As several aftershocks shook the region, residents were to afraid to return home, wandering dazed and confused in the streets, many in tears.
More than 20,000 residents living in the shadow of Mount Merapi were already staying in emergency shelters.
An Indonesian Red Cross spokesman told the BBC that five action teams had been dispatched to the area and 21 field hospital units were operating at full capacity.
Britain and France offered aid while Russian President
Vladimir Putin and other foreign officials expressed their condolences.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity.
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Pacific 'Ring of Fire' unleashes another disaster
AFP
May 27, 2006
Jakarta - The earthquake that rocked Java Saturday was the latest disaster in a part of the world known as the Pacific "Ring of Fire" that has seen a burst of seismic and volcanic activity this year.
Whether on land or undersea, the volatile edges of the north Pacific, bounded by the east Asian rim and the west coast of the Americas, are alive with near-constant seismic activity.
Some of the most dramatic natural disasters of recent history have happened within the Ring's arc, which stretches from Chile, north to Alaska and then west to encompass Japan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands.
From the nuclear-like explosion of Krakatoa volcano off the coast of Indonesia in 1883 to the Indian Ocean tsunami disaster that killed 220,000 in late 2004 the Ring's awesome power is legend.
The eruption of Mount St Helens in the United States in 1980, the freak quake that felled San Francisco in 1906 and the one that devastated Kobe, Japan, in 1995, were all part of the Ring's devastating toll.
Since the start of the year there has been an increase in seismic activity with dozens of earthquakes and a volcanic eruption within the Ring.
From January 3, when a huge quake occurred between Fiji and Tonga, to May 23, when a temblor shook Kamchatka, in Russia's Far East, there were 33 earthquakes on the Ring that have measured 6.0 or more on the Richter scale.
Adding to the tableau of upheaval is the angry awakening of the volcano Mount Merapi on the Indonesian island of Java, just north of the Saturday quake that rocked the island's southern coastline.
Twenty-nine of the quakes have taken place on the western side of the Rim, in an arc running from Kamchatka to New Zealand.
Six of the total involved quakes bigger than 7.0, topped by a 7.9 behemoth off Tonga on May 3. Six took place in Kamchatka and three near Tonga.
The reason for such geological volatility is the fragile fault lines that skirt the zone.
The Earth's crust is made up of a series of rocky plates that literally float on the molten rock of the Earth's mantle and core, interlocked over the entire planet like the pieces of a puzzle.
These plates are in constant motion, clashing into each other or moving away from each other, creating stresses and pressure build-ups at their margins.
The edges, or fault lines, are weak points in the planet's surface where the crust drops to just a few miles in thickness; at its thickest it is about 20 miles deep.
Many, mostly small eruptions occur, but occasionally huge volcanic explosions, earthquakes or landslides are generated, as pent up energy is released through the weak fissures.
According to the US Geological Survey (USGS), since 1900 there have been on average 19.4 quakes of 7.0-plus strength on the Ring each year, although there were only 11 in 2005. So this year's burst may not prove to be so exceptional.
Indonesia, which sits on the ring of fire, has suffered three catastrophic earthquakes within 18 months.
The 9.3-magnitude December 26 2004 quake that occurred west of Sumatra, unleashing tsunamis that crashed into Indian Ocean shorelines and killed 168,000 in Aceh alone, was followed by an 8.7 quake just 160 kilometres (100 miles) to the south on March 28 2005, killing more than 600.
Tremors continued to shake the region and scientists had warned a third big seismic event was possible in the region.
"The probability of a third quake in the coming months and years, cannot be excluded," Mustapha Meghraoui, of the Institute for Planetary Physics in Strasbourg, eastern France, told AFP last year.
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5 die after storms hit Ind., Ky., Tenn.
AP
Sat May 27, 2006
IRVINGTON, Ky. - Severe thunderstorms that lashed through Kentucky, Tennessee and Indiana left five people dead and a 4-year-old girl missing, authorities said Friday.
The girl's mother and another adult got out of their vehicle safely before a rain-swollen creek swept the car away with the child about 50 miles southwest of Louisville Thursday night, said Rick Priest, Breckinridge County emergency management director.
"We're trying to find the vehicle, and we're assuming that the 4-year-old is still in the vehicle," Priest said.
In central Kentucky, a 68-year-old woman died after being struck by lightning from the storms, officials said.
Shirley F. Cosby, of Lexington, was found early Friday on the sidewalk in front of her residence, the coroner's office said. It appeared she was placing her yard waste container by the curb when she was struck.
In southern Indiana, searchers found the bodies of Greg Kemp, 35 and his 4-year-old son, Isaac, both of Leopold, downstream from where their pickup truck was washed off the road by a rain-swollen creek, Indiana Conservation Officer Mark Farmer said.
A search Friday failed to find the boy's grandfather, Robert Edwards, 55, also of Leopold. Greg Kemp's 7-year-old son, Morgan, was able to swim away to safety Thursday, Farmer said.
In Tennessee, the bodies of two 15-year-old boys, Vincent Kruk and Philiip Siefert, were found Friday after they were swept away the night earlier while swimming in a creek just north of Clarksville, said Montgomery County Emergency Medical Services official Gary Perry.
Two emergency workers trying to rescue the teens were injured, one critically, when their boat capsized.
One of them, rescue diver Joe Snow, was under water for up to six minutes after he was caught in the undertow, Perry said.
Snow was in critical condition Friday at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
About 187,000 Duke Energy customers in southwest Ohio and northern Kentucky were without electricity at one point, and service to some Cincinnati-area homes was not expected to be restored until Saturday, spokesman Steve Brash said Friday.
On Friday, the storms were moving east through New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, and hazardous weather advisories warned of severe thunderstorms bringing damaging gusts and hail.
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Long History of Southwest Droughts Confirms Looming Water Shortage
Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience.com
Sat May 27, 2006
A new study comparing the most recent drought in the Southwest United States with other dry periods going back 508 years confirms worries that water shortages will become more common and severe.
Agreements to allocate water from the Colorado River were made in 1922, during an historically wet period. More water was allocated than is actually available now, scientists say.
Not all of the allocated water is actually used yet. But during a drought from 2000 to 2004, some reservoirs in the Southwest dropped to less than half full and water restrictions became common in many areas before the drought ended abruptly.
Expect worse
The new study, which examined growth rings in trees throughout the Colorado's vast drainage basin from New Mexico to Wyoming, is the first to look at five-year periods such as the 2000-2004 drought.
The researchers found that as many as eight droughts similar in severity to the most recent one have occurred since 1500, said study leader Connie Woodhouse of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.
At least one drought and possibly three or more in the past were worse than the one that ended in 2004, said study team member David Meko from the University of Arizona.
Meanwhile, development in much of the Southwest is booming. In the Phoenix metro area alone, permits were issued for 63,570 new homes last year.
"Planners should consider that there's a limit to the water resource and that we're starting to push that at times," Meko said. "This recent drought was a good example. That's going to happen in the future more and more as demand increases."
In a telephone interview, Meko told LiveScience that the study results "should put a limit on how much growth can occur in the arid parts of the Southwest."
What is a drought?
The Colorado River supplies drinking water to some 30 million people and irrigates 3.5 million acres of farmland. Among the major population areas it serves: Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix and Albuquerque.
The study is detailed in the May issue of the journal Water Resources Research.
The very word "drought" may now be defined in ways that have little to do with natural climate patterns. Water resource managers nowadays factor human thirst into the definition.
"It's not purely a function of the natural system," Meko said. "It's partly a function of need. What might not have been defined as a drought 50 years ago would be now."
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Disorder In The Homeland
Sources: Treasury secretary's resignation near
From Suzanne Malveaux
CNN Washington Bureau
Friday, May 26, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Administration officials and Republican insiders said Friday that Treasury Secretary John Snow's resignation announcement is imminent -- a matter of weeks or even days.
Treasury Department spokesman Tony Fratto refused to "comment or speculate on personnel issues," and White House press secretary Tony Snow would say only that President Bush is the one who makes personnel announcements.
But several GOP sources, including some former White House officials, said John Snow has told several White House officials he intends to resign. However, they said, Snow has not spoken to Bush about it.
At a news conference Thursday night, Bush -- asked whether Snow had given him "any indication that he intends to leave his job any time soon" -- said, "No, he has not talked to me about resignation. I think he's doing a fine job. After all, our economy is, it's strong. ... He's done a fine job."
But several current and past administration officials have said the president has been ready to replace Snow for the past year. They said the White House has been searching for an "acceptable alternative" but has had difficulty getting someone to accept the position.
In January, CNN confirmed that one of those who had refused the job was Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons.
A former White House official in frequent contact with Snow said that in December the secretary indicated he wanted to leave in early spring, though he agreed to stay until the White House found a replacement.
It is not clear whether Snow has set a timetable for his departure, sources said, or whether he is trying to nudge the president along to find a replacement. Sources would not confirm a Washington Post report that Snow's last day would be July 3.
Snow is due to leave June 8 for the G8 finance ministers summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sources said it is likely he would want to be in Washington, standing next to the president, when he announces his resignation, meaning that if he plans to make the announcement soon it would be either in the 10 days after the Memorial Day weekend and before the summit, or soon after he returns from the summit June 11.
Officials told CNN they do not feel it would weaken his position during the summit if his resignation were announced beforehand.
Possible replacement candidates
Several sources gave CNN the following assessments on people who have been mentioned as possible replacements for Snow:
- Stephen Friedman, the president's former chief economic adviser: a real possibility. He's available, and Bush likes him. He is a former Goldman Sachs chief executive.
- Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez: chances unknown. His name has been floated for several months.
- Don Evans, former commerce secretary: not likely. Although he's very close to Bush, and his name is often mentioned, no one has reached out to him, the sources said.
- David Mulford, ambassador to India: not likely. He was once considered high on the list, but some of the sources said they believe that was largely through self-promotion. He is a former treasury undersecretary.
- Robert Kimmitt, Snow's deputy: not likely. The Dubai Ports World deal, which was initially approved by the committee he heads, damaged his prospects.
- Robert Zoellick, deputy secretary of state: not happening. He wanted the job, and it has long been known he would resign if he didn't get it, sources said. They said he has indicated to colleagues during the past several weeks that he intends to resign and go back to work in the private sector. He is a former U.S. trade representative.
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FEMA chief Paulison wins Senate approval
By LARA JAKES JORDAN
Associated Press
Fri May 26, 2006
WASHINGTON - The Senate confirmed R. David Paulison as FEMA's chief on Friday, ending uncertainty over whether the beleaguered disaster relief agency would have a permanent director by next week's start of the hurricane season.
Paulison's confirmation was one of three Homeland Security Department nominations the Senate approved without objections before heading out of town on a one-week recess for Memorial Day.
Federal Emergency Management Agency, said he is "confident the American public will be well-served" by Paulison.
Despite a push to get Paulison confirmed before the June 1 start of the annual storm season, his nomination hit several temporary snags.
On Wednesday, members of the Senate Homeland Security Governmental Affairs Committee questioned irregular travel expense deductions on three years worth of his tax returns. Paulison said Thursday he would refile amended returns to correct any errors, satisfying the committee.
But hours later, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said he would block Paulison's nomination to protest FEMA's failure to develop an appeals system for property owners whose flood insurance claims are rejected. FEMA administers the national flood insurance program.
By Friday morning, however, Bunning dropped his threat after being assured by Chertoff - in a phone call and a letter - that FEMA would establish an appeals process soon.
Paulison has served as acting FEMA director since September, taking over the beleaguered agency two weeks after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He has had a three-decade-long firefighting career, including a stint as chief of the Miami-Dade County fire department and head of the U.S. Fire Administration.
The Senate also confirmed David L. Norquist as Homeland Security's chief financial officer, and former Secret Service director Ralph Basham as commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
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Kissinger called Japanese 'sons of bitches' over China links
by P. Parameswaran
AFP
Sat May 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - Henry Kissinger called Japanese "treacherous sons of bitches" for wanting normal relations with China, when he was trusted aide to president Richard Nixon, according to declassified documents.
The outburst by national security advisor Kissinger came just before Nixon met Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka at a summit in Hawaii in August 1972, according to transcripts of talks between the powerful negotiator and local and foreign officials released by the National Security Archive.
When Kissinger learned that Tanaka was to travel to China to establish diplomatic ties, he lividly reacted, "Of all the treacherous sons of bitches, the Japs take the cake."
"It's not just their indecent haste in normalizing relations with China, but they even picked National Day as their preference to go there," Kissinger said at a meeting in his hotel room with then US envoy to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker.
Kissinger was angry apparently because Japan, a key US ally, defied the foreign policy of the United States, which at that time had diplomatic ties only with Taiwan.
Tanaka established diplomatic relations with China on September 29, 1972, a year after the
United Nations expelled Taiwan in favor of China.
It was only seven years later that the United States restored formal links with Beijing and severed official diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
Nixon however made a landmark visit to China much earlier -- in February 1972 -- to end 20 years of frosty relations between the two countries.
Kissinger's outburst against the Japanese is an example, confirmed by other documents, of his often difficult, sometimes antagonistic, relationship with Japan, a society that he had great difficulty understanding, said The National Security Archive, a private, independent clearing house for declassified documents, based at George Washington University in Washington.
The offending language used by Kissinger was "an extraordinary example in the documents of how he gets acerbic sometimes and makes comments behind people's backs," William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive, told AFP.
Burr edited "The Kissinger Transcripts: A Verbatim Record of US Diplomacy, 1969-1977," comprising more than 2,100 memoranda of conversations, many of them near-verbatim transcripts, detailing talks between Kissinger and US and foreign leaders and official.
Angry over the Japanese Prime Minister's prospective visit to China, Kissinger also refused to meet a foreign ministry official from Tokyo who wanted to discuss with him privately the trip's agenda, according to the documents.
The documents also showed that Kissinger told China in 1972 that the United States might accept a Communist takeover of South Vietnam if it occurred after a withdrawal of American troops.
"While we cannot bring a communist government to power, if, as a result of historical evolution it should happen over a period of time, if we can live with a Communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina," Kissinger told then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.
He told Zhou that, for credibility reasons, the United States could not meet Hanoi's demand for the "overthrow" of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu.
But, once US forces had left Indochina, Kissinger declared, the White House would accept the results of historical change, according to the documents.
All US military forces withdrew from South Vietnam in 1973, in accordance with the Paris Peace Accords signed with North Vietnam. Saigon fell two years later.
Comment: "Kissinger was angry apparently because Japan, a key US ally, defied the foreign policy of the United States, which at that time had diplomatic ties only with Taiwan."
Gosh, that sounds familiar, doesn't it?
What's even more amazing is that so many Americans think so highly of Kissinger.
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Bush hails House bill opening Alaska wildlife refuge to drilling
AFP
May 25, 2006
Washington - US President George W. Bush on Thursday hailed a vote in the House of Representatives to allow oil drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
"I applaud todays vote in the House to allow for environmentally responsible energy exploration in a small part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge," the president said in a statement, saying the the new oil source should help make America less dependent on imported oil.
"A reliable domestic supply of energy is important to America's security and prosperity," Bush said.
"This project will keep our economy growing by creating jobs and ensuring that businesses can expand. And it will make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy, eventually by up to a million barrels of crude oil a day -- a nearly 20 percent increase over our current domestic production," he said, calling on the US Senate to pass a similar bill.
The Senate has blocked previous attempts to permit oil drilling in the area, and environmental groups say scores of rare and endangered wildlife species would be put at risk by the proposal.
The House bill, which passed by a vote of 225 to 201, directs the US Secretary of the Interior to begin leasing a portion of the refuge along Alaskas northern coast for oil exploration.
Republicans have lobbied for years to allow exploration of Alaska's environmentally-sensitive wildlife refuge.
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Man arrested in Calif. dynamite theft case
AP
Mon May 29, 2006
RIVERSIDE, Calif. - A man wanted in the theft of 686 sticks of dynamite from a gold mine has been arrested after a short car chase in a stolen car, officials said.
Sheriff's deputies arrested Joshua Lee Gawn, 33, for investigation of auto theft Friday night, Deputy Chris Durham said. Gawn didn't give his name and authorities didn't realize he was wanted in the dynamite case until fingerprint information came back Saturday night, Durham said.
Investigators earlier this month had focused on Gawn based on information from witnesses and tipsters. After his apartment was searched, he was arrested for investigation of a probation violation but was released the next day on $25,000 bail.
While in custody, Gawn admitted he stole explosives, according to an affidavit from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The ATF obtained an arrest warrant for Gawn on May 18 after he did not turn himself in for arraignment in federal court.
The warrant accuses him of being a felon in possession of explosives.
Most of the dynamite has been recovered from an impounded vehicle and in front of two fire stations. Thirty-nine sticks remain missing, officials said.
Gawn told authorities two weeks ago that the missing sticks were destroyed by water from a car wash, according to the ATF affidavit. The bureau is still trying to account for the missing sticks, said John D'Angelo, an ATF special agent.
Authorities did not offer a motive for the theft, which was reported May 3.
"I think he got himself into something he couldn't get out of," said Gawn's wife, Amy.
"I'm glad he's in jail. That makes me feel a little better," said Greg Paul, owner of the Gold Mountain Mine Co., the Big Bear mine from which the explosives were stolen.
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AP poll finds Americans in a hurry
By CALVIN WOODWARD
Associated Press
May 28, 2006
WASHINGTON - We'll make this quick. We know you're busy.
An Associated Press poll has found an impatient nation. To get to the point without further ado, it's a nation that gets antsy after five minutes on hold on the phone and 15 minutes max in a line. So say people in the survey.
The Department of Motor Vehicles, the U.S. version of the old Soviet bread line, is among the top spots where Americans hate to wait. But grocery stores are the worst.
Almost one in four in the AP-Ipsos poll picked the grocery checkout as the line where their patience is most likely to melt like the ice cream turning to goo in their cart.
And it seems people don't mellow with age. The survey found older people to be more impatient than younger people.
Nor does getting away from the urban pressure cooker make much difference. People in the country and the suburbs can bear a few more minutes in a line before losing it than city inhabitants can, but that's it.
In short, Americans want it all NOW. Or awfully close to now.
"If you ask the typical person, do you feel more time-poor or money-poor, the answer almost always is time-poor," says Paco Underhill, an authority on what draws and drives away shoppers.
"We walk in the door with the clock ticking with various degrees of loudness in our heads. And if I get to the checkout and if I have the perception it's not working efficiently, often that clock gets even louder."
In other words, it's not just how long you wait, but how you wait. Creative merchants turn waiting time into something approaching quality time. A lot don't.
A free-for-all deli counter that doesn't let people take numbered tickets is a flashpoint for frayed nerves. But if managers approach shoppers in a long line and help shepherd them to the right counter, they'll have happier sheep.
The typical supercenter shopper spends 25 to 30 minutes in the store, but many think they've been there an hour, Underhill says. His company, Envirosell, monitors the behavior of shoppers and sellers across the U.S. and in other countries.
Americans are demanding. Half in the AP-Ipsos poll said they refuse to return to businesses that made them wait too long. Nearly one in five owned up to speaking rudely to someone in the last few months when they weren't served efficiently.
Hana Sklar, 23, lives in New York and wants things done, yes, in a New York minute.
A native of Australia, where "it's relaxing, calm, everyone takes their time," Sklar now lives in Brooklyn and says she typically loses patience after waiting less than one minute in a line or on the phone.
The snail's slither to the post office counter drives her the nuttiest. "By the time you get there and it's your turn, there are only two people working there," she said. "It's not only me getting angry. Everyone is talking about it."
Now meet one of the most patient men in America. John Vivian, 72, of Lantana, Fla., can wait "hours" on hold on the phone. "I spent 23 years in the military and if you spent 23 years in the military, you don't lose your patience."
He worked for just as long behind the post office counter, giving him a really thick skin. "Life is too short to be upset," he says.
Underhill says post offices and some DMVs have improved in recent years but grocery stores are notably poor at managing crowds, especially considering busy times are so predictable.
One solution: Online ordering of routine purchases, which make up 80 percent of the shopping cart.
This would transform the store into a series of "pleasure centers" where people linger over the gourmet cheeses, fancy breads and fine wines, then pick up the bagged-and-ready staples they ordered earlier from the home or work computer.
Overall, 60 percent in the survey said they can usually wait no more than 15 minutes in a line before losing their cool.
Their fuses are even shorter on the phone.
Nearly four in five respondents in the survey said their patience has run out while being kept on hold.
As if by some cruel joke, phoning the phone company is often a path to madness.
"I stayed on the phone once for an hour, just to see how long it would take," said Janet Collier, 76, of Macdon, N.Y. "It was just stubbornness."
Asked if she finally gave her carrier an earful, she laughed and said, "I'm not with them anymore."
Exasperation with phones extends to cell service. Underhill described cellular company stores as "locations of last resort" for customers who have been put through all manner of nuisance trying to get their service needs met or their questions answered on the phone or computer. Many come in those doors already upset.
In the survey, 54 percent said they can wait no more than five minutes on hold before losing their patience. Only 7 percent could bear more than 20 minutes.
However long the wait, people strongly prefer hearing recorded music while on hold and appreciate periodic estimates of remaining waiting time, the poll indicates. Most did not want to be held hostage to talk radio or company ads, and less than one-third wanted silence.
Altogether, 1,003 adults took time out from their evening to answer questions for the poll March 28-30. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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Man throws his 2 kids, himself off balcony
By JENNIFER KAY
Associated Press
May 27, 2006
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - A man killed his two young children Saturday by throwing them off the 15th floor of a landmark South Beach hotel and then jumped to his own death, police said.
The children were 4 and 8 years old and the family was on vacation from Alton, Ill., said police spokesman Bobby Hernandez.
The mother of the children told police she and her husband had been having marital problems for the past six months, Hernandez said. Police did not immediately release the identities of the family members.
The woman heard one of her children screaming from an adjacent room in the Loews Hotel, and when she walked into the room she saw her husband going off the balcony, Hernandez said.
She looked over the railing and saw her husband and her two children lying on a mezzanine roof that is about two floors above the ground.
Hernandez said that despite the marital problems, the family had been celebrating the couple's 10th wedding anniversary.
"It's a terrible tragedy. It's unfortunate that this gentleman was so selfish and in an effort to get back at his wife he took the two most loved people in the world away from her," Hernandez said.
Hernandez said the woman did not know why her husband killed the children and himself.
"There was no indication that he would be capable of doing something as horrible as this," Hernandez said.
People in neighboring rooms said they did not hear any noises, Hernandez said.
A Loews Hotel spokeswoman in Miami would not comment.
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Disgruntled Citizens Beware!
Gonzales Gone Wild
May 29, 2006
by Mark Anderson
Antiwar.com
On Feb. 6, 2006, U.S.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales launched a convoluted attack on the Fourth Amendment before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This assault on the meaning of the Fourth Amendment is, in my estimation, the biggest leap forward for totalitarianism in this country.
The following is an excerpt from Alberto Gonzales' Fourth Amendment catechism (emphasis mine):
"Finally, the NSA's terrorist surveillance program fully complies with
the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. The
Fourth Amendment has never been understood to require warrants in all circumstances.
The Supreme Court has upheld warrantless searches at the border and has
allowed warrantless sobriety checkpoints. See, e.g., Michigan v. Dept. of
State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990); see also Indianapolis v. Edmond,
531 U.S. 32, 44 (2000) (stating that 'the Fourth Amendment would almost certainly
permit an appropriately tailored roadblock set up to thwart an imminent terrorist
attack'). Those searches do not violate the Fourth Amendment because they involve
'special needs' beyond routine law enforcement. Vernonia Sch. Dist. v. Acton,
515 U.S. 646, 653 (1995). To fall within the 'special needs' exception to the
warrant requirement, the purpose of the search must be distinguishable from
ordinary general crime control. See, e.g., Ferguson v. Charleston, 532
U.S. 67 (2001); City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 41 (2000).
"The terrorist surveillance program fits within this 'special needs'
category. This conclusion is by no means novel. During the Clinton Administration,
Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick testified before Congress in 1994 that
the president has inherent authority under the Constitution to conduct foreign
intelligence searches of the private homes of U.S. citizens in the United States
without a warrant, and that such warrantless searches are permissible under
the Fourth Amendment. See 'Amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act: Hearings Before the House Permanent Select Comm. on Intelligence,' 103d
Cong. 2d Sess. 61, 64 (1994) (statement of Deputy Attorney General Jamie S.
Gorelick). See also In re Sealed Case, 310 F.3d at 745-46.
"The key question under the Fourth Amendment is not whether there was
a warrant, but whether the search was reasonable. Determining the reasonableness
of a search for Fourth Amendment purposes requires balancing privacy interests
with the government's interests and ensuring that we maintain appropriate safeguards.
United States v. Knights, 534 U.S. 112, 118- 19 (2001). Although
the terrorist surveillance program may implicate substantial privacy interests,
the government's interest in protecting our nation is compelling. Because the
need for the program is reevaluated every 45 days and because of the safeguards
and oversight, the al-Qaeda intercepts are reasonable."
The above statement from Alberto Gonzales is breathtaking. Notice how he never
says the "terrorist" surveillance program satisfies the Fourth Amendment's probable
cause provision. Instead, he says it passes the neoconservative "reasonableness"
standard. Then, he uses three different types of examples that satisfy the probable
cause requirement to imply that the Fourth Amendment doesn't really say what
it says about probable cause.
Although I do question the constitutionality of sobriety checkpoints, a sobriety
checkpoint on a public road is still different from invading the privacy of
one's house, or eavesdropping on a phone conversation. Sobriety checkpoints
are considered constitutional not just because they pass a "reasonableness"
standard, but, because they are on public roads, they satisfy the entire Fourth
Amendment.
Gonzales then uses the example of FISA searches. It is important to understand
that evidence obtained from a FISA search cannot be used in a criminal prosecution,
precisely because the FISA standard doesn't meet the probable cause threshold
of the Fourth Amendment. The evidence can only be used for narrow purposes,
such as deportation of a foreign intelligence operative. So, yes, FISA searches
don't meet the probable cause threshold, but that is exactly why they can't
be used to obtain evidence for criminal prosecutions. The probable cause threshold
is satisfied, since it isn't violated.
Notice the eclectic examples Gonzales uses. He fuses together "special needs"
law enforcement operations with counterintelligence operations. This is a very
dangerous comparison. Making counterintelligence operations part of "special
needs" law enforcement programs is a calculus to use FISA-type searches for
crime control.
Gonzales then repeats his view that the Fourth Amendment doesn't require probable
cause and warrants. The search only has to be "reasonable," pursuant to the
arbitrary discretion of government agents. He then cites United
States v. Knights. I have to wonder if he has ever read that decision,
since the Supreme Court didn't rule against Knights because the search only
passed the "reasonableness" standard. The search satisfied the probable cause
threshold because Knights was on probation! He was subject to warrantless searches
as part of his sentence.
Would it be constitutional for the government to execute all of us, since Ted
Bundy was constitutionally executed? Or would it be okay for the government
to force all of us to submit to urinalysis testing because people on probation
have to?
The "reasonableness" standard is a neoconservative invention. None of the examples
Gonzales cited give the Bush administration a detour around the probable cause
threshold. Not all searches must meet the probable cause threshold, but all
searches must satisfy the probable cause threshold. Gonzales doesn't even pretend
that the NSA's program satisfies the entire Fourth Amendment. Instead, he says
searches only need to satisfy a "reasonableness" standard.
To fully appreciate the significance of the Bush administration's assault on
the Fourth Amendment, one should place this in a historical context. For King
George III's deputies to enforce his laws, Parliament passed the Writs of Assistance
Act. Writs of assistance were warrants so general that they allowed the king's
agents to go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, for whatever reason
they wanted. Writs of assistance were basically licenses for the king's men
to oppress the colonists. It was the writs of assistance that spawned the Revolutionary
War. The Founding Fathers prevailed in the war against the Crown. The Founders
gave us the Bill of Rights, which includes the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth
Amendment condemns the concept of general warrants.
Fast-forward 230 years: King George W. Bush is surpassing George III, by attacking
the concept of needing any type of warrant. Do we really want federal agents
to go wherever they want, whenever they want, for whatever reason they want,
with impunity?
The usual refrain I hear from neoconservatives is that we shouldn't be concerned
about what the government is doing unless we are doing something wrong. I say
the government shouldn't be concerned about what we are doing unless we are
doing something wrong. If somebody is engaged in criminal activity, why can't
an official say this under oath?
Consider all of the statutes on the books. Are there no statutes that violate
our rights? Perhaps some people do have a legitimate need to hide illegal activity
- i.e., illegal activity that shouldn't be illegal. Also, are there no legal
activities that should be private? Would you trust your neighbors having the
power to invite themselves inside of your house whenever they wished? Why would
you trust somebody with that same power just because they work for the government?
As Paul Craig Roberts
pointedly asks, "Why, if only evildoers have anything to fear from government,
the Founding Fathers bothered to write the Constitution?"
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Gonzales Said He Would Quit in Raid Dispute
By DAVID JOHNSTON and CARL HULSE
The New York Times
May 27, 2006
WASHINGTON - Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and senior officials and career prosecutors at the Justice Department told associates this week that they were prepared to quit if the White House directed them to relinquish evidence seized in a bitterly disputed search of a House member's office, government officials said Friday.
Mr. Gonzales was joined in raising the possibility of resignation by the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the officials said. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. McNulty told associates that they had an obligation to protect evidence in a criminal case and would be unwilling to carry out any White House order to return the material to Congress.
The potential showdown was averted Thursday when President Bush ordered the evidence to be sealed for 45 days to give Congress and the Justice Department a chance to work out a deal.
The evidence was seized by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents last Saturday night in a search of the office of Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana. The search set off an uproar of protest by House leaders in both parties, who said the intrusion by an executive branch agency into a Congressional office violated the Constitution's separation of powers doctrine. They demanded that the Justice Department return the evidence.
The possibility of resignations underscored the gravity of the crisis that gripped the Justice Department as the administration grappled with how to balance the pressure from its own party on Capitol Hill against the principle that a criminal investigation, especially one involving a member of Congress, should be kept well clear of political considerations.
It is not clear precisely what message Mr. Gonzales delivered to Mr. Bush when they met Thursday morning at the White House, or whether he informed the president of the resignation talk. But hours later, the White House announced that the evidence would be sealed for 45 days in the custody of the solicitor general, the Justice Department official who represents the government before the Supreme Court. That arrangement ended the talk of resignations.
F.B.I. officials would not comment Friday on Mr. Mueller's thinking or on whether his views had been communicated to the president.
The White House said Mr. Bush devised the 45-day plan as a way to cool tempers in Congress and the Justice Department. "The president saw both sides becoming more entrenched," said Dan Bartlett, Mr. Bush's counselor. "Emotions were running high; that's why the president felt he had to weigh in."
Tensions were especially high because officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. viewed the Congressional protest, led by Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and House Republicans, as largely a proxy fight for battles likely to come over criminal investigations into other Republicans in Congress.
Separate investigations into the activities of the lobbyist Jack Abramoff and Randy Cunningham, the former congressman from California, have placed several other Republicans under scrutiny; in the Cunningham case, federal authorities have informally asked to interview nine former staff members of the House Appropriations and Intelligence Committees.
By Friday, the strong words and tense behind-the-scenes meetings of the previous few days had been replaced, in public at least, by conciliatory terms and images of accommodation. Mr. Gonzales traveled to Capitol Hill and met with Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, as Republican leaders explored a formal procedure to cover any future searches.
"We've been working hard already, and we'll continue to do so pursuant to the president's order," Mr. Gonzales told reporters on his way to the meeting.
After the meeting, Mr. Frist said, "I want to know as leader exactly what would happen if there was a similar sort of case."
Senior lawmakers in the House and Senate said their intent was not to prohibit searches of Congressional offices if there was a legitimate reason. But they said the Jefferson case powerfully illustrated how Congress and the administration had no set guidelines for how such a search should be done, what notice was required and how law enforcement and House authorities would interact.
But within the Justice Department and the F.B.I., some officials complained that the 45-day cooling-off arrangement was a politically motivated intrusion into the investigative process. Others said the deal was preferable to what some called the potential "cataclysm" of possible resignations if the department had been ordered to give up the material, as one official briefed on the negotiations described it. This official and others at the department and the F.B.I. were granted anonymity to discuss a continuing criminal case.
At the Justice Department, there was hope that the courts might quickly resolve the issue. Government lawyers prepared a brief on Friday in opposition to the motion filed by lawyers for Mr. Jefferson seeking the return of materials taken from his office. The F.B.I. search was conducted on the basis of a search warrant issued by a federal judge, T. S. Ellis, in Alexandria, Va.
On Friday, Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi and chairman of the Rules Committee, said he had been meeting with Senate counsel to explore potential procedures and had given Mr. Frist a memorandum on a possible approach.
"The Justice Department is going to have to look at what we put in place and agree to it," Mr. Lott said. "I hope we can work it out."
But he said, "I am perfectly willing to get it on with the administration and take it right to the Supreme Court if they want to argue over it."
To some, the most astounding aspect of the Jefferson clash is that the question has never arisen before in two centuries of assorted Congressional criminality and misconduct.
At the same time, law enforcement officials said the deal did not mean that the Jefferson investigation would stop until the disagreement about the evidence was resolved. Mr. Jefferson has denied wrongdoing, but within law enforcement circles it is regarded as all but certain - based on evidence already collected - that he will face indictment on bribery-related charges.
On Friday, Brent Pfeffer, a former aide to the lawmaker, was sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy charges related to a kickback scheme involving Mr. Jefferson, identified in court documents only as "Representative A."
Mr. Pfeffer said he was an intermediary in an effort by Mr. Jefferson to obtain money from a Kentucky telecommunications firm for help getting contracts in Nigeria.
The investigation is being handled by the United States attorney's office in Alexandria, which until recently was headed by Mr. McNulty. He was the chief negotiator for the Justice Department in trying to reach an accommodation with the House.
Mr. McNulty seemed like the perfect point person on Capitol Hill for Mr. Gonzales. He was the chief counsel for the House majority leader when former Representative Dick Armey, Republican of Texas, had the job. And Mr. McNulty was chief counsel and spokesman for the Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.
But it was Mr. McNulty who appeared to lead the protest at the Justice Department, telling House officials that he would quit rather than obey an order to return the search material to Mr. Jefferson.
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Human rights for security
By Akiva Eldar10:06 25/05/2006
Mishael Cheshin did Supreme Court President Justice Aharon Barak a favor by presenting his colleague as someone for whom the rights of Arabs precede the security of Jews. A short daytrip through Jerusalem, along the concrete walls that are a blight on the stone walls of the Old City, can teach the retired justice a thing or two about security and human rights under occupation.
Let him observe the small girls on their way to school, squeezing through the still unfilled cracks in the wall, and ask himself if this is what a state that promotes human rights looks like. He should also take a good look at the young boys who throw their schoolbags over the wall and then jump over themselves, and ask himself how much the wall, which he and Barak approved, actually contributes to the security of the citizens of Israel.
The answer also holds good when it comes to the matter of denying the right of thousands of Arabs to live with their children because of the risk that a few of them might exploit the permission to threaten the lives of Jews.
Some 39 years ago, a few days after the Six-Day War, Prof Yeshayahu Leibowitz bridged the apparent gap between Barak-style sensitivity to human rights and the concern for security according to Cheshin's school of thought. The true prophet from Jerusalem proposed the distinction between "stupid evil and evil stupidity." He meant that the damage done by the occupation would not pass over the occupier. Violating Palestinian rights and the personal security of Israelis are no less contradictory than the internal contradiction in the ridiculous turn of the phrase "enlightened occupation," which was popular in Israel for years.
The separation fence invades the West Bank and separates Palestinians from Palestinians, and the withdrawal from Gaza is belated proof that the occupation is both evil and stupid. For years, Israel has been trying "to create facts on the ground," while wasting enormous resources and undermining Palestinian rights. Then, when the territories were transformed from a bargaining card for negotiations into a security burden, it gives them up without getting anything in exchange.
For years, Israel has been undermining the most basic human rights of the Palestinians - the right to life, freedom, security, health, education, respect, movement, employment, prosperity. For years, Barak, Cheshin and their colleagues have approved executions and arrests without trials, land expropriations, checkpoints and closures - and all in the name of "security." And when security experts and even settlers declared that the settlement (Elon Moreh) had nothing to do with security, the High Court lent its hand to the perverted use of the term "state lands," as coined by Meir Shamgar, then-president of the Supreme Court.
Like sleepwalkers, they followed in his path, and allowed the continued establishment of Israeli settlements in places where Jewish civilians endanger the lives of soldiers posted to guard them. Those settlements, built in contravention of international law, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens into the occupied territory, taught the Palestinians that they should seek justice outside the halls of justice.
Cheshin did Barak a favor when he presented the court president as a knight of human rights. True, compared to some of his other colleagues, including Cheshin, Barak did demonstrate here and there a skeptical approach to those "security" arguments, and lent an ear to complaints from victims of the occupation and human rights groups.
If, as Cheshin charged (before apologizing), Barak was truly "prepared to see 30-50 people blow up as long as there are human rights, when the small girls who have difficulty going to school and the boys who are kept away from their mothers grow up, they won't be interested in killing Jews.
Responsibility falls first and foremost on the shoulders of the political echelon; but in the overall balance, the Barak school of thought did no more for human rights in the territories or security in Israel than Cheshin's did.
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Bush Marks Memorial Day with New Law Banning Protests Near Cemetaries
MSNBC
May 29, 2006
Summary: President Bush, visiting America's most hallowed military burial ground to "honor this place where valor sleeps," said Monday the nation must persevere in the war against terrorists for the sake of those have already given their lives in this cause.
At the White House, Bush signed the Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act," passed by Congress largely in response to the activities of a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country, claiming the deaths symbolized God's anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.
The new law bars protests within 300 feet of the entrance of a national cemetery and within 150 feet of a road into the cemetery. This restriction applies an hour before until an hour after a funeral. Those violating the act would face up to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
ARLINGTON, Va. - President Bush, visiting America's most hallowed military burial ground to "honor this place where valor sleeps," said Monday the nation must persevere in the war against terrorists for the sake of those have already given their lives in this cause.
Noting that some 270 fighting men and women of the nearly 2,500 who have fallen in Iraq are buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Bush said, "We have seen the costs in the war on terror that we fight today."
The president spoke after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns. He ventured across the Potomac River on a sun-splashed Memorial Day just a short time after signing into law a bill that restricts protests at military funerals.
At the White House, Bush signed the Respect for America's Fallen Heroes Act," passed by Congress largely in response to the activities of a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country, claiming the deaths symbolized God's anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.
The new law bars protests within 300 feet of the entrance of a national cemetery and within 150 feet of a road into the cemetery. This restriction applies an hour before until an hour after a funeral. Those violating the act would face up to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.
Monday's observance at Arlington National Cemetery was not a funeral, so demonstrators were free to speak their minds at the site.
And several did.
Approximately 10 people from the Washington, D.C., chapter of FreeRepublic.com, a self-styled grass roots conservative group, held signs at the entrance of the cemetery supporting U.S. troops. A large sign held by several people said, "God bless our troops, defenders of freedom, American heroes."
They were faced off against a handful of anti-gay protesters who stood across a four-lane highway as people headed toward the national burial grounds.
The FreeRepublic.com group was trying to counter demonstrations by the Kansas-based group, led by the Rev. Fred Phelps. He previously had organized protests against those who died of AIDS and gay murder victim Matthew Shepard.
In an interview at the time the House passed the bill that Bush signed Monday, Phelps charged that Congress was "blatantly violating" his First Amendment rights. He said that if became law, he would continue to demonstrate but would abide by the law's restrictions.
Bush signed a second bill Monday that allows combat troops to deposit tax-free pay into individual retirement accounts. Supporters of the legislation argued that rules governing these accounts were punishing soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who earn only tax-free combat pay.
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Government asks for dismissal of NSA wiretapping suits
By Kevin Krolicki
Reuters
May 27, 2006
DETROIT - The U.S. government has asked a pair of federal judges to dismiss legal challenges to the Bush administration's controversial domestic eavesdropping program, arguing any court action in the cases would jeopardize secrets in the ongoing "war on terror."
Civil rights activists, who argue the National Security Agency's wiretapping violates the rights of U.S. citizens, said the Bush administration's position threatened Constitutional checks on the power of the presidency.
"The Bush administration is trying to crush a very strong case against domestic spying without any evidence or argument," said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought one of the parallel lawsuits against the NSA program in January.
"I think it's a clear choice: can the president tell the courts which cases they can rule on? If so, the courts will never be able to hold the president accountable for breaking the law," he said.
Filed just before a midnight Saturday deadline and only partly made public, the arguments by the Justice Department marked the latest skirmish in a battle over an NSA program to listen in on international communications involving Americans.
President Bush said in December he had authorized that eavesdropping without a court order shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in order to track suspected communication from al-Qaeda operatives. Government officials have since declined to provide details on how widely the NSA wiretaps have been used or what communications have been intercepted.
In asking federal judges in Detroit and New York to throw out challenges to the eavesdropping, the Bush administration invoked a doctrine known as the "state secrets privilege" it has used to head off other court action on its spy programs.
The claim was accompanied by an affidavit by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who said disclosure of any information about the NSA's "Terrorist Surveillance Program" would "cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States."
'CHILLING EFFECT'
The administration said the case before Judge Gerard Lynch in New York could not proceed without "revealing to the very adversaries we are trying to defeat what we know about them and how we are proceeding to stop them."
Government lawyers made the same argument in an attempt to scuttle the parallel lawsuit brought by the
American Civil Liberties Union being heard in Detroit.
"The government believes that state secrets gives it the power to shut down litigation," said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer involved in the ACLU lawsuit.
The civil rights activists behind the two cases argue the eavesdropping violates the privacy and free speech rights of U.S. citizens and have asked the courts to order it shut down.
Both suits contend U.S. officials have already disclosed enough for judges to rule that the recent wiretapping skirted the requirements of a 1978 surveillance law.
Both lawsuits also argue the NSA program threatens the ability of defense lawyers in terrorism-related cases to speak freely with their clients, a so-called chilling effect.
"Plaintiffs cannot credibly claim that they face any added marginal chill of surveillance ... when their clients facing terrorism-related investigations or charges may be subject to surveillance pursuant to other means," the government said.
A fuller, classified version of the government's argument for dismissal is being held in a secure location in Washington awaiting review by the courts, the Justice Department said.
The ACLU suit is being heard by Detroit Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, who has scheduled the first hearing for June.
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AT&T leaks sensitive info in NSA suit
By Declan McCullagh
CNET News.com
May 26, 2006
Lawyers for AT&T accidentally released sensitive information while defending a lawsuit that accuses the company of facilitating a government wiretapping program, CNET News.com has learned.
AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable.
But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.
The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action lawsuit in January, alleges that the room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program.
"AT&T notes that the facts recited by plaintiffs are entirely consistent with any number of legitimate Internet monitoring systems, such as those used to detect viruses and stop hackers," the redacted pages say.
Another section says: "Although the plaintiffs ominously refer to the equipment as the 'Surveillance Configuration,' the same physical equipment could be utilized exclusively for other surveillance in full compliance with" the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The redacted portions of AT&T's court filing are not classified, and no information relating to actual operations of an NSA surveillance program was disclosed. Also, AT&T's attorneys at the law firms of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Sidley Austin were careful not to explicitly acknowledge that such a secret room actually exists.
A representative for AT&T was not immediately available to comment.
Although EFF's lawsuit was filed before allegations about the room surfaced, reports of its existence have become central to the nonprofit group's attempts to prove AT&T opened its network to the NSA. A former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, has released documents alleging the company spliced its fiber optic cables and ran a duplicate set of cables to Room 641A at its 611 Folsom Street building.
This is hardly the first time that PDF files have leaked embarrassing or sensitive information. In an ironic twist, the NSA published a 13-page paper in January describing how redactions could be done securely.
A similar problem has arisen with metadata associated with Microsoft Office files. In March 2004, a gaffe by the SCO Group revealed which companies it had considered targeting in its legal campaign against Linux users. Microsoft Office 2003/XP even offers a way to "permanently remove hidden data and collaboration data" from Word, Excel and PowerPoint files.
Documents that EFF filed, including a redacted version of a sworn statement by Klein released this week, were properly redacted. Instead of including the underlying text and layering a black rectangle on top, the San Francisco-based civil liberties group saved those pages as image files.
EFF did experience its own blunder earlier in the case, though, in which it accidentally placed sealed documents on the court's public Web site. They were visible for about an hour--a situation that U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker dubbed "a mishap" during a hearing last week.
'State secrets' invoked
Also this week, the Bush administration submitted a 29-page brief that elaborates on its argument that the case should be tossed out of court because of the "state secrets" privilege.
Lawyers for the Justice Department have offered to fly a courier from Washington to San Francisco with classified documents that Walker could review in private--documents that, in the eyes of the government, will convince him to dismiss the lawsuit. (The Bush administration also argues that EFF lawyers should not be permitted to see the classified information.)
"No aspect of this case can be litigated without disclosing state secrets," the government said in its brief this week. "The United States has not lightly invoked the state secrets privilege, and the weighty reasons for asserting the privilege are apparent from the classified material submitted in support of its assertion."
It also pointed to a May 12 ruling from a federal judge in Virginia who dismissed a case against Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. (El-Masri had claimed to have been abducted and tortured by the CIA in an "extraordinary rendition.")
The Bush administration said the case must be dismissed on "state secrets" grounds, and U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis reluctantly agreed. Ellis wrote that "any answer to the complaint by the defendants risks the disclosure of specific details about the rendition argument."
In addition, Wired News filed a brief written by Tim Alger at Quinn Emanuel asking Walker to unseal Klein's formal declaration.
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Around The World
EU to tax e-mail, text messages?
Reuters
May 26, 2006
European Union lawmakers are investigating a proposed tax on e-mails and mobile phone text messages as a way to fund the 25-member bloc in the future.
A European Parliament working group is reviewing the idea, tabled by Alain Lamassoure, a prominent French MEP and member of the center-right European People's Party, the assembly's largest group.
Lamassoure, a member of Jacques Chirac's UMP party, is proposing to add a tax of about 1.5 cents on text or SMS messages and a 0.00001 cent levy on every e-mail sent.
"This is peanuts, but given the billions of transactions every day, this could still raise an immense income," he said.
Currently the EU budget is funded through a combination of import duties, value added tax revenues and direct contributions from member states--the so-called "Gross National Income resource," which is calculated according to wealth.
However, following a yearlong battle over the current seven-year budget, agreed on last December, it was decided that the way in which the EU is funded should be changed, with new proposals expected by 2008/2009.
A single "EU tax" has found support among many of the 25 EU governments, MEP's and the European Commission, the EU's executive arm. Other ideas include a tax on airline tickets and an extra levy on oil companies.
In Italy, the concept of a tax on texting was floated in the past, as a way to help offset the country's huge deficit, though it was flatly rejected by the outgoing government.
But Lamassoure argues that with billions of e-mails and texts sent around the world, it's a novel and simple way to raise funds from new technology.
"Exchanges between countries have ballooned, so everyone would understand that the money to finance the EU should come from the benefits engendered by the EU," he said.
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Italy vote ends, Milan hangs in balance -poll
Reuters
May 29, 2006
ROME - Prime Minister Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition may unexpectedly force a run-off election for mayor of Milan, a centre-right stronghold, according to a poll released on Monday after the two-day local elections vote.
The elections were seen as a first test of Prodi's support since he narrowly swept to power in April general elections, ousting Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right coalition after five years of economic stagnation.
According to the Piepoli telephone poll of voters commissioned by Sky Italia television, neither candidate in Milan clearly won an absolute majority of votes in the first round, held on Sunday and Monday.
The outcome of the vote in other regions appeared to follow expectations.
Prodi's candidate in Sicily, the sister of a murdered anti-Mafia magistrate, looked set to lose the gubernatorial election to centre-right incumbent Salvatore Cuffaro, according to early results.
Rome's popular centre-left mayor Walter Veltroni was also comfortably ahead in his bid for re-election, as was the centre-left incumbent mayor of Turin, Sergio Chiamparino, according to the Piepoli poll.
The centre-left candidate was also ahead in Naples, but that race may also go to a second round of voting, which is due to take place on June 11-12.
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Airbus factory explosion in Toulouse injures five
TOULOUSE, France - Five people were injured, two seriously, on Monday when a hydraulic press blew up in a factory of aircraft maker Airbus in southwestern France, police said.
The blast occurred at 7:45am, according to firefighters, who denied an earlier report that the building containing the press had collapsed.
Airbus said in a statement that the lives of the injured were not in danger and that there was no risk of pollution linked to the explosion.
It said an investigation had been opened into the cause of the blast, stressing that the hydraulic press in question had been regularly maintained in line with the manufacturers' instructions.
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French bottom line: farm subsidies trump free trade
ZWETTEL, Austria, May 29, 2006 (AFP)
French Agriculture Minister Dominique Bussereau ruled out changes on Monday to the European Union's system of farm subsidies, saying he would prefer that the Doha trade talks fail instead.
"I would prefer that the negotiations fail rather than negotiations that would raise questions about the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) and its future," he told reporters in Austria.
"Europe does not have to make new concessions on agriculture" for the World Trade Association's (WTO) Doha round to be completed successfully, he said.
EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson has suggested that the Union could improve an offer to open up its agricultural market if its trading partners were also ready to make concessions.
"Mandelson must stick to his mandate," Bussereau said, adding that the last "offer of October 28 is already the limit for France".
WTO talks in the Mexican resort of Cancun collapsed in September 2003 after poor countries had protested against farm subsidies in rich countries and high tariffs levied on agriculture imports from developing nations.
The latest round of WTO negotiations, known as the Doha round, is aimed at increasing international commerce by removing trade barriers to boost poor countries.
Negotiations are currently deadlocked with the US under pressure to cut its subsidies to farmers, while the EU is being asked to make deeper cuts in the tariffs imposed on imported farm products.
Trading partners had been hoping to finalise the round this year.
US officials have described France's hard line as unhelpful.
Austrian Agriculture Minister Josef Proell, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said that the EU had already made enough concessions and that it was know up to others to make offers.
"The main focus is on the USA to show flexibility," he said at an informal meeting of EU farm ministers in Austria. "But we are certainly not aiming at failure of the negotiations."
However he said it was unacceptable for "progress always to be made solely at the cost of the European Union."
US officials have said that Crawford Falconer, New Zealand's WTO ambassador who has been chairing agricultural talks in Geneva, is preparing to submit the new outlines of a trade round deal in the middle of next month.
But that will leave precious little time to sign, seal and deliver a global package to dismantle world trade barriers by the end of the year.
The US government would have just months to get a WTO deal through Congress before it loses its "fast-track" trading authority at the start of July 2007.
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China promises "non-smoking" Olympics
www.chinaview.cn 2006-05-29 17:20:22
BEIJING, May 29 (Xinhua) -- China, with 350 million smokers - about one third of the world's smoking population - has vowed to put on a "non-smoking" Olympic Games.
Zhang Bin, an official with the Ministry of Health (MOH), said on Monday that smoking will be banned at all hospitals that will be used specifically for the Games by the end of 2007.
The ban will extend to public transport and public buildings, with places that offer services to children the main concern, Zhang said.
In his meeting with World Health Organization Director-General Lee Jong-Wook in 2004, Premier Wen Jiabao said a non-smoking Games is on top of the agenda for China's preparations for a green Olympics.
The ministry has learned from the practice and experience of previous Games hosts, Zhang acknowledged.
The concept of a "non-smoking" Olympic Games, initiated in 1988,was put into practice in Barcelona in 1992.
Considering the country's large smoking population, Zhang warned that China faces many obstacles to overcome in hosting a non-smoking Olympics.
The largest tobacco producer and consumer in the world, China reports about one million deaths from smoking a year, and the figure is expected to reach three million by 2050.
The spread of smoking results in the heavy burden of providing medical treatment for illnesses like lung cancer, said Yang Gonghuan, deputy director of the China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
"It is society who has to foot the cost of medical treatment made by tobacco promotion," she said, underscoring that tobacco control needs the participation of NGOs and people from all walks of life, she said.
She called for a prompt implementation of the national action plan on tobacco control with priority placed on teenage education and publicity.
The expert also appealed for promulgating national laws to ban smoking in public places and to beef up early detection and treatment of lung cancer.
"The current consumption of cigarettes will see an increase in deaths from lung cancer in the next 20 to 30 years, apart from other causes like the aging of the population, greater industrialization and deterioration of environment," she continued.
Unfortunately, China is still slow in detecting lung cancer and most patients do not receive the necessary surgery in time, said Qiao Youlin, researcher with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, who specializes in cancer treatment.
"The high cost of early detection methods of lung cancer prevents early diagnosis, especially in rural areas," he told Xinhua.
The new cooperative rural medicare system promoted by the government in the past few years has only provided farmers with about 50 yuan (6.25 U.S. dollars) for healthcare, but the screening costs about 300 yuan (37.5 U.S. dollars), he said.
"Therefore, China's treatment of lung cancer still lags far behind developed nations," said Qiao, adding that the five-year survival rate of lung cancer patients in developed nations is 15 percent, but less than 10 percent in China.
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Pathocrats Ponder
Bilderberg to Meet in Canada
By James P. Tucker Jr.
AmericanFreePress.net
Issue #22, May 29, 2006
The secretive group known as Bilderberg will hold its annual secret meeting at the posh Brook Street Resort a few miles from Ottawa, Canada, June 8-11.
The location and part of the agenda was disclosed to American Free Press by a source inside Bilderberg's inner circle.
High on the Bilderberg's secret agenda this year are oil prices and the political upheaval in Latin America. When meeting last year in Rottach-Egern, Germany, Bilderberg called for dramatic increases in the price of oil. Oil prices started climbing immediately from $40 a barrel to $70.
Whether Bilderberg will call for still higher prices is unclear, but Henry Kissinger and others had gleefully anticipated ultimate prices at $150 a barrel a year ago. Bilderberg is certainly concerned about supply, which is related to the "Latin American problem," as one insider said.
Approximately 120 international leaders in politics and finance will also discuss the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which has caused a rare breach between American Bilderbergers and their European counterparts since the United States Iraq invasion in 2003. Whether the United States should invade Iran is also high on the agenda.
Bilderberg is especially concerned about Venezuela, where as part of a plan to increase revenues from its petroleum industry President Hugo Chavez said May 7 he would impose a new tax on companies that extract oil from his country. Big Oil is represented at Bilderberg by Jeroen van der Veer of The Netherlands, chairman of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Franco Bernabe of Italy, vice chairman of Rothschild Europe, among others. "We are going to create a new oil tax, called the tax on extraction," Chavez said. "The companies that are pumping oil in Venezuela are making a lot of money."
Chavez accused foreign oil companies of exploiting his country's vast petroleum reserves without paying sufficient taxes. Venezuela is the world's fifth-largest oil exporter but has troubled oil barons by sending cheap petroleum to needy American families and subsidizing domestic use so local citizens pay 12 cents a gallon.
Venezuela has voided oil-pumping contracts with private companies at 32 fields and replaced them with a mixed-company model that gave Venezuela's state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela SA a minimum 60 percent stake. Chavez has also sharply raised royalties and taxes, and reduced potential drilling acreage by almost two-thirds. He is also resisting expansion of NAFTA throughout the hemisphere, a prime Bilderberg goal.
Chavez's outspoken criticisms of the United States make it unlikely that American Bilderbergers can help smooth over the supply problem. However, banker David Rockefeller's family has always had a heavy interest in oil and other investments in South America.
President Bush will have a top White House aide representing him at Bilderberg, and high officials of the state, defense and treasury departments will attend. Heads of state and other high officials in government and banking will attend from Europe and Canada.
Bilderberg's agenda also includes the turmoil in the Middle East, nuclear proliferation, with an emphasis on Iran, North Korea and Pakistan, and global warming.
The Bilderberg group takes it name from the hotel in Holland where the group met in 1954, during the earliest period of its inception. Bilderbergers meet regularly, presumably on a once-a-year basis, at various locations around the world, always in extreme secrecy, often at resorts controlled by either the Rockefeller or Rothschild families. The Rothschild family is the leading European force within the Bilderberg Group, sharing its power with the American-based Rockefeller empire.
Bilderberg maintains an extremely low profile and seldom, if ever, publishes reports or studies for the public, at least, under its own official aegis. Participants denied the groups very existence for decades until it was forced into the open by the glare of media publicity, generated largely by the now defunct Spotlight newspaper.
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EU chiefs say constitution must wait
By Boris Groendahl and David Brunnstrom
Reuters
Sat May 27, 2006
VIENNA - European Union foreign ministers acknowledged on Saturday there was no chance of rescuing the EU constitution before elections next year in France and the Netherlands where voters have already rejected the charter.
Ministers meeting in Austria insisted the project, aimed at streamlining EU decision-making and boosting its foreign policy clout, was not yet dead. But they saw no chance soon of breaking a political stalemate over its fate.
"We cannot say today it's dead because 15 democracies are not considering it dead," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said of the states which have ratified the charter despite French and Dutch "No" votes in referendums last year.
Moeller said the EU would have to wait until France and the Netherlands had their national elections, around May next year.
But all 25 EU nations have to ratify the charter for it to come into force and a poll in the Netherlands on Saturday showed that if a fresh referendum were held now, more voters would oppose the constitution than did in last year's ballot.
Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot told reporters at talks at a monastery outside Vienna: "We will not change our minds, that's for sure."
Germany, which takes over the EU presidency in January, said the results of those two votes had to be respected but signaled it would be ready to find a solution by the end of June 2007 if other EU states wanted it to.
"For Germany -- and no doubt all those who have ratified the text -- it is essential to hold on to the political substance of the constitutional treaty," he told counterparts according to comments made available to the media.
German officials are looking for a winner to emerge from French elections with a strong enough mandate to take decisions on the way ahead for the charter by a June 2007 EU summit.
Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn said that would potentially allow the charter to be finally adopted two years later, but Britain argues the EU would do better to focus its priorities elsewhere.
MOOD OF CRISIS
The deadlock has created a mood of crisis in Brussels. A recent poll showed barely half of Europeans see EU membership positively and many were concerned about the bloc's policy of inviting poorer states from the east to join.
Foreign ministers were to study how to win back popularity for the EU by increasing cooperation in specific areas, such as boosting cross-border cooperation in crimefighting.
Other proposals include ideas to pool European consular resources available to travelers caught up in natural disasters, such as the 2004 southeast Asian tsunami, which hit thousands of European tourists.
Analysts say the EU enlargement has been the chief victim of the constitution deadlock, which some politicians have blamed for fuelling eurosceptic feelings in the EU and being a main factor why French voters rejected the charter.
The EU has taken a tougher tone toward would-be members. Last week it delayed until October a decision on whether Romania and Bulgaria can join the bloc in 2007, urging them to do more on administrative reforms and tackling organized crime.
For future aspirants from Turkey to the Balkans, it says that even if they fulfil membership criteria, the EU itself may not be economically and politically ready to take them in.
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Pope: How could God 'tolerate' Holocaust?
By VICTOR L. SIMPSON
Associated Press
May 28, 2006
OSWIECIM, Poland - Pope Benedict XVI visited the Auschwitz concentration camp as "a son of the German people" Sunday and asked God why he remained silent during the "unprecedented mass crimes" of the Holocaust.
Benedict walked along the row of plaques at the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex's memorial, one in the language of each nationality whose members died there. As he stopped to pray, a light rain stopped and a brilliant rainbow appeared over the camp.
"To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible - and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany," he said later.
"In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?"
Benedict said that just as his predecessor, John Paul II visited the camp as a Pole in 10979, he came as "a son of the German people."
"The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the Earth," he said, standing near the demolished crematoriums where the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims.
"By destroying Israel with the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention."
Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, during which the Nazis killed 6 million Jews.
As many as 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, died at Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighboring camps built by the German occupiers near the Polish town of Oswiecim - Auschwitz in German. Others who died there included Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, Roma - or Gypsies, and political opponents of the Nazis.
Benedict did not refer to collective guilt of the German people but instead focused on the Nazi regime. He said he was "a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness."
He also did not mention the controversy over the wartime role of Pope Pius XII, who some say did not do all in his power to prevent Jews from being deported to concentration camps. The Vatican rejects that accusation.
Typically, Benedict did not mention his own personal experiences during the war. Raised by his anti-Nazi father, Benedict was enrolled in the Hitler Youth as a teenager against his will and then was drafted into the German army in the last months of the war.
He wrote in his memoirs that he decided to desert in the war's last days in 1945 and returned to his home in Traunstein in Bavaria, risking summary execution if caught. In the book, he recounted his terror at being briefly stopped by two soldiers.
He was then held for several weeks as a prisoner of war by U.S. forces who occupied his hometown.
Earlier, the white-clad Benedict walked alone under the camp gate containing the notorious words: "Arbeit Macht Frei," or "Work Sets You Free."
He stopped for a full minute before the Wall of Death, where the Nazis killed thousands of prisoners. He was handed a lighted candle, which he placed before the wall.
At the Wall of Death, a line of 32 elderly camp survivors awaited Benedict, most of them Catholic. He moved slowly down the line, stopping to talk with each, taking one woman's face in his hands and kissing one of the men on both cheeks.
Benedict then visited the dark cell in the basement of one of the buildings, the place where St. Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish Franciscan friar, was executed after voluntarily taking the place of a condemned prisoner with a large family in 1941. Kolbe was canonized by John Paul II in 1982.
Benedict stopped to pray again in the cell, standing before a candle placed there by John Paul during his 1979 visit.
The visit is heavy with significance for Roman Catholic-Jewish relations, a favorite theme for Benedict and John Paul.
This was the third time Benedict has visited Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau. The first was in 1979, when he accompanied John Paul, and in 1980, when he came with a group of German bishops while he was archbishop of Munich.
Benedict's stop at Auschwitz - his last before he left for Rome - was a somber close to a four-day trip that was otherwise upbeat, with some 900,000 people turning out for his Sunday mass in a meadow in Krakow, the city where John Paul II once served as archbishop.
Earlier, he urged 900,000 singing, clapping Poles gathered in a rain-soaked field to share their faith with other countries, saying it was the best way to honor their beloved John Paul.
The enormous, exuberant crowd chanted "Benedetto! Benedetto!" and sang "Sto Lat," or "A Hundred Years," wishing him a long life.
"I ask you, finally, to share with the other peoples of Europe and the world the treasure of your faith, not least as a way of honoring the memory of your countryman, who, as the successor of St. Peter, did this with extraordinary power and effectiveness," Benedict said as he concluded his homily during the Mass in the Blonia meadow.
"I ask you to stand firm in your faith! Stand firm in your hope! Stand firm in your love! Amen!" he concluded, speaking in Polish on the last day of his trip.
Predominantly Roman Catholic Poland joined the
European Union only two years ago, 15 years after the collapse of communist rule.
"He told us that we should remain ourselves, that we should stay as we were before, attached to our traditions and Christian values," said Jacek Radon, 37, a Krakow businessman. "We should carry into the European Union our attachment to faith and to Christ."
A shadow was cast over the papal visit by Saturday's attack on Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, who was to say Kaddish, or the Jewish prayer for the dead, during the ceremony led by the pope.
Schudrich told The Associated Press he was attacked in central Warsaw after confronting a man who shouted at him, "Poland for Poles!" The rabbi said the unidentified man punched him in the chest and sprayed him with what appeared to be pepper spray. He was not injured.
Police said they were treating the incident as a possible anti-Semitic attack.
Schudrich, said the most important part of Benedict's message "was his physical presence at Auschwitz" but that some Jews wished he had gone further by directly addressing anti-Semitism.
"It was a very powerful statement and the words that we heard were powerful, but I'm sure some felt a glaring omission ... on the question of anti-Semitism. Jews are very sensitive to that and we are used to hearing the words of John Paul II."
Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles, California-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Associated Press that Benedict's presence at the camp and his remarks were firm reminders that Holocaust deniers were not speaking the truth.
"He wore the uniform of the Hitler Youth. For him to now go there as the pope and acknowledge the horrors the Holocaust visited on the Jewish people and all mankind is important," he said.
Benedict, 79, has reached out to Poles by delivering parts of his speeches and homilies in Polish and by retracing beloved native son John Paul II's steps. He visited John Paul's birthplace, Wadowice, and Sunday's Mass was held on the same spot where John Paul also drew large crowds on his return trips to Krakow.
Benedict has been applauded during his visit to Poland for encouraging prayers for John Paul's canonization as a saint and for saying he hopes it will happen "in the near future."
Comment: Isn't it funny how a loving "god" has been used to justify countless wars, and yet afterwards everyone always asks why "He" remained silent??
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Time Wasters
Oil could top $105 in major supply outage: expert
By Haitham Haddadin
Reuters
Sun May 28, 2006
KUWAIT - A Goldman Sachs projection that oil prices could top $100 a barrel in the event of a major supply disruption could be conservative in the current tight market, said a senior executive with the investment bank.
Other energy experts told an energy forum late on Saturday in Kuwait that global oil market fundamentals point to generally higher energy prices as demand growth outstrips new supply.
"We thought that maybe somewhere within $50 to $70 (oil price) we might get the economic damage and that it would take a major, not a minor, disruption to get to the $105 number," said Arjun Murti, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs.
"If we truly did have a major outage in a major exporting country then $105 will prove conservative," Murti added at the National Bank of Kuwait energy forum.
Murti said when Goldman Sachs issued a projected range of $50 to $105 a barrel in March 2005, actual prices hovered around $55 a barrel. Oil prices in New York and London traded above $70 Friday.
Katherine Spector, head of energy research for JP Morgan Securities, said market fundamentals point to petroleum prices reverting to a higher mean in coming years. "The world is running out of easy barrels of crude production," she said, adding that marginal costs of production are rising.
Both Spector and Murti said one factor that the oil markets will remain focused on for the rest of this year would be the U.S. hurricane season after Katrina caused big disruptions last year to refining capacity on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had shown "energy markets are highly susceptible to a supply shock," Murti noted.
Spector said another severe hurricane season predicted for this year was bullish for oil and products prices as are changes to U.S. diesel and gasoline specifications this year. But she said among factors that are bearish for the market are relatively comfortable global oil inventories.
ASIAN DEMAND
Other delegates told the forum that global oil market fundamentals pointed to the possibility of higher prices given that global oil demand is robust and tends to grow every year, especially due to firm demand from China and India.
Edward Morse, executive adviser with Hess Energy Trading Co., said that between 1965 and 2004, total Asian oil demand has risen 620 percent while world oil demand was up by 158 percent.
"Asian energy demand growth, especially oil demand, has been truly extraordinary," Morse said, adding that most analysts believe incremental Asian demand growth drives the market.
On the supply side, spare capacity is gone, traditional areas of oil production are mature and areas with growth are geopolitically or demographically challenged, Murti noted.
"We believe that oil markets are in the early stages of what we are calling a multi-year 'super-spike' period," Murti added.
Murti said total non-OPEC crude supply has grown in recent years mostly due to Russia, but excluding Russia the supply from producers that are outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has been essentially flat in recent years.
"Effective production capacity -- that what actually can come out of the ground today -- is pretty close to zero," he said. "Our point is not that the OPEC countries are running out of oil. But the question is, are we to believe that real-time production capacity is going to grow, year in and year out, to match economic growth?."
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NASA extends satellite's mission
CNN
Friday, May 26, 2006
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- NASA has extended the mission of a satellite probing the least-studied region of the Earth's atmosphere through 2010.
The four-year extension, announced Thursday, allows the $195 million Timed spacecraft to further study how the sun influences the middle and upper atmosphere.
That could help scientists better understand how the region affects satellite tracking and communication systems on Earth.
"Timed's extended mission will bring insights into atmospheric evolution and perhaps the fate of the Earth's atmosphere," said Sam Yee, a project scientist from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft.
Timed -- short for Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics -- focuses on a little-explored region of the atmosphere 40 miles to 110 miles above the Earth.
The area is too high for airplanes and balloons to fly and too low for other satellites to study.
Launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in 2001, Timed's mission was extended once before. The new extension will ensure that the satellite operates through this decade.
NASA headquarters didn't immediately know how much the extended mission would cost.
The project is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
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WHO Puts Tamiflu Maker on Bird Flu Alert
By MARGIE MASON , 05.27.2006, 10:20 AM
The World Health Organization put the maker of the global stockpile of the anti-bird flu drug Tamiflu on alert for the first time after human-to-human transmission was suspected in Indonesia, officials said Saturday.
The organization said that a precautionary 9,500 treatment doses, along with protective gear, were flown into Indonesia on Friday, but the shipment was not expected to be followed by further movement of the drug.
"We have no intention of shipping that stockpile," WHO spokesman Dick Thompson said.
An Indonesian health official, meanwhile, said tests had confirmed five more cases of bird flu, three of them fatal.
One of those cases was of a 32-year-old man who on Monday became the last fatality in a human cluster in Kubu Simbelang, a village of about 1,500 people in North Sumatra.
No health workers could be seen Saturday in the village, where dozens of chickens and geese ran among houses and through backyards framed by high mountains and surrounded by rich fields of chilis, oranges and limes.
The family infected by the virus lived in three houses near the church in the Christian village.
The WHO in Jakarta received word from the Indonesian Health Ministry about the cluster on Monday. The Geneva-based organization put Swiss drug maker Roche Holding AG on alert hours later, said Jules Pieters, director of WHO's rapid response and containment group.
Roche spokesman Baschi Duerr said the stockpile, which consists of 3 million treatment courses kept in Europe and the United States, is ready to be shipped at any time to any place.
"We are in very close contact with WHO, even today, and our readiness is geared to be able to deliver," Duerr said. "We are ready to fly it wherever and whenever it's needed."
Pieters stressed the alert was part of standard operating procedure when WHO has "reasonable doubt" about a situation that could involve human-to-human transmission. He said Roche would remain on alert for approximately the next two weeks, or twice the incubation period of the last reported case.
"We were quite keen to inform Roche quite timely," Pieters said. "We knew Thursday would be a holiday in Europe and wanted to make sure Roche warehouses would be open."
On Saturday, Nyoman Kandun, a director general at Indonesia's health ministry, said a WHO laboratory in Hong Kong has confirmed five more cases of human bird flu, three of which were fatal.
All five had earlier tested positive for the H5N1 virus in a local laboratory. Bird flu has now infected 48 people in Indonesia, and 36 of them have died.
Indonesia's number of human bird flu cases has jumped rapidly this year, but public awareness of the disease remains low and government commitment has not equaled that of other countries. Indonesia's reaction has raised concerns it is moving slowly and ineffectively in containing the disease.
Vietnam, the country hardest-hit by bird flu, has been hailed for controlling the virus through strong political will and mass poultry vaccination campaigns. No human cases have been reported there since November.
Indonesia, a sprawling nation of 17,000 islands, has refused to carry out mass slaughters of poultry in all infected areas - one of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's most basic containment guidelines - saying it cannot afford to compensate farmers. And bio-security measures are virtually nonexistent in the densely populated countryside, home to hundreds of millions of backyard chickens.
Bird flu has killed 124 people worldwide since the virus began ravaging Asian poultry stocks in late 2003.
The latest confirmed deaths were a 39-year-old man from Jakarta, a 10-year-old girl from West Java and the 32-year-old man in the North Sumatra cluster.
He was among six members of an extended Indonesian family who caught bird flu and died. Another family member who died was buried before tests could be done, but she was considered to be among those infected with bird flu.
Health experts have been unable to link the family members to infected birds, leading them to believe the virus may have passed among them. None of the poultry in the village have tested positive for the virus.
But health officials have struggled to gather information or take blood samples from villagers, many of whom believe black magic is responsible for their neighbors' deaths.
The WHO has stressed the virus has not mutated into a version easily passed between people, which would trigger a potential deadly pandemic, or shown any sign of spreading outside the family - all blood relatives who had very close contact with each other.
So far, the virus remains hard for people to catch and most human cases have been linked to contact with infected birds.
The organization has said that limited human-to-human transmission is believed to have occurred in about four previous clusters. It was not immediately clear why WHO had not ordered previous alerts for the global stockpile.
But the most recent and largest human cluster comes after the organization developed important new protocols for mobilizing reserves of the drug.
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Remember The Net?
Amnesty International seeks to end Net repression
Reuters
May 28, 2006
Amnesty International marked its 45th anniversary on Sunday by launching a global campaign to stamp out state censorship of the Internet.
The human rights pressure group called on Web users to sign a pledge calling on governments to stop censoring sites and urging technology corporations not to collude with them.
Arguing that online censorship is a new threat to freedom, Amnesty claimed to have uncovered Internet repression in areas around the world from China and Tunisia to Vietnam, Iran, Israel and the Maldives.
Calling for the release of "cyber dissidents" jailed for expressing their political views online, Amnesty said Internet cafes are being shut down, computers seized, chat rooms monitored and blogs deleted.
"The Internet is a huge, powerful tool. We see governments censoring access to the Internet or locking people up for having conversations about democracy and freedom," said Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International.
Launching a new Irrepressible.info Web site to challenge Internet censorship, Allen said "I call on governments to stop the unwarranted restriction of freedom of expression and on companies to stop helping them do it."
The world's largest Internet providers have become embroiled in an international debate about Web censorship, especially in China.
Earlier this month, Yahoo said it was seeking the U.S. government's help in urging China to allow more media freedom after reports linking information it gave to Chinese authorities with the jailing of a dissident. The case was the latest to highlight conflicts of profit and principle for Internet companies in the world's second biggest Internet market.
Web search leader Google has come under fire for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing.
The new campaign for freedom on the information superhighway was launched in the Observer newspaper. In 1961, an article by Peter Benenson in the same newspaper, calling on governments to stop persecution, led to Amnesty being founded.
Corporations accused of collusion were quick to defend themselves in the newspaper with Yahoo corporate communications manager Alex Laity telling The Observer: "We condemn punishment of any activity internationally recognised as free expression whether that punishment takes place in China or anywhere else in the world."
Amnesty, which once relied on letter writing campaigns to bombard governments with pleas to release political prisoners, now has 1.8 million supporters in more than 100 countries.
Adapting "People Power" to the electronic age as a tool for pressurising international opinion, Amnesty urged Web users to sign an online pledge which will be presented to a U.N. meeting on the future of the Internet in November.
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Over time, memories may grow more positive
By Charnicia Huggins
Reuters
Mon May 29, 2006
NEW YORK - When recalling memories of negative or positive events that helped to shape our identity, such as a break-up or marriage, we tend to downplay the fear, anger or other negative emotions experienced at the time and remember more of the positive emotions, new study findings indicate.
"These findings suggest that healthy individuals work to build a positive narrative identity that will yield an overall optimistic tone to the most important recalled events from their lives," write study authors Drs. Michael Conway and Wendy-Jo Wood, both of Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec.
The findings may also have implications for an individual's mental health.
"Mental health is maintained or improved by people's attempts to make sense of their life experiences," Conway told Reuters Health.
"People try to see the positive in even very difficult life experiences, and come to downplay, as much as they can, how negative some events were in the past," he explained.
For their research, Conway and Wood investigated people's emotional memories for self-defining events, which they described as emotionally complex events that contribute to a person's sense of identity or overall life story.
In one study, 279 university students were asked to think about an important past event that helped define themselves. They were then asked to describe the event in various terms, including the extent to which it had a big impact on them and how much it helped them learn about themselves and about life.
Based on the students' responses, Conway and Wood conclude that a person's perception of the impact of an event is a good marker for meaning making, that is the process that results in an individual integrating an event with his or her positive sense of identity.
In a second study, 79 university students were asked to report and describe, on paper, five self-defining memories and to rate those events on a five-point scale in terms of its impact. They also completed two questionnaires about the 10 emotions they felt when the event occurred and how they currently felt about the event, respectively.
Conway and Wood found that when the study participants reflected on negative events, such as conflict with bosses or teachers, death, or physical or sexual assault, they reported that they currently felt less negative emotions, like anger and disgust, and more happiness and pride than they had felt at the time of the event.
Further, when the students reflected on positive events, like a dating relationship or marriage, recreation, or attaining a personal goal, they reported feeling just as happy as they had felt at the time of the event, as well as similarly intense feelings of love and pride. Again, however, they also reported feeling less anger, embarrassment, guilt and other negative emotions than they had initially felt, the report indicates.
"What was striking is that the findings held up for a wide range of emotions," Conway told Reuters Health, adding that "when making sense of their past experiences, people would downplay all the negative types of feelings they had, such as fear and anger."
With regard to a negative event like the death of a grandmother, for example, "the sad event is still mostly sad," Conway said, "but the positive emotions have come out more."
People are "seeing the silver lining, so to speak" and may feel happy afterwards as they realize that the grandmother's suffering is over, he said.
Describing how the practice is common among men and women in a variety of life situations, Conway told Reuters Health that "everyone can experience strong emotional reactions in extreme situations, and everyone needs to come to terms with such events in order to maintain a positive sense of self, and a positive sense of the world at large."
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